EDITOR’S NOTE
Morgantown’s Community Coalition for Social Justice (CCSJ) is celebrating this Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, at 2 p.m. Read more about the event and how to attend in Joan Browning’s essay on Page C-1 of Sunday’s (Jan. 12, 2025) The Dominion Post.
BY JIM BISSETT
JBissett@DominionPost.com
Thursday made for an even busier morning than usual for Joan C. Browning, the author, activist and former Freedom Rider.
There were Zoom meetings, deadline projects and time spent on telephone interviews with this newspaper and other media outlets in Atlanta.
She had missed Jimmy Carter’s funeral on TV, but she was hoping to carve out time to at least stream a replay later.
During this professional tumult, something else was also happening on the other side of her door.
The beckoning of good neighbors.
Good neighbors who shoveled out stretches of the road leading to her home that Winter Storm Blair had layered with ice and snow. Good neighbors who offered to go on grocery runs in the chilling cold (anything you need, Miss Joan, just give us a list).
Good neighbors who keep watch, because that’s what good neighbors do.
“That’s one advantage of being an old lady living in a double-wide trailer on a hillside in Greenbrier County,” she said, with her signature, droll sense of humor.
“Nice people want to do nice things for you.”
In 1960, she was a young woman living and going to college in Milledgeville, Ga., who knew that she needed to do something.
Well, check that.
Robert E. Lee Jr. – the president of Georgia State College for Women and not the Confederate general – made the decision for her.
Hard work – and heart work
Browning grew up in economic straits in the Peach State. She and her family worked hard as sharecroppers.
By the time she was 16, the age she graduated high school early because of her good grades, she could pick 200 pounds of cotton a day.
Her knees, wrists and back ached, and the relentless Dixie sun couldn’t be more unforgiving
At Georgia State College for Women, a sharecropper’s kid previously tagged with a Poor White Trash label (though she didn’t necessarily know that at the time) was warming to life there.
She was busily transforming herself into a proper young lady of the South.
Which meant dresses, white gloves and, as she noted with more drollery, “what some might call an aspiration to be June Cleaver.”
That was a wry reference to how females of the day were depicted on television shows.
Women on those airings always did their chores in pearls and heels, and they always had a fresh-from-the oven meal waiting on the table, without fail, as their bread-winning husbands arrived home from work.
Meanwhile, her state was also broadcasting and stoking hate and racism against the Black community. She also had to admit that she didn’t fully realize that either, at the time.
She toiled alongside Black people in the cotton fields, and, truth be told, she enjoyed their company and kinship more.
On a sun-dappled Sunday morning in Milledgeville, she crossed the line.
Well, she crossed the street to worship at the African Methodist Episcopal church in town. She enjoyed the experience and became a faithful congregant.
“I just thought I was accepting an invitation to go to church,” as she recalled. “I apparently caused a little bit of a stir.”
Waiting (not) for Robert E. Lee
An hour south of Atlanta, Milledgeville, with its tidy, tree-lined trees and president’s mansion on her campus done out in the requisite, classic Roman architecture, made for a nice postcard.
With all the outward gentility, though, there was also an underlying frequency of institutional racism, given the tenor of the time.
Jim Crow.
Dr. Lee delivered an ultimatum. College or church.
One or the other.
If she kept attending this particular church, he decreed, she would no longer be welcome on campus, even if she was an honors student. The school was receiving threats, he said.
She made her choice.
That same year, 1961, she had also traveled to Augusta, near the South Carolina state line, for a Christian conference that included white and Black students.
It was a gathering which showed her how dangerous being in the Civil Rights movement below the Mason-Dixon line could be.
The Black students in attendance staged a non-violent sit-in that didn’t stay that way. The organizer of the sit-in was stabbed in the chest and almost died.
Ironically, he had stepped in to protect one of the white attendees who was being threatened.
Browning said goodbye to Milledgeville and its mansion-dwelling college president.
The interpretation of Dreams
She moved to Atlanta a month later, where on one evening, she attended a lecture at Spellman College delivered by Martin Luther King Jr.
“Dr. King wasn’t in his ‘preacher mode’ that night,” she remembered.
“This was a lecture on his principles of nonviolence. He didn’t pound the pulpit, but he spoke with such quiet intensity and eloquence that the man burned. I said to myself, ‘This is someone I need to pay attention to.’”
She got his autograph that night and signed on with the ever-growing Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a group of idealistic college students ready to put those principles into practice.
Browning stuffed envelopes, ran the mimeograph machine and got to know Julian Bond and the others on the front lines.
“Good morning, young lady,” King would hail her, in daily greeting. “How are you today?”
With other volunteers, white and black, she fanned out across Georgia and Alabama, as part of the famed Freedom Riders bus tours, where the whites turned the tables on themselves by sitting at the back of the bus, and frequenting “Coloreds Only” areas in the towns and cities along the way.
Two weeks before Christmas in 1961, she and a handful of fellow riders spent 10 days in jail, in Albany, Ga., where she befriended Charles Person, the reason for those Atlanta phone calls the other day.
Browning and Person were among the younger of the Freedom Riders and were around the same age.
Twenty-four hours before Browning’s very busy morning in Greenbrier County, Person passed at the age of 82 in Georgia.
They had stayed in contact all these years. It’s because of him, Dr. King and other kindred souls, she said, that she soldiered on in movement.
Country roads …
Meanwhile, a job and volunteer outreach work at Emory University in the 1960s turned into speaking engagements as Browning’s history in civil rights became more and more known.
She’s traveled the country since, lecturing on human rights at schools from Alabama to California, and she has written extensively about her years in the civil rights movement, contributing to several books and scholarly journals over the years.
Her skills in marketing, business development and writing brought her to the Mountain State in 1969, for an appointment at now-West Virginia State University.
That school began its life as one of the original historically Black colleges and universities founded in the nation after the Civil War.
“I said then that I’d give it a year, and here we are.”
Community development jobs and freelance writing jobs followed in the Greenbrier County region, in those years since.
Miss Eva (and Miss Ella) have their say
In 2005, WVU’s Center for Black Culture and Research honored her with its annual Martin Luther King Achievement Award for Service.
Most recently, she was involved in the publication of the graphic novel, “West Virginians’ Experiences in Civil Rights: How we have been connected all along,” which was written, designed and illustrated by Eve Faulkes, a graphic design artist and professor in WVU’s School of Art and Design, who has long been lauded for her work in civil rights across the state.
Browning helped compile the stories of West Virginians involved in the Civil Rights Movement and shared editing chores with Barbara Howe, a professor emeritus at the university.
The 132-page book is available on Amazon and local bookstores, she said, which is heartening to her.
Doors, meanwhile, remain a constant in Browning’s life. There are good neighbors who knock on them in Greenbrier County.
And there’s also what Miss Ella Baker, another Freedom Rider, had to say about those physical and metaphorical portals, back in their inaugural days in the movement.
“Miss Baker always told me, ‘Honey, if you want to change the world for the better, you don’t have to be heroic. Just step outside your door each morning and do the good work you find there.’”
