SPELL FREEDOM: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement  shares the hidden history of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans in the Jim Crow south laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement. We’ve read about the big voter registration and equal rights drives of the mid 1960s—Birmingham, Freedom Summer, the march over Selma’s Pettus Bridge—but we’ve not heard of the program that built the foundation for these campaigns: the Citizenship Schools. SPELL FREEDOM will finally bring the thrilling, important stories of Septima Clark, Esau Jenkins, Bernice Robinson, and Myles Horton to life in full relief—names mentioned only in passing in the great civil rights histories—portraying how, with creativity and courage, they took the fight for enfranchisement into their own hands, and prepared southern Black communities for the larger struggle.

About the author

Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and public speaker. In addition to Spell Freedom, she is the author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote and Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army of the Great War. Elaine lives with her husband in Baltimore, Maryland. Find out more at ElaineWeiss.com.