Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement

Deep in Our Hearts is an eloquent and powerful book that takes us into the lives of nine young women who came of age in the 1960s while committing themselves actively and passionately to the struggle for racial equality and justice. These compelling first-person accounts take us back to one of the most tumultuous periods in our nations history--to the early days of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Albany Freedom Ride, voter registration drives and lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Summer, the 1964 Democratic Convention, and the rise of Black Power and the womens movement. The book delves into the hearts of the women to ask searching questions. Why did they, of all the white women growing up in their hometowns, cross the color line in the days of segregation and join the Southern Freedom Movement? What did they see, do, think, and feel in those uncertain but hopeful days? And how did their experiences shape the rest of their lives?

"These essays—insightful, warm, funny, committed, illuminating—teach us as much about this country as about their authors, as much about the present as about the past. The book is a very important contribution toward helping us understand the freedom movement as human experience."--Charles Payne, Duke University

“An important contribution to the growing literature of the Civil Rights Movement."--Choice

"A powerful testament to a time when the goal of universal justice was in sight."--Library Journal

"These oral histories provide a range of perspectives on an important period. . . . Full of vivid insights into what really happened during those troubled times."--Booklist

"A wonderful portrayal of young women with deep and open hearts. They faced danger by daring to be traitors to their race and class; they also learned to face their own families and their fears. This is an invaluable and unique look at a hidden chapter in the history of the civil rights movement."--Julian Bond

"Riveting . . . Particularly powerful is the retrospective wisdom in the book, and the sharing about where the civil rights movement led these women.”--Other Side

"A marvelous collection of memoirs . . . Despite the voluminous scholarship on that movement, their stories constitute a missing piece of the puzzle, one that can only be known when it is told by those who lived it. . . . The early years of the civil rights movement have given us many images of courage and liberation. Deep in Our Hearts adds one more dimension to those stories with writing that is direct, honest, and occasionally lyrical."--Journal of Southern History

"A moving collection . . . For scholars of the movement, Deep in Our Hearts offers rich personal recollections of many of the movement's most famous events, from the story of organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the frantic search for murdered civil rights workers during the summer of 1964. The collection would also be a wonderful tool in the classroom because the stories make clear how the lives of these young white women were forever changed by their involvement in the movement."--Alabama Review