Jo Freeman Reviews My Race to Freedom: A Life in the Civil Rights Movement By Gwendolyn Patton
Review of My Race to Freedom: A Life in the Civil Rights Movement
By Gwendolyn Patton
Forward by Bob Moses
Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books, 2020, 38 pages with photographs
By Jo Freeman
This is a posthumous memoir of a black activist. Gwen Patton died on May 11, 2017 in Montgomery, AL. Although born in Inkster, MI on October 14, 1943, she always considered Montgomery to be home. Her roots were there, her father had left for Detroit after graduating from high school in 1941. Who went where in the Great Migration was often determined by the rail lines. Alabama emigrants went to Michigan, where they got jobs in the auto factories.
Gwen spent summers in Montgomery, where her grandparents had a nice home. She was there during the year-long bus boycott which initiated the civil rights movement and with it her lifelong fight for black liberation. When her mother died in 1957 and her father remarried, Gwen moved to Montgomery permanently.
Her first passion was cheerleading, which she pursued in high school and college. In many ways, she spent her life as a cheerleader, first for her team, then for her causes. Her second passion was leadership. She served as president of Tuskegee Institute’s student government and chose her successor when the rules did not permit her re-election. Gwen liked being in charge.
She identified with SNCC but worked with many other black organizations. She started some, such as the National Black Anti-War, Anti-Draft Union, and the National Association of Black Students. To support these she applied for foundation grants, solicited individuals, and demanded reparations from the National Student Association. She worked her way through the pantheon of black and anti-war organizations that emerged during the Sixties. Slowly seduced into the white Left, she eventually joined the US Communist Party. When she left it, she joined a black Baptist church. Throughout the book we get a taste of what it was like to be in these many different organizations.
Gwen had a talent for making friends, from the President of Tuskegee Institute, to Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, Bettina Aptheker and many lesser knowns. They opened doors, helping her find jobs, travel to interesting conferences in far away places and serve on boards. She did make a few enemies, but there appear to be remarkably few. While doing all this, she both taught at various institutions and furthered her own education. It’s a wonder she found time to sleep.
The biggest challenges in Gwen’s life were medical. She spent a year in a tuberculosis sanitarium and repeatedly damaged her left leg in auto accidents and falls. Her family and friends provided an amazing support structure. They took care of her in every way possible. Those medical problems did not leave her with medical debt; she always had enough money to buy whatever she wanted, from a Jaguar to antique furniture.
In her spare time, Gwen wrote. She wrote a lot of articles, but this is her only book. She didn’t live to see it published. Gwen spent 15 years producing two thousand pages, which she presented to NewSouth books in 2007. She had found and interviewed not only every living family member, but friends she hadn’t seen since high school. It had enormous detail, such as what she cooked for dinner when her students visited her at home. Her editor cut it in half, ending with her moving back to Montgomery in 1978, followed by a short epilogue. It still needed a lot of work, which paused when Gwen died in 2017. There may be a volume 2 lurking in the wings. If so, please include an index.
©2020 Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com
Editor's Note: Gwendolyn M. Patton oral history interview conducted by Joseph Mosnier in Montgomery, Alabama, 2011, June 01.More Articles
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