Diritto di voto e alfabetizzazione. Bernice Robinson e le Citizenship Schools delle Sea Islands
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2016.i8.595Parole chiave:
American literature, Bernice RobinsonAbstract
American historiography in the last two decades has been paying growing attention to the contribution of women to the African American Freedom Struggle. Women were often the main agents in grassroots experiences, delving on their deep connections to local communities, where they were involved on many levels, including friendship networks or church activities. The experience of Bernice Robinson (1914-1994) is telling in that line: after leaving her native Charleston in her youth, she returned after the war, due to family obligations, carrying the experience of integrated life in New York. She relied on the two trades she had learned in New York, as a seamstress and beautician. She was an active member of NAACP, besides being the cousin of a more widely known activist, Septima P. Clark, who had been fired from her position as a teacher because of NAACP membership. Clark first took her cousin to the interracial Highlander Folkschool, Tennessee, along with an activist from Johns Island, Esau Jenkins. This experience brought to a bold experiment in the education of illiterate adults in the Sea Islands, stretching along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia: the site of an outstanding grassroots experiment in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Basic literacy for adults was taught, with the aim of getting them registered for voting, starting with a small class in January 1957, when the literacy test was still the main instrument for excluding African American Southerners from the ballots. Robinson accepted to be a non-professional teacher on the Sea Islands, while keeping her business running in Charleston. She successfully developed original methods for teaching adults. Within a few years she became a full-time activist, holding workshops around the South, cooperating with both SCLC and SNCC. The Citizenship Schools project in 1961 was administered by SCLC, and it spread in the whole South, totaling 900 classes led by non-professional teachers, coordinated by Clark, and 700.000 registrations before VRA was enacted. After the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Robinson’s experience proved valuable for other organizations involved in literacy projects for migrants. Her personality is a good example of the way in which Southern African American women could develop strategies for civil rights in a very difficult political context, still widely imbued with male chauvinism.Riferimenti bibliografici
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ARCAAHC-b: ARCAAHC, Bernice V. Robinson Papers, B1, F6, interview by E. Wigginton, n.d.
ARCAAHC-c: Bernice V. Robinson Papers, South Carolina Voices of the Civil Rights Movement,
proceedings of the Conference on the History of the Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina,
November 1982.
ARCAAHC-d: ARCAAHC, Bernice V. Robinson Papers, B1, F11, Reaching Out: “Empowerment of the
Estranged, the Powerless.” Literacy Conference, Cabrillo Community College, CA, October 11, 1986.
Dudziak, Mary, Cold War Civil Rights. Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000.
Foner, Eric, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and its Legacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1983.
Garrow, David, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther K, Jr., and the Voting Rights of 1965. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1978.
---. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York:
Morrow, 1986.
Glen, John M., Highlander, No Ordinary School, 1932-1962. Knoxville: University Press of Tennessee, 1996.
Hamlin, Françoise, Crossroads at Clarksdale. The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after
World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012
Gary May, Bending Toward Justice. The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy.
New York: Basic Books, 2013.
Gill, Tiffany M., Beauty Shop Politics. African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2010.
Mellen Charron, Katherine, Freedom’s Teacher. The Life of Septima Clark. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2009.
Morris, Aldon D., The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New
York: Free Press, 1984.
Payne, Charles, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom
Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Robnett, Belinda, How Long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Rose, Willie Lee, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. 1964. Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1999.
Twining, Mary e Keith Baird, “The Significance of Sea Island Culture.” Journal of Black Studies 10.4 (1980):
379-86.
Vallelly, Richard M., The Two Reconstructions. The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2004.
Venturini, Nadia, Con gli occhi fissi alla meta. Il movimento afroamericano per i diritti civili, 1940-1965.
Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2010.
---. La strada per Selma. La mobilitazione afroamericana e il Voting Rights Act del 1965. Milano:
FrancoAngeli, 2015.
Wright, Gavin, Sharing the Prize, The Economics of the Civil Rights devolution in the American South.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
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2016-12-01
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