 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about a nontraditional education. Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools that Built the Civil Rights Movement, by Elaine Weiss. While not as headline-grabbing as marches and sit-ins, the Freedom Schools and the Citizenship Education Project (CEP) were vital parts of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. A common racist tactic to keep Black people from voting was the "literacy test," which could be applied at the registrar's discretion. Being able to read the ballot was not enough; in South Carolina, for instance, prospective voters could be required to read and interpret obscurely worded sections of the state Constitution. Segregated, underfunded schools didn't offer much education - and people who couldn't vote had no leverage to improve the schools. The book covers the period from 1954 (the Brown v. Board of Education ruling) through 1970 when the CEP ended. The narrative follows four individuals. Septima Clark was a teacher who set up classes for adult literacy and voter education. She recruited her beautician cousin, Bernice Robinson, to help teach. Esau Jenkins was a bus driver who used the long ride to teach his passengers and recruit them to vote. And Myles Horton was a White ally who ran Highlander Folk School, an activist training ground where White and Black students learned, ate, sang, and even roomed together, which was illegal in Tennessee at the time. Spell Freedom covers the victories and setbacks, and also the struggles within the movement. Septima Clark expressed frustration at how women's suggestions and concerns were routinely ignored by male leaders, who still expected women to show up and do the work. (And they mostly did: the movement could not have functioned without the brigades of women who volunteered, organized, and handled logistics.) The CEP activists and their supporters endured harassment, threats, and violence. Some were fired from jobs, turned away by landlords, or refused services at grocery stores and other businesses. Pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. at a Highlander event were distributed with claims that it was a "communist training school." Highlander was forced to close in 1960 after a fabricated charge of "selling alcohol." The charge was absurd, but was upheld by a jury. One effect of forcibly keeping Black people off voter rolls was that they were kept off juries. Spell Freedom packs in a lot of information about the Freedom Schools, and the context of the larger movement and legal/political battles. Yet it's very readable, and easy to keep track of who's who and what's happening. The book is an education in itself, making clear how far we've come and how the struggle for equal rights isn't over.
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