Highlander, Septima Clark, and the Citizenship Schools

Before SNCC, before SCLC, there was Highlander Folk School and Septima Clark's Citizenship Schools — a base-building infrastructure that taught Black Southerners to read, register to vote, and lead.

Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, founded by Myles Horton in 1932, was the training ground for nearly every major figure of the Southern civil rights movement. Rosa Parks attended a workshop there months before the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Highlander's 25th anniversary. Bernice Johnson Reagon trained there.

Septima Clark, working with Highlander and later SCLC, designed the Citizenship Schools: a network of local literacy and citizenship classes that taught Black adults in the rural South to read the state constitution, register to vote, and train the next round of teachers in their own communities. By 1965 the schools had trained roughly 10,000 teachers and reached an estimated 25,000 students. That is base building at scale, owned by the communities themselves.

Two design choices we can learn from. First, the curriculum was made with the community — built around local language, local newspapers, and the actual questions on the voter registration form, rather than generic civics material. Second, the program was designed as a pipeline: students went on to become teachers, and teachers went on to become base leaders, so the work never stayed dependent on outside staff.

The pattern repeats in every durable Black-led base in the South: training infrastructure that produces leaders who produce leaders. Without it, every campaign starts from zero.