Start With the Catalog

Esau Jenkins, Septima Clark, and the discipline of meeting people where they are

In 1954, a bus driver named Esau Jenkins was driving tobacco workers and longshoremen from Johns Island, South Carolina to their jobs in Charleston, and using the ride to teach them to read. What he was teaching them to read were the sections of the South Carolina constitution they would be required to recite at the voter registrar’s office. Jenkins had just run for school board. He lost. The reason he lost was that almost no one in his community was registered to vote, and the reason for that was the literacy test, a policy designed precisely to produce the outcome it had, in fact, produced.

Jenkins could have absorbed that loss as evidence that the terrain was simply closed to his people. He did something else. He used the forty minutes he already had every morning to teach his people how to read.

I spent part of my working life at the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. Septima Clark, who had been fired from the Charleston County schools in 1956 for refusing to give up her NAACP membership, had come to Highlander a generation before me to teach. She’d been teaching adults on Johns Island since 1916, when, as an eighteen-year-old Black teacher barred from the Charleston public schools, she had taken a position at the Promise Land School and spent her evenings helping her students’ parents learn to read. She taught with what was already in the house: the Sears Roebuck catalog, the canned-food labels on the pantry shelf, the mail-order forms the household already depended on to reach the world past the tidal marshes.

Clark invited Jenkins to Highlander in August 1954. There he met Myles Horton, Highlander’s founder. He also met Clark’s cousin, Bernice Robinson. Over workshops and long evenings, the three of them - Jenkins, Clark, and Robinson - built what became the Citizenship Schools.

The first one opened on January 7, 1957, in the back of a grocery store on Johns Island. Fourteen adults came. The oldest was sixty-four. None of them had been to school. Bernice Robinson, who taught the class, was not a professional teacher - she was a beautician. Clark had insisted on this, precisely because a professional teacher would have taught the way teachers had always taught, and that was not what the room needed. Robinson asked the students what they wanted to learn. They told her. How to read well enough to pass the voter registration test. How to fill out a money order. How to sign their own names. How to read the Sears catalog that was already in every house. That was the curriculum. When there was no blackboard, they wrote on dry cleaner bags.

Three months later, the class took a field trip to the Charleston voter registration office. Eight of the fourteen passed the literacy test.

By 1961, there were thirty-seven Citizenship Schools across the Sea Islands and the nearby mainland. The program was absorbed into the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Clark moved it to the Dorchester Center in Liberty County, Georgia, where she spent the next decade training roughly ten thousand teachers who carried the method across eleven southern states. By 1965, the schools had taught more than twenty-five thousand adults to read and had added about fifty thousand new voters to the rolls. Andrew Young, who worked alongside Clark at SCLC, later said the Citizenship Schools became the base on which the whole civil rights movement was built.

They didn’t build a base by recruiting to their analysis. They built a base by meeting a need their neighbors already had.

What civil resistance must take from this

The people I work with in the growing civil resistance movement - in the United States and increasingly abroad - are often in a hurry. The moment demands it. But the hurry produces a recurring error, which is the tendency to bring a framework to a community rather than to let a community produce its own. Jenkins, Clark, and Robinson did the opposite. Here is what their method teaches the people just starting out.

1. Meet a need people already have

The need was to vote. The obstacle was literacy. The literacy was going to be acquired through the material of everyday life - a catalog, a money order, the name of one’s own child to be signed on a school permission slip. The political frame followed the human one, not the other way around. Movements that invert this order, that require people to care about the organizer’s theory of change before the organizer will engage with their actual life, do not build bases. They build audiences.

2. Let the room set the curriculum

The first question Robinson asked was what the students wanted to learn. That question is the whole method. It sounds unremarkable. It is, in fact, the move that separates durable organizing from everything else. Most attempts at movement-building fail at exactly this step, because organizers come with a syllabus and try to recruit a class to it. Durable organizing does the opposite. It asks the people already in the room what they need, and it builds the work from the answers.

3. The teacher comes from the room

Bernice Robinson was a beautician on Johns Island. She was someone her students already trusted, who already knew them, who spoke in the cadences of their own homes. Clark insisted on this choice for a strategic reason: a credentialed teacher would have re-created the power relationships that had already failed these adults. A neighbor would not. Movements grow from horizontal relationships of trust. They wither when they depend on imported experts.

4. The materials of liberation are already in their hands

The Sears catalog is the lesson in miniature. Civil resistance, in its early stages, tends to over-invest in its own vocabulary - pillars of support, noncooperation, narrative infrastructure, framing. These are useful terms. I have written enough of them. But the catalog teaches something different. It says: the materials of liberation are already in the hands of the people you are trying to organize. You do not have to bring them. You have to notice what is there, and help people use what is already theirs.

The guidance you find here is intended to help those facilitating the participation of communities in civil resistance to bound their work in the context of tried and true strategic frameworks and well-tested tactics, not to substitute for community wisdom.

5. Every student is a future teacher

Many of the people who learned to read at a Citizenship School went on to teach the next class. They became the organizers, the deacons, the block captains, the poll workers, and, in time, the candidates. Andrew Young’s claim that these schools built the base of the movement is not poetic overstatement. It is an accurate description of what happens when a method treats every participant as a future leader. The durability of the Citizenship Schools came from the fact that graduation and recruitment were the same act.

6. Respect self-interest honestly met

The students did not come because they had been inspired by a speech. They came because they wanted to vote, or fill out a money order, or sign their own name. The organizing used that. It did not pretend the motivation was somewhere nobler than where it actually was. Movements that respect the real reasons people show up tend to hold. Movements that demand a conversion to the organizer’s theory of change before participation begins tend not to.

Where to start

The Highlander Center sits on a ridge in East Tennessee. The original building burned down in 1961, set on fire by people who understood perfectly what was being taught there. It was rebuilt. It still teaches. In the archives are photographs of the people who shaped this work - Septima Clark, Esau Jenkins, Bernice Robinson, Myles Horton - and thousands of students whose names are less famous but whose hands held the catalog, the pen, the registration form, and eventually the ballot.

The question facing civil resistance today, in the United States and around the world, is the same question they answered. What do the people in your town, your congregation, your neighborhood, your workplace, already want? What do they already know how to do? What is already in their hands that, if used a little differently, could bend toward freedom?

The answer is always specific to the place. That is the point. Start there. Ask the room. Let the curriculum come from the catalog.

To read further: Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) is the definitive biography and the indispensable one. Guy and Candie Carawan, Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life? The People of Johns Island, South Carolina - Their Faces, Their Words, and Their Songs (University of Georgia Press, revised edition 1989) is a beautiful documentary record of the community that produced this work. The SNCC Digital Gateway’s entry on Septima Clark (snccdigital.org) is a well-sourced short introduction with primary photographs. And the Highlander Research and Education Center, in New Market, Tennessee, is still a place you can go.