One of the most important, yet little-known, initiatives of the mid-20th-century civil rights movement were "Citizenship Schools,” a literacy and civics education program that trained and mobilized hundreds of thousands of Black citizens in the Jim Crow South to understand their Constitutional rights and demand the right to vote.
Join the League of Women Voters of Chicago to hear noted author and speaker Elaine Weiss discuss this audacious experiment in civic education and leadership training.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required; seating is limited.
About the Speaker
Elaine Weiss is an award-winning author and journalist who holds a graduate degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
Her first book on the women's suffrage movement, The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote was a GoodReads Readers' Choice Award winner, short-listed for the 2019 Chautauqua Prize, and received the American Bar Association's highest honor, the Silver Gavel Award.
Her newest book, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools that Built the Civil Rights Movement, has won high praise from scholars and readers alike. It has been long-listed by the American Library Association for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence and was selected by Amazon's editors as one of the best history books of 2025.
Weiss resides in Baltimore, and is a member of the League of Women Voters of Baltimore City.
This event is part of our Chicago in Focus lecture series, which seeks to highlight and explore the most important issues facing Chicagoans today.