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Septima Poinsette Clark: World Changer of the Month — September 2023

  • Kimberley Guillemet
  • Sep 1, 2023

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The second of eight children, Septima Poinsette Clark was born May 3, 1898, in Charleston, South Carolina. Her parents, Peter Poinsette, who was enslaved at birth, and Victoria Warren Anderson Poinsette, deeply valued education and prioritized access to it for their children notwithstanding their limited means.

Clark's first educational experience was in 1904, when she started attending Mary Street School. When Clark’s mother realized that she was not being educated at the school and was instead being made to sit on a set of bleachers with scores of other 6-year-olds, learning nothing all day, she quickly withdrew her from the school. An elderly woman across the street from their house was teaching girls, so Clark learned to read and write there. Her family could not afford to pay tuition, so Clark provided child care for the woman's children every morning and afternoon in lieu of payment.

Clark graduated from high school in 1916. Unable to afford college tuition, she sat for and passed a state examination at the age of 18 which licensed her to teach. As an African American, she was barred from teaching in Charleston's public schools, but was able to find a position teaching at Promise Land School in a rural school district on St. John's Island. There she taught children during the day and illiterate adults on her own time at night.

In 1918, Clark returned to Charleston to teach sixth grade at Avery Normal Institute, a private academy for Black children. At that time, she also joined the local branch of the NAACP. While teaching at the Avery Institute, she noticed the gross discrepancies that existed between her school and the White school across the street. Clark's school had 132 students and two teachers. Clark not only worked there as a teacher, she also served in the capacity of principal. As the acting principal and teacher, Clark made $35 per week, while the other teacher made $25. Meanwhile, the school across the street had only three students, and the teacher who worked there received $85 per week. Her first-hand experience with these inequalities led Clark to become an active proponent for teachers of color. In 1920, she secured the first of many legal victories when Blacks were given the right to become principals in Charleston's public schools.

Clark settled in Columbia, South Carolina in 1929, where she began teaching at Booker T. Washington High School. During summers, Clark began studies at Columbia University in New York, and at Atlanta University in Georgia. Between 1942 and 1945, she received a bachelor's degree from Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina and a master's degree from Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). While earning her B.A.,Clark took classes in the morning, taught from noon to five in the afternoons, and took more classes in the evenings. She was earning $62.50 per month in college and every summer she traveled to Maine to earn more money. In 1945, Thurgood Marshall, Clark and the other members of the Columbia, South Carolina chapter of the NAACP sponsored a lawsuit that won the equalization of teacher salaries.

In 1956, Clark obtained the position of vice-president of the Charleston NAACP branch. That same year, the South Carolina legislature passed a law banning city or state employees from being involved with civil rights organizations. Clark refused to leave the NAACP, and was consequently fired from her job by the Charleston City School Board, losing her pension after 40 years of employment. Thereafter, no school in Charleston would hire her.

Clark is most famous for establishing "Citizenship Schools" which taught Black adults how to read, as well as citizenship rights so that they could pass the voter registration exams that had become so prevalent in many Southern states. Citizenship Schools were frequently taught in the back room of a shop so as to elude the violence of those who did not want Blacks educated. In addition to literacy, Citizenship Schools also taught students to act collectively and protest against racism.

The schools ultimately spread to a number of Southern states, growing so large that the program was transferred to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1961. With the increased budget of the SCLC, the Citizenship School Project was able to train over 10,000 teachers throughout the South, reaching and educating more than 25,000 people. By 1958, 37 adults were able to pass the voter registration test as a result of the first session of community schools. By 1969, about 700,000 African Americans became registered voters thanks to the Citizenship School movement. Clark came to national prominence, becoming the SCLC's director of education and teaching and the first woman to gain a position on the SCLC board. Clark worked closely with other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, including Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois. Washington and Clark both emphasized the importance of self-improvement before the importance of institutional reforms. DuBois and Clark agreed on the emphasis of education as the most important approach to the civil rights movement.

U.S. President Jimmy Carter awarded Clark a Living Legacy Award in 1979. She penned two memoirs: Echo in My Soul, and Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement, which won the American Book Award. Clark died December 15, 1987. At the time of her death, she was awarded the SCLC's highest award, the Drum Major for Justice Award.



“If you never take risks, you'll never accomplish great things.

  • Kimberley Guillemet
  • Aug 3, 2023

Everybody dies, but not everyone has lived."


― C.S. Lewis


High achievers tend to be risk averse rule followers. To be fair, this is usually for good reason. Following the rules and staying within pre-set boundaries tends to pay off, or at least that is what we are socialized to believe. I agree that we owe it to the other humans with whom we share space to engage in prosocial and cooperative behavior. Society would not function properly if we did not. However, being a good citizen and living life in a manner that pushes past artificial limitations are not mutually exclusive.


We must be willing to take risks that are consistent with our purpose and/or calling. As an anonymous philosopher once said, “Your current safe boundaries were once unknown frontiers.” In other words, someone had to do it first. Someone had to invent a mechanism with four wheels and a motor that could carry people from one place to another at a time when most people were traveling by foot or horse. Someone had to invent a machine that could keep itself in the air and propel itself thousands of miles at a time when automobile production was in its nascent stages. Someone had to become the first female medical doctor at a time when women were generally not permitted to be educated. In short, someone has to both have the vision to see what others do not, as well as the courage to act upon it.


I challenge you to ask yourself if there is something in your heart that you feel called to do, but haven’t because of fear—fear of failure, judgment, disappointment, embarrassment or shame. I dare say that we all have a dream that we have buried in the recesses of our hearts and have tried to ignore because we are afraid of where the journey of exploration of that dream will take us.


What if the people who invented the first car and the first airplane abandoned their invention efforts because they were afraid of failure or other people’s judgment? It is probable that eventually someone would have developed a prototype for their invention, but their specific contributions and unique insights would be lost and their legacy would be omitted from the annals of history.


There is a time for everything under the sun: a time to study fastidiously, a time to diligently labor, and a time to quietly prepare, but if your heart is telling you that it is time to stand up, step out and do more, do not ignore that message. In trying to convince yourself that you are satisfied with the status quo, you may be limiting yourself from realizing your fullest potential and depriving the world of the blessing of who you truly are.

Dorothy Donegan: World Changer of the Month — August 2023

  • Kimberley Guillemet
  • Aug 1, 2023

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Dorothy Donegan was born in Chicago on April 6, 1922. Her father, Donazell Donegan, was a cook, and her mother, Ella Donegan, rented out rooms in the family’s large apartment. Donegan’s mother used the rent money to support her daughter’s music studies. Donegan readily admitted that it was her mother who truly appreciated her talent, listened to her, and encouraged her to put feeling into her music. Her mother even served as her first business manager.


With her mother’s encouragement, Donegan began taking piano lessons when she was five years old and obtained her musical education in Chicago’s public schools. By the age of ten, she was already performing as a church organist, and began playing jazz professionally in local nightclubs during her high-school years. At 14 years old, she became the first African American to perform at Costello’s Grill in Chicago. At the age of 17, she graduated from Chicago's DuSable High School, and was hired to play jazz piano with The Bob Tinsley Band.


In 1942, Donegan recorded her first album of blues and boogie-woogie on the Bluebird label. However, despite her early jazz success, she still aspired to be a classical pianist. Consequently, she continued her classical music education, studying piano at the Chicago Musical College and later attending the University of Southern California. One year after releasing her first jazz album, Donegan became the first African-American performer and first jazz pianist to perform in concert at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. The concert earned Donegan a frontpage review in the Chicago Tribune and caught the attention of legendary jazz pianist Art Tatum. Blessed with an enormous orchestral capacity at the keyboard, Donegan was fluent in several styles of jazz, as well as with European classical music.


In the 1950s, she developed her flamboyant performance style, which at times tended to obscure her extraordinary piano playing, deep sense of swing, and wide-ranging repertoire. She would often spice her performances with uncanny impressions of other pianists and singers, skills that enhanced her abilities as an entertainer. She spent the bulk of her career performing in trios with bass and drums. Her appearance at the Sheraton Centre Hotel in 1980 broke all previous attendance records.


Unfortunately, her first six albums proved to be obscure compared to her successes in performance. In 1987, a recorded appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival and her live albums from 1991 were met with acclaim. Even so, she remained best known for her live performances. Ben Ratliff argued in The New York Times that "her flamboyance helped her find work in a field that was largely hostile to women.


Donegan was often referred to as “the wild one,” “the triumphantly unfettered, “the shoulder-shaking, finger-popping, hip-slapping lioness of piano rooms.” At the same time, however, critics also were quick to add that Donegan was, “wild but polished,” “possessor of enormous technical skill,” and “brilliant, ridiculously talented.” Donegan was outspoken about her view that sexism, along with her insistence on being paid the same rates as male musicians, had limited her career.


As Donegan entered the last decade of her life, she finally seemed to be earning recognition commensurate with her talent. She was awarded a Jazz Masters fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992 and played at the White House in 1993. The following year she received an honorary doctorate from Roosevelt University, and in 1995 she made a guest appearance on Sesame Street, playing the blues with Hoots the Owl. During this period Donegan also lectured at several universities, including Harvard, Northeastern, and the Manhattan School of Music. Her last big show was in 1997 at the Concord Jazz Festival in the Bay Area.


Despite being underrated during her lifetime, Donegan was an exceptional pianist with a rich harmonic sense who broke race and gender barriers. She was a musical genius who was ahead of her time.



Food for Thought

World Changers Archive

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