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About our speaker:
Joan Browning
Joan Browning was born and raised in rural Georgia, and started college in 1959 at Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville) at the age of 16. While there she became involved in the freedom rider movement. At 18, she decided to move to Atlanta, where she worked in the library of Emory University and attended classes at night.
At the age of 19 she became one of the Freedom Riders who traveled the south in 1961, where she joined the racially mixed group of people traveling south. She was arrested in Albany, Georgia and was the only white woman to be put in jail where she spent a total of five days. Browning's role in the civil rights movement was detailed in the book The Road South, B. J. Hollars' book about the Freedom Riders.
Browning would go on to graduate from West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University) in 1994. She shares her experiences in the civil rights movement as a means to engage young people, and she writes on the historical details of the civil rights movement using biographies such as her article on the women's rights and voting rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer.
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