THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 12, 1995 TAG: 9503120310
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY FRANCIE LATOUR, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 193 lines
Victoria Jackson Gray-Adams can remember when teaching civics was an act of defiance.
Three decades ago, she gave her first lesson, in a makeshift classroom in her hometown of Hattiesburg, Miss.
They met at night in clandestine spaces, a half-dozen sharecroppers and domestics who feared retribution from white segregationists. Many had never written their own names; some came with tattered notebooks and borrowed pens.
Literacy was only the first goal. Gray-Adams, a civil-rights activist, made it her mission to teach fellow blacks in her community, a handful at a time, to discover themselves as citizens.
``I will never forget that night,'' Gray-Adams said recently in her Petersburg home. ``At the end of every class period, we would sing `We shall overcome, we shall overcome, someday.' So we were doing that ritual, and I remember saying to myself, `You've got to be kidding. You have got to be kidding. What on earth is this group going to overcome?
``I never forgot that, because Hattiesburg had one of the most vibrant citizen movements of that time. And it grew, to a large extent, from that little band of people.''
Dramatic moments in the struggle for civil rights have been frozen in time: fire hoses pinning black protesters to a wall; a defiant and resolute Rosa Parks staring out from the front seat of a bus; soldiers escorting children into high schools.
But those who undertook the slow work of citizenship education in the South's rural pockets say there were other, less visible actions that laid the groundwork for those momentous changes.
They also say it is important that those efforts receive the recognition they deserve. Though the challenges have changed with time, the need to educate citizens remains, they believe.
``Why do you think this society is having all the problems that still plague us?'' Gray-Adams asked. ``Because people are lacking some basic things, and they don't realize the power of their own vote.''
Citizenship lessons could once again spur that realization and reinvigorate a democracy that is threatened by voter alienation and helplessness - enemies that are blind to color and just as destructive as the Jim Crow laws of the 1960s.
``People talk about marches, and the marches were important, they played a tremendous role,'' Gray-Adams said. ``But where did those marches come from? What precipitated it? Where did people get the courage after 100 years to rise up and begin to do that, knowing full well that they were taking their lives in their hands?
``Even though you might have seen thousands of people out there marching, that whole thing started somewhere, with somebody.''
For Gray-Adams, somewhere was the Dorchester Center in McIntosh, Ga., where the first citizenship school was founded in the early 1960s. Led by Septima Clark, Andrew Young and other civil rights pioneers, the experiment drew bus loads of black activists from across the South for intensive weeklong workshops in citizenship training, budgeting and voter registration.
Those who finished the program returned to their hometowns to teach others, exploring their state constitutions in group sessions and penetrating deeper into rural communities for more promising recruits to send to Dorchester.
``That's the power of replication,'' said Gray-Adams, herself a product of the citizenship school's ever-expanding web.
It is almost impossible to estimate how many blacks the program touched, or whether any citizenship efforts extended into Virginia, Gray-Adams said. The far-reaching, dispersed nature of the network was part of its power.
``Septima Clark's plan was always that you would take back the knowledge you had gained to your community.''
Gray-Adams was recruited by members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who came to speak at her local St. John Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1960s. A successful businesswoman and a mother in her 30s, Gray-Adams was among the first volunteers from the ``hill country'' of southern Mississippi to embark on the 700-mile journey to reach Clark's one-room citizenship center.
A fellow activist drove her to Greenwood, Miss., where a bus would be waiting to take them and about two dozen others from around the state to the school in Georgia.
``The woman who drove me, Mrs. Woods, she and I were among the only adults who dared to identify with the movement at that time,'' Gray-Adams said. ``But Mrs. Woods was not going to exceed that speed limit. And I thought to myself, `We're never going to get there.' ''
Looking back, Gray-Adams said, she could understand her partner's caution: Any violation of the law, or no violation at all, could have gotten them stopped by a county sheriff or state trooper.
Gray-Adams not only caught that bus, but she also sent dozens of others on the same trip as supervisor of the citizenship education program in her state.
``Before long,'' she said, ``there were four and five and six little pockets of students instead of just one. As people begin to learn the business of citizenship and see the courage of a few, they will begin to rise above their own fears.''
Dorothy F. Cotton came to the program through her work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. A coalition of civil rights organizers founded by The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others in 1957, the SCLC adopted the citizenship program along with other voter-education projects in 1962.
Cotton, who last week joined hundreds of civil rights veterans in recreating the historic march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., is one of the few who remembers the Dorchester Center from its beginnings.
``The focus was to get black people involved in the governing of themselves and make radical changes in their daily lives,'' said Cotton, who directed the program in the mid-1960s.
Cotton said she learned more about the work of building democracy from teaching farmers to fill out money orders and read the 14th Amendment than she did from her own college education.
``We would teach them how to spell the word `vote,' but you weren't just learning how to spell `vote' for its own sake,'' Cotton said. ``They had to learn why it was important that they learn to spell it.''
Students and teachers used everything from newspaper articles to social security forms to answer those deeper questions. They learned how council members were elected, how they made decisions and the responsibilities that came with their positions of power.
Armed with that knowledge, citizenship educators began to chip away at long-held myths that black Americans were either not interested in participating in the democratic process or incapable of contributing to the system.
``Septima always saw registration and literacy not as ends in and of themselves, but as a means to the goal of developing active citizens,'' said Charles M. Payne, who teaches African-American Studies at Northwestern University outside Chicago, Ill.
Payne's upcoming book, ``I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle,'' chronicles the grassroots movements that fed civil rights progress in Mississippi.
Payne said the power of Clark's teaching method was rooted in her ability to wed such abstract principles as liberty with everyday activities.
``If someone repaired the plow that day, that experience would be the basis of her lesson,'' Payne said. ``She dared people to imagine that something like the constitution could mean as much to them as a plow.''
That intimate understanding of grassroots education gave Clark an authority that humbled even the most prominent leaders of the movement.
``The point where Septima intersected with the public cause is that she could really shame the visible leaders,'' said Taylor Branch, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Civil Rights Movement called ``Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63.'' Branch dedicated the book to Clark, who died in 1989.
``She would criticize the big-time ministers for not realizing the human potential of what they were doing,'' Branch said. ``They would come out in their fancy suits, and fight over who had the biggest congregation. And she would say, `You don't understand your own movement. These people are the roots of freedom, not your Ph.Ds.' ''
``She was very gentle, with a marvelous spirit, but very firm and clear,'' said Gray-Adams, who was taught by Clark.
Clark's commitment to education formed the basis of a kinship between Gray-Adams and her mentor.
That lesson stuck with Gray-Adams, now 68. She lectures on the civil rights movement and coordinates an interfaith program at Virginia State University. The program seeks to bring a diversity of spiritual perspectives to political and social problems.
The goal of democracy that Clark embraced still eludes many Americans, Cotton said.
While legal discrimination largely has been swept away, it has been replaced by a national mood of cynicism and disconnectedness. Now blacks and whites, alike, feel alienated from their roles as citizens.
That alienation has led Cotton to try to revive the lessons of citizenship she began more than three decades ago.
``Back then, it was only black folk, because we were the ones who felt oppressed, and everyone else thought they were free,'' said Cotton, who is now part of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota.
``But I think we can all see now that we aren't really free. You're not free just because you can vote, because the government you vote for can't fix everything. Even the president of the United States can't fix everything by himself.''
Cotton said the nation has grown despondent, in part, because the problems loom so large and conflicts over how to solve them continue to grow more high-pitched and extreme.
That national debate, played out among a few politicians and academics, has left a majority of citizens disheartened, she said.
``If you live as a victim,'' she said, ``you don't see yourself as having any power, regardless of your race. . . . People get into the bad habit of thinking that someone else is going to solve the country's problems.''
But if unschooled sharecroppers and disenfranchised grandmothers could conquer oppression and unlearn those habits 30 years ago, Cotton said, it has to be possible today.
``People look at what happened in history with the citizenship schools,'' she said, ``and you can see that we blacks had to get involved to change things. So we know that people can be taught how to participate in the process, even if it's not a natural thing or a familiar thing. We know it can be done because we did it.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
MOTOYA NAKAMURA/Staff
Victoria Jackson Gray-Adams taught in a network of citizenship
schools in the 1960s.
Photo
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Septima Clark led a network of schools in the South in which blacks
taught each other about being citizens.
by CNB