
Spell Freedom
The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement
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Narrated by:
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Robin Miles
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By:
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Elaine Weiss
About this listen
The acclaimed author of the “stirring, definitive, and engrossing” (NPR) The Woman’s Hour returns with the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.
In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.
Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights—and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, “Mother of the Movement.”
In the vein of Hidden Figures and Devil in the Grove, Spell Freedom is both a riveting, crucially important lens onto our past, and a deeply moving story for our present.
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Had no idea that we had almost 400,000 German prisoners in the country during World War II
- By JDM808 on 06-27-25
By: William Geroux
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There Is No Place for Us
- Working and Homeless in America
- By: Brian Goldstone
- Narrated by: Dion Graham, Brian Goldstone
- Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.
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an important work
- By Pat Willard on 06-29-25
By: Brian Goldstone
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He Leadeth Me
- An Extraordinary Testament of Faith
- By: Walter J. Ciszek S.J., Daniel L. Flaherty S.J.
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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He Leadeth Me is a deeply personal story of one man’s spiritual odyssey and the unflagging faith which enabled him to survive the ordeal that wrenched his body and spirit to near collapse. Captured by a Russian army during World War II and convicted of being a “Vatican spy,” Jesuit Father Walter J. Ciszek spent some twenty-three agonizing years in Soviet prisons and the labor camps of Siberia. In He Leadeth Me, he relates how it was only through an utter reliance on God’s will that he managed to endure.
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One of the very best spiritual reading books
- By Chris on 06-23-25
By: Walter J. Ciszek S.J., and others
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Medicine River
- A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools
- By: Mary Annette Pember
- Narrated by: Erin Tripp
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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A sweeping and deeply personal account of Native American boarding schools in the United States, and the legacy of abuse wrought by them in an attempt to destroy Native culture and life.
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Medicine River really brought a lot of feelings to the surface from my own experience with my family.🪶💔🥀
- By Nokomii on 05-16-25
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Homestand
- Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America
- By: Will Bardenwerper
- Narrated by: Dan Bittner
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Batavia, New York—between Rochester and Buffalo—hosted its first professional baseball game in 1897. Despite decades of deindustrialization and evaporating middle-class jobs, the Batavia Muckdogs endured. When Major League Baseball cravenly shut them down in 2020—along with forty-one other minor league teams—the town fought back, reviving the Muckdogs as a summer league team comprised of college players.
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The author’s hatred of MLB leadership
- By CaeMike on 07-04-25
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Mary Chesnut's Civil War
- By: Mary Chesnut, C. Vann Woodward
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 50 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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The incomparable Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut wrote that she had the luck “always to stumble in on the real show.” Married to a high-ranking member of the Confederate government, she was ideally placed to watch and to record the South’s headlong plunge to ruin, and she left in her journals an unsurpassed account of the old regime’s death throes, its moment of high drama in world history. With intelligence and passion she described the turbulent events of politics and war, as well as the complex society around her.
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Amazing book
- By Bonnie Burros on 06-20-25
By: Mary Chesnut, and others
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The Question of Palestine
- By: Edward W. Said, Saree Makdisi
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and an exile's passion (he is Palestinian by birth), Edward W. Said traces the fatal collision between two peoples in the Middle East and its repercussions in the lives of both the occupier and the occupied--as well as in the conscience of the West.
By: Edward W. Said, and others
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Klan War
- Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction
- By: Fergus M. Bordewich
- Narrated by: Landon Woodson
- Length: 16 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The Ku Klux Klan, which celebrated historian Fergus Bordewich defines as “the first organized terrorist movement in American history,” rose from the ashes of the Civil War. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them landowners, lawmen, doctors, journalists, and churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen. And their mission was to obliterate the muscular democratic power of newly emancipated Black Americans and their white allies, often by the most horrifying means imaginable.
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a great but depressing book
- By D. Littman on 12-12-23
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Lincoln's Peace
- The Struggle to End the American Civil War
- By: Michael Vorenberg
- Narrated by: Landon Woodson
- Length: 16 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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We set out on the James River, March 25, 1865, aboard the paddle steamboat River Queen. President Lincoln is on his way to General Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, and he’s decided he won’t return to Washington until he’s witnessed, or perhaps even orchestrated, the end of the Civil War. Now, it turns out, more than a century and a half later, historians are still searching for that end.
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Evan's Review
- By Evan on 06-22-25
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Black Fatigue
- How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body, and Spirit
- By: Mary-Frances Winters
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 6 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the first book to define and explore Black fatigue, the intergenerational impact of systemic racism on the physical and psychological health of Black people - and explain why and how society needs to collectively do more to combat its pernicious effects.
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Great Book— For Certain Audience
- By Taylor on 05-06-21
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A Wilder Shore
- The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson
- By: Camille Peri
- Narrated by: Jeanette Illidge
- Length: 16 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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He was an ambitious but drifting writer from a prominent Scottish family. She was a tough Nevada silver miner’s wife, with children, when they met. Who could have predicted that Fanny Van de Grift and Robert Louis Stevenson would go on to create one of history’s great literary marriages? From their first encounter in France in 1876, Fanny and Louis’s partnership transcended societal expectations to become a literary union that was progressive, eccentric, and tempestuous, but always animated by a profound mutual respect
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Fairly interesting
- By Luke on 10-25-24
By: Camille Peri
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The Next One Is for You
- A True Story of Guns, Country, and the IRA's Secret American Army
- By: Ali Watkins
- Narrated by: Jennifer Woodward
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Northern Ireland, 1975. Violence has erupted on the streets of Belfast. After years as a guerilla army, the IRA is clashing with Loyalist gangs and heavily armed British soldiers. But the Troubles have spilled beyond the island: An ocean away, in the heart of Philadelphia’s Irish enclave, a teenage girl finds a letter in her mailbox. Inside is a bullet, and the message is clear: The next one is for you or your family. As reporter Ali Watkins reveals, the conflict in Northern Ireland might have gone very differently had it not been for a small ragtag band of gunrunners in the United States.
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Another pro British narrative
- By Paul O'Brien on 05-18-25
By: Ali Watkins
They kept on keepin’ on!
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