In a 1981 interview for Eliot Wigginton ’s Refuse to Stand Silently By, Clark told Peter Wood that her mother used to get angry with her father “because he refused to condemn the whites who mistreated him. All her married life, Victoria hated being poor and deeply resented having to take in washing to support the family. Her mother, Victoria Warren Anderson Poinsette, had grown up free and financially comfortable in Haiti. Her father, Peter Poinsette, was born a slave after being freed, he worked low-paying jobs as a cook, caterer, and custodian. Septima Poinsette Clark was born on May 3, 1898, in Charleston, South Carolina. Her “citizenship schools, ” which combined the teaching of literacy with voting rights organization, spread throughout the southeastern United States and were, in large part, responsible for the registration of thousands of African American southerners to vote.Ĭlark ’s passion for racial equality stemmed from her experiences as a teacher and a mother in the segregated South she wrote in her 1962 autobiography Echo in My Soul: “There is nothing worse ” than having to teach a black child “that none of the pleasant things in life are for him … explaining why the native soil is such a hard place for the native to grow in. A schoolteacher for most of her life, she came to activism through teaching and remained committed to the idea that education was the key to political empowerment. Little has been written about Septima Clark ’s life, and many Americans have never heard of her yet those who knew and worked with Clark remember her as one of the most influential women in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
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