‘Mama’ of the Movement

Carolyn Daniels stood up to a racist sheriff and bomb-hurling night riders to help Black voters in South Georgia get the rights denied them. What would she say today about laws limiting voter access? The students who shared her home – and her courage – 60 years ago recall her fearless spirit and say this about today’s challenge: “Don’t just talk about her. Be her!”

Words by Chaya Tong | Art by Shanequa Gay

She squared off against hateful sheriffs twice her size. She survived a firebomb lobbed into her home and a barrage of  bullets that arrived day and night. All because she offered food and a place to sleep to students working to register Black voters in South Georgia, in a county they came to know as Terrible Terrell. And I was about to meet her.

When I ask for Carolyn Daniels, the lady at the front desk in the Atlanta nursing home directs me to the memory-care unit. As I follow her directions — up one floor, down the hallway, first left — I’m not sure what to expect. I’ve spent weeks searching for Daniels.

I enter a sunlight-filled room, TV blaring loudly in the background as residents in wheelchairs gaze absently at the screen or into the distance. “Which one is Ms. Daniels?” I ask a nurse. In this room of elderly people, the woman who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and organized a movement for Civil Rights doesn’t stand out from the crowd. “That one.” She points to a 93-year-old in a chair by the windows. 

During my search for Daniels, I spoke to people who knew her in the 1950s and ’60s, when as many as nine shared her simple 700-square-foot home in Dawson, Georgia. More than six decades had not dimmed their awe and admiration. She was “just very magnetic,” said Faith Holsaert, who lived in Daniels’ house while working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She later described that experience in a book she co-wrote and edited, Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. “She’d walk into a room, and the energy level would go right up just because Carolyn was there.”

As I approach Daniels, I see the spirit of the woman Holsaert describes. When I tell her I’ve been down to Dawson, she lights up before I even finish my sentence and cries, “Wait a minute, now that’s my hometown!” 

We chat briefly about Dawson before I name-drop two of her foes: Terrell County Sheriff Zachary Taylor Mathews (aka, Z.T. and Zeke) and Weyman B. Cherry, a Dawson policeman who won a City Council pay raise after killing one Black man in 1958 and was promoted to police chief when he killed another five weeks later.  

Sheriff Mathews? Excitement comes over her face when I say the name. “Well, we all just loved him,” she says. It doesn’t appear she is being sarcastic, and it’s an almost comical comment about her worst enemy in town. This was the man who beat Daniels’ teenage son and created an atmosphere of constant terror for Black people in Terrell. 

“What made Terrell County so terrible before we got the vote,” Daniels wrote in an essay in Hands on the Freedom Plow, “was that the white people felt, ‘This is my county; this is the way things are going to be. And I don’t want it to change.’” Mathews had famously landed on the front page of The New York Times in July 1962, when he and an armed posse invaded a voter registration meeting at a Black church. Times reporter Claude Sitton watched as deputies scuffed their heels over the wood floors, moved their hands to and from the .38-caliber pistols on their hips, and slapped long flashlights into the palms of their hands. “We want our colored people to go on living like they have for the last hundred years,” Mathews told the gathering. 

Now, Daniels hedges a little. “Maybe I didn’t have time to be bothered with all the stuff he was doing and all that,” she says. Then she adds quietly, almost to herself, “We stayed in there, we stayed right there with him, didn’t we?” 

I don’t rush to answer her question, or fill in the blanks. Maybe the loss of that particular memory is a blessing for Daniels, whether she has consciously rejected it or forgotten it out of need. At the end of our lives, there’s something as beautiful about our ability to forget as there is about our ability to remember.

• • •

Carolyn Daniels died on November 2, 2023,  nine months after my visit. She left this Earth from the state of Georgia, where she was born and where she made her mark. Though she is largely absent from the many history books about the Civil Rights Movement, the young people from SNCC who were there in that tiny corner of southwest Georgia celebrate her as an unlikely hero without whom the movement in the Deep South would not have survived.   

Grassroots leaders have been overlooked by many historians and academics. Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, a member of the SNCC sisterhood with Daniels in Terrell County, suggests what may be to blame: an  “underlying stereotype of southern Black people as being passive and being set into motion by outside forces.” Without Daniels, she says, “the Albany Movement wouldn't have even gotten off the ground.” 

Starting in 1961, SNCC, in conjunction with the NAACP and other groups, launched a campaign to challenge all racial segregation and discrimination in Albany, Georgia. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. joined the effort and was jailed, drawing national attention to Albany as the campaign for Civil Rights progressed into the Deep South for the first time. After Albany, King moved on to Birmingham, often cited as a turning point in the movement, triggering national demonstrations and eventually leading to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Without the Albany Movement, historians have shown, there would have been no Birmingham. 

Carolyn Crumbley Daniels was born on March 12, 1930, the youngest of 11 children, in the tiny farming town of Sasser, Georgia. She attended public schools in Terrell County, where night  riders would burn three Black churches to the ground and where a majority of the county’s 12,742 residents were Black but only 51 Black people were registered to vote in 1960.

And yet it was here in “Terrible Terrell,” with its particularly horrifying white supremacy and racial oppression, that this young Black woman grew up and managed to own her own home and business, a beauty salon in Dawson, 24 miles from Albany. It was not the first time she would do the unthinkable in Terrell, where everything was stacked against her. In fact, it was just the start. 

• • •

Daniels didn’t run into the arms of the Civil Rights struggle. It was her son and only child, Rochester Patterson Jr., known as Roy, who brought his mother into the movement while he was in high school in the early 1960s.

Daniels was just 33 at the time. Though she’d had Roy when she herself was just a teenager, she raised a strong activist with a feisty spirit not unlike her own. During our visit in Atlanta, she told me she taught her son “what he should and should not do” and of how proud she was of him. “I’m just so glad he is my son and that he has been a good person.” Roy would go on to become a successful journalist and work as a press secretary for Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, before dying in 2012.

In 1962, Roy brought his friend Charles Sherrod, who would later become a key leader in SNCC and serve as its first secretary, to stay at the Daniels home. The two began registering local people to vote. When Roy brought a recruit to the courthouse to register, Sheriff Z.T. Mathews slapped and kicked Roy. “I knew I couldn’t stand by and let things like this happen,” Daniels later recalled. “I had no other choice. I started working and really got involved in the movement. Through anger I became active.” 

As SNCC formed in southwest Georgia, drawing students from the Northeast into the heart of the South, Daniels’ two-bedroom house became their headquarters. “There is always a ‘mama,’” Sherrod noted in The Making of Black Revolutionaries, the autobiography of SNCC Executive Secretary James Forman. “She is usually a militant woman in the community, outspoken, understanding, and willing to catch hell, having already caught her share.” In Terrell, Carolyn Daniels, he said, “is the ‘mama’ for us there.”  

Daniels was willing to catch hell, and catch hell she did. Holsaert, the SNCC worker who lived with Daniels in the summer of 1962, remembers the flashy red and white Chevrolet Impala that Daniels would take SNCC students canvassing in. “It was a big, showy car that was an act of defiance, really, on her part,” Holsaert said. Four years earlier, as Daniels was well aware, Dawson police officer Weyman B. Cherry beat to death a Black resident, James Brazier, for having the temerity to purchase a new Chevrolet Impala.

Daniels taught people at her church how to register to vote and held her own voter education classes supported by King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. When white segregationists burned down the churches where Daniels taught in Terrell and nearby Lee County, she moved her classes to makeshift tents. 

In September 1962, night riders fired shots into Daniels’ cinder-block home. Two SNCC workers were hit: Prathia Hall in the finger and Jack Chatfield in the arm. 

“I got much of my courage and strength from her,” says Willie Ricks, also known as Mukasa Dada. “Just by being in that house, going in that house, and sleeping in that house, it took a lot of the fear out of me.”

One night, in December 1963, Daniels was home alone, lying in bed, when she heard footsteps and the slam of car doors. Then the shooting began. Daniels rolled under her bed. A bomb thrown through a window landed beside her but failed to detonate. When the shooting stopped, Daniels realized she had taken a bullet in the foot and went to the hospital. While she was there, the bomb exploded.

The entire house was destroyed. There was a massive hole in the ground where her bed had been, and slats from the roof lay around the rubble like fallen soldiers. But, in Daniels’ words, “we just kept going.” She rebuilt. And then she welcomed back the organization and students whose work had made her house a target. 

Holsaert recalls the contrast between the place that hated them and the person who inspired them. It was “a rural, isolated, segregationist, violent setting,” she says. “And yet this spirit.”

• • • 

Sixty years after night riders brought Daniels’ house to the ground, a few SNCC members sit in the back pews of Murray Brothers Cascade Chapel in Atlanta to bid Daniels one final farewell. Walking down the aisle to an emotional hymn are Daniels’ three adult grandchildren, great-grandchildren, her daughter-in-law, nieces, nephews, and other extended family. Some have made the two-and-a-half-hour trek from Dawson. Daniels lies in repose in front of the altar, her small body enveloped in the pink satin of her coffin. The funeral program, a light pink to match the coffin lining, features a spread of photos ranging from ice cream sundaes with family and selfies with the grandchildren to an exquisite photograph by one of the most famous documentarians of the student Civil Rights Movement. 

Danny Lyon was traveling in Dawson with another student during the summer of 1963. “I was not a ‘famous photographer’ then. I was a 21-year-old SNCC staff photographer,” Lyon wrote to me after Daniels’ passing. “What struck me [was] that I was allowed into her home with a camera, which is a very personal thing.” He made just seven pictures there, including a portrait of her standing in front of an open window, gazing into the distance.

“Women like Ms. Daniels were real heroines within the movement. An inspiration, really, and that’s how I felt in her presence,” he said. “So the picture I made of her that day was like that. Her face lifted up, caught in the light, very gentle and brave.”

In the chapel, the SNCC members sit quietly through the invocation and Scripture reading, songs and prayers, reflections by close family members. Then Willie Ricks walks to the altar, and the somber event suddenly transforms into a lively storytelling session, a kind of rallying cry, as Ricks recounts harrowing escapes from white segregationists and the little lady at the center of it all who seemed to show no fear. Daniels’ house was constantly under attack, “full of machine gun bullets, but it looked like polka dots all over her house,” Ricks tells the mourners. Sometimes, he says, “they would miss her house and hit the house next to Carolyn Daniels’ and it was full of bullets.”

Ricks puts his fist in the air, as if calling the troops to battle. “We gotta fight now.” The room erupts as people start clapping, nearly drowning out Ricks’ words. “We fought then, and now the fight is even greater than it was then. So when y’all thank Carolyn Daniels, don’t just talk about her. Be her!” 

To the SNCC students whose lives she touched, Daniels is unforgettable. After all, she raised them. But for the rest of us, there is something of Daniels that lives on, too: a better and more just society. 

This November, just three days after the one-year anniversary of Daniels’ death, I will vote in the first presidential election in which I’ve been eligible to cast a ballot. But even as I, a college senior in Georgia, exercise my democratic right, Ricks’ words ring true: The fight is far from over. In the last 10 years, at least 29 states including Georgia have passed 94 laws restricting voting access, most of which are still in effect today. As I wait in line to vote on Election Day in Atlanta, Carolyn Daniels will not be far from my mind. 

What would she make of the 2024 election? What would she say to me and my peers, now the same age as the SNCC students who fought for their right to vote more than 60 years ago? 

“She would educate them and tell them to keep fighting,” Ricks told me. “That’s what she did to us. She sent us out to fight — to face bombs, dogs, guns. She just said, ‘Go fight and go get organized.’ And she taught us to have no fear.”  ◊

Chaya Tong is from the Bay Area, California and is now an undergraduate at Emory University, majoring in English and biology. She is a writer and editor at The Emory Wheel and a student researcher with The Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project, investigating racially motivated murders in Georgia during the modern civil rights era.

Shanequa Gay is a Spelman College visiting professor who exhibits within the United States, Europe, Japan, and South Africa. Featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale, she is a 2020 Emory University Arts and Social Justice Fellow, a 2022 Hudgens Prize Finalist, and in 2022 became the inaugural Visual Artist-in-Residence at Oglethorpe University.