07/31/2026
A woman past forty rode a bus before dawn, practising a passage she could barely read. Alice Wine had left school in the third grade, but South Carolina demanded that Black citizens confront the language of its constitution before they could vote. She mastered the passage, registered, and later gave Guy Carawan the refrain that became “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” Millions would sing her words. Few would learn her name.
She was somewhere past forty. She had left school in the third grade to work her family's rows, and she was riding into Charleston to wash and press linen for a white household that would never trouble itself to learn her name.
The paper in her hands had gone soft at the folds from being handled.
It was a copy of what South Carolina required of a person who wanted to vote, and the driver kept a stack of them up front near the fare box, the way another man might keep road maps.
Her name was Alice Wine.
South Carolina did not simply tell Black citizens they could not vote.
It made them audition. The applicant had to read a passage of the state constitution aloud and then explain what it meant, and a white registrar sat across the desk and decided by himself, with nobody to appeal to, whether the explanation was good enough.
At the start of the 1940s, only a few thousand Black South Carolinians in the entire state were on the rolls.
The man driving the bus was Esau Jenkins, and his own schooling had stopped in the fourth grade.
His mother died when he was young and he went to work. By 1945 he had a truck farm, a produce route, and a bus he bought because there was no high school on Johns Island that would take Black children, so he drove his own into the city himself at four in the morning.
Then he started driving other people's children. Then he started driving grown men and women to the docks and to the kitchens.
Two out of every three people on Johns Island were Black.
Jenkins used to tell his riders what that number would mean if they could vote. Most of them heard it the way you hear somebody describe a country they will never be able to afford to visit.
They had reason to hear it that way.
Jenkins had started organizing in the first place because Black men on Johns Island were being shot by white men, and nothing happened afterward. One of them was a local man named Sammy Grant, shot by a white man during a dispute involving the man's dog.
A magistrate threw the case out.
Jenkins and another islander named Joe Williams went around collecting money from their neighbors to appeal it, and out of that collection came the Progressive Club in 1948. A legal defense fund, put together dollar by dollar by people who did not have dollars.
That is the world Alice Wine was riding through at dawn with a piece of paper in her hands.
She had decided she wanted to vote. So she asked the driver to teach her to read the passage.
He worked with her on the morning run, over the diesel noise, with the marsh going by black outside the windows.
She got stuck. She would come to a hard word and want to skip straight over it, and by her own description her tongue felt so heavy in her mouth that the sounds would not come out right.
She was speaking Gullah. The document was written in the English of white lawyers in Columbia, and it had been chosen for exactly that reason.
She did not skip it.
She went at that passage morning after morning, on the way to a full day of somebody else's laundry, until she could read the whole thing straight through.
Then she went downtown and stood in front of the registrar.
There is no transcript of what happened in that room. What is recorded is the outcome, which is that a woman with a third-grade education read the constitution of South Carolina out loud to a white man whose entire job was to find a reason to fail her.
He approved her.
Esau Jenkins understood immediately what he had just watched.
If Alice Wine could do it, the test was not a wall. It was a lock, and locks can be picked, one person at a time, if somebody teaches the picking.
In August 1954 he went up into the Tennessee mountains, to a place called the Highlander Folk School, where Black and white southerners sat in the same room in open violation of Tennessee law. He went to ask them to help him do on his island what he had been doing on his bus.
The woman who told him to go was Septima Clark.
Clark had been teaching for forty years. She started at eighteen on Johns Island, at a school where two Black teachers taught 132 children for a combined sixty dollars a month, while the white teacher down the road taught three students for eighty-five.
In April 1956, the South Carolina legislature made it illegal for any city or state employee to belong to the NAACP.
Clark would not resign and she would not lie about it. Before the board came for her, she tried to get the other teachers to stand with her, and letters went out to every Black teacher in Charleston County, more than seven hundred of them.
Twenty-six wrote back.
Those twenty-six met and agreed to go see the superintendent together. On the morning it was supposed to happen, five walked into his office.
Clark never called the rest of them cowards. Teaching was the only professional work most of them would ever be allowed to do, and the board could take it away in an afternoon.
She said it plainly. "They were afraid, but I wasn't."
They dismissed her that May. She was fifty-eight, in her forty-first year in a classroom, and the state kept the pension she had been paying into since 1916.
Highlander hired her that same year to run its workshops.
So by 1957 the three of them were in place. A bus driver with a fourth-grade education, a teacher who had just been stripped of forty years, and a woman neither of them had gone looking for.
Bernice Robinson was forty-two and ran a beauty shop in Charleston.
She had no teaching degree, no classroom experience, and no interest in getting either. When they asked her to teach the first class, she said no.
Clark kept asking, because what made Robinson right was the exact thing Robinson thought disqualified her.
Robinson had one other advantage that Clark no longer had. She worked for herself, pressing and cutting hair in a Black neighborhood, which meant no white employer could take her living away as punishment for teaching grown people to read.
They held the class in the back of a store.
The front of the building looked like precisely what it claimed to be, a grocery with canned goods on the shelves and a gas pump outside, run as a co-op by the same families who shopped in it. Behind it were two rooms, and those rooms had no windows.
Clark explained the arrangement years later without any decoration on it.
"We didn't want white people to know we had a school back there," she said.
On the night of January 7, 1957, fourteen adults came in out of the January cold and sat down in the dark part of the building.
Field hands, domestic workers, men off the boats.
The oldest of them was sixty-four.
Somebody had handed Bernice Robinson a stack of children's primers to teach from.
She got rid of them.
Then she stood in front of fourteen people who had spent their whole lives being reminded of what they did not know, and she told them she was not their teacher. She said she did not consider herself one, that they were all going to learn together, and that they would be teaching her some things too.
Then she asked them what they wanted to learn.
They told her. They wanted to sign their own names.
They wanted to fill out a money order at the post office without handing it across the counter for a stranger to finish. They wanted to read the order form in the mail-order catalog, and the labels on the cans stacked out front in the store.
And they wanted to read the passage.
That became the curriculum. No textbook, just the paper already moving through their lives, plus the one document standing between them and a ballot.
For the names, Robinson had them write on cardboard and then trace the same letters over and over with a pencil.
Clark described the method later, the way a hand learns a shape through pure repetition until the fingers know the route without being told.
Sit with that for a second. A woman of sixty-four, after a full day of work, in a room with no windows, tracing her own name until her hand could do it by itself.
At the end of the session, the class rode into Charleston and stood in front of the registrar.
Eight of the fourteen came back out registered.
Word crossed the water before the year was out. Within twelve months, more than six hundred people on Johns Island had passed the state's literacy test, and classes opened on Wadmalaw, on Edisto, and up in North Charleston.
Highlander sent a music director named Guy Carawan down to spend his winters on the island. He brought a guitar into the classes.
One evening he was playing an old spiritual called "Hold On," a song sung in both Black and white churches across the South.
Alice Wine came over to him and told him she knew a different echo to it.
Then she sang it for him with no accompaniment, quiet, the way you sing in a small room. One phrase in the refrain was not the phrase he knew, and it was not a phrase any folklorist had ever written down.
The phrase she put in was "keep your eyes on the prize."
In April 1960, Carawan carried it to Shaw University in Raleigh, where students were meeting to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Inside a year it was everywhere. Mass meetings, marches, church basements, and holding cells, sung by people who had no idea where it came from.
The rest of it came apart and kept going at the same time.
In the summer of 1959, Tennessee's district attorney general and twenty deputies raided Highlander during a workshop and arrested Septima Clark along with others in the building. The stated charge involved whiskey, which nobody serious believed for a minute.
The courts revoked the school's charter, the state seized more than two hundred acres and sold it at auction, and one of the main buildings burned.
The Citizenship Schools moved to Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and kept spreading.
Scholars count more than five thousand people trained as citizenship teachers between 1957 and 1970, and at least twenty-five thousand adults taught by them across eleven states. They met in churches, in beauty parlors, in living rooms, and in back rooms exactly like the first one.
When the Voting Rights Act finally killed the literacy test in August 1965, it did not arrive to an unprepared South.
That same year, Pete Seeger was still telling audiences he did not know who had come up with the phrase. He had heard it was some woman in Georgia.
She was in South Carolina, and she was still there.
South Carolina took its time settling with Septima Clark. The governor gave her pension back in 1976, twenty years late, and the legislature approved her back pay in 1981, when she was eighty-three.
Somewhere in between, the voters of Charleston County elected her to the same school board that had dismissed her over a membership card.
Esau Jenkins died in 1972. Part of his Volkswagen bus is in the Smithsonian now, with the motto he painted across the back of it still legible.
Love Is Progress, Hate Is Expensive.
Alice Wine was never recorded singing the song she gave away.
Decades later Guy Carawan came to see her with a tape machine, to try to capture the things she had taught him that he had never gotten down. By then she said she could not remember it.
She died in 2004.
The ruins of the Progressive Club are on River Road on Johns Island. Cinderblock walls, open sky where the roof used to be since Hurricane Hugo took it in 1989, the club's name still spelled out across the front.
There was no insurance on it. FEMA turned down the claim.
You can drive past it at highway speed and never know it was there.
Her name sits on the copyright now, which is the whole of her official payment. A line in a registration file, for a song she told a man she could no longer recall.
Ten years of people singing her sentence in jail cells, and it took the movement half that long to figure out which state she lived in.
So learn whose mouth it came out of first.
And when somebody finally got around to asking Alice Wine why she had bothered to learn to read past the age of forty, with a full day's work behind her and another one waiting in the morning, she did not make a speech about it.
"I like my right," she said.
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