From: "Joan C. Browning" <oma00013@wvnvm.wvnet.edu>
Subject: Women in SNCC
Re: Aimee Koch's request for readings for a major research project on the
women of SNCC:
My basic text for women in SNCC is Sara M. Evans' Personal Politics: the
Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left
(1982). Next, be sure to look at Susan Lynn's Progressive Women in
Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace, and Feminism, 1945 to the 1960s
(1992). For the most contemporaneous account of SNCC, see Howard Zinn,
SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964). Similarly, the one SNCC women's
memoir is Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil
Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (1991) -- Casey Hayden's preface
is a wonderful statement of what we thought we were doing in the Movement.
You will find snippets of interviews with SNCC women in Fred Powledge's
Free At Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (1991)
and Howell Raines, My Soul is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South
Remembered (1997), Pat Watters, Down to Now: Reflections on the Southern
Civil Rights Movement (1971), and Pat Watters & Reece Cleghorn, Climbing
Jacob's Ladder: The Arrival of Negroes in Southern Politics (1967). For
what happened, at ground level, for a long time, read Constance Curry,
Silver Rights (1997) by an original SNCC adult advisor. Consult, with
caution, Emily Stoper, The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: The
Growth of Radicalism in a Civil Rights Organization (1989). In recent
scholarship, see Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The
Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995); Joanne
Grant, Freedom Bound: Ella Baker (1998); Cynthia Fleming, Soon We Will Cry
No More: Life of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson (1998).
These will lead you to other sources.
For my take on how to read the world of SNCC writing, see Joan C. Browning,
"Invisible Revolutionaries: White Women in Civil Rights Historiography,"
Fall 1996 Journal of Women's History.
By the way, after you've finished your paper, how about posting to this
list the sources you found helpful? Let us know what resonated with you?
Thanks. I'd love to see your paper, too.
Joan C. Browning
Ronceverte WV
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[2]
From: "James L. Wood" <jwood@mail.sdsu.edu>
Subject: Re: Women in SNCC (multiple responses)
Another reference: The outstanding book by Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power.
James L. Wood <jwood@mail.sdsu.edu>