Cross Cultural Solidarity

History; in the Service of Solidarity

Joan C. Browning

By Lynn Burnett

The following story is based primarily on Joan C. Browning’s wonderful chapter in “Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement.”

Freedom Rider Joan C. Browning was born into the summer heat of Georgia, in a small shed on the family farm, in 1942. Hers was a small community – too small to be called a town – that had one store, and one school. She grew up picking cotton – by age 16 she could pick 200 pounds a day – and her family would sew chicken feed sacks into clothing. Joan grew up thinking she was well-off: for her family farm was larger than those around her, and hers was the first house for miles around to get electricity. She was shocked when she learned that much of the wider world saw her family as “poor White trash.”

The farming community that Joan grew up in was deeply proud of their self-sufficiency. They also embraced a strong community spirit of lifting one another up in hard times. When drought hit the farms, community members shared scarce resources and made sure everyone made it through. When her family’s house burned down, the community donated their own clothes and furniture, and raised funds to help the family rent a new home. Joan later reflected that “My family and community ordeals and the responses people had to them prepared me for the Freedom Movement’s concept of the Beloved Community.”

Joan was a precocious student. She skipped grades, graduated from high school at age 16, and headed off to Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville. The switch from rural to urban life was a difficult one. “After an initial infatuation with paved streets and paved sidewalks,” Joan recalls, “I missed my family. I missed my rural home of small places and small groups.”

Central to those small groups had been Joan’s beloved Methodist church. It was a tightly knit community, where everybody knew each other, sang passionately together, and where the values of rural life such as the spirituality of land stewardship were preached from the pulpit. The Methodist church in Milledgeville, on the other hand, had a thousand congregants. A professional choir performed for the congregation. Joan experienced it as feeling overly formal, stiff, and impersonal. For the first time in her life, she began avoiding church on Sundays.

During this time, however, Joan would often walk by a Black church, carrying her books under her arm. The Reverend was often sweeping the leaves in front of the church, and would engage her in conversation about the books she was carrying, or the beauty of the autumn leaves. Joan soon began attending Reverend Mincey’s church… where the people sang passionately together in the way that she longed for.

When her college discovered that she was attending a Black church, the president called Joan into his office. He looked nervous and afraid as he told Joan that the college had received threats of violence if she didn’t cease her “dangerous and irregular activities.” Although Joan had grown up in an all-White rural community, she had harvested cotton alongside Black people – and rested in the shade with them – for her whole life. Because her community – including the local rural papers – kept silent on the matter of race, Joan was naively unaware of segregation’s violent enforcement. She was dumbfounded that what felt to her like an innocent activity could lead to threats of violence.

Motivated in part by a desire to understand why simply attending a Black church would lead to such a backlash, Joan snuck off to an interracial Christian conference for college students, hosted in Augusta. This was in the spring of 1961, and the Black college students in the conference had been staging sit-ins for a full year. The conference buzzed with movement energy. James Lawson – one of the leading trainers of nonviolent resistance during the Civil Rights Movement – was a conference speaker. His teachings reminded Joan of a message that had been so important to the rural community in which she was raised: that God is Love, and that God is known through Love and through taking actions grounded in Love. Lawson inspired her to see the Civil Rights Movement through that lens. In her words, he showed her “how to behave as a nonviolent Christian witness against racism.” Joan joined the sit-ins the same day that she heard him speak.

That sit-in took place at the H.L. Green Variety Store, which was “just around the corner from a store that served as a hangout for the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Council.” During the sit-in, a group of Whites paced back and forth behind them muttering threats. When one of them raised a knife to attack a White participant, the local sit-in leader Bill Didley leapt in front of the blow and was stabbed just under his heart. The Black participants of the sit-in, seeing that the White participants were being targeted for violence, told them to run. Bill Didley survived – but in true Jim Crow fashion, was charged with possessing a concealed weapon: the knife that was lodged in his chest.

News of Joan’s sit-in quickly reached her college president, and she was given two choices: to be expelled, or to leave quietly, with her excellent college record intact. She left quietly. In her chapter in Deep In Our Hearts, Joan reflects:

“I visited the black Methodist church not because it was black but because the minister and I had struck up a cordiality that was reminiscent in style to my rural roots. I went there to worship, not to break some racial barrier. Certainly I had no notion that attending church would lead to my expulsion from college. I did not know that society had built those limits into my own freedom . . . I stumbled innocently, unaware, across southern racism’s dividing line. In the rural isolation of my home, I did not know that there was a taboo against black and white Methodists worshipping God together. In the end, my search for the warmth and friendliness of a small community meant ostracism from the very thing I sought . . . The personal history I was writing made me an outcast in white southern society, while my white skin sometimes separated me from black people.”

And so, at age 18, Joan moved to Atlanta with $25 in her pocket. When she had been kicked out of college, she had been accused of being part of several “subversive” groups she had never heard of. In Atlanta, she quickly looked them up and visited their offices: the NAACP, the Urban League… and SNCC. Her first SNCC contacts were Jim Forman, Norma Collins, and Julian Bond. As Joan recalls,

“I was drawn to SNCC’s few dingy, poorly lit, upstairs rooms . . . I remember dilapidated desks and chairs, with lots of commotion, always people mimeographing. I felt lucky to do whatever Jim, Julian, or Norma asked me to do. Julian Bond wrote press releases, and I folded them and put them in envelopes, feeling I had been entrusted with a very special task.”

When Jim Forman began to look for White volunteers to join the Albany Freedom rides, Joan volunteered to go. Although she was scared by the fire bombings and vicious beatings that had met former Freedom Riders, she was inspired to join because of the deep trust she had developed in Jim Forman and the official observer for the ride, Casey Hayden. (One of only four White southern women to participate in the Freedom Rides, Joan’s comrades would later joke that she was the token “Hillbilly Freedom Rider.”)

Although the Albany Freedom Riders arrived safely at their destination, they were thrown in jail. Joan, as the only White woman, was placed in solitary confinement. When her SNCC comrades suggested bailing her out due to their concern that she would be a special target of the guards, Joan refused to be released until they all were. Meanwhile, the Albany movement, newly energized by the Freedom Rides, exploded around them. As hundreds of demonstrators filled the jails, Joan secretly documented the experience by writing detailed notes on toilet paper and napkins.

Upon release, she went straight to a mass movement meeting in a Black church. In that moment, she felt profoundly at home. Joan would later write that the movement allowed her to explore “new dimensions of my own Christianity . . . The movement allowed harmony in myself between ideas and ideals and action. I could be more fully whole in the movement than anywhere else . . . For me, the Freedom Movement was the all-inclusive true church.”

However, the Freedom Rides also ushered in a lifelong source on pain for Joan. She had kept her reasons for leaving college a secret from her family. When her brother Wayne saw her picture in the newspaper, he threw it across the room in disgust. Joan’s mother asked Wayne what they should do: he said to leave her in jail. Joan’s mother told her not to come home for Christmas: she was no longer welcome. She would just create discord and tension in the family and the community. Wayne later told her: “We just wrote you out of the family.” Joan was never able to repair the rift: “Being ‘written out of my family’ has scarred and shaped my life ever since.”

And yet, the family and community that exiled her had also blessed her with her first experience of Beloved Community – a community in which all people were treated with dignity and respect, and in which all people were cared for and no one was left behind. In pursuing the Beloved Community in the Freedom Movement, Joan didn’t feel that she was severing her roots as a White southerner. Rather,

“It was an expansion of my early life . . . You might . . . expect that, as a freedom fighter, I had to reject all my upbringing. I did not. As I understood my journey, I was searching for restoration of my membership in a loving family and community, membership that comforted me in early life and yet remains an elusive goal.” 

Joan continued to participate in the sit-ins throughout 1962, but as she re-entered college she had less time and energy for the movement. Still, her home remained a hive of movement activity. During the Freedom Summer of 1964, she organized housing for volunteers, and sorted through thousands of documents for the Freedom Schools.

However, as the culture of SNCC began to shift away from what Joan had experienced as a more spiritual commitment to nonviolence, she increasingly felt that she didn’t fit in anymore. She continued to party with SNCC people, but she organized with them less and less. She began to reorient her energies towards other antiracist organizations and causes, including working on prison reform and with the ACLU, the National Urban League, and the American Friends Service Committee. “I was securely ensconced in this sector of the Beloved Community,” Joan writes, “when SNCC moved into the Black Power phase. From my perspective, Black Power was about cultural richness . . . as I experienced the cultural aspects of Black Power, it added new richness to my world.” Inspired by the celebration of Black beauty and Black natural hair, Joan was inspired to “stop torturing my own hair with chemicals.”

As the Civil Rights era came to an end, Joan found herself craving a return to her rural roots. She briefly tried living on a farm once again, but soon relocated to a mobile home in a mountainous region in West Virginia, overlooking the Greenbrier River. From there, she has spent decades following the advice of one of her most important mentors: Ella Baker, “who advised stepping outside one’s door and doing the good work awaiting there.” Joan continues to live in that mobile home overlooking the river today, with her dog Gabriel and her cat, Agape.

Additional Resources

By Joan C. Browning:

Video

Other Resources

Joan C. Browning papers at Emory University.

Wikipedia entry.