- Collection:
- Oral Histories of the American South: The Civil Rights Movement
- Title:
- Oral history interview with Septima Poinsette Clark, July 25, 1976
- Creator:
- Clark, Septima Poinsette, 1898-1987
- Contributor to Resource:
- Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd
Southern Oral History Program - Date of Original:
- 1976-07-25
- Subject:
- South Carolina--Race relations
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (U.S.)
Trade-unions--Officials and employees--Southern States--Education
Highlander Folk School (Monteagle, Tenn.)
Women civil rights workers
African American civil rights workers--Georgia
African American women civil rights workers
African American women educators
African Americans--Civil rights--Southern States
Civil rights movements--Southern States
Southern States--Race relations
Segregation--Southern States
African Americans--Suffrage--Southern States
Race relations in school management--South Carolina--Charleston
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Charleston (S.C.)--Race relations
African Americans--South Carolina--Charleston--Social life and customs - People:
- Clark, Septima Poinsette, 1898-1987
- Location:
- United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, South Carolina, Charleston County, Charleston, 32.77657, -79.93092
United States, Tennessee, Franklin County, 35.15496, -86.09218
United States, Tennessee, Grundy County, 35.38837, -85.72258
United States, Tennessee, Marion County, Monteagle, 35.24008, -85.8397 - Medium:
- transcripts
sound recordings
oral histories (literary works) - Type:
- Text
Sound - Format:
- text/html
text/xml
audio/mpeg - Description:
- Septima Clark was a teacher and citizen's education director for the Highlander Folk School and Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She also worked with the South Carolina Council on Human Relations, YWCA, and American Friends Service Committee. This interview covers her childhood in Charleston, South Carolina, and her family's efforts to survive poverty and racial prejudice. Her mother was a washerwoman reared in Haiti, and her father was a former slave on the Poinsette plantation. Her first job as a teacher on John's Island from 1916 to 1919 led to her early activism with the NAACP, her friendship with Judge and Mrs. Waring, and her work with the Charleston YWCA. She married Nerie David Clark as an act of rebellion against her parents, but she chose not to remarry after his early death. She attended college in Columbia, returned to Charleston in 1947, and lobbied for the first local credit union to serve black workers. After she lost her teaching position in 1956 due to her NAACP membership, she worked for the Highlander Folk School encouraging voter registration and education. The SCLC hired her to form education programs, but her plans for increasing community involvement, protecting the labor rights of black teachers, and educating black voters were often ignored because she was female. The interview ends with her thoughts on why she started receiving more recognition for her work in the mid-1970s.
The Civil Rights Digital Library received support from a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for the aggregation and enhancement of partner metadata. - Metadata URL:
- http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/G-0016/menu.html
- Language:
- eng
- Extent:
- Title from menu page (viewed on July 21, 2008).
Interview participants: Septima Poinsette Clark, interviewee; Jacquelyn Hall, interviewer.
Duration: 03:46:55.
This electronic edition is part of the UNC-CH digital library, Documenting the American South. It is a part of the collection Oral histories of the American South.
Text encoded by Mike Millner. Sound recordings digitized by Aaron Smithers. - Contributing Institution:
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South (Project)
- Rights:
-
