Septima P. Clark Corporate Academy

     "My father came out of slavery nonviolent. He was a gentle, tolerant man. My mother was something else. She boasted that she was never a slave, but I have a feeling that somewhere down the line somebody paid her way out. My mother was born in Charleston but reared in Haiti . The English schoolteachers in Haiti did a very good job with my mother, because they taught her how to read and write. That made her the proud soul she was all her life.

     "[In 1956, after being fired by the Board of Education for being a member of the NAACP] I had to go away for twenty years from Charleston . I couldn't get a job here, nowhere in South Carolina . Not only that, but the black teachers here gave me a testimonial . . . and do you know that at that party my sisters would not stand beside me and have their picture made with me? If they had, they would have lost their jobs.

     "I traveled by bus all over the South, visiting teachers and recruiting new ones. I always took the fifth seat from the front to test the buses. They asked me to move, but I didn't. I reminded them that we had a law now that said we could sit anywhere in the bus.

     "We went into various communities and found people. I sat down and wrote out a flyer saying that the teachers we need in a citizenship school should be people who are respected by the members of the community, who can read well aloud, and who can write their names in cursive writing. These are the ones we looked for.

     "We were trying to make teachers out of people who could barely read and write. But they could teach. If they could read at all, we could teach them that c-o-n-s-t-i-t-u-t-i-o-n spells constitution.

     "When they saw the black people coming in to register [to vote] at the bank, the registrar would hide in a vault and pretend that registration was closed. We had a lady there who was very fair. We sent her in, and when the man came out to register her, the other black people surged in. They thought they had a white woman but she was one of us.

     "They considered me a Communist, because I was following Martin Luther King. But anyone who was against segregation was considered a Communist.

    "I felt that Dr. King had a dream that all people should be free. When he said 'freedom,' he was thinking that they should be able to do the things that they wanted to do in America . I think we're nearer. I want people to say, 'This is my dream and I want it carried forth.' I want that dream enforced.

     "In those days I didn't criticize Dr. King other than asking him not to lead all the marches. Like other black ministers,

     "Mr. King didn't think too much of the way women could contribute. I see this as one of the weaknesses of the civil rights movement, the way the men looked at women.

     "My husband had strong feelings against women and he did not think that women had the right to do anything worthwhile. As we grew up together he never, never believed that there were women who could do things. He always felt that a woman should stay in her place, in the house. I couldn't see that women should be just in the house making children, keeping house, or buying groceries. So we could not agree.

     "I think that the work the women did during the time of civil rights is what really carried the movement along. The women carried forth the ideas. I think the civil rights movement would never have taken off if some women hadn't started to speak up.

     "Women need to grab the men by the collar and do more. That's the way I feel. We need women who will get these men by the collar and work with them. We still have a hard time getting them to see what it means to vote.

     "I have great belief in the fact that whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift.

    "I'd tell the children of the future that they have to stand up for their rights. They have an idea that they can. But I feel that they are shadows underneath a great shelter and that they need to come forth and stand up for some of the things that are right.