Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement

“Through elegant writing, masterful storytelling, and prodigious research, Weiss takes us on a journey for freedom.” —Carol Anderson, New York Times bestselling author

The acclaimed author of the “stirring, definitive, and engrossing” (NPR) The Woman’s Hour returns with the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.

In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins traveled 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. 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.

Risking their lives and livelihoods, they created the underground Citizenship Schools project, preparing Black southerners to pass the voter registration literacy tests and have a voice in their nation’s democracy. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, over nine hundred citizenship school classes had been established—often in secret locations—across the south, quietly educating tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their civil rights, and vote. The program nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—trained in community organizing, political action, and tactics of resistance, who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement.

In the vein of Hidden Figures and Devil in the Grove, Spell Freedom is the exhilarating story of ordinary citizens confronting injustice with courage and creativity, offering a revealing narrative “that illuminates not only the past but also a path forward” (Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize winner).