Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools that Built the Civil Rights Movement tells the moving story of the civil rights activists who offered “citizenship classes” to African Americans throughout the South from 1955-1970.

Author Elaine Weiss joins Midday to discuss the work, her third of narrative history. Weiss wrote about the Woman’s Land Army of World War I in Fruits of Victory and the women's suffrage movement in The Woman’s Hour.

The story centers around Septima Clark, whom Martin Luither King, Jr. called “the mother of the movement,” and three others who worked tirelessly and at great personal cost to develop a system of secret schools. Esau Jenkins, Bernice Robinson, and a white activist, Myles Horton are not household names of the civil rights movement, but this book makes the compelling case for their underappreciated influence.