Septima Clark was an American original-early member of the South Carolina NAACP, crusader for expanded educational opportunities for Blacks, Director of Education for the Highlander Center, member of the SCLC Board of Directors, and perhaps most significantly, founder of the Citizenship Schools, which played a key role in the voter registration campaigns of the later 1950s and early 1960s. She was among a relatively small number of African American activists who advocated anti-hierarchal, democratic leadership. She spoke once of "broadening the scope of democracy to include everybody and deepening the concept to include every relationship." Charles Payne will explore just what democratic leadership meant to her and will speculate on how she developed her conception. There will also be some discussion of Bob Moses and Ella Baker as activists with similar conceptions of democracy.

Cosponsored by: Department of Education Policy Studies, Department of History, Department of Sociology, Department of Political Science, Afro-American Studies and Research Program, LAS/Humanities Council, Women's Studies Program, African-American Cultural Program