Teaching World-Changers: Lessons From the Civil Rights Movement
As I completed my first semester of student teaching, my cooperating teacher recommended a book that would change my career and life. Myles Horton's The Long Haul tells the story of a lifelong devotion to education and true democracy, and it showed me just how powerful teachers can be. It introduced me to an African-American woman named Bernice Robinson, a Charleston beautician who, in 1957, was the first teacher in what was eventually known as the Citizenship School. I was fascinated by Robinson's workâand later, as a graduate student of the late scholar Manning Marable , devoted the better part of the year to learning more.
According to Horton, Civil Rights Movement leader Andrew Young referred to the Citizenship Education Program as the basis of the movement. Under the guidance and leadership of her aunt, Septima Clark, Bernice Robinson began the program with 14 students on Jones Island, S.C. Eventually, the CEP reached as many as 50,000 students in Citizenship Schools throughout the South and later became the largest program of Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
In an era when many African-Americans were required to take "literacy tests" to vote, the CEP helped tens of thousands of illiterate adult students become literate voters. Meanwhile, the CEP simultaneously developed its teachers into respected grassroots leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in their home communities. The schools pushed against the dehumanization of segregation, transforming its students into...
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