Working for the Friends Service Committee as a "messenger"
Queen describes her five years spent working for the Friends Service Committee from 1951 to 1956. During those years, Queen was based in Greensboro, North Carolina, but spent time traveling throughout the South to recruit students. Queen's comments are revealing of some of the challenges and tasks of the civil rights movement during the mid-1950s and she stresses the importance of keeping activists connected. As such, she describes her own role as that of a "messenger between committed groups and communities, many of whom were living just tragically isolated lives."
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Anne Queen, April 30, 1976. Interview G-0049-1. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- JOSEPH HERZENBERG:
-
It was in 1951 that you left Georgia and came to
Greensboro?
- ANNE QUEEN:
-
Yes, and that was sort of the beginning of a new decade in the South when
things were really beginning to change and the pressures were coming for
change fast and furious. Those are the five years that I traveled for
the Friends Service Committee. I look back on it now as a kind of
roaming of the South. I remember when Bob Johnson of the Wesley
Foundation gave his closing sermon before he left the Wesley Foundation
to take a traveling job. He had been here and he talked about the South.
It's a beautiful sermon. Have you seen that
sermon?
- JOSEPH HERZENBERG:
-
No.
- ANNE QUEEN:
-
I'll get you a copy of it, and when he talked about leaving
this job to roam the South, I said to him that I came to Chapel Hill at
the same time that he did after roaming the South. I wouldn't
take anything for the five years that I traveled in the South. Those
were years of tremendous change and I recruited
students for Friends' projects. I think that in a sense was a
kind of vehicle for a more important job and I regret that the Friends
don't do this anymore. During that time, there was tremendous
need for people to serve as a kind of messenger between committed groups
and communities, many of whom were living just tragically isolated
lives. I tried to serve as that kind of grapevine messenger, to keep one
group informed of what another group was doing. The Fellowship of
Southern Churchmen were doing this kind of thing. I can remember how
exciting it was always to go to Macon, Georgia to Mercer University to
visit where McLeod Bryan was. He always gathered in his living room when
I would go there, a group of people who (that's where I met
Will Campbell), a group of people who were really committed to the South
and in this case, they were committed Christians from a Baptist school.
I remember it was through McLeod Bryan, who now is at Wake Forest
…and by the way, one thing that I failed to say, when I was
in New Haven, I was a member of his church and did my field work under
him …no this was volunteer work, my field work was to be
president of the women's dormitory and I never could figure
out how that was justified as field work, but Dean Weigle did so
…but McLeod Bryan was the pastor of the Mt. Olivet Baptist
Church in the Winchester Community. Then he was at Mercer teaching
religion and he always gathered into his home
students who were really on the cutting edge of change in the South. The
same thing was true in Nashville. I expect it was during those years
that I came to really appreciate the Department of History here. I met
George Tindall, I met Cliff Johnson, who was at LeMoyne, someone whose
last name was Harper, and Dewey Grantham …the Granthams
always had a gathering for me in their home in Nashville. And what I
would try to do on those occasions would be to sort of take a message
from one group to another what they were doing. I did this in the
process of recruiting students. I think for that period in the South it
was very important. I was not the only one doing this.