Citizenship Schools
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Citizenship Schools Started (1954-196?)
Started by Esau Jenkins in the South Carolina Sea Islands, Citizenship Schools initially focused on teaching adults to read so that they could pass the voter-registration literacy tests. Under the auspices of first the Highlander Center and later the Southern Christian Leadership Conferance (SCLC), Jenkins, Bernice Robinson, and Septima Clark, expanded the program across the South. Under the seemingly benign cover of adult-literacy classes, the schools secretly taught democracy and civil rights, community leadership and organizing, political strategy, and tactics of resistance and struggle. Many of the Movement's adult leaders such as Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer — and unsung local leaders in Black communities across the South — attended Citizenship Schools and then taught others.
(Text Taken From: http://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis54.htm#1954ccs)
Related Wiki Pages:
Myles Horton Septima Clark Bernice Robinson Highlander Folk School
External Links:
The Birth of the Citizenship Schools: Entwining the Struggles for Literacy and Freedom David P. Levine - (http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/heq/44.3/levine.html)
"This essay focuses on the formative years of the program as a Highlander project in the Charleston area. My goal is to deepen our understanding of how an explicitly educational endeavor can nourish a movement for social justice by transforming its participants. The account will explain how, through Citizenship Schools, both teachers and students increased their knowledge, expanded their problem-solving abilities, and challenged the unjust social order of the segregated South."
