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NEWS & LETTERS, July 2002
Woman as Reason column by Terry Moon
Women in the Civil Rights Movement
DEEP IN OUR HEARTS: NINE WHITE WOMEN IN THE FREEDOM
MOVEMENT edited by Constance Curry Athens, Ga., University of Georgia
Press, 2000. *** In DEEP IN OUR HEARTS nine women tell of their
participation in the Civil Rights Movement including the choices they made after
it, as a mass movement for freedom, ended. These stories bring back the passion
for freedom, the hope as well as the terror of those times; and how, just the
fact of being a white woman in the Southern movement could mean death for her
and any Black man she was around. This is a ground-breaking book that reveals
how white women were instrumental in founding and running many of the
organizations that made the movement possible. Also shown is how different theories were—and were
NOT—discussed. There is ample discussion about nonviolence vs. violence, and
about the decision of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee to purge
white members, for example, but the most consistently discussed theory is
religious thought and the ideology of The Beloved Community. That many
considered their activity revolutionary, didn't lead them to discussions of
theories of revolution. Joan C. Browning is the most detailed about what she
calls "largely a spiritual journey." Browning was looking for "a
place where I can answer the question...: 'What does the Lord require of
you?'" (p. 40). Dorothy Dawson Burlage expresses where many of the women
ended up in their spiritual quest: "The movement became my new spiritual
home" (p. 10). More common is a separation between theoretical
development and activism. Constance Curry, for example, never discusses what
called itself "communism," but she must have had some interest as she
made trips to Russia, China, Cuba and Chile, and 15 trips to Ireland. In 1959,
Burlage was a foreign exchange student to the USSR, which led her "to an
extreme dislike of Communism as practiced there." Yet how that influenced
her ideas and work in the movement, where Communist supporters of Stalinist
Russia were very active, is not discussed. Theory is often falsely counterposed
to activism: Casey Hayden writes, "Our radical truth was an experience, not
an idea" (p. 351). This book also offers glimpses into how the Women's
Liberation Movement flowed out of the Civil Rights Movement. Many of the writers
document sexism they encountered. But, surprisingly, they erect a barrier
between women's and Blacks' struggles for freedom. Elaine DeLott Baker writes,
"[D]espite the personal anger that I sometimes felt when confronted with
sexist situations...it was always the freedom struggle that held me. To shift my
identity, commitment, and energy from the freedom struggle to the women's
struggle was not something I could do... The freedom struggle was the flame; all
else was shadow." I thought Casey Hayden would have a different view,
having been a primary author of the SNCC position paper "Women in the
Movement." But she downplays it, writing: "I recall the group as
white," and that, "The paper and its topic seemed an aside" (p.
365). Fortunately, a different view is expressed by Emmie Schrader Adams, who
remembers that "many people had contributed to the discussion about women's
issues...not just we white women on whom it got blamed" (p. 325). Hayden is also an apologist for Stokely Carmichael's
infamous statement, "The proper position of women in the movement is
prone," made as a comment about "Women in the Movement." Hayden
says, "It was really funny" (p. 366). That not everyone was laughing
is revealed by a Black woman SNCC activist, Cynthia Washington, who wrote:
"I was standing next to Muriel Tillinghast, another project director [of
SNCC], and we were not pleased. But our relative autonomy as project directors
seemed to deny or override his statement." (PERSONAL POLITICS: THE ROOTS OF
WOMEN’S LIBERATION IN THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND THE NEW LEFT, by Sara
Evans, p. 239.) Was the separation between women's struggle for freedom,
and the Black freedom movement—a separation that many Black women refused to
make—the reason almost all these nine women (with Curry being a shining
exception) "crashed and burned," as Hayden admits she did? Why did
women who struggled with male chauvinism, while taking part in this most
passionate and dangerous freedom movement, end up separating themselves from
other struggles for freedom? The book documents what happens when the unifying theory
of "The Beloved Community" is destroyed and there is a disdain for
other theory and philosophy. The powerful Particular of the Civil Rights
Movement—a Particular that often reflected the Universal—became their
eternal Universal—"the flame"—while other freedom movements were
viewed as unobtainable, left up to others, or, as Theresa Del Pozzo naively
writes, a solved problem: "Once African American people took on real-life
personalities [to whites], the circle was completed" (p. 206). This book breaks new ground in showing how vital women—Black and white—were to the movement, like Curry writing that it "was three women—Ella [Baker], Jane [Stambridge], and I—albeit behind the scenes, who helped build SNCC in its early days" (p. 16). And while DEEP IN OUR HEARTS did not set out to show the necessity of being grounded in a philosophy of freedom in order to sustain our involvement in movements for freedom, that is one of its startling messages. |
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