Spell Freedom: Voting Rights and the Civil Rights Movement

When I bought Spell Freedom by Elaine Wells, I didn't realize how important it would turn out to be.  The focus of the book is on voting registration and election participation in the Deep South.

                                                         

                                                                                                                 

I learned about the origins of the song "We Shall Overcome".  It was originally a church hymn with different lyrics.  I first learned this song in Hebrew in which the title is "Ahnachnu Nitgaber"

 Myles Horton  founded a school to teach Black citizens what they needed to know in order to vote.  During the era of McCarthyism , the Horton school was considered to be communist.  The school didn't teach communism.  It taught literacy and basic knowledge about citizenship. 

I was impressed to learn that Eleanor Roosevelt had her own newspaper column.  No other First Lady had a newspaper column either before or since.

The lynching of Emmett Till was mentioned. I had previously written about Emmett Till on this blog in a review of  Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes.

The Horton school survived and continued to be a resource for Black voters in the South.   At one point Nelson Rockefeller provided the Horton school with funds.