Our Minds on Freedom examines the role of women as organizers and leaders in the black struggle for equality in Louisiana. Using gender as a basic organizing principle, in combination with other systems of inequality -- race and class -- it challenges the notion that "men led, women organized," and places female activism, regardless of gendered expectations, at the center. The author concludes that women were not passive participants in the Louisiana civil rights movement, but leaders and heroines in their own right.

Shannon Frystak is professor of history at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania.