CLA Honors The Daughters of the Civil Rights Movement
Known as the “Mother of the Movement,” Septima Clark was a pioneer in grassroots citizenship education.
Clark graduated from Atlanta University where she studied under W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1956, Clark lost her teaching job as South Carolina had passed a statute that prohibited state employees from belonging to civil rights organizations. Clark was a prominent member of the NAACP and refused to leave the organization.
Septima Clark
Known as the “Mother of the Movement,” Septima Clark was a champion for human rights and citizenship education. Clark was born in 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina to a laundrywoman and a former slave. She began her career as a teacher and remained in that profession for over thirty years.
Septima Clark leads a Citizenship School teacher training workshop in North Carolina.
Clark was a firm believer in the intersectionality of literacy and political power which inspired her work as the director of education and teaching at the Citizenship Education Program at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In that role, Clark conducted teacher training and developed curricula, including basic literacy skills, the rights and duties of U.S. citizens, and how to complete registration forms.
Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer worked for SNCC and ran for Congress in 1964 as a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).
Born in 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi, Hamer strove to expand Black voting registration and economic opportunity. In 1964, she co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which challenged the Democratic Party’s efforts to block Black political participation. Hamer additionally organized the Freedom Summer, which utilized college students to help with Black voter registration in the segregated south.
She made history by joining Victoria Gray and Annie Devine as the first Black women to stand in the U.S. Congress, where they protested the Mississippi House election of 1964. Hamer relied on economic strategies to promote racial equality. She created the Freedom Farm Cooperative, buying and distributing land for Black farmers. She created 200 units of low-income housing in Mississippi; many of these buildings still exist today. Throughout her life, Hamer traveled extensively, delivering powerful speeches promoting civil rights.
Alice Walker
A well-respected activist and educator, Alice Walker’s works center the history and experiences of Black women.
Alice Walker is a talented writer whose novels, short stories, and poems center the history and experiences of Black women. Walker has published more than 20 books and became the first woman of color to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
A social worker, teacher, lecturer, Walker initially became active in the civil rights movement while living in Mississippi in the 1960s and participated in the 1963 March on Washington. She continued her activism while teaching at various universities, including Jackson State College, Tougaloo College, Wellesley College, and the University of California at Berkeley. Walker taught the first American course on Black women writers.
Walker became a vocal voice in the emerging feminist movement and developed a Black woman-centered feminist theory known as “womanism.” She is the recipient of many awards for her writing and her book, “The Color Purple,” was adapted for film in 1985.
Daisy Bates
Daisy Bates received national recognition for her work in promotion of school integration, including organizing the Little Rock Nine.
Daisy Bates was a native of Arkansas, where she founded and contributed to The Arkansas Weekly, one of the only Black newspapers dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement. Within her community, she served as the President of the NAACP, where her work quickly transformed the Civil Rights Movement.
Bates sought to integrate local schools and encouraged Black students to enroll at all-white schools. If schools failed to integrate, she would expose them in her newspaper. Most notably, Bates organized the Little Rock Nine in order to integrate Central High School in Little Rock. She received national recognition for her work in promotion of school integration.
In 1962, she published her memoir entitled “The Long Shadow of Little Rock,” which won an American Book Award. After her death in 1999, the state of Arkansas proclaimed the third Monday in February, Daisy Gatson Bates Day in honor of her civil rights activism. Bates was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1999.