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Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built The Civil Rights Movement by Elaine Weiss K’73.

June 17, 2025

Tags Alumni Book Kirkland College Alumna

(Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2025).

The author, whose previous work of nonfiction The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote earned national accolades, returns with the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.

Here is the synopsis from the publisher: “In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.

“Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than 900 citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights — and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists — many of them women — trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Beautifully told, this riveting account of ordinary people who find the courage and resilience to stand up for their rights is not only a powerful reminder of our past, but also an inspiration for a path forward.

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