Fellow Leaders

Dorothy Cotton

Sun, 10 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Dorothy Foreman Cotton served as Education Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where she co-led the Citizenship Education Program directly alongside Septima Clark and Andrew Young throughout the 1960s. Recognized as the highest-ranking woman in SCLC during most of that decade, Cotton traveled across the South training local leaders and teachers for the Citizenship Schools. The program helped more than 6,000 men and women learn their civil rights, prepare for voter registration, and develop strategies for organizing their communities.

Cotton’s work proved that education was the engine of the movement. She helped organize the students during the 1963 Birmingham campaign and its Children’s Crusade, and was among the small circle invited to accompany Martin Luther King Jr. to Oslo when he received the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. After retiring from SCLC in 1972, she continued to teach leadership and social change, eventually publishing her memoir If Your Back’s Not Bent in 2012. The Dorothy Cotton Institute, founded in her honor in Ithaca, New York, carries forward her belief that mass movements are built from the ground up.

Rosa Parks

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks had been an active member of the NAACP and a committed organizer long before the Montgomery bus boycott made her a national figure. In the summer of 1955, she attended a two-week workshop on school desegregation at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, where Septima Clark ran the program. Parks arrived tense and discouraged after years of political work that had produced little change, but she was inspired by Clark’s calm courage and the interracial community she found at Highlander.

Four months after leaving Clark’s workshop, Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus on December 1, 1955, an act of resistance that ignited the Montgomery bus boycott and galvanized the modern Civil Rights Movement. A photograph of Parks and Clark together at Highlander, preserved in the Library of Congress, captures the connection between two women whose work reinforced each other — Clark teaching people to claim their rights through literacy, Parks demonstrating what it meant to exercise those rights with quiet, unyielding resolve.

Bernice Robinson

Sat, 03 Sep 1994 00:00:00 +0000

Bernice Violanthe Robinson was Septima Clark’s cousin and became the first teacher of the Citizenship Schools on Johns Island, South Carolina in January 1957. A beautician by trade, Robinson had no formal teaching credentials, which Clark saw as an advantage — she would not teach like a traditional teacher. Fourteen adults arrived at the Progressive Club for that first class, the oldest aged sixty-four, none of whom had been to school.

Robinson asked her students what they wanted to learn: how to read well enough to pass the voter registration test, how to fill out a money order, how to write their names. She taught using materials from daily life — Sears catalogs, application forms, canned food labels. When they had no blackboard, they wrote on dry cleaner bags. After three months, eight of the fourteen students passed the literacy test and registered to vote. The success of that first class on Johns Island proved the Citizenship School model and led to its expansion across the South, eventually reaching more than 25,000 students.

Ella Baker

Sat, 13 Dec 1986 00:00:00 +0000

Ella Josephine Baker was a tireless organizer who helped shape every major civil rights organization of her era. She co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, served as its executive director, and connected Septima Clark’s Citizenship School work with the broader movement. In 1960, Baker organized the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Shaw University, insisting that the new organization be student-led rather than directed from above.

Baker’s philosophy of grassroots, participatory democracy profoundly influenced the movement’s direction. She believed that ordinary people could and should lead their own liberation, a conviction she shared with Clark. Her mentorship shaped a generation of young activists including Diane Nash, Bob Moses, John Lewis, and Stokely Carmichael. Known as “Fundi” — a Swahili word for one who teaches a craft to the next generation — Baker’s legacy lives in the organizing traditions she helped build.

Fannie Lou Hamer

Mon, 14 Mar 1977 00:00:00 +0000

Fannie Lou Hamer was a Mississippi sharecropper who did not know she had the right to vote until the age of forty-four. In August 1962, she attended a meeting organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was transformed. She became a SNCC field organizer and led seventeen volunteers to register to vote at the Indianola courthouse, only to be denied by an unfair literacy test, fired by her employer, and shot at that same night. Her experience embodied the exact injustice that Septima Clark’s Citizenship Schools were designed to overcome.

In 1964, Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and challenged Mississippi’s all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention. Her televised testimony before the Credentials Committee was so powerful that President Johnson called an emergency press conference to pull coverage — but network news programs broadcast her words that evening to an even larger audience. She went on to help organize Freedom Summer, found the Freedom Farm Cooperative, and co-found the National Women’s Political Caucus, dedicating her life to the belief that the right to vote was inseparable from the right to live with dignity.