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  • Belles of Liberty: Gender, Bennett College, and the Civil Rights Movement in Greensboro, North Carolina by Linda Beatrice Brown
  • Joy Ann Williamson-Lott
Linda Beatrice Brown. Belles of Liberty: Gender, Bennett College, and the Civil Rights Movement in Greensboro, North Carolina. Greensboro, NC: Women and Wisdom Press, 2013. 230 pp. Paperback: $18.00. ISBN-10: 0988893703; ISBN-13: 978-0988893702

Dr. Linda Beatrice Brown's book, Belles of Liberty, is the story of Bennett College, a Black, private, all-women's institution in Greensboro, North Carolina, and its students, called Bennett Belles, who played a vital role in the local Black freedom struggle of the early 1960s. In it, Dr. Brown disrupts the myth of the Greensboro movement where four Black men from North Carolina A&T University planned, organized, and executed the sit-ins by themselves. Through archival research and interviews, Dr. Brown demonstrates that Bennett women—aided by the support of their president and faculty—participated in all phases of the movement and that the campus was a haven for Black activists and their white allies in the local region. It is a loving tribute to the institution from which Dr. Brown received her undergraduate degree and at which she is currently on the faculty. That, plus the fact that Dr. Brown is the niece of Dr. Willa Player, president of the institution during part of the Black freedom struggle era, means Dr. Brown has an intimate knowledge of the campus, its history, and its place in the movement.

The book offers a brief discussion of the institution's founding and its orientation to the education of Black women, but it begins with the story of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s visit to campus in 1958. Denied access to facilities at the publicly supported North Carolina A&T, Bennett's chapel, theater, and assembly hall were full to capacity to hear Dr. King speak about the movement and the role of youth in it. Inspired by his words, imbued with the spirit of racial advocacy nurtured at the institution for decades, and eager to upend white supremacy, Bennett Belles became vital in the local movement. Dr. Brown's analysis focuses on what she calls two phases of the movement: the 1960 sit-ins to desegregate Woolworth and the 1962–1963 mass movement to extend desegregation to all public accommodations in the city. Although it is a case study, the book contextualizes Bennett activism in the longer and wider history of Black women's activism as well as the Greensboro movement.

A particularly valuable part of the book is Dr. Brown's attention to race and gender in her analysis. Not only does she demonstrate that male activists of the early 1960s often discounted female participation in the movement, but she ably demonstrates that scholars of the movement render Black women invisible, too. She is right that Black women have been, until recently, almost wholly written out of the literature on the movement. Her contribution here is beyond reinserting Bennett women into the narrative of Greensboro activism. It lies in her discussion of the twin aims of ending racial and gender inequality. Though the participation of Bennett women in the local movement has been construed as what she calls "racial defiance," Dr. Brown argues that it also was "gender defiance" in that Bennett Belles bucked the respectability politics that constrained the lives and behavior of Black women. Bennett Belles violated respectability politics when they demonstrated, broke the law, and were arrested. I believe she is right when she argues that stripping Bennett women (and other Black women) of their gender has distorted how scholars make sense of their participation in the movement and their agendas for doing so. I hope that future scholars take that up and use the frame [End Page E-1] to further that work. Relatedly, the last chapter of the book includes excerpts from oral interviews and written communication with an impressive number of Bennett graduates. As a historian myself, I hope Dr. Brown deposits these materials in an archive. They are a precious resource for future generations of researchers.

It should be noted that this is not a scholarly treatment. To...

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