Book Talk Examines Civil Rights Movement Citizenship Schools
By ERIC SANTOMAURO-STENZEL
COOPERSTOWN
The League of Women Voters of the Cooperstown Area, with over a dozen local sponsors, is set to host a book talk with the author of “Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement,” Elaine Weiss, on Thursday, May 28 at 7 p.m. The event will be held at the Village Hall Ballroom, 22 Main Street, Cooperstown.
“This particular story, it’s very compelling,” LWVCA Co-president Hudi Podolsky told AllOtsego. “It really speaks to what individual students, individual people can do to change the world.”
The talk, moderated by Cooperstown Graduate Program Director Dr. Gretchen Sorin, will dive into the history described in the book and related topics. Published last year, Weiss’ book chronicles the Citizenship Schools project that equipped tens of thousands of black Americans with reading, writing, voting and advocacy skills that were a boon to the Civil Rights Movement.
“In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement,” a book description reads. “There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.”
By the time the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became law, the description says, the project established more than 900 such citizenship schools across the South.
Highlander continues similar work to this day, serving as a hub for interracial movement training and building.
“I want us to stay focused on what we can do at the grassroots,” Podolsky said of the event, “what individual people can do to change the conversation to change what people know and understand, and to give people a sense of their own agency.”
Podolsky said the idea for the event came from her sister and fellow LWVCA board member Aviva Schneider. In organizing the event, LWVCA accrued the following sponsors: Connections at Clark Sports Center; Cooperstown Graduate Program; Cooperstown PTA; Community Foundation of Otsego County; AllOtsego, The Freeman’s Journal, and Hometown Oneonta; Friends of the Village Library; Green Toad Bookstore; NAACP Oneonta Branch; Otsego 2000; Race, Equity and Justice Series of the First Baptist Church of Cooperstown; Rotary Club of Cooperstown; Village of Cooperstown; and Village Library of Cooperstown.
“We didn’t want their financial support, we just wanted them to help spread the word,” Podolsky said. Additionally, “we really wanted to demonstrate that there’s a strong network of community organizations that are dedicated to keeping our democracy strong.”
