#5. Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and The Highlander Folk School (ft. Stephen Lazar and Daniel Marshall)

This episode takes us into the long history of the Civil Rights Movement as we talk about the methods and legacies of two long-distance runners, Ella Baker (1903-1986) and Septima Clark (1898-1987).

Baker was a legendary organizer who espoused a group-centered form of leadership and insisted that deep change required the long-haul “spadework” of community organizing. Clark, known as “the teacher of the Civil Right movement,” built a network of Southern Citizenship Schools, which were crucial to the emergence of Black voting power in the early 1960s.

We also discuss the influence of the famous Highlander Folk School (today the Highlander Research and Education Center) in New Market, TN—and the role of its workshops as a seedbed of activism since the labor struggles over coal mining in the 1930s.

For this conversation, we invited two guests whose work has been inspired by the organizing culture of Highlander and the Civil Rights Movement:

* Stephen Lazar is a National Board Certified Social Studies teacher, who is typically teaching students Social Studies and English at Harvest Collegiate High School in NYC, which he helped to start. His writing on policy and practice has been published on the New York Times, Washington Post, Education Week, Chalkbeat, and Albert Shanker Institute websites.

* Daniel Marshall is the founder and director of the Sand Mountain Cooperative Education Center (in Gunstersville, AL), whose Highlander-inspired mission is to house and support programs that facilitate freedom, community centered-development, and cooperative education in the South.

Recommended:

* Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (2005), Barbara Ransby

* Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (2012), Katherine Mellen Charron

* I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (2007), Charles Payne

* The Long Haul: An Autobiography (1991), Myles Horton, with Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl

* Starting with People Where They Are: Ella Baker’s Theory of Political Organizing (2022), Mie Inouye

* Ella Baker and the Origins of “Participatory Democracy” (2004), Carol Mueller

* Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker (1981), documentary about Ella Baker

* You’ve Got To Move: Stories of Change in the South (1985), documentary about the Highlander Folk School

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