Local Author Elaine Weiss Examines a Little-Known Chapter of the Civil Rights Movement

March 11, 2025 Simone Ellin, Associate Editor

Elaine Weiss: "Maybe this book will give some inspiration and some guidelines as to where we need to go.” (Provided photo)

Award-winning, Baltimore-based journalist Elaine Weiss prefers telling stories that haven’t been told before.

Her latest book, “Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement” (Atria/One Signal Publishers), is no exception.

“Spell Freedom” uncovers the little-known history of a small group of unsung heroes who helped Jim Crow-era Black citizens pass the literacy tests meant to keep them from exercising their voting rights. In the process, they changed the trajectory of the civil rights movement.

Weiss spoke about “Spell Freedom” Mar. 11 at the Enoch Pratt Free Librar. She was joined by Natasha Murphy, chief of staff for Black Girls Vote.

“Attempting to vote [in the Jim Crow South] was extremely dangerous,” says Weiss. “If you even attempted to register, you would lose your job, you would lose your house, or you’d be evicted by your landlord. There were literacy tests that were imposed on black people, but not white. And these were ridiculous tests. But most black residents of the rural South, especially in the rural areas, had very poor educations and couldn’t pass them.”

That’s where the book’s real-life protagonists come in: Septima Clark, a 56-year-old elementary school teacher; Esau Jenkins, a small businessman on a rural sea island off the coast of Charleston; and Bernice Robinson, a beautician turned teacher. Together, they developed a game plan for “citizen schools,” gatherings where Black adults in the rural South could gain the skills and knowledge they needed to assert their voting rights.

“Citizenship schools were not brick and mortar establishments,” says Weiss, who also authored “Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army of America in the Great War” (Potomac Books) and “The Women’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote” (Penguin). “They were community classes, taught by Blacks for Blacks, that were held in grocery stores behind the shelves, in funeral parlors after hours, in beauty and barber shops, in people’s homes, in church basements.”

Classes started with the basics. Students learned to write their names and even how to hold their pencils. In time, they learned to read, write and do arithmetic. The schools also taught Black history, a subject that wasn’t permitted to be taught in the Southern states.

“[The process] changed people both inside and outside,” says Weiss, a Beth Am congregant. “They now had the skills and the confidence to try to register to vote and to understand what this movement for equal rights is about. They learned that they deserved full American citizenship. And they learned their constitutional rights and how government works. But they also had a spiritual or psychological effect — what Septima Clark called ‘being ready from within.’ The schools had an extraordinary effect.

“By the time the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, there were 900 of these little schools that started in neighborhoods, on farms, under trees. And the people were ready. They understood why they were being asked to march or protest or sit in or freedom ride.”

When she first began work on “Spell Freedom,” Weiss says she didn’t anticipate the book would be landing in bookstores “at this moment when democracy is again, very much endangered.”

During these early days of the current presidential administration, she says the book has new resonance.

“The work that the people in my book accomplished is not done,” Weiss says. “We’re having to fight some of those battles right now. This story is about resistance and democracy and voting rights and black history and education. And we’re in this moment, having to fight on all of those fronts.”

Weiss also believes that today’s citizenry could benefit from learning many of the lessons that were taught in the citizen schools she describes in her book.

“People come of voting age not understanding the role of a citizen in their town,” she says. “When you don’t understand what the Congress is supposed to do, what your state legislator is supposed to do, what your city councilman is supposed to do, then it all seems vague and sinister and people kind of check out like, ‘Well, I can’t do anything about this’ and ‘My vote doesn’t count. I’m not going to vote.’ If you understand the stakes, you understand how important this is and how dangerous [the situation is] right now, there may be a different attitude.

“It’s kind of startling, but maybe this book will give some inspiration and some guidelines as to where we need to go.”

For information, visit ElaineWeiss.com.