From the Dorothy Cotton Institute website:

"The Citizenship Education Program (CEP) led by Dorothy Cotton (with a team including Andrew Young, Bernice Robinson, Ben Mack, Victoria Gray Adams, BJ Johnson, Annell Ponder and Septima Clark), was a critical component of the SCLC’s overall organizing strategy. The CEP helped ordinary people identify what was intolerable in their circumstances, envision the changes they desired, learn their civil rights, prepare for democratic engagement, and craft courageous strategies for organizing communities and speaking truth to power. It fostered the transformation of often poorly educated and disenfranchised people from “victims” to full “citizens.” The victories won as a result of this work, and the systemic and social changes attained through the growing power of the African American electorate and its emerging leadership, ultimately led to state and federal protections against discrimination in voting, access to public accommodations, housing and employment throughout the nation."

From the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee website:

"[...]But another less well-known component of SCLC engaged in voter education work in the form of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP). The idea for a citizenship education program for potential Black voters was born during a 1954 workshop at the Highlander Folk School in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee. Septima Clark, a Charleston school teacher who had been fired from her job because of her NAACP activities, was leading the workshop. One of the attendees was Esau Jenkins, a Black farmer, businessman and former student of Septima Clark from the majority-Black John’s Island off the coast of Charleston. He said he wanted to create a school to teach literacy to Black residents of John’s Island, most of whom were unable to vote because they were illiterate or could barely read and write."