In STAYED ON FREEDOM, award-winning author Dan Berger presents to the wider world Zoharah and Michael Simmons. Noted figures in multiple countries, they are quiet yet persistent leaders in movements both broad and specific targeting civil and human rights.

Zoharah, whose birth name is Gwendolyn, was a Black child growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, at a time when Jim Crow laws were widely in effect. Though some members of her family feared and avoided whites, her grandmother displayed a defiant attitude that left a deep impression on Zoharah, who became a human rights activist in her college years. In that atmosphere she met Michael Simmons, a Black Philadelphian who by his teens began to parse for himself the racial divides that he observed all around him. Zoharah and Michael admired each other, and their wide-ranging challenges of the system that kept Black people and others in subservience and deprivation underpinned a romance that would last the rest of their lives.

"STAYED ON FREEDOM is perfect for individual study and would make for a lively discussion among academic, activist and even religious assemblages."

Zoharah became an administrator for the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and later joined the Black Power movement and the Nation of Islam. Working with Michael, their connections spread, and they were attracted to the goals and activities of the AFSC (American Friends Service Committee). This took them to Europe and elsewhere, then back to the U.S. where they became involved in the rights of Native Americans. Their lives and experiences project human love, warmth and attachment, and a universal sense of the need to right wrongs. As Michael, now in his 70s, puts it, “[W]herever you’re at…some people are being oppressed,” meriting your attention and active assistance.

Berger, a professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell, has organized this chronicle as something akin to side-by-side biographies. Although Zoharah and Michael always envisioned the same goals for humankind and took on similar challenges, each was so dynamic that their individual actions and attitudes sometimes led them in separate directions. This gives Berger's diligently researched work even greater cause and credibility, as readers will see Michael rigorously concerned with the rights of the Roma people of Europe, and Zoharah always involved in the struggles of women.

There is also a historical skein that runs through the narrative --- the growth and gradual change and broadening of focus within the Black rights movement, a transformation to which the couple has been inevitably and inextricably linked. STAYED ON FREEDOM is perfect for individual study and would make for a lively discussion among academic, activist and even religious assemblages.