User:LHAbba/sandbox

Early Life
Dorothy Dawson Burlage, born Dorothy Dawson, was born on September 13, 1937, in San Antonio, Texas. At an early age, Burlage and her family moved to Jackson, Mississippi, however, they returned to San Antonio by the time she began elementary school. While growing up in the Deep South, Burlage was raised in an upper middle class, conservative Christian household with several Black workers. In her autobiographical chapter of the book, Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement, she cites her relationships with many Black individuals who worked for her family, as well as her religion, as playing a significant role in her later involvement in the civil rights movement and racial justice organizations. Elaborating on the intersections of her upbringing, she states, “I kept struggling with the contradictions between the messages I heard about segregation and the ones I heard in church about love and brotherhood, justice and righteousness."

Throughout junior high and high school, Burlage continued to question the contradictions of her Christian upbringing and life in a segregated society. In high school, she wrote a series of essays for the school newspaper discussing discrimination she witnessed against the few Mexican American students at the school. She continued to seek out information and involvement surrounding social issues throughout high school, crediting her boyfriend at the time, John Worsham, as having a significant influence on her thinking surrounding segregation. It was with Worsham that Burlage attended her first interracial NAACP meeting at the George Washington Carver Center, exposing her to ideas of desegregation.

Education & Early Activism
In 1955, Burlage attended Mary Baldwin College, a women’s private school in Staunton, Virginia. She stayed only for one year, writing papers challenging segregation and attending interracial meetings of the National Student Association (NSA), before transferring to the University of Texas in the fall of 1956. After leaving her sorority due to the chapter’s “white only” clause, she became involved with the YWCA Christian Faith and Life Community, or “the Community,” and lived in their interracial dorms. It was here that Burlage met many other activists, including Robb Burlage whom she would later marry, and Casey Hayden who was her roommate in the Community’s women’s dorm.

One of her first experiences with racial justice activism came in 1957 when a fellow student at UT, Barbara Smith, was removed from the university’s spring musical production. Smith, a black woman, was originally cast in the lead role opposite a white man, but was taken out of the production after some Texas legislators pressured the university. Burlage, along with other students and some faculty, created petitions and protested the decision in front of the university’s Hogg Auditorium. Throughout the rest of her time of UT, Burlage continued to advocate for desegregation at the university and the public facilities near it, joining both the “Steer Here” campaign aimed to desegregate restaurants and the Fellowship of Sitters who’s goal was to “ensure that anyone, regardless of color, would be allowed to sip a cup of coffee."

In 1959, Burlage graduated college and participated in a summer exchange program in the USSR before returning to Austin, Texas later that fall to attend graduate school at UT. In January 1960, she was offered the role of program director for the YWCA at the University of Illinois. After accepting the position and moving to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, she worked with members of NSA and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to organize protests, speaking programs, and direct action projects focused on racial equality. The same year, she attended the NSA congress and officially became a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Considering a career in social justice with YWCA, Burlage decided to return to school and was accepted to the Harvard Divinity School. While only there for a year and a half, she became even more involved in civil rights organizations and activism throughout her time in Boston. In response to reports of violence against Freedom Riders in the South, she organized and led a group of undergraduate students at Harvard to support southern activists. Under her leadership, this group undertook many projects supporting civil rights, including picketing and boycotting the Trailways bus station in downtown Boston, as well as working and advocating for fair housing.

While attending the wedding of Tom and Casey Hayden in October 1961, Burlage spoke with Alan Haber, president and executive secretary of SDS, who told her about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and their efforts to increase Black voter registration in the South. Once she returned to Boston, she contacted the executive secretary of SNCC, James Forman, and discussed her idea to make and sell buttons in order to raise money for SNCC’s voter registration projects. She continued to work with the students she had organized at Harvard, creating a newsletter of updated news from the South and sending money earned from selling buttons to SNCC workers in Georgia. As a result of the group’s growth, Burlage’s group of Harvard undergraduates merged with Peter Countryman’s organization, the Northern Student Movement (NSM), to form the Boston Metropolitan Area Northern Student Movement Coordinating Committee, or Boston NSM. Eventually, the Boston NSM had chapters on sixteen different college campuses, all operating under the same model which utilized Burlage’s button selling fundraiser to send money to SNCC.

Civil Rights Activism
As a result of her connections with SDS and SNCC, Burlage was offered a position working for the NSA Southern Student Human Relations Project in Atlanta, Georgia during the winter of 1961. After speaking to Casey Hayden, she decided to accept the position, drop out of Harvard, and become a full time civil rights activist for the next nine years. Now in the South, she became much more active in many civil rights organizations, but prioritized her efforts working with the NSA and SNCC. While working with both the NSA Southern Project and SNCC, Burlage developed a relationship with SNCC activist Ella Baker, who would continue to mentor her throughout her career in the civil rights movement.

While working for the NSA Southern Project, she planned and organized educational programs for students and voter registration workshops. At only twenty-four, she created and directed the NSA Voter Registration Project, acquiring volunteers through her connections with SNCC, SDS, and several other organizations. Drawing on her extended experience with SNCC and their voter registration work in the South, Burlage worked closely with the Raleigh Citizens Association (RCA) to register voters in North Carolina. Originally, SNCC activist Bob Moses suggested that she set up the project in Mississippi, however Ella Baker recommended Raleigh after several other activists voiced concerns of sending a women-led voter registration project to Mississippi. While sending only male volunteers was discussed, Burlage felt that it was important for women to be a part of this work and made the decision to set up the project with the RCA in the summer of 1962. Occurring two years prior to the Mississippi Freedom Summer, Burlage’s Voter Registration Project was able to register over 1,600 individuals to vote by working with small community organizations, canvassing door to door, and holding meetings in local churches that elaborated on the importance of voting. Not only did this program strengthen the political power of black voters in North Carolina, but it proved to many SNCC members, who would later be a part of the Freedom Summer, that it was possible to effectively organize voter registration projects with northern students in the South. Once the project ended, however, the RCA requested that Burlage set up tutoring programs for students who would be attending desegregated schools, a program that was once again mirrored by the Mississippi Freedom Schools in 1964.

In August 1962, Burlage returned to Atlanta and continued to work for the NSA Southern Project until the following summer. In 1963, she moved to Nashville, Tennessee with Robb Burlage, whom she married that December, and the president of SDS, Todd Gitlin. While her husband and Gitlin focused primarily on SDS projects in Nashville, she spent most of her efforts working for the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), an organization targeted mainly toward white college students in the South, and using her connections from SNCC and SDS to bridge the goals of the three organizations.

Community Organizing
In 1965, Dorothy and Robb Burlage moved to Washington D.C. There, she spent the next three years working as a community organizer in the Anacostia area. She joined a group of fellow organizers, including pastor and activist John Kinard, known as the “Target Team” of the Southeast Neighborhood House. The goal of the Target Team was to organize a strong, community-based grassroots movement in Anacostia. Rather than leading the residents of this community, Burlage and her fellow Target Team activists wanted to help the community organize and lead, itself. Soon, this program helped independent groups, such as the teenage organization “Rebels With A Cause” and a women led organization “Band of Angels,” emerge and operate successfully within their community. The Target Team and community organizations sought to improve their neighborhood by fighting for more public facilities, developing an alternative school for those who did not complete high school, and working for policy reform on public housing. In 1966, Burlage and the Anacostia organizers even assisted Marion Barry, leader of SNCC in Washington, in organizing a citywide bus boycott to protest fare increases. Their efforts were ultimately successful as bus usage in the city was reduced by over eighty-five percent and the fare increases stopped.

By 1968, the Target Team disbanded as the organizers felt that the community organizations in Anacostia were strong and stable enough to operate without them. Not long after, Dorothy and Robb Burlage separated and divorced. In 1970, SNCC member Ralph Featherstone, who had worked closely with Burlage to set up food co-ops in Washington, was killed in a car bombing incident. It was his death that signaled the end of her activist career, and after speaking with Ella Baker, Burlage decided to return to graduate school.

Later Life
Upon the advice of Baker, Burlage returned to Harvard in 1970 and was admitted into the doctoral program in clinical psychology, focusing specifically on women and children. There, she completed research at Harvard Medical School, received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in Women’s Studies, and graduated with her Ph.D. in psychology. In 1972, she gave the Lentz Lecture at Harvard on “Women and Sexuality” and organized the Women’s Counseling and Resource Center. The nonprofit organization, made up of a group of psychologists, met in the same church basement Burlage had used to fundraise for SNCC eleven years earlier.

For the rest of her career, Burlage remained in Massachusetts and worked as a child psychologist at the Harvard University Health Services. In 2000, she wrote the book Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement with other activists, detailing her involvement in movement. Since then, she has remained in contact with many of her fellow activists, regularly attending SNCC, SDS, and SSOC reunions.