Faith Holsaert (born 1943) is an American educator and activist during the

Civil Rights Movement The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the Unite ...

. Holsaert was born in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

in 1943. She was raised by her Jewish mother, Eunice Spellman Holsaert, who was divorced, and her female

African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

music teacher, Charity Abigail Bailey, in the same household, in

Greenwich Village Greenwich Village ( , , ) is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. Greenwich Village ...

. Being brought up in a biracial household, headed by two mother-figures, she was raised in the midst much unrest and disapproval from those around her.Faith Holsaert, “Resistance U,” ''Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC'', edited by Faith Holsaert, et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 181-195. She volunteered for the Harlem Brotherhood Group and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as a teenager. She matriculated to Barnard University in 1961, when she first participated in a sit-in in

Crisfield, Maryland Crisfield is a city in Somerset County, Maryland, United States, located on the Tangier Sound, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. The population was 2,515 at the 2020 census. It is included in the Salisbury, Maryland-Delaware Metropolitan Statist ...

to protest

racial segregation Racial segregation is the systematic separation of people into race (human classification), racial or other Ethnicity, ethnic groups in daily life. Racial segregation can amount to the international crime of apartheid and a crimes against hum ...

. She was arrested at the sit-in. She registered voters in

Terrell County, Georgia Terrell County is a county located in the southwestern portion of the U.S. state of Georgia. As of the 2020 census, the population was 9,185. The county seat is Dawson. Terrell County is included in the Albany, GA Metropolitan Statistical A ...

in 1962. She also volunteered for the Brown Berets. She resides in Durham, North Carolina. As a white, woman activist of organizations and movements such as SNCC (student nonviolent coordinating committee), women's rights, LGBT community, Faith has come across several hardships throughout the course of her life and is still seen to be very active in the community. She has a collection of letters and papers written, documenting her experiences and actions as an activist, called the "Faith Holsaert Papers".

References

External links

SNCC Digital Gateway: Faith Holsaert
Documentary website created by the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University, telling the story of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee & grassroots organizing from the inside-out Living people 1943 births Activists from New York City People from Durham, North Carolina Activists for African-American civil rights Jewish women activists Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Jewish American activists American women activists Jewish American anti-racism activists American anti-racism activists 21st-century American Jews {{civil-rights-movement-stub