Joan Browning, to hear her tell it, didnt exactly set out to be a foot soldier in the civil rights movement.

I just thought I was accepting an invitation to attend church,said Browning, a former Freedom Rider who was honored by West Virginia University on Monday (Jan. 17) with its annual Martin Luther King Achievement Award.

I never dreamed all this was going to happen.

This is the 20 th year for the award, which is traditionally presented at a Unity Breakfast on the morning of the national holiday for the slain civil rights leader, who was gunned down in Memphis in 1968.

WVU s Center for Black Culture and Research honored Browning and student Jennifer Douglas, a nursing major from Cross Lanes, who was awarded a scholarship in Kings name.

Douglas has done outreach work across her home state and across the ocean in Africa. Shes also very much involved in campus ministries.

Browning, as a young college student, was also active in her church.

And thats what got me into all this,chuckled the woman who is now a freelance writer and development director in rural Greenbrier County.There were just certain things you didnt do at the time.

Especially, she said, in Milledgeville, Ga., in 1960, where, as Browning describes herself then, she wastrying to be proper young white lady with white gloves and what some would call an aspiration to be June Cleaver.

The June Cleaver wannabe would soon make an unforgivable social faux pas there.

One sun-dappled Sunday morning in the tiny central Georgia town 90 miles south of Atlanta, Browning crossed Main Street to attend a service at the blacks-only Wesley Chapel A.M.E. Church.

She always felt more of a kinship with the blacks in town, she said, since she grew up in a family of sharecroppers.

Her presence in the pew that morning didnt go unnoticed.

I apparently caused a little bit of a stir,said Browning, who, on scholarship, was attending the towns then all-white, and then all-female, Georgia State College for Women.

Milledgeville, like most southern towns at the time, was pleasant enough on the surface, Browning recalls, with its tidy, tree-lined streets. The presidents mansion on her campus was done out in classic Roman architecture.

But Jim Crow still lurked in the cotton rows Browning had worked in as a little girl, and the outcry of her actand the threats of violence and other harassment that would followprompted her mansion-dwelling college president, Dr. Robert E. Lee Jr., to eventually dismiss her from school.

Just one month later, though, she landed on her feet and moved to Atlanta, where she planned to re-enter college.

One evening she attended a lecture at Spellman College delivered by a young Martin Luther King.

Ive never been so moved,she said.Dr. King wasnt in his �€~preacher modethat night. This was a lecture on his principles of nonviolence. He didnt pound the pulpit, but he spoke with such quiet intensity and eloquence that the man burned. I said to myself, �€~This is someone I need to pay attention to.

She got his autograph that night, and signed on with the ever-growing Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a group of idealistic college students ready to put Kings principles into practice.

With other volunteers, white and black, she fanned out across Georgia and Alabama, as part of the famedFreedom Ridersbus tours, where the whites turned the tables on themselvesby sitting at the back of the bus, and frequentingColoreds Onlyareas in the towns and cities along the way.

Two weeks before Christmas in 1961, she and a handful of fellow riders spent 10 days in jail, in Albany, Ga.

She couldnt help but stay in the movement, she said. A job and volunteer outreach work at Emory University turned into speaking engagements as her history in civil rights became more and more known.

Shes traveled the country since, lecturing on human rights at schools from Alabama to California, and she was written extensively about her years in the civil rights movement, contributing to several books and scholarly journals over the years.

And her personal journey has literally come full circle, as she has even been invited back to the school that expelled herwhich is now coed, ethnically diverse and known as Georgia College&State University.

Brownings last appearance there was two years ago February as a keynote speaker during Black History Month.

They put me up in the former presidents house,she said.Thats former President Robert E. Lee Jr. Now, that was interesting.

A few years ago, she left the chrome and glass of Atlanta for the more agreeable rural life: She settled in the only state borne of the Civil War, West Virginia, where she lives and works in Lewisburg, as a writer, lecturer and part-time development director of the Greenbrier Community College Foundation.

Martin Luther Kings mission keeps her going, she says, but its Miss Ella Bakers mantra that gets her out of bed every morning. Baker, a fellow Freedom Rider, was Brownings mentor in the civil rights movement.

On the mornings when I wake up and nothing hurts, I feel like Im 20 again,Browning said.And I feel like all of us have all this promise, and all this potential, that Dr. King so eloquently spoke of. Miss Baker always told me, �€~Honey, if you want to change the world for the better, you dont have to be heroic. Just step outside your door each morning and the do the good work you find there.