Our Minds on Freedom: Women and the Struggle for Black Equality in Louisiana, 1924–1967 (Library of Southern Civilization) - Hardcover

Frystak, Shannon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807134937 ISBN 13: 9780807134931

Publisher: LSU Press, 2009

Synopsis

In Our Minds on Freedom, Shannon Frystak explores the roles women played in civil rights activism in Louisiana from the 1920s through the 1960s. Women in Louisiana led unions and civil rights organizations and agitated for voting rights and equal treatment in public and private arenas. Black and white women worked together to organize the 1953 Baton Rouge bus boycott, which inspired the famous Montgomery bus boycott two years later; alter the system of unequal education throughout the state; and integrate New Orleans schools after the 1954 Brown decision. Frystak vividly describes the dangers women faced hosting civil rights workers, teaching in Freedom Schools, and canvassing for voter registration.

As Frystak shows, the civil rights movement allowed women to step out of their prescribed roles as wives, mothers, and daughters and become actors―even leaders―in a social structure largely dominated by men. Our Minds on Freedom is a welcome addition to the literature of the civil rights movement and will intrigue those interested in African American history, women’s history, Louisiana, or the U.S. South.

About this title

Book Description:

Our Minds on Freedom examines the role of women as organizers and leaders in the black struggle for equality in Louisiana. Using gender as a basic organizing principle, in combination with other systems of inequality -- race and class -- it challenges the notion that "men led, women organized," and places female activism, regardless of gendered expectations, at the center. The author concludes that women were not passive participants in the Louisiana civil rights movement, but leaders and heroines in their own right.

About the Author:

Shannon Frystak is professor of history at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania.

About this edition

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0807134937
• ISBN 13: 9780807134931
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280