The Echo in My Soul and Ready from Within by Septima Clark

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The majority of society today sees the value in receiving an education. Most states make school compulsory until at least the age of 16, and a few have mandated that everyone attend until they reach eighteen years of age or they graduate. In South Carolina, the earliest a child can drop out of high school is seventeen (FAQ). Education hasn’t always been recognized as the necessity that is today, however. During the industrial age, although there were a handful of laws regulating child labor, they were almost entirely ignored (Child Labor in U.S History). Before that, beginning at colonization, there were no laws requiring children to attend school. This meant that children were working instead of receiving an adequate education. It wasn’t until 1938 that any kind of child labor laws were federally regulated with the passing of Fair Labor Standards Act (Child Labor in U.S History).
The mentality that all children are not deserving or in need of an education was further perpetuated in the South, where the economy was bolstered first by slave labor and then by sharecropping. In 1870, only 9.1% of African American children attended school- compared to 50% of white children (A Timeline…). Fast forward 30 years and still 43% of the black population over 15 is illiterate (120 Years of Literacy).
This is the kind of environment that one of the most important women in the Civil Rights Movement came into. It was May 3rd, 1898 that Septima Poinsette was born in the town of Charleston, South Carolina (Olson). Her parents, Victoria and Peter Poinsette, were altogether proud of their joint creation, despite their incredibly different personalities. Victoria was born in the same town as her daughter, but spent many of her more formative yea...

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...o Know... in Order to Speak the Truth"" Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-black Power Movement. By Bettye Collier-Thomas. New York: New York UP, 2001. 95-117. Print.
"Frequently Asked Questions." South Carolina Department of Education. South Carolina Department of Education, n.d. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.
Olson, Lynne. ""The Cobwebs Are Moving from My Brain"" Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830-1970. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. 213-24. Print.
"Timeline - Highlander Research and Education Center." Highlander Research and Education Center. The Highlander Center, 2012. Web. 20 Apr. 2014.
"A Timeline for the Education of African Americans in the United States." Equity in Elementary and Secondary Education. University of Michigan School of Education, Sept.-Oct. 2007. Web. 20 Apr. 2014.

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