Belles of Liberty - 2nd Edition by Linda Beatrice Brown (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The historic Greensboro, North Carolina lunch counter sit-In on February 1, 1960 is one of the most well known incidents in Civil Rights history. This singular event was universally credited to four young men from North Carolina A&T State University. The integration of public accommodations in Greensboro and many other cities followed.

Belles of Liberty: Gender, Bennett College, and the civil Rights Movement in Greensboro, North Carolina recalls a more complete story, illuminating what many historians have overlooked: that the first sit-In in Greensboro was carefully planned on Bennett College's campus; and without the women who sat down, marched, and were incarcerated in the hundreds from 1960 to 1963, the Sit-In effort and subsequent desegregation of Greensboro, might not have happened.

Review Quotes

"Required reading for anyone who wants to know more about how women have changed the world. Written with the authority of one who was there, Linda Beatrice Brown has expanded our understanding of a turning point in American history in the 1960s. Excellent!"

-Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, Director, National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian

"From Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, to Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and Septima Clark, to our Black feminist foremothers, the Combahee River Collective

and the founders of Black Lives Matter, the Belles of Liberty deserve a seat at the table of history's freedom fighters. Their story, quiet as it's kept, is a guide for mobilizing and building power, especially when we feel alone because we are Black and woman and presumably powerless and small. See what these barely young women imagined and fought for our world to be. May we say their names, know a deeper truth, and (à la Lucille Clifton) 'pass it on.'"

-E. Gale Greenlee, Ph.D., Independent Scholar of African American Literature