Southern Association for Women Historians Julia Cherry Spruill Prize
Finalist, Hooks National Book Award
Honorable Mention, Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South Deep South Book Prize
How Black women used lessons in literacy to crack the foundation of white supremacy
This
book details how African American women used lessons in basic literacy
to crack the foundation of white supremacy and sow seeds for collective
action during the civil rights movement. Deanna Gillespie traces the
history of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), a grassroots
initiative that taught people to read and write in preparation for
literacy tests required for voter registration—a profoundly powerful
objective in the Jim Crow South.
Born in 1957 as a result
of discussions between community activist Esau Jenkins, schoolteacher
Septima Clark, and Highlander Folk School director Myles Horton, the CEP
became a part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1961.
The teachers, mostly Black women, gathered friends and neighbors in
living rooms, churches, beauty salons, and community centers. Through
the work of the CEP, literate black men and women were able to gather
their own information, determine fair compensation for a day’s work, and
register formal complaints.
Drawing on teachers’ reports
and correspondence, oral history interviews, and papers from a variety
of civil rights organizations, Gillespie follows the growth of the CEP
from its beginnings in the South Carolina Sea Islands to southeastern
Georgia, the Mississippi Delta, and Alabama’s Black Belt. This book
retells the story of the civil rights movement from the vantage point of
activists who have often been overlooked and makeshift classrooms where
local people discussed, organized, and demanded change.
A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller