Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement
By Elaine Weiss
Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2025

Four seemingly ordinary Americans laid the groundwork for extraordinary change when they founded the Citizenship Schools project in the Jim Crow South of 1954. The project established more than 900 schools which taught tens of thousands of Black Southerners to read and write in order to pass the voter registration tests of the era. Their work nurtured a generation of activists, many of them women, who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, one of the project’s founders, “Mother of the Movement.”

About the Author
Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and public speaker. 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 where she loves exploring the Chesapeake on her kayak.

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