Born: May 3, 1898, Charleston, SC

Education: Avery Institute, graduated 1916; Benedict College, B.A., 1942; Hampton Institute, 1945

Died: December 15, 1987, Charleston, SC

A courageous teacher in the Jim Crow era, Clark also taught during the King years. Fired in 1956 because of her NAACP affiliation, she sued the Charleston, South Carolina schools and won compensation (1976). A staff member at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, she adapted her teaching methods from Charleston and Johns Island to create a curriculum for “citizenship schools.” It stressed basic literacy and life skills and knowledge of voting rights.

About 897 Citizenship Schools operated in the South ca. 1957–70. Using them to foster voter registration, the Atlanta-based Voter Education Project (1962) trained 10,000 citizenship tutors by 1966. Schools convened in churches, lodge halls, homes, and fields. Like ex-slaves’ Sabbath Schools, foundational in their freedom struggle, Citizenship Schools paved the way for Freedom Schools, which Ella Baker and student activists used to enlarge “the grassroots base of the southern wide opposition to segregation” and increase black suffrage. Baker and Clark had been sisters in civil rights struggles since the 1940s.