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Local Leadership in the Early Civil Rights Movement: The South Carolina Citizenship Education Program of the Highlander Folk School

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Peter Ling
Peter Ling
Affiliation:
Peter Ling is Lecturer in American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, England.
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Extract

Between 1953 and 1961 Myles Horton's Highlander Folk School developed the Citizenship Education Program (CEP) beginning in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Within the program from 1957 onwards Septima Clark and Bernice Robinson developed Citizenship Schools centered on literacy classes. By slowly developing local leaders, like Esau Jenkins, the CEP evolved as an educational framework for social mobilization, which was later used by the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. In the summer of 1961, since the Folk School faced closure by Tennessee state authorities, Highlander transferred the CEP to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Between 1961 and 1970, hundreds of civil rights activists from across the South attended the SCLC's Citizenship School teacher training courses at the Dorchester Center near Savannah in south-east Georgia. Moreover, in the mid-1960s the Southwide Voter Education Project enabled civil rights activists from across the region to study the political organization that the CEP had spawned in Charleston county as a model for their own community work. Given its widespread influence, the CEP's work was a vital aspect of the Civil Rights Movement itself and constituted Highlander's chief contribution to it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , December 1995 , pp. 399 - 422
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 Cited by Tjerandsen, Carl, Education for Citizenship: A Foundation's Experience, (Santa Cruz: Emil Schwartzhaupt Foundation, 1980), 185Google Scholar.

2 The Sea Islands are part of a chain of coastal islands extending from North Carolina to Northern Florida. Johns Island, the largest, is just six miles south of Charleston, and further south are the islands of Wadmalaw and Edisto.

3 For details of the transfer, see Garrow, David J., Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, (New York: Jonathan Cape, 1988), 150–1, 161–4Google Scholar.

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6 The best treatments are Tjerandsen, ch. 4, and Horton, Aimee I., The Highlander Folk School: A History of the Development of Its Major Programs Related to Social Movements in the South, (Brooklyn: Carlsen Publishing, 1990), ch. 13Google Scholar. Tjerandsen was an ESF officer who monitored the program for many years and Aimee was Myles Horton's second wife. Other works include Glen, John's Highlander: No Ordinary School, 1932–1962 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988)Google Scholar and Guy, and Carawan, Candie, Ain't You Got a Right to the Tree of Life (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989)Google Scholar. Guy Carawan participated in the later expansion of the program but Tjerandsen and Horton were so deeply involved as to make their works almost primary sources.

7 Cf. Grace Jordan McFadden, “Septima Clark and the Struggle for Human Rights”; Donna Langston, “The Women of Highlander”; Oldendorf, Sandra B., “The South Carolina Sea Island Citizenship Schools, 1957–1961,” in Crawford, Vicki L., Rouse, Jacqueline Anne, and Woods, Barbara, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 85–98; 145–168; 169–182Google Scholar, respectively.

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22 Conversations with Esau Jenkins, (1960), HP-SHSW, 33: 996.

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42 Ibid., 33: 586.

43 Fairclough, Adam, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 95–6Google Scholar; Tjerandsen, 142–4.

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53 Horton, 220.

54 Program for Highlander Workshop, 3–9 Jul. 1955, Robinson Papers, Avery Center, uncatalogued.

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69 Clark, “Sea Island Citizenship School”, HP-SHSW, 33: 981; on consumer co-op, v. Citizens Club meeting 5 Jul. 1955, Ibid., 33: 61.

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83 PSVA Minutes, 4 Mar. 1957, HP-SHSW, 34: 92.

84 Both incidents reported by Clark in the SCLC Papers, Box 154: file 9, Martin Luther King Center for Non-violent Social Change, Atlanta.

85 Tjerandsen, 168.

86 Oldendorf, 178–9; personal interview with Bill Jenkins, Esau's son, 14 Apr. 1994.

87 On memories of Reconstruction, see Blake, “Citizen Participation,” 50–1; on voting strength, ibid., 58–9.

88 Tjerandson, 173.

89 Sproat, “Firm Flexibility”, 170–82.

90 Sobel, L. A., ed., Civil Rights 1960–1966, (New York: Facts on File, 1967), 205Google Scholar; for hospital strike, see Fink, Leon and Greenberg, Brian, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital Workers Union, Local 1199, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), ch. 7Google Scholar.

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92 Fairclough, , To Redeem, 40, 48–52, 68–9Google Scholar. The tax problem was solved by having the Board of Home Missions of the United Church of Christ [Congregationalist] receive the Field Foundation grant and disburse it to the SCLC.