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

We are all very different: southern and northern; rural and urban; state university and Ivy League; middle class, working class, and poor. We were moved to our radical activities in various ways: by Marxism, Christian existentialism, and immigrant folk wisdom; by our grandmothers and the Constitution; by Thoreau and Dumas; by living on a kibbutz; by African freedom fighters; and by a Deep South upbringing. . . . Our book is about girls growing up in a revolutionary time and place. It is about love and politics and the transcendence of racial barriers. We offer this work to enrich the chronicle of a social movement that forever changed the country and our lives.

From the Foreword by Barbara Ransby:

These first-person accounts by white women activists represent a critical voice, yet one that has not been often heard. . . . This book breaks that silence. . . . Deep in Our Hearts gives us another lens through which to view the politics of race and gender in the civil rights movement [and] probes the themes of growth, discovery, friendship, and courage. . . . The real gift of these stories is a more optimistic legacy for a new generation of blacks and whites as they navigate the ever-volatile path of racial relations into the twenty-first century and, hopefully, take up the challenge that 1960s activists did of trying to make the world a better and more humane place.