Adam Shields (@adamrshields.bsky.social)

I finished Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement this morning. I don't think I will ever stop learning about different facets of the civil rights era.

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Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement by Elaine Weiss – Bookwi.se When I first heard about Spell Freedom, I thought it was a history of the Highlander Folk School. The Highlander Folk School played an important part in establishing the early freedom schools and eventually moved their teacher training program (and main Freedom school staff person, Septima Clark) to the SCLC. As is made clear in the book, the Highlander Folk School played an important behind the scenes role in the Civil Rights Movement. By the early 1950s, when Septima Clark attended her first training program, Highlander had been around for nearly 30 years. It was consciously integrated from early on, but its work shifted from labor organizing to civil rights organizing in the late 1940s. Clark quickly started leading training sessions and soon after, was forced out of her teaching job in Charleston SC because she was a member of the NAACP and in leadership of the local chapter. https://bookwi.se/spell-freedom/