Deep in our Hearts:Nine white women in the freedom movement

Yvette Duarte
December 7, 2010
HPSC 106
Book Review #4
Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement
Deep in our hearts is a book that talks about the story of nine women that were involved in the Civil Right Movement. These nine women have something in common each one believed in the equality of rights. These women were leaders and each one of them tells there stories. They were women that each began to understand and resist segregation and racism from a variety of different angel. They were women from the north and south moving in and out of each other’s lives as they work on the major southern civil rights struggles. It is a story of racism, and what it means to understand it, and to resist it. Two women that caught my attention the most were Joan C. Browning, and Dorothy Dawson Burlage.
Joan C. Browning was born in Shiloh, Georgia a small town. Shiloh was a small town in an isolated rural road; the town consists of one store, one church, a school and four or five homes. She was the second of five children. At a young age she become she did not had the privilege to be an adolescent, from a protected child to an adult she become when she turn eleven. As her being the oldest daughter she becomes the assistant of her mother. Just as she become an assistant mother, Wayne his brother at the age of thirteen, become a substituted father after his dad death. As she grew she was raised that everyone was equal, and she believed in that. In 1960 she crossed with a crossed an invisible color barrier. For Browning the Freedom Movement of the early sixties was the “Beloved Community”. She was largely a spiritual journey, symbolized by the biblical places important to the Hebrew. As she tells her story one day in Shiloh Baptist Church was packed, people would sitting in the floor and other would be standing along the wall. She was there for days isolated from everything in a hunger strike. After days of solitary imprisonment she got out weak from hunger strike and almost blind after days she did not see the light. Many people that were involved in SNCC come down to Albany to support this movement. Browning was raised that god made everyone equal with no differences, she decided to make a change to show people that everyone is equal; “They echoed and expanded lessons I had learned from childhood, showing me hot to be a Shiloh witness that god is love.”
These nine women they did not mind what there parents or people will think about them. They wanted to cause a change in this movement even though the color people would believe in that. But for them being these all time they are showing to the people that everyone is the same. While I read this women stories I realized the courage they had to show what they think without thinking what other will be saying about them, the way they believed that everyone is equal no matter if your white, dark or light. Nothing stopped them from this movement not even that they were white, instead of being there and not fighting what they think is right, they went after a dream they wanted. They know that they would not be accepted at first because they were white defending the right of a colored people. These women were raised with the mentality that everyone was equal.
In one way we can relate this today life because people are fighting for an Immigration Reform, and for the Dream Act to be passed by the congress. In this movement we see people that do support that people that are legal in this country and people that can go to college with no problem we see these people being there helping this come true for people that can be legal in this country. It’s not because they are being rebel or because they want to go against the rule is because they believed in something. It is the way the see life that everyone deserved to be treated the same with out being discriminated or denies a higher education. God made everyone equal, in the eyes of god we are the same no matter what is your ethnicity or were you come from or what skin color you have.
From these I book I learned about these women that stood up for what they believed and thought me a little bit more about the Freedom Movement. My respect to this women that fought in a mass movement. These women scarified there family and personal identity in a vary personal decision to fight segregation, without no guarantee that they would make a change, they just wanted to fight injustices that were made to the people.