
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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Story
Few Americans covered as much ground as Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Born in 1823 to a family descended from Boston's Puritan founders, he attended Harvard, like all the men in his family, and prepared for the settled life of a minister. Instead, he rejected both privilege and convention, and embraced radical causes, attaching himself to nearly every major reform movement of the day, from women's rights to abolitionism. More than merely a fellow traveler, Higginson was a proponent of direct action.
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Expect Great Things!
- How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women
- By: Vanda Krefft
- Narrated by: Eliza Foss
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s a safe bet that most of the secretaries on the TV series Mad Men would have attended the Katharine Gibbs School in New York City. The iconic institution was in its heyday in the 1950 and '60s synonymous with supplying secretaries—always properly attired in heels, ladylike hats, and white gloves—to male executives. In Expect Great Things! Vanda Krefft turns the notion of a “Gibbs girl” on its head, showing us that while the school was getting women who could type 90 words per minute into the C-suite, its more subversive mission was to get them out of the secretarial pool.
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Interesting women's "micro" history book!
- By NMwritergal on 03-07-25
By: Vanda Krefft
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The Trouble of Color
- An American Family Memoir
- By: Martha S. Jones
- Narrated by: Martha S. Jones
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?” Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors’ lives.
By: Martha S. Jones
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The War Came to Us
- Life and Death in Ukraine
- By: Christopher Miller
- Narrated by: Christopher Miller
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the definitive, inside story of Ukraine's long fight for freedom. Told through Miller’s personal experiences, vivid front-line dispatches and illuminating interviews with unforgettable characters, The War Came To Us takes listeners on a riveting journey through the key locales and pivotal events of Ukraine’s modern history.
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The Woman's Hour
- The Great Fight to Win the Vote
- By: Elaine Weiss
- Narrated by: Elaine Weiss, Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 16 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, 12 have rejected or refused to vote, and one last state is needed. It all comes down to Tennessee, the moment of truth for the suffragists, after a seven-decade crusade. The opposing forces include politicians with careers at stake, liquor companies, railroad magnates, and a lot of racists who don't want black women voting. And then there are the "Antis" - women who oppose their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage will bring about the moral collapse of the nation.
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Good book, poor choice of reader
- By Amazon Customer on 05-24-18
By: Elaine Weiss
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The Crossing
- El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story
- By: Richard Parker
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Award-winning El Paso-native journalist Richard Parker offers a radical work of history that re-centers the American story around El Paso, Texas, gateway between north and south, center of indigenous power and resistance, locus of European colonization of North America, centuries-long hub of immigration, and underappreciated modern blueprint for a changing United States.
By: Richard Parker
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A Man on Fire
- The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson
- By: Douglas R. Egerton
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 15 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Few Americans covered as much ground as Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Born in 1823 to a family descended from Boston's Puritan founders, he attended Harvard, like all the men in his family, and prepared for the settled life of a minister. Instead, he rejected both privilege and convention, and embraced radical causes, attaching himself to nearly every major reform movement of the day, from women's rights to abolitionism. More than merely a fellow traveler, Higginson was a proponent of direct action.
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Patriot Presidents
- From George Washington to John Quincy Adams
- By: William E. Leuchtenburg
- Narrated by: Tim Fannon
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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The founding fathers of the United States created a unique institution, the presidency, as they were determined to authorize an effective chief executive but wary of monarchy. They endowed this office with broad prerogatives and power but hedged it in with limitations. The presidency that developed over the next generation, however, was fashioned less by the clauses in the Constitution than by the way that the first presidents responded to challenges such as sectional enmity and the vexing Napoleonic warfare that jeopardized maritime rights.
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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.
By: Brian Goldstone
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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.
By: Mary Chesnut, and others
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Outmaneuvered
- America's Tragic Encounter with Warfare from Vietnam to Afghanistan
- By: James A. Warren
- Narrated by: Jonathan Beville
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Most scholars and analysts believe that the primary cause of our abysmal war record since Vietnam has been the US military’s overwhelmingly conventional approach to conflict, which favors kinetic operations, highly mobile precision firepower, and sophisticated systems of command and control. Here, James Warren argues that a much more formidable obstacle to success has been pervasive strategic ineptitude at the highest levels of decision-making, including the presidency, the national security council, and the foreign policy community in DC.
By: James A. Warren
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Propaganda Girls
- The Secret War of the Women in the OSS
- By: Lisa Rogak
- Narrated by: Samara Naeymi
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Betty MacDonald was a 28-year-old reporter from Hawaii. Zuzka Lauwers grew up in a tiny Czechoslovakian village and knew five languages by the time she was 21. Jane Smith-Hutton was the wife of a naval attaché living in Tokyo. Marlene Dietrich, the German-American actress and singer, was of course one of the biggest stars of the 20th century. These four women, each fascinating in her own right, together contributed to one of the most covert and successful military campaigns in WWII.
By: Lisa Rogak
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Mrs. Cook and the Klan
- Booze, Bloodshed, and Bigotry in America's Heartland
- By: Tom Chorneau
- Narrated by: David Lee Garver
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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On the day she was murdered, Myrtle Underwood Cook boasted to local authorities about new evidence of a major bootlegging ring operating out of the Rock Island train depot behind her house in a small town in eastern Iowa. Then, as she sat at her window sewing, she took a single slug through the heart. She was president of the local temperance union; her killing made the front page of the New York Times. The next day her funeral made national news due to the eerie presence of a small army from the Ku Klux Klan, its members, donned in full regalia, drawn from three surrounding states.
By: Tom Chorneau
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A Genocide Foretold
- Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine
- By: Chris Hedges
- Narrated by: Ali Nasser
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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A Genocide Foretold confronts the stark realities of life under siege in Gaza and the heroic effort ordinary Palestinians are waging to resist and survive. Weaving together personal stories, historical context, and unflinching journalism, Chris Hedges provides an intimate portrait of systemic oppression, occupation, and violence.
By: Chris Hedges
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Seven Social Movements That Changed America
- By: Linda Gordon
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 17 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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How do social movements arise, wield power, and decline? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these questions in a groundbreaking work, narrating the stories of many of America's most influential twentieth-century social movements. Beginning with the turn-of-the-century settlement house movement, Gordon then scrutinizes the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and its successors, the violent American fascist groups of the 1930s.
By: Linda Gordon
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Disposable
- America's Contempt for the Underclass
- By: Sarah Jones
- Narrated by: Sarah Mollo-Christensen
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In the tradition of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and Andrea Elliot’s Invisible Child, Disposable is a poignant exploration of America’s underclass, left vulnerable by systemic racism and capitalism. Here, Sarah Jones delves into the lives of the essential workers, seniors, and people with disabilities who were disproportionately affected by COVID-19—not due to their age or profession, but because of the systemic inequality and poverty that left them exposed.
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Not comparable to Evicted but interesting
- By NMwritergal on 02-27-25
By: Sarah Jones
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Original Sins
- The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism
- By: Eve L. Ewing
- Narrated by: Robin Miles, Eve L. Ewing
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.
By: Eve L. Ewing
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Red Scare
- Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America
- By: Clay Risen
- Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
- Length: 15 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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An urgent, accessible, and important history, Red Scare reveals an all-too-familiar pattern of illiberal conspiracy-mongering and political and cultural backlash that speaks directly to the antagonism and divisiveness of our contemporary moment. Drawing upon newly declassified documents, journalist Clay Risen recounts how politicians like Joseph McCarthy, with the help of an extended network of other government officials and organizations, systematically ruined thousands of lives in their deluded pursuit of alleged Communist conspiracies.
By: Clay Risen
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King of the North
- Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South
- By: Jeanne Theoharis
- Narrated by: Jasmin Walker
- Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, award-winning and New York Times bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King's time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—outside Dixie—was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. King of the North follows King as he crisscrosses the country from the Northeast to the West Coast, challenging school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination.
By: Jeanne Theoharis
What listeners say about Spell Freedom
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Janie
- 03-15-25
They kept on keepin’ on!
I loved learning about the slow and steady progress that was made, now terrifying that so much has changed. The narrator emphasized the T in Monteagle which we Tennesseans don’t do!
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