I don`t remember ever being told not to do something because I was a girl.
My father was the sixth Methodist minister in five generations, all born in Virginia and North Carolina. He was the first person in his family to go North. My mother had come from Colombia, South America. They met when he was in seminary in New York City and my mother was in nursing school there.
When I was a child, it seemed like my mother was always working. I remember her leaving at night to go on night duty. Then she began to teach nursing, and later she became a supervisor in the public school system. As if that weren`t enough, she was also painting on the side. When the work day was over, my brothers and I often would help her with the cooking. Then at night she would paint or read articles. My memory of my mother is that she was always working on a project, which is obviously where I get it from.
I had three younger brothers, and I became the babysitter for them when I was 7 years old. I learned self-reliance; I learned how to stand on my own feet. I think the last thing you want is a clinging, dependent little daughter. You`ve got to have confidence when she moves out that she`s going to be able to fend for herself and she`s going to be able to see to her own needs. I think it`s the way you must be to function in our world. Pity the poor children who don`t have that.
My mother worked because we needed the extra income. My father`s salary as a Methodist minister was not enough to bring up four kids. My mother felt very guilty about it, because the people in the church thought she was working for selfish fulfillment or pin money or something. Actually her working was the only reason my brothers and I were able to go to private colleges.
I went to Ohio Wesleyan because it was a Methodist school and I was a Methodist minister`s daughter. When I enrolled, I thought I wanted to be an anthropologist.
Then on Feb.1, 1960, news of the first sit-in came on the news. It had a stunning effect on me. Here were four young black students in North Carolina who had confronted the rigid protocols of segregation. They had gone down to a Woolworth`s lunch counter, asked for a Coca-Cola and decided to sit. And they sat and they sat and they sat. They weren`t even arrested. And they came back the next day and they sat again.
Others began getting this idea, and they started getting arrested. Within a few months, 35,000 students had sat in across the South. By the end of that year, 70,000 had sat in-most of them black but increasingly with a number of whites. There were 3,600 arrests.
Out of that phenomenon grew the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was a loose coordinating mechanism among the leaders of the sit-ins. I was watching all this from Ohio, and I knew that one epoch had ended in the United States and we were at the beginning of another. I knew that the South was where I wanted to be.
In my senior year the campus YWCA adviser took a group of us to Nashville and Atlanta and Tuskegee (Ala.). We met leaders of civil rights organizations and publishers of newspapers and church leaders. But the people who turned me on were the SNCC people.
The SNCC workers touched me with their intensity, determination, commitment and earnestness. I felt they were like me; I saw in them a kind of passion and a kind of purity that I related to. They weren`t concerned with practicalities. They were very idealistic and very visionary. From that point on, I knew I wanted to go to work for SNCC.
But how? I was a white woman. I couldn`t just walk in and say ”Hello, here I am to help.” I had to work my way in.
I had met this wonderful woman in Atlanta who had a magnetic effect on me. Her name was Casey Hayden. At that time, she was married to Tom Hayden
(founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society and now a California assemblyman).
She was traveling throughout the South on a human relations project for the YWCA, and she talked to our group from Ohio Wesleyan. I asked her how I would go about organizing a group at Ohio Wesleyan to support the sit-ins. She gave me basic advice, and I went back and followed it.
As I finished my senior year, I decided to go to graduate school either at Tulane or Emory, to get myself into the Deep South so that I would have a base from which I could work my way into the movement.
Then something wonderful happened. I was ready to go home from Ohio Wesleyan, actually at the bus station, when the pay phone rang. It was the director of the College Division of the YWCA, who had tracked me down from my dormitory. She asked me if I would be willing to replace Casey (who was leaving to follow her husband). Well, I was stunned. Without hesitating, I said yes.
When they asked me to replace Casey, it meant I would be working with Ella Baker, who also was a senior adviser to SNCC. It was Miss Baker who gave me the imprimatur, who said, in effect, ”You can trust her. She`s reliable, she`s dependable and she`s genuine.” That`s the way I was able to work my way onto SNCC`s staff as a white woman.
I didn`t see it as their struggle and me as something apart. I saw it as my struggle, too. I believed-perhaps this sounds sentimental-that as long as black people were oppressed, I was oppressed. So I saw this as something I was doing for everyone including myself.
The other thing was, we were all in physical jeopardy. We all lived in fear. Before going to work for the civil rights movement, each of us had to make the decision that we were willing to die. None of my fellow workers, no matter how jaded they are today, no matter how worldly they have become, would disagree with me when I say we were ready to die for each other.
My naivete was a great asset to me when I was 21 and went to work for SNCC. My naivete helped me because I was really not fully aware of all of the daunting odds. It allowed me to have strength.
It`s a mistake to think that the civil rights movement was like an invincible machine that went from one triumph to another. We had many doubts, and there were many imponderables. The summer of 1964 was a very brutalizing summer for us. Eighty of my fellow workers were beaten. There were 1,000 arrests; 35 churches in Mississippi were burned. Thirty homes were bombed, and there were 35 shootings. Then three of my fellow workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were killed. Their bodies were found buried under a dam.
It was a discouraging period. We had to figure out, where do we go from here? There began to be a series of debates about SNCC`s structure and its future. Casey Hayden and I decided to raise the issue of women`s rights, which we had been talking about for three years. We decided to write a position paper arguing that the position of women was analagous to that of blacks, and that there was a caste system at work.
I spent months gathering examples of how women were treated in an inferior, subjugated way, as blacks were in the larger society. It was as if we knew a secret that no one else knew and if we tried to tell them about it, they wouldn`t understand.
The word ”feminism” was not in use then. You didn`t hear the term
”women`s liberation.” The term ”sexism” didn`t exist. We prepared the paper secretly, to present it anonymously. Casey and I were afraid that if we put our names on it, we would be ridiculed.
In fact, most people did laugh at us. But a year later Casey and I wrote another memo that was sent to women organizers in the peace and civil rights movements across the country. They began meeting together in study groups, and those study groups became the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s. So one of the roots of the modern women`s movement grew from the civil rights movement.
