A Civil Rights Summer: A Memoir

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Although I was not involved in the voting rights campaign, I knew Jeanne in the 1960s when she was. A few comments on her memoir, those times, and that friendship:

This is a personal account of the experiences of a young woman who served as a volunteer civil rights worker in the South in the 1960s. The author’s style is clear and direct, making the individuals she describes genuine and the incidents credible. She served as a foot-soldier in the front lines of a campaign to ensure that black citizens were able to take advantage of the suffrage they were due. The memoir of her work and working conditions in South Carolina in 1966 will be of value to any future study of the civil rights movement in our country, or of Berkeley student life and perspectives in the 1960s. For the general reader, it documents an individual journey during a unique time two generations ago when college students, despite campus distractions and turbulence, provided much of the moral ballast and societal awareness and discourse our country seemed to lack after November 1963. Many of these students, including the author, showed the courage of their convictions.

I knew the author when we were both students at Berkeley in the 1960s. As she relates, those were intense years. I was only generally aware of her work in the summer of 1966, but remember being greatly relieved to learn she had returned safely. Through that friendship long ago it was clear that she possessed a passion for the study of political and social structures, and compassion for the individuals and classes influenced, indeed prejudiced, by these systems. This memoir provides an old acquaintance the opportunity to reflect with satisfaction and respect on her understanding and humanity.

John Filson
Madison, New Hampshire

Thanks for your civil rights memoir which we very much enjoyed reading. I must confess, however, that it made me feel my age somewhat more, since as you were preparing to go to South Carolina to register voters in the spring of 1966, I was an associate prof. ending my fifth and final year at the U. of Tennessee and preparing to head west to Arizona.

Your memoir served to remind me that I was in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 about a week after the march on Montgomery began there and the resulting melee on the Edmund Pettus bridge, something I had largely forgotten until I read your memoir. I was asked with some hostility what I was doing in Selma by the motel clerk when I checked in and the tension in the town seemed to be palpable to me. I was there to interview a couple of lawyers who were involved in the Alabama reapportionment case, Reynolds v. Sims, and since I was wearing a coat and tie, on later reflection I decided the motel clerk probably thought I was an FBL agent. In any case, I at least have some inkling of the tension and hostility you and your colleagues encountered in South Carolina.

Thanks again for the memoir, and take care.

Richard C. Cortner, Professor Emeritus, University of Arizona