"AN ORDINARY PERSON FROM SHILOH METHODIST CHURCH"

 “AN ORDINARY PERSON FROM SHILOH METHODIST CHURCH” 

(This is an excerpt from Nibs’ article in the Mar/Apr, 2024 issue of Hospitality)

In 2021 Joan Browning gave a speech in West Virginia which gave a capsule of her history and her times:

“Sixty years ago, we Freedom Riders challenged a reluctant United States federal government to enforce sacrificially obtained Supreme Court rulings and Interstate Commerce Commission orders.  White supremacist state governments, that were elected by refusing the right to vote to African American citizens, said of those federal rulings: “You and what army will make us obey?”  Four hundred and thirty-six of us in 62 small groups enlisted in that army.  As historian Raymond Arsenault wrote, Freedom Riders “appeared to court martyrdom with a reckless regard for personal safety or civic order.  None of the obstacles placed in their path – not widespread censure, not political and financial pressure, not arrest and imprisonment, not even the threat of death – seemed to weaken their commitment to nonviolent struggle.”

Joan Browning was one of the foot soldiers in that army, beginning when she was 18.  How did she come to do this?   Was she a fire-breathing Northerner, come down to rescue the Black folk of the South?   No, she was a child of the South, born in 1942 to a farming family in Wheeler County, Georgia.  Her mother sewed the clothes that her seven siblings and Joan wore from flour and chicken-feed sacks.  When she was 8, her family became the first in the neighborhood to get electricity, first to get a telephone.  She grew up in the die-hard white supremacy of her time – neo-slavery governor Eugene Talmadge’s farm was only 4 miles away.  

  She was raised as a Christian, and she and her family were guided by the Micah 6 prophecy:  “do justice, to love kindness, and  walk humbly with your God.”  She was raised in her daddy’s Shiloh Methodist Church.  The launching of Sputnik in 1957 had stirred her to want to become a scientist/engineer to help the USA catch up in the space race.  She longed to go to Georgia Tech, but in 1958 it did not accept women (or Black people).  She ended up going to Georgia State College for Women (GSCW) in Milledgeville in the summer of 1958 – it is now Georgia State College and University.  

She liked the academics of college, but she felt out of place in Milledgeville, missing her family, her church, and the community in which she grew up.  Browning was a dedicated churchperson, and she attended the whites-only Milledgeville Methodist Church.  She found that it was too large and cold, and she missed her rural, family church.  She also resented that as a young white Southern lady in training, she had to wear the girdle, garter belt and stockings and hats and gloves mandated for church attendance.  She began seeking retreats for herself and found a spot near campus where she could read and meditate.  It was in close proximity to Wesley Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and she shared the retreat space with eleven year old Cassandra Mency, who introduced Joan to her father, Reverend T. Leander Mency.  They began having conversations, and soon Reverend Mency invited her to worship at his church.  In the autumn of 1960, she began attending his church with another white friend Faye Powell.  Here she found what she had desperately been seeking:  vibrant worship, a sense of community, and a genuine welcoming place. 

Unknowingly, however, she had crossed the white dividing line that had a taboo against white people and Black people worshipping together.  The president of GSCW called her into his office – his name was Dr. Robert E. Lee – and he warned her strongly against going to the AME church, indicating that 1960 was not yet the time to cross such a racial barrier.  He told her that her continued attendance there would likely result in her being expelled from the college and harm to the Mency family, possibly even the burning of Wesley Chapel A.M.E. Church.  Browning was flabbergasted – what was her offense?  Dr. Lee indicated that such racial boundaries could not be crossed, and he ordered her and Faye to cease attending the Black church.

Rather than submitting, she upped her game.  She began attending reconciliation conferences at Paine College, and while she was there, she participated in sit-ins in Augusta.  Word got back to GSCW, and she was forced to withdraw from the college or be expelled.  She enrolled part-time at Georgia State College of Business Administration (now Georgia State University), and she began working at Emory University.  While in Atlanta, she discovered the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and joined with them. Later that year, Jim Forman asked her to sign up for the Freedom Rides – this one from Atlanta to Albany.  She agreed to do it. 

In December 1961, she boarded the train in Atlanta with the integrated Freedom Riders group, and when they arrived in Albany, there were police officers waiting for them, and for the first time in her life, Joan Browning would spend time in jail, the only white woman arrested in the Albany Freedom Ride.   She was released after 24 hours, then jailed two days later for five long days.  She went to a rally at Mr. Zion Baptist Church, and she looked around in awe – the Black sanctuary was filled to overflowing.  She was asked to speak, and she noted how lonely she had been in jail but how good it was: “It’s a funny, mixed up feeling to hate being in a dirty place---but to be glad you’re there for a good reason.  We hope that you’ll keep it going.”

The sit-ins and the Freedom Rides were part of the body of civil rights work that Joan Browning developed.  She lived in Atlanta for a while, then the north Georgia mountains, then to the mountains of West Virginia, where she now lives in a doublewide mobile home on a hillside.  Ever the warrior and witness, she had these words to say in early 2023 on an op-ed piece for the Charleston Mail-Gazette:

“Now, I speak as an ordinary citizen and challenge students and others who consider themselves ordinary to see themselves as living lives of purpose, of grabbing what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described as the “moral arc of the universe” and help bend it more toward justice.  I try to convey to citizens and students alike that even those who consider themselves as “ordinary” citizens can make a difference. My work has been recognized and honored with a long list of awards and appointments.

But now, all that many others and I are doing — and have done — is in danger of being erased as legislatures around the country, including in West Virginia, try to stifle discussion of those parts of America’s past.  For the first time in those 3 1/2 decades of speaking about the Freedom Rides, I have had two presentations cancelled because leaders in those states had issued an edict forbidding the discussion of race, diversity, equality or inclusion.

It seems that the West Virginia Legislature, through the proposed Anti-Racism Act of 2023 and other legislation, also intends to forbid me to speak about being an ordinary person who, by going on a Freedom Ride, helped take down those illegal, discriminatory signs and also inspire other ordinary citizens to help make this a better place for all of us.”

West Virginia did not pass the Anti-Racism Act (though it has returned in 2025), and witnesses like Joan Browning helped to derail it.  Browning’s life and witness remind us that we are all called out of our “ordinariness” to be extraordinary witnesses.  Let us find our places in this great cloud of witnesses.