These foot soldiers in the Civil Rights Movement are the focus of Elaine Weiss’ “Spell Freedom,” a richly researched and detailed new history of the underground schools that sprang up throughout the South in the aftermath of the Brown decision.

Credit: Simon & Schuster

Credit: Simon & Schuster

Clark, Robinson and Jenkins all trained at Highlander Folk School on Monteagle Mountain, Tennessee, 50 miles north of Chattanooga, a social justice training center and the only place in the South where Blacks and whites regularly lived and ate together.

Founded by Miles Horton, a white rural Southerner and self-styled “Radical Hillbilly,” Highlander was one of the springs that watered the movement. On some mornings the white attendees would fix breakfast before the Blacks came down; Rosa Parks, one of the more famous school attendees, took “special pleasure” in this amazing role reversal.

Horton’s wife Zilphia provided the soundtrack for the school, passing out mimeographed lyric sheets to the Highlander attendees and leading them in sing-alongs. Zilphia and folk singer Pete Seeger had modified an old hymn and written new verses to create a newish song, “We Shall Overcome,” that rang from the rafters every night at Highlander before being carried out to the marches and jail cells.

John Lewis came as a young seminary student. He wrote in his memoir “Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement” that his time at Highlander helped him realize the movement would not be powered by elites but by the “tens of thousands of faceless, nameless, anonymous men, women and children who were going to rise like an irresistible army.”

Although Civil Rights leaders march through these pages, Weiss prefers the company of the unsung, the members of the irresistible army, the beauticians and bus drivers who risked their lives and their families’ well-being.

Credit: Nina Subin

Credit: Nina Subin

While the Brown ruling was cause for celebration, a follow-up Supreme Court decision in 1955 on implementing it was the opposite. Segregation was illegal, the court maintained, but it was up to the states to figure out how to implement changes. Soon Southern states were passing even more laws to entrench segregation everywhere.

The only way to fight back was at the ballot box, but that meant overcoming difficult “literacy tests,” usually given only to Blacks who were trying to register. Hence the need for the schools, held secretly in beauty parlors and the back rooms of grocery stores, where Blacks taught basic literacy to their neighbors, some of whom could not sign their own name when they started.

“They sat, hunched over the long wooden tables, elbows akimbo, eyes fixed on their task,” Weiss writes of one class. “… The loudest sound in the room was the sharp crack of pencils snapping” as adults traced over the letters in their own names to learn to write.

“The new students were trying too hard, gripping too tightly, bearing down too heavily. Too eager, too anxious, their pencils broke, and they mumbled in frustration.”

From the mid-50s to the mid-60s, more than 900 citizenship schools helped teach more than 40,000 Black citizens to read and write -- and ultimately vote.

Weiss is the author of two previous histories that elevated ordinary women doing extraordinary things: “The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote” and “Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army in the Great War.”

She is highly attuned to the ingrained patriarchy of the era, including in much of the Civil Rights Movement, where women were the boots on the ground while men took leadership roles (and higher salaries). At the 1963 March on Washington, none of the speakers were women.

“Those of us who did not sing,” Rosa Parks remarked after the March, “didn’t get to say anything.”

As the citizenship schools spread, racist officials threw everything they could at the schools to close them down, including Highlander. They revoked its IRS tax exemption and held kangaroo court hearings on charges of communist infiltration. The Georgia Education Commission printed and distributed more than 1 million copies of a pamphlet that showed a photo of Horton, Parks and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at Highlander spreading the “communist doctrine of racial nationalism.”

Eventually, those who were attacked were vindicated. Clark, whose teacher’s pension had been canceled by the state of South Carolina in the 1950s, was awarded the state’s highest civilian award, the Order of the Palmetto, when she retired in 1982. She is now on a South Carolina $1 coin issued by the U.S. Mint.

Most of the once-powerful white men who tried to stop her are now consigned to a shameful legacy on the scrap heap of American history.

If, however, that history is allowed to be fully taught in our schools.

NONFICTION

“Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools that Built the Civil Rights Movement”

By Elaine Weiss

Simon & Schuster

384 pages, $29.99

Author Appearance

Elaine Weiss. A Cappella Books and Georgia Center for the Book present the author in conversation with Melita Easters, executive director of Georgia WIN List. 7 p.m. March 12. Free. Decatur Library, 215 Sycamore Ave., Decatur. www.acappellabooks.com