Join us to hear from noted activist and author Elaine Weiss, who will speak about her new book, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement, the story of four activists whose bold plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement.
These activists ran a citizen schools project in the back of a small grocery store in rural Tennessee to help Black Americans pass the daunting Jim Crow-era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them. 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, the schools nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—who were trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required; seating is limited.
About the Speaker
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. Find out more at ElaineWeiss.com.
This event is part of our Chicago in Focus lecture series, which seeks to highlight and explore the most important issues facing Chicagoans today.