Teaching Septima Clark

Submitted by Liz Clift on October 1, 2013

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Printer-friendly versionIn Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark, Katherine Mellen Charron documents the public life of a lesser-known civil rights activist and gives modern educators an opportunity to fill some gaping holes in the teaching of the civil rights movement. Charron’s book tells the story of Clark, an African-American woman who founded a citizenship training program to help black Americans subjected to citizenship questions when they tried to register to vote in the Jim Crow South. This book offers the opportunity for discussions about history, community activism and why civic engagement matters.
The book follows the progress of the movement for African-American equality in South Carolina and the rest of the South and reveals how Clark’s experiences and connections with other powerful people informed her activism. Charron bases her telling of Clark’s life story on numerous interviews, historical records (papers, meeting minutes and newspaper articles), and Clark’s two autobiographies, among other primary sources. This narrative approach provides a detailed picture of the events surrounding Clark and her endeavors as a civil rights leader. It also signifies Charron’s efforts to avoid appropriating Clark’s voice or the voices of those who surrounded her. By relying on primary sources, she “shows” rather than “tells” the story, allowing readers—whenever possible—to hear the story through the voices of those who lived it.
Freedom’s Teacher sheds light on a figure of the civil rights movement few students are exposed to. As an educator raised on the border between North and South Carolina, I never knew—and found it fascinating—that heroic figures such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. knew Clark, and that she significantly expanded educational opportunities for black citizens. Utilizing Charron’s book can help educators teach more fully and truthfully the history of oppression in the United States and the heroism of those who fought against it. This informational text also can form the basis for meaningful research and writing tasks for students (like the one below).
Sample Research and Writing Activity for Students
Assign Charron’s book or excerpts to read and then lead the students in a discussion about the types of research the author conducted. The next step is for students to interview and write a paper on a member of their community, supplemented by primary sources (such as letters, diary entries, newspaper articles and interviews with the subject’s friends and family members).
When the students have finished researching, but before they turn in their papers, ask them to identify the difficulties they encountered, the types of information they included and excluded and their reasons for their selection decisions. Start the conversation by noting that Clark recorded very little autobiographical information about her son and other members of her family. Ask students whether they think Charron could have made Clark more relatable by including more information about Clark’s private life, given the writer’s visits to the family home, extensive interviews and access to Clark’s family documents. Examine the possible reasons for Charron’s approach.
As they work on their papers, students may struggle with the best way to portray the subjects of their interviews. This is a good opportunity to explore the use of voice in Charron’s book. The author primarily covers Clark’s activist life, so it is important to remember that Clark was managing multiple personal problems during the same period. Despite brief mentions of Clark’s mother, relationships with key civil rights figures and heart attacks later in life, Charron does not provide a full account of Clark’s private life.
The final step in this activity is to have the students read their completed papers to the class and reflect on the research and writing process.