Clark, Septima

Khaula Murtadha

In the 1950s, widespread public resistance to the Supreme Court's ruling on school desegregation was so strong that South Carolina passed a law forbidding government employees from membership in civil rights organizations. Septima Clark taught in Charleston area Black schools for many years but was fired in 1956 because she admitted her membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Nevertheless, she remained steadfast in her community activism. Septima Poinsette Clark (1898–1987) was born on May 3, 1898, in Charleston, South Carolina, one of eight siblings. Her father, Peter Porcher Poinsette, was born a slave, and her mother, Victoria Warren Anderson Poinsette, was a free woman who had spent her early childhood years in Haiti. Peter and Victoria met in Jacksonville, Florida, married and moved to Charleston. In her 1990 book, Ready from Within , edited with Cynthia Stokes, Clark described her mother as proud of ...

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