My friend Barbara Brandt was one of the brave young people who worked with SNCC back in the 1960s and early 1970s. She moved to Atlanta to work in the office of the Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee with people, black, white, Asian, and Latino, who were risking their lives for justice and equality. Last year, she went to the 50th anniversary of the founding of SNCC and spoke to me about it. This year, her short memoir is part of this fine, fine book that has a lot to teach all of us.
I picked it up to read her few pages and ended up reading every word.
Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC edited by Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner
Chicago: Univ of Illinois Press, 2010
ISBN 978-0-252-03557-9
Angeline Butler
page 44: Through our consciousness, developed in struggle, we could see the specific things to do, then design a course of action, and stand up for our beliefs. Change and revolution are created by individuals who react to a given situation, study it, envision a solution, then step forward and set activity in motion.
Annette Jones White
page 101: Negro male offenders in the same age group [young teens] were called "men" when they committed minor offenses, especially offenses that only Negroes could commit, such as "sassing" whites, "reckless eyeballing" (looking at white women), or acting "suspicious" or "uppity." These acts were considered crimes and resulted in prosecution and jail.
Bernice Johnson Reagon
page 126: Also there was this tiny but growing awareness that being female was different. It was something you knew and that you had ingrained in you as a girl. It was something you lived with; it was like the floor you walked on, the walls of your house - it was just there. If you were a girl, some really bad things could happen to you - and often there was not one thing you could do about it. It seemed to come with being female. I mean it was there when I first knew I was a girl. I knew I was prey and that protection for me was weak or nonexistent. I also knew at the same time that I must go on anyway. I still remember the instructions we received about rape in high school: if someone tries to rape you, don't struggle, and maybe he won't kill you.
It took Joan Little to crash that prison I was locked up in. In 1975, when Joan Little in her jail cell killed the jailer who forced her sexually, she set me free. That's why I wrote the song about her: "Joan Little, she's my sister, Joan Little, she's our mama, Joan Little, she's your lover, Joan's the woman who's going to carry your child." It was key to my counting myself as a part of the Women's Movement. But this was not 1975; this was 1961, and I was not there yet.
page 151: This is not about a specific song, but about singing in a way that is beyond words to express. If you walk into the singing with your body, it is not a hearing experience; your ears are not enough, your eyes are not enough, your body is not enough, and you can't block it. The only way you can survive the singing is to open up and let go and be moved by the singing to another space.
Victoria Gray Adams
page 235: They were thinking that the MFDP [Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party] lawyers were the experts on these matters and that they had recommended accepting the compromise. Our lawyers might have been experts, but they were the experts at things as they were. The last thing we needed was things as they were. We needed something new and different.
page 239: Make the information available and all of the sources accessible. Then hear what the people have to say. If you do, you will find, to borrow a phrase from Miss Ella Baker, "Strong people don't need strong leaders."
Gloria Richardson Dandridge
page 280: The Cambridge [Maryland] Movement and other movements in the South were not based on rhetoric. We really took the pulse of the community prior to the time we took a position. I learned this in SNCC and also from my grandfather, the city council member, who insisted, "You have to find out what the people think. Find the key person on that block or in that neighborhood, the person that people look up to, and see what they're thinking."
The Cambridge Movement respected what the people wanted.
page 294: Looking back, I think it's important to remember that organizing takes time, that things don't come together all at once. People think you start a project and are able to have thousands of people step forward the next day. It generally takes around eighteen months, which is how long it took us in Cambridge to get to that moment when local people filled the jail for the first time.
Joanne Grant
page 306: She [Mama Dolly Raines] said,"I grew up on a plantation with white people and always lived with them, so I guess that's why I'm not afraid of then." In her words, she was "the most nonviolent shot in the county."
page 309: She [Ella Baker] taught the SNCC students the importance of nurturing local leaders, the value of organizing local groups who would make their own decisions, and the vital concept of a group-centered leadership as opposed to a leadership-centered group. She instilled in them the idea that they were not organized to exist in perpetuity as an organization, that others would come along to continue the struggle, and that the struggle is continuous. "The tribe increases," she always said.
Jane Bond Moore
page 330: Yet if the Movement is the universal move to recognize and place in operation all human rights, I am still in it.
Mary E King
page 334: I am a direct descendent of an officer with Nathaniel Bacon in the failed rebellion of 1676 against Governor Alexander Spotswood, the British representative in colonial Virginia.
pages 335-336: For this mechanism [sending reports to news organizations] to work, however, we had to gain respectability as credible sources in the eyes of the national news corps, which could be indifferent and was suspicious of being "used" by propagandists. Julian [Bond]'s inclination toward understatement set the tone. We downplayed anything sensational and underestimated the numbers of people participating in movement activities or any count of atrocities. We attributed facts to named sources. The style was clear and unembellished with no opinions or value judgments.
Elaine DeLott Baker
page 416: I left the south with two powerful realizations. The first was a deep appreciation for ordinary people and how they understand the world. Mississippi taught me to listen with my heart and to speak with my actions. My teachers were the people whose faith, intelligence, and willingness to risk everything were the heart of the black freedom struggle. The second realization was a frightening, gut-level understanding of racism and a terrible awareness of its corrosive and pervasive legacy. As a civil rights worker, I underestimated the lengths to which our society would be to preserve its privilege. In the midst of the struggle for racial justice, I found that I and my movement brothers and sisters had lost the ability to move beyond race in our personal relationships. There were moments when race and gender did not separate us. I know that to be true. For me, Mississippi was a state of grace, one that remains with me in memory - and in the work that I do in honor of that memory.
Annie Pearl Avery
page 459: After the Civil Rights Movement, we should have started educational, cultural, and economic projects directed toward controlling our communities and build economic power I think if SNCC had gone this way after the Civil Rights Act and the voting rights bill - I mean, added a cultural and economic direction - the organization might have survived.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to ask Representaive John Lewis whether he and his civil rights colleagues had ever studied Gandhian economics. He said they didn't but "Maybe we should have."
Maria Varela
page 566: In the audience was an older gentleman who had worked all his life on a plantation in Tennessee and was now homeless, evicted as a result of his participation in the Movement. He rose and with tears in his eyes said, "You don't know how it feels to know that we are not the only ones."
The job of the system is always to make us think we are the only ones.