
Spell Freedom
The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement
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Narrated by:
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Robin Miles
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By:
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Elaine Weiss
About this listen
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.
In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled 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.
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The incomparable Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut wrote that she had the luck “always to stumble in on the real show.” Married to a high-ranking member of the Confederate government, she was ideally placed to watch and to record the South’s headlong plunge to ruin, and she left in her journals an unsurpassed account of the old regime’s death throes, its moment of high drama in world history. With intelligence and passion she described the turbulent events of politics and war, as well as the complex society around her.
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Fascinating look at upper class South
- By MikeEC on 04-08-25
By: Mary Chesnut, and others
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True to Our Native Land (Second Edition)
- An African American New Testament Commentary
- By: Gay L. Byron - editor, Emerson B. Powery - editor, Brian K. Blount - editor
- Narrated by: Julienne Irons, Leon Nixon
- Length: 34 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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True to Our Native Land is a pioneering commentary on the New Testament that sets biblical interpretation firmly in the context of African American experience and concern. In this second edition, the scholarship is cutting-edge, updated, and expanded to be in tune with African American culture, education, and churches.
By: Gay L. Byron - editor, and others
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Mrs. Cook and the Klan
- Booze, Bloodshed, and Bigotry in America's Heartland
- By: Tom Chorneau
- Narrated by: David Lee Garver
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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On the day she was murdered, Myrtle Underwood Cook boasted to local authorities about new evidence of a major bootlegging ring operating out of the Rock Island train depot behind her house in a small town in eastern Iowa. Then, as she sat at her window sewing, she took a single slug through the heart. She was president of the local temperance union; her killing made the front page of the New York Times. The next day her funeral made national news due to the eerie presence of a small army from the Ku Klux Klan, its members, donned in full regalia, drawn from three surrounding states.
By: Tom Chorneau
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Patriot Presidents
- From George Washington to John Quincy Adams
- By: William E. Leuchtenburg
- Narrated by: Tim Fannon
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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The founding fathers of the United States created a unique institution, the presidency, as they were determined to authorize an effective chief executive but wary of monarchy. They endowed this office with broad prerogatives and power but hedged it in with limitations. The presidency that developed over the next generation, however, was fashioned less by the clauses in the Constitution than by the way that the first presidents responded to challenges such as sectional enmity and the vexing Napoleonic warfare that jeopardized maritime rights.
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Gold
- The Remarkable Story of Edward Hammond Hargraves – Charlatan, Imposter and Self-Proclaimed Discoverer of Gold in Australia
- By: Matt Murphy
- Narrated by: Kaya Byrne
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Ask google Who discovered gold in Australia? and you'll promptly get 'Edward Hammond Hargraves'. Hargraves has for decades (and decades) received the fame, fortune and adulation from all corners of the country, but did he earn it? This is the story of an oversized layabout who received years of accolades and free lunches, despite lumbering from one embarrassment to another, and of those who spent decades trying to expose him and seek their share of the glory.
By: Matt Murphy
What listeners say about Spell Freedom
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Janie
- 03-15-25
They kept on keepin’ on!
I loved learning about the slow and steady progress that was made, now terrifying that so much has changed. The narrator emphasized the T in Monteagle which we Tennesseans don’t do!
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