-
Freedom Rider Joan Browning Presentation at University of South Alabama
Joan Browning
Ms. Joan Browning was invited to speak at the University of South Alabama's Marx Library on April 29, 2025. She shared her experiences as one of the original Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights Movement. This event was sponsored by the Marx Library and the Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, with support from the Student Government Association.
Between May and December 1961, 436 Freedom Riders participated in sixty different Freedom Rides across the South and succeeded in taking down the “white” and “colored” signs in transportation waiting rooms and on trains and buses. Four of the Freedom Riders were white southern females, Joan Browning being one of them.
Browning, a 1959 graduate of Lumber City High School in rural Georgia, was the first in her family to attend college, enrolling at Georgia State College for Women (GSCW) at the age of 16, hoping to complete a B.S. as a pre-Med major, with a minor in English. Her college plans were cut short when she was forced to leave GSCW in 1961 after worshipping at Wesley Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church across from the college campus in Milledgeville, and subsequently attending an interracial conference in Augusta, Georgia. The Paine College Student Christian Conference introduced Joan to the Freedom Movement, and she participated in picketing a store and a lunch counter sit-in while in Augusta.
After leaving GSCW, Browning moved to Atlanta and became involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), working with Casey Hayden, Julian Bond, and others involved in the Civil Rights Movement. On December 10, 1961, Browning was among eight Freedom Riders who traveled in a segregated railroad car from Atlanta to Albany, Georgia, where they were arrested and jailed.
Browning earned her bachelor’s degree at age 52 from West Virginia State College, a historically black institution. In 1996, she published “Invisible Revolutionaries: White Women in Civil Rights Movement Historiography” in the Journal of Women’s History. In 2000, her memoir “Shiloh Witness” appeared in the autobiographical collection Deep In Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement, published by The University of Georgia Press. In 2000, she received the West Virginia Governor’s Living the Dream award for exemplifying the characteristics of justice, scholarship, sharing of self, human and civil rights, and advocacy for peace. Ms. Browning received an honorary doctorate from Marshall University in 2024.
Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library holds the Joan C. Browning papers. Ms. Browning was interviewed by the University of Mississippi as part of the Freedom Riders 40th Anniversary Oral History Project in 2001.