Septima Earthaline Poinsette Clark was born in 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina. Her life and work can be characterized as being ‘for the people’. Her long career as an educator, which began with her accepting her first teaching position in 1916, was activist in its orientation, advocating for better conditions for African American schools and increased pay for African American teachers along with promoting education for the masses. After being fired from her teaching position due to her involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she began working for the Highlander Folk School, a multi-racial social justice training centre then located in Monteagle, Tennessee. Among numerous interventions in reshaping the United States Southeast, Clark is the orchestrator of ‘literacy-based citizenship pedagogy’ (Hall et al, 2010) which is revealed through examining the structure of the Citizenship Schools Program. Through the Highlander, and later through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Clark launched the Citizenship Schools Program with Esau Jenkins, opening the first in Johns Island, South Carolina, in 1957 then expanding throughout the southeast. The Citizenship Schools were characterized as focusing on eliminating illiteracy, as voter literacy tests became common throughout the southeastern US to keep African Americans from voting, though the work of the schools extended to economic literacy, civil rights, and democracy education. By 1970, over 28,000 African Americans had gone through the Citizenship Schools, a powerful accomplishment highlighting ‘the nature of Clark's work in the movement: using education to empower grassroots people, particularly African American women, so they might become leading citizens in their communities’ (Hall et al, 2010, p 32). Re-orientating commonly held understandings of histories of inequality, oppression, exploitation, and white supremacy in the US Southeast reveals deep and long legacies of Black feminist activism and praxis.