Please note that this event has been moved from the Carter Library to the Decatur Library.

The acclaimed author of the “stirring, definitive, and engrossing” (NPR) The Woman’s Hour returns with the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.

A Cappella Books and Georgia Center for the Book welcome author Elaine Weiss to discuss her new book, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement. The author will appear in conversation with Georgia WIN List Executive Director Melita Easters.

This event is free and open to the public. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the venue.

About the Book
In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins traveled to rural Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow-era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.

Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights—and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, “Mother of the Movement."

In the vein of Hidden Figures and Devil in the Grove, Spell Freedom is both a riveting, crucially important lens onto our past, and a deeply moving story for our present.

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

About the Conversation Partner
Melita Easters is the Executive Director and Founding Chair of Georgia WIN List, the state’s leading PAC for electing pro-choice Democratic women. A former journalist and UGA grad who grew up in rural Georgia, she is also a regular panelist on “The Georgia Gang,” Atlanta’s longest-running public affairs program, which airs Sunday mornings on Fox 5 at 8:30 a.m. She has two daughters and eight grandchildren.