samandrade

I love this book. This book tells the story of nine white women who were leaders in the Civil Rights movement, each told in her own words. They joined early. They were from both the north and the south. They each began to understand and resist segregation and racism from a variety of different angles, moving in and out of each other’s lives as they work on the major southern civil rights struggles; the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenge in 1963, Freedom Summer, they were at the planning meetings of SNCC and saw it decline, and participated, though often minimally, in the sit-ins. They were the backbone of the movement, in the field doing grassroots organizing in black and white communities and a huge amount of administrative work to support the field. It is a story of racism, and what it means to understand it, and to resist it. This is a book that struck me particularly at this moment because it spoke to me deeply and meaningfully as a reflection of myself and the work I was doing when I read it in my last weeks in Mississippi, as I prepared to leave and seek out work that is more consciously antiracist. It is a history of the land where I have been living teaching me about my work. But I think it is an important work for activists of all kinds. In this book we see the mythical heroes of the Civil Rights movement at their beginnings. Julian Bond is introduced not as an aged professor, but a young student. And they are moved by an energy that I think any activist can understand, but with a unity and purpose that many of us desire. I am constantly struck by how young the movement was, how much they are like me. Much of the work these women describe includes long nights of mimeographing and phone calls. Although the technology is different, the essence of the work is the same. They are kids working hard and passionately, developing as they go what will be one of the most important movements in American history, with little to no guidance. And they burn out. Fast. I think this is the most striking to me. I guess I never realized how short the Civil Rights movement was “hot,” active and scorching, with its members moving at break-neck speeds. Most spent a few intense years at the core of the movement, and then as the movement changed, they moved on. Many moved on unwillingly, spending the next years or decades searching for the Beloved Community. And I am struck by the unsustainablity of the movement. That no one lasted more than a few years in the thick of it. (I guess this is really important to me because I am walking out of a strangely beloved community at Hands On, with a desire to commit to the work without burning out, and expected to find some sort of guidance from history, but it failed to materialize). * * * No matter how different, Katrina relief is built on the back of the Civil Rights movement. At no point in American History have so many well-meaning, unpaid, white Americans moved through or to the deep south. We ride in integrated cars without blinking and eye. We sit on the porches of black residents without realizing that would have been dangerous and unthinkable to these residents in their own lifetime. This book has taught me about the history I am stepping into, though the women who made it. I have the most respect for the Southern white women who scarified much of their family and personal identity in the very personal decision to fight segregation, which many did before it was a mass movement, before the counterculture of the sixties, when there was no guarantees, just the need to fight injustice. I find in all these women so much power. This book kept my heart pumping and my eyes often watered.

2023-07-23 04:36