When the Ku Klux Klan crashed a voter registration drive held in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, Janet Moses one of the voter registry event's co-organizers stood her ground.
"We can only be chased if we run," Moses said during a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee event on Wednesday, recounting her thoughts as she refused to abandon her post at the voter registration event.
Moses was one of three veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, along with Judy Richardson and Penny Patch, who shared their experiences working at the forefront of civil rights activism in the 1960s as members of SNCC. The speakers discussed their experiences and read excerpts of their testimonies from a recently published book, "Hands on the Freedom Plow: SNCC Women Tell Their Stories," in Filene Auditorium.
History professor Russell Rickford, who introduced the speakers, described SNCC an organization that supported civil rights for blacks in the South as "a vanguard organization in the best sense of the word."
"They had the courage to go out and put their bodies on the line," he said.
Patch discussed her experience as a white woman working with a predominantly black organization. Although she faced challenges in her position, Patch said she understood the important function she could serve as a white female student in SNCC.
"The presence of white students, especially Northern ones, could attract media attention," she said.
This attention helped SNCC increase its presence on the national stage, according to Patch. Patch said that although she was "hugely embarrassed" at times by the attention she received, she understood the importance of garnering media coverage for the movement.
Patch also discussed the deep levels of internalized racism in the South at the time, describing instances of elderly black women offering her their chairs and fellow SNCC members "pretending" to always agree with her, even though they would later consult black organizers instead.
Patch said these experiences provided "opportunities to break down stereotypes."
As a white female involved in the movement, Patch also drew personal attention from people who opposed her involvement with SNCC. While staying with a host family during an event for the organization, Patch's host received so many threats that she asked SNCC to relocate Patch to another home, Patch said.
Although Patch said she was, to an extent, "protected from extreme white violence as a white woman," she still faced significant danger. In an excerpt she read from "Hands on the Freedom Plow," she described an instance in which she was overseeing voting and a group of white teenagers threw a live snake at her feet.
"I became more afraid not less as time went by," Patch said about her work with SNCC.
Patch said that after leaving SNCC, she had difficulties transitioning back into her old life.
"My perception of the world had been turned upside-down," she said.
Because she was white, Patch could no longer be in a "black world," but wasn't comfortable in a white one, either, she said.
Richardson described the closeness and trust that existed between members of SNCC. Women felt welcomed in SNCC's "nurturing environment," which allowed her to "let her guard down," she said.
"[Women] were seen as equals in SNCC," she said.
Some of the people who fueled the feminist movement had been involved with SNCC, Richardson said. After her involvement with SNCC ended, Richardson continued her involvement in the black community, helping to open and run Drum and Spear, a bookstore that specializes in books by black authors.
Rickford said that students at Dartmouth are becoming aware of injustices on campus and can look to SNCC as a model of a grassroots movement for social change.
The event was sponsored by the history, women and gender studies and African and African-American studies departments.
