Deep in Our Hearts is an eloquent and powerful book that takes us into the lives of nine young women who came of age in the 1960s while committing themselves actively and passionately to the struggle for racial equality and justice. These compelling first-person accounts take us back to one of the most tumultuous periods in our nation's history--to the early days of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Albany Freedom Ride, voter registration drives and lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Summer, the 1964 Democratic Convention, and the rise of Black Power and the women's movement. The book delves into the hearts of the women to ask searching questions. Why did they, of all the white women growing up in their hometowns, cross the color line in the days of segregation and join the Southern Freedom Movement? What did they see, do, think, and feel in those uncertain but hopeful days? And how did their experiences shape the rest of their lives?
Constance Curry is a writer, activist, film producer, and a fellow at the Institute for Women's Studies, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. She has a law degree from Woodrow Wilson College. Curry did graduate work in political science at Columbia University and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bordeaux in France. She earned her B.A. degree in History, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. She was a Fellow at the University of Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute, Center for Civil Rights, Charlottesville, 1990-91.
Curry is the author of several works, including her first book, "Silver Rights" (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1995; Paper--Harcourt Brace, 1996), which won the Lillian Smith Book Award for nonfiction in 1996 and was a finalist for the 1996 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. The book was named the Outstanding Book on the subject of Human Rights in North America by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights. With an introduction by Marian Wright Edelman, "Silver Rights" tells the true story of Mrs. Mae Bertha Carter and her family's struggle for education in Sunflower County, Mississippi. The Carters were Mississippi Delta sharecroppers living on a cotton plantation in the 1960's and dared to send seven of their thirteen children to desegregate an all-white school system in 1965. Curry wrote "Mississippi Harmony" with Ms. Winson Hudson, published fall 2002 by Palgrave/St. Martin's press, which tells the life story of Mrs. Hudson, a civil rights leader from Leake County, Mississippi, who also challenged segregation in the 1960s. Curry collaborated in and edited "Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement" (University of Georgia Press, 2000) and the book "Aaron Henry: the Fire Ever Burning" (University Press of Mississippi, 2000). "The Wrong side of Murder Creek," released Nov. 1, 2008, is the memoir of Bob Zellner, the first male white field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1961-67, and is co-written by Curry. They received the Lillian Smith book award for Non-fiction in September 2009.
From 1957 to 1959, she was Field Representative, Collegiate Council for United Nations. From 1960 to 1964, she was the Director of the Southern Student Human Relations Project of U. S. N. S. A., Atlanta, developing programs for black and white college students to organize. During that period, she was the first white woman on the executive committee of SNCC and was often their "designated observer" for sit-ins and other demonstrations. From 1964 to 1975, Curry was Southern Field Representative for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). From 1975 to 1990, she was appointed by the mayor to serve as director of the City of Atlanta's Bureau of Human Services Director.
Curry is the producer of the award winning film "The Intolerable Burden," based on "Silver Rights," but showing today's resegregation in public schools and the fast track to prison for youth of color. In Feb., 2009, she was given the Living Legend Award by the Seventh Day Adventist church in Baltimore, the first white person to receive it. An activist/participant and a writer/intellectual holding a law degree, Connie Curry has helped illuminate the struggle for justice.
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