Septima Poinsette Clark

Septima Poinsette Clark was an American educator and civil rights organizer whose citizenship schools taught literacy and voter registration skills to thousands of adults across the segregated South. Born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1898, she taught in South Carolina's rural schools for decades while campaigning through the NAACP to open teaching posts to Black educators. In the 1950s and 1960s she developed citizenship education workshops, later adopted by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where she became director of education, its first female board member. Her classes used everyday materials such as mail order catalogs and voter forms to teach reading and civic participation, helping an estimated 700,000 African Americans register to vote by 1969. Martin Luther King Jr. called her the mother of the movement, and she received the American Book Award for her 1987 autobiography.