What We Owe to the Black Women of This Powerful Civil Rights Group
Their fearlessness is a lesson to us all
When Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons arrived at Spelman College as a freshman in 1962, the Memphis native carried the hopes and aspirations of an entire generation, for she was the first in her family to graduate high school. Simmons shared her parents’ lofty ideals about a college education as a ticket to a brighter future until fate — also known as the civil rights movement — intervened. Soon Simmons was marching, taking part in lunch counter sit-ins in Atlanta, and getting arrested. By sophomore year, she had helped create the curriculum for the 1964 Freedom Summer Project, a bold endeavor that sent thousands of civil rights workers into Mississippi to teach Black Americans voter literacy and register them to vote.
Intending to volunteer for the summer as a Freedom School teacher, Simmons was drafted by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) — a burgeoning group of young activists and organizers — to be project director in Laurel, Mississippi, which was a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity. She was frightened, but fear was secondary to righteous anger. Simmons, 75, a professor emerita at University of Florida, recalls as a child reading Jet magazine with the searing photos of Emmett Till’s corpse. The everyday ravages of racism —…
