A pioneer in grassroots citizenship education, Septima Clark also challenged the exclusion of women in the leadership of the civil right movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. described her as an exemplary southern black woman who served as “a community teacher, intuitive fighter for human rights and leader of her unlettered and disillusioned people.”
Clark was born on 3 May 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina, to Victoria Warren Anderson Poinsette of Haiti and Peter Poinsette, a former slave from South Carolina. She graduated in 1916 from the Avery Institute, a private secondary school, and began teaching on John’s Island.
In 1937, Clark studied under W. E. B. Du Bois at Atlanta University. She eventually earned her B.A. from Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, and her M.A. from Hampton Institute in 1946. While working towards her degrees and supporting herself as a teacher, Clark became the first black central board member of the YWCA and participated in an NAACP lawsuit against the Columbia School District to equalize black and white teachers' salaries. In 1956, South Carolina passed a statute prohibiting city employees from joining civil rights organizations, and Clark was fired by the Charleston school board for her refusal to resign from the NAACP.
Immediately following Clark's termination, Myles Horton offered her a position as the director of workshops at Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. Within a year, she had developed a citizenship school model which spread throughout the southeast. Believing that literacy and political empowerment were inextricably connected, Clark taught people to write their names, balance check books, fill out voting ballots, and understand their rights and duties as U.S. citizens. As she explained in her autobiography, "I just thought that you couldn't get people to register and vote until you teach them to read and write . . . and I was so right."
When the Tennessee government forced the closure of Highlander in 1961, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) established the Citizenship Education Program (CEP) using the model of Clark’s citizenship schools. Clark became Director of Education for SCLC, conducting teacher training and developing curriculum.
Although Clark had tremendous respect for King’s vision and deemed him a “real leader of the American people,” she sensed that he and the other men in SCLC "didn't think too much of women." She asserted that, "the civil rights movement would never have taken off if some women hadn't started to speak up."
After retiring from SCLC in 1970, Clark was elected to the Charleston School Board. In 1986, she published her autobiography, Ready from Within. She continued to serve as an advocate for civil rights and education until her death on 15 December 1987 .