‘You’re not going to get anywhere unless the people are behind you.’

A conversation with Elaine Weiss, author of ‘Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement’

Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and public speaker.¹ Her latest book is Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement, a history of the community-led “citizenship schools” that played a vital but largely overlooked role in the civil rights movement.²

While Spell Freedom is a chronicle of the past, it could hardly be more relevant to the present. In part that’s because the book is about voting rights and justice and resisting government-led oppression and, perhaps most of all, organizing—the kind of people-to-people, community-to-community engagement and mobilization that remains the only true guarantor of democracy.

But it’s also relevant to our current political moment because Weiss’s work seems to make the White House uncomfortable. Earlier this year, Weiss was scheduled to speak about Spell Freedom at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta. The Carter Library is run by the National Archives.³

Weiss’s event was booked last November, but just weeks after Trump fired the head of the Archives, his free speech-obsessed administration—determined as ever to break the shackles of censorship and cancel culture in America—deplatformed Weiss and a number of other authors. The focus of their work: homelessness, climate change, and the struggle for Black freedom. “It seemed obvious that books on race, poverty, and the climate had failed the new administration’s ideological test,” Weiss wrote for The Atlantic.⁴

The conversation below has been condensed and edited significantly for clarity and accuracy. To listen to our full 40-minute conversation, head here, or search for “Reframe Your Inbox” wherever you get your podcasts.

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ADAM: There are a lot of storylines throughout Spell Freedom. When people ask you what the book is about, how do you respond?

ELAINE: The book is about ordinary, very brave Americans who believed so strongly in the democratic principles of our nation that they were willing to risk everything to fix our democracy and be able to vote. These were Black citizens in the Jim Crow South. They had very little power, very little in the way of wealth or connections. And yet, working together they were able to change our nation. It gives me a sense of hope, of how citizens can make a real difference.

It is remarkable how many people you cite—civil rights icons who we celebrate today—who describe the Highlander Folk School as the “backbone” of the civil rights movement, as you put it. Can you tell us what Highlander is?

The Highlander Folk School, as it was called from 1932, at its founding in the depth of the depression, until 1961, when it changed its name, wasn’t a school the way we think of a school. It was a farmhouse on a mountaintop in the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee. It was founded by a man named Myles Horton, a white man born in the mountains of Tennessee. His parents were teachers and sharecroppers. He went to college and studied theology and sociology and thought for a while he might be a minister.

But he wanted to help his neighbors, [who] were deeply impoverished. [They] had no sense of hope. He returns to his home region and opens this retreat center [and] educational facility. It’s based on a European concept at the time called “folk schools,” which brought communities together to discuss their common political, economic, social problems. [Horton] brings that concept back to America.

People came to Highlander for a residency of a week, two weeks, sometimes four weeks. They lived together. It was always integrated, which was against the Jim Crow laws of Tennessee. Horton proudly flaunted that. People lived together, discussed their problems, and came up with solutions and debated them. Then [they] would go back to their communities with a blueprint. It wasn’t just for education—it was really a plan of action. They would go back and execute this plan, whether it was to start a citizens group or raise money for a cooperative. And Highlander staff would help them.

Around the late 1940s, early 1950s, Horton realized that race was the determining factor that was keeping the South from progress. He said, We can’t solve our political problems, our economic problems, our social problems, until we reckon with our racial problems.

By this time, Highlander had become a training center for the labor movement and was a training facility for the Congress of Industrial Organizations. But Horton pivots and becomes a place where Blacks and whites—academics, newspaper editors, community activists—come together and discuss racial issues and, around 1953, start talking about desegregation, [when] Brown v. Board of Education is bubbling in the Supreme Court. That’s where my book begins.

How did Highlander come to play such a big role in the movement?

Highlander becomes the place where Black and white activists come together to strategize, to argue, to have fights, to learn from one another. Horton’s an expert educator. He really prods them and makes people uncomfortable with his questions and gets at the root of their thinking.

[In 1958,] John Lewis is a 19-year-old seminarian in Nashville. He’s studying, with Rev. James Lawson, nonviolent resistance to Jim Crow. Lawson brings his students, including [Lewis and] James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette—these icons of the movement—to Highlander for a weekend.

John Lewis says it changed his life.⁵ It was the first time he sat at a table and ate with white people. Seeing an integrated society in microcosm was very, very powerful. Rosa Parks comes to Highlander, and she, too, has a revelatory experience. Three months later, [Parks] refuses to give up her seat and gives full credit to Highlander for giving her the strength and the sense of possibility in the ten days she was there.

Highlander is investigated, spied upon, attacked, and closed down at one point. [But today it] is still running outside of Knoxville.

One output that emerged from Highlander is the protagonist of the book—the citizenship schools, which became a foundation for much of the organizing success of the civil rights movement. Can you talk about what the citizenship schools were?

The citizenship schools begin on Sea Island, off the coast of Charleston, with [Esau Jenkins], an extraordinary man who is a native of the island. He realizes that his neighbors, his community, his island will have no ability to progress or have economic development or have any political power or even protect [themselves] against the vicious injustices that they face until they have political power, which means they have to vote.

Very few [Black] people on the island or in the rural south—the eleven formerly Confederate states—are able to vote. They are inhibited by a range of suppression techniques, one of them being violence: People are lynched or shot if they attempt to vote. [Another] is the poll tax, which is usually out of reach for most subsistence workers [to pay]. [A] third is the literacy test. Most of the states still have them in the 1950s and 60s. These are ridiculous tests. It’s not just writing your name or being able to read in a rudimentary way. It’s being able to analyze and discuss the legal aspects of the state constitution with all its archaic language.

Jenkins starts teaching his riders on his daily bus route. He owns a bus. He brings them over from the islands to Charleston [and] to their work. He teaches them the South Carolina Constitution. He can get two or three or four people registered to vote. He takes them to the courthouse. But he realizes he needs something bigger and larger, something that will really teach them to read and write.

He had been a student of a teacher named Septima Clark. When the book opens, she’s a 56-year-old Black elementary school teacher in Charleston, working for 40 years in the classroom. She will soon be fired from her job because she refused to renounce her membership in the NAACP, and the NAACP was marked as a “subversive” organization.

She goes to work at Highlander and she brings [Jenkins] to discuss his idea. And Myles Horton gets involved. They develop this idea of teaching literacy to adults who have been denied a decent education, [in part because of] the inferiority of the segregated Black schools, which are no more than shacks—no desks, no blackboards, no bathrooms. If you’re a sharecropper, your children are put in the fields. They’re only allowed to go to school for a few months a year.

This means that functional or even complete illiteracy is the norm in most of these rural areas. And purposefully so, because education is power—we’re seeing that again right now, too. They’re kept illiterate, uneducated, helpless, [in] menial jobs. This is all part of the power structure of the South.

This citizenship school idea is going to break that. The first one opens in a cooperative grocery store that Jenkins buys and rehabs. It’s put behind the grocery shelves in a back room with no windows, so white people could not see what they were doing. Because just as it was illegal, by punishment of death, in the antebellum South to teach an enslaved person to read and write, it was still dangerous to be doing this—to be empowering the Black community to vote. So it’s done in secret.

It’s very successful. The other islanders hear, They’re starting to register to vote over there. They want a school. It begins to grow. Hosea Williams, who will become a lieutenant to Dr. King, hears about it and sponsors a dozen citizenship classes.

These aren’t brick-and-mortar buildings. They are community, peer-to-peer learning. They were in the backs of beauty parlors [and] funeral parlors, in automotive garages, under the trees. They were informal—not kids coming down from northern colleges to teach. These were your neighbors, so there was a sense of trust. Volunteers to become citizenship school teachers went to study with Septima Clark to learn the curricula, to learn how to manage a class, how to establish [a school].

They got no pay beyond their expenses. It was dangerous. Some lost their jobs when it was known that they did this. Some were shot at. Many were economically or physically harassed. Fannie Lou Hamer begins as a citizenship school teacher. It becomes the entryway, especially [for] women, to enter the movement.

These students have to be taught how to hold a pencil in the first classes. Then they learn how to sign their names, by muscle memory [or] by doing it on a template. They learn their letters. They learn their numbers and basic arithmetic. But even more so, they learn their rights. They learn the Constitution—the U.S. Constitution is put up on the wall. The UN Declaration of Human Rights is put up on the wall of every classroom.

They learn what their rights are. They learn how government works. They learn it’s not a black box. It’s not just the white man’s government, it’s your government. And this is how it works, this is what your state legislator does, this is what your mayor does, and this is what the president does. They practice writing letters to the president and to their congressmen.

They have a sense of agency that they never had before. They organize citizens’ groups and voting leagues and they study. They learn how to pull the levers in a voting machine. It becomes a full citizen education—to become [what] Septima Clark calls, “ready from within.”

It’s not just the skills they’re learning. It’s the psychological, spiritual, political sense of confidence they gain. So when Dr. King is called in to help lead a march or a campaign or a boycott or a protest, they’re ready. They know what they’re fighting for.

A lot of us right now are being reminded that there’s no one who’s coming to save us, whether a political party or a corporation or a court. It is always going to be people, and people organizing. It’s a lesson that Septima Clark and Myles Horton have to learn: You can’t just tell people, “Go out and vote and be brave.” You have to first show them and make them feel and believe that it actually matters. Can you talk about the lessons that these icons of the civil rights movement had to learn, over and over again, about what effective organizing and mobilizing of people requires?

That is what it’s about at its core. A woman like Septima Clark, who’s a teacher and grew up poor—she has no patience for those who don’t understand that poor people are smart and have dignity and have ideas and have contributions to make. And she really rails at anyone who looks down on people who may not be part of the elites.

She teaches some of the icons [of the civil rights movement]. She teaches the people she’s working with, especially the men, that they have to have a sense of humility when talking to a sharecropper who has never been able to go to school but is joining the movement. She’s a very religious woman, and that comes out of her sense of every human is God’s child, but [it also comes from] her really clever organizing sense that you’re not going to get anywhere unless the masses of people are behind you. You can march all you like, but if you can’t encourage and support and inspire the people on the ground, this movement is not going to get anywhere. She’s both pragmatic and spiritual about it.

They do have to learn lessons. One of the really interesting events I describe is the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which comes out of those meetings that John Lewis attends at Highlander.⁶ In that room you have a lot of the people who become those icons, like Lewis and James Bevel and Diane Nash.

They learn that they’re going to have to inspire people with their courage and with their language. But the people they’re working with are not all going to be college students. They’re going to be ordinary people and they have to learn to relate to them. Then they have to articulate what they’re asking people to risk, and why.

Horton and Clark play a big role in making them confront that and learn that. When they’re in the field, time and again, Clark thinks about the dangers she has led people into. For instance, she trains a whole community in western Tennessee to be able to register and vote. And they do. They’re extremely brave. They register and vote in 1960 for Kennedy.

And they are punished by the white establishment. The day after the harvest is in, they’re all evicted from their sharecropper cabins and they’re thrown into the cold. Grandmothers, babies, everything out into the mud. They live in tents for the next two years. Clark goes to them and helps organize relief efforts. She realizes she’s asked them to do this, and she’s so proud of them because though they’re suffering mightily, none of them asked to have their names removed from the registration books.

This is what they were willing to do to be able to vote.

I was thinking while reading the book about not just the physical violence, but the economic retribution—what you’re describing about people being fired and kicked out of their homes and not able to buy food and basically being exiled. That’s an actual cancellation.

We think being criticized on social media is a cancellation. But if you had the nerve to try to go to the registrar, [it] was open two days a month in most places, at very inconvenient times. And if they saw a Black person coming [to try to register to vote], they would just close the office.

Let’s say you actually did get in and attempt to take the literacy test. You could be a college graduate and you would be flunked eight times. It really didn’t matter. It was just another way of discriminating against Black voters. Let’s say you did attempt to register. The registrar would say, Well, come back in two weeks, and I’ll let you know if you’ve succeeded.

In the meantime, by the time you got home, that registrar would have called your employer, and you were fired—that’s what happened to Fannie Lou Hamer. [They would have] called your landlord, or the owner of the land on which you worked, and you and your family were evicted. Your extended family was evicted. Your name was posted at city hall, so everyone knew. The names were distributed to the police and the highway patrol, so you would be harassed on the road and arrested. The loan for your truck was pulled. If you did own a house, your mortgage was canceled. The pharmacy wouldn’t fulfill the prescriptions for your sick baby. It was called “The Squeeze.” It was a very organized and structured oppression tactic of the white communities.

This is what you faced if you attempted to register to vote. And yet people were so brave and so determined to exercise their constitutional rights and to prove this was a democracy that they were willing to do this. [They] realized what they were going to face. And, of course, quite a few were killed.

Something I always struggle with, reading history, is to remember that at the time, success was not guaranteed. I was thinking about that in the context of the political moment we’re in right now, where everything rightly feels uncertain and daunting and scary. Reading about the civil rights movement, I have to remind myself that it felt daunting and uncertain and scary then too—and success was not guaranteed.

It is easy to read about it now, knowing that it ultimately proved successful, and think that the moment we’re in is unprecedented in its uncertainty and in the anxiety many of us are feeling. But, of course, that was the case then as well.

Absolutely. And even more physically so, perhaps. There was no certainty at all. And it drags on for years. Even the most committed organizers begin to feel weary and frustrated and angry. We certainly see it among the young students of SNCC.

There are these incredible letters that [Septima Clark] writes to a white federal judge from South Carolina and his wife [who have become friends of Clark’s and advisors to the movement]. Those are the most revealing. She does wonder, Is this worth it? I think it’s worth it, but I’m asking people to do something that’s very dangerous, and I don’t know if it will succeed. The thing is, you can’t just go and vote. You have to influence the monolithic white power structure which controls every part of their lives. There was great uncertainty that this was worth it. They were putting people’s lives on the line.

Now we say, Okay, I’ll go to that demonstration, that Tesla takedown, the women’s march. There’s not a sense that you might die—a real sense that you might die. Not necessarily when you [were] there, though that could happen too. It’s afterwards. If you [went] to a meeting, there were police officers in the parking lot taking down your license plate number, and those were given to the highway patrol, and you’d be arrested on the road for some trumped up charge. Your name would be posted publicly, and you would suffer retribution. [There was a] sense of, where is this going to end? How can it end?

One of the most moving parts of the book for me was the thread of the song “We Shall Overcome,” which we now associate with the civil rights movement. It emerges from Highlander—and by the end of the book, it is being echoed by Lyndon Johnson in his 1965 speech to Congress that precipitates the Voting Rights Act. Can you talk about the emergence of “We Shall Overcome” and the way that music and song were such powerful parts of the movement?

[“We Shall Overcome”] begins as a church hymn in the Black church. It’s used by a group of Black women who are striking at a tobacco factory in Charleston. At the end of the day, it’s been long, it’s been cold. They’re trying to get a small raise. They’re out on the streets, and they sing this hymn led by a woman who sang in her church choir. And they change the words to make it a strike song.

They come to Highlander in the late 1940s. It’s a labor organizing facility at that point. They bring the song. And Myles Horton’s wife, Zilphia, is a trained musician and a musicologist. She gathers songs from around the region and uses them at Highlander. There’s music every night.

She learns the song from the striking women [at the tobacco factory]. She recognizes [it] has real power, [but] it’s a little hard to sing. She tweaks the chords and she tweaks the rhythm. She teaches it to her friend Pete Seeger. It’s used as Highlander’s anthem. And then it begins to be sung in the citizenship schools. It is sung at the workshops where these young students come. John Lewis hears it for the first time at Highlander. Then it is taught in the mass meetings of [the] Montgomery [bus] boycott and the Nashville sit-ins. There are more freedom songs that get written and popularized by the students themselves and by other people, taking gospel songs and spirituals and church music and popular music.

Singing becomes such an important part of the movement. Facing this danger day in and day out—a campaign like the Montgomery boycott goes on for a year of great sacrifice and fear. Every other night or so, there were mass meetings where everyone would gather in a church and pray and hear Dr. King give an oration and sing together. And it gave a sense of strength and unity and purpose. That’s why it’s taught in the citizenship schools. Thousands of people come out singing these songs, and then they can sing it on the streets and they can sing it at the March on Washington.

That moment that you mentioned, after Bloody Sunday [in Selma, Alabama], LBJ finally says, I’m going to submit a voting rights bill to Congress. He gives this very moving speech about how necessary this is and how American it is for people to vote. And he ends it with, “And we shall overcome.”

John Lewis writes about that moment. He’s watching it on TV with Dr. King in Selma. Dr. King begins to cry because to hear the president speaking the words that they had been singing for the last decade is very, very moving. It’s an extraordinary evolution of a song, and the political and emotional power it still has.

1. https://elaineweiss.com

2. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Spell-Freedom/Elaine-Weiss/9781668002698

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/arts/national-archives-carter-library-cancels-event.html

4. https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2025/03/why-trump-administration-canceled-me/681934

5. “I left Highlander on fire,” Lewis would write in his memoir, Walking with the Wind.

6. A remarkable audio clip of Lewis discussing the Nashville sit-ins at Highlander in 1961: https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/highlander/id/1930.