Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970.

By Lynne Olson. (New York and other cities: Scribner, c. 2001. Pp. 460. $30.00, ISBN 0-684-85012-5.)

Freedom's Daughters adds to the growing scholarship on African American and white women's vital contributions to the civil fights movement. Intending to explain "the complicated, often tortured connection between African-American women and white women in the civil fights cause," Lynne Olson focuses on events from slavery to the civil fights movement that illustrate their interaction (p. 16). Without black and some white women's work as leaders and participants, the story of the civil rights movement is not only incomplete; it is flawed. Thus, the core of this engaging narrative describes the significance of meetings between African American and white women engaged in the fight for civil rights like Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1940s, Rosa Parks and Virginia Foster Durr in the 1950s, and those in SNCC during the 1960s. These relationships were essential to the success of the civil fights movement because women acted "as organizers, strategists, fund-raisers, and foot soldiers" (p. 125).

The 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott exemplifies Olson's argument, as Parks of the NAACP, Durr of the Council on Human Relations, and Jo Ann Robinson of the Women's Political Council combined efforts to galvanize the black community and begin the boycott. As E. D. Nixon and Martin Luther King Jr. publicly preserved the momentum in the press and speeches, Robinson planned carpools and edited the boycott's newsletter. Olson's description of the boycott ranks among the finest because she demonstrates how women provided the courage and initiative for the boycott that allowed men like King to capitalize on its path to action.

Much of the book then describes SNCC's campaign for voter registration in Mississippi, the organization that best depicts the alliances and conflicts between women civil rights workers of both races. In Mississippi, white SNCC volunteers Mary King and Casey Hayden worked with local blacks like Fannie Lou Hamer and Unita Blackwell. Wherever SNCC went, organizers made "a point of seeking out women as contacts" because of black women's historic role as community leaders (p. 251). Few white women ever did actual fieldwork in Mississippi because of threats against them from racist whites, but their meetings with local African American women inspired them and taught them courage and pride. At the same time, problems emerged. Partially because of sexual relations between black men and white women in SNCC, the failure of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964, and disagreements between local Mississippi blacks and civil rights workers on future goals, SNCC eventually collapsed as an organization. Divisions between black and white women exploded over discussions about women's role in SNCC and society when African American women claimed primary allegiance to their race. Overall, Olson's analysis of SNCC and the Montgomery boycott superbly merges previous accounts of these events with current scholarship on SNCC and activists like Ella Baker and Septima Clark.

Clearly, many courageous women made the civil rights movement successful, and Freedom's Daughters makes a compelling addition to the movement's history (although Olson tends to minimize the NAACP's work and the SCLC's 1963 campaign in Birmingham). But black and white women's interactions were far more complex than Olson conveys. She argues that "subterranean currents of anger, competition, and jealousy" between black and white women undercut the potential for alliances (p. 367). In fact, because they held racist beliefs, most white women accepted white supremacy, fought desegregation, and often treated black domestics abominably. Some African American women may have been suspicious of white women's help, but their fears rested more on whites' complicity with Jim Crow than it did, for example, on sexual competition.

ANY SHORT CHIRHART

Indiana State University