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Faith Holsaert

b. 1943

by JWA Staff
Our work to expand the Encyclopedia is ongoing. We are providing this brief biography for Faith Holsaert until we are able to commission a full entry.

SNCC Southwest Georgia project members. Left to right: Agnew James of Lee County, Penny Patch, Faith S. Holsaert, Larry Rubin, and Charles Sherrod, project director.

From an article in the Southern Patriot, "Students Challenge Rural Georgia."

Photo credit: Patriot Photo.

Faith Holsaert was one of the first white women field workers for the civil rights movement in the south, volunteering for voter registration in one of the worst counties in Georgia. Holsaert was shaped by her childhood, raised by her divorced mother and her black music teacher in an interracial household. In high school, she volunteered with the Harlem Brotherhood Group doing surveys to document housing discrimination. She was arrested at her first sit-in in 1961 and began voter registration in Georgia in 1962 in “terrible Terrell” county. She continued working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, as well as with the back-to-the-land movement in New Mexico, the Brown Berets, the antiwar movement, and the Southern Conference Educational Fund. She taught for several years at a community college in Baltimore, Maryland. As of 2013, she lives in Durham, North Carolina. She is the co-editor of Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC.

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How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Faith Holsaert." (Viewed on March 29, 2024) <http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/holsaert-faith>.