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Interview: Faith Holsaert
Challenging historians' claims of sexism within the civil rights movement, Faith Holsaert emphasizes the egalitarian nature of her experience with the 1964 summer project: I think particularly of my project director, Charley Sherrod, sexist to the core, and yet it was Charley who said "Faith I don't care whether you grew up in Greenwich Village where no one drives a car. To be a soldier among equals in this movement, you must learn to drive a car. Faith, I don't care whether you want to speak in mass meetings; soldiers in this army are public speakers, and so you must learn to do this. Faith expresses her revulsion at being confronted with a physical manifestation of segregation when she tries to get her learner's permit. She explains that rather than being channeled into collusion with this system, she recategorized herself racially: I walked into this long narrow cinder block building that was divided down the middle with just a piece of twine and white people were on one side and Black people were on the other. I just couldn't bear to walk down the white side so I went down the Black side and got a so-called "colored" permit. Then he [Charles Sherrod] wouldn't let me use it because he thought it would be even worse to have me picked up and have the wrong race on my permit. So actually, I never did learn to drive.
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