Elaine Weiss (MSJ74)

The gripping story of four social justice activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans in the Jim Crow south laid the grassroots foundation for the Civil Rights Movement. They developed the Citizenship Schools project, starting with a single secret classroom hidden in the back of a South Carolina rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, over 900 citizenship schools had been established in eleven southern states, quietly preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights—and vote.
Spell Freedom plunges readers into the heart of the burgeoning movement, offering a visceral and intimate story of ordinary citizens confronting injustice with courage and creativity, attempting to repair American democracy with their own hands.