Civil Rights Activist Joan Browning Guest Lecture Nov. 8

Joan Browning was photographed in 2008 with President Barack Obama for her role as one of four southern white women among the 436 Freedom Riders jailed in Albany in December 1961.

VALDOSTA – Valdosta State University’s Department of History will host guest speaker Joan Browning from 7 – 8 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 8, in the Jennett Lecture Hall Room 1111.

The title of Browning's presentation is “That’s Not My Movement . . . Is It?” Browning's "movement" was that of civil rights for blacks in the 1960s - or the Freedom Movement as she and others prefer to call it.

“In the upcoming presentation at VSU, Browning will be pointing out what she has discovered through her activism in causes other than civil rights for blacks since the 60s, namely that there are common elements in all social justice causes and movements,” said Catherine Oglesby, professor of history. “Her point demonstrates the truth of the aphorism attributed to MLK, Jr. ‘No one is free until everyone is free.’”

Now a free-lance writer on a mountain in West Virginia, Browning expresses the values that brought her to the Civil Rights Movement as a citizen and "villager" supporting quality of life initiatives, children’s programs, and libraries. She is currently team teaching an undergraduate and a graduate course in civil rights movement history at Marshall University in Huntington, W. Va. She also teaches an autobiographical writing class at First Presbyterian Church in Dunbar, W. Va.

Browning has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and was photographed in 2008 with President Barack Obama for her role as one of four southern white women among the 436 Freedom Riders jailed in Albany in December 1961.

For more information about the event, call 229-333-5947.