The Women Who Led the Civil Rights Movement from the Ground Up

Jo Ann Robinson, an Alabama educator who led the Women's Political Council in Montgomery, organized the Montgomery bus boycott and ran its day-to-day operations — while men such as E.D. Nixon and a young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became the public faces of the Montgomery Improvement Association. Her story is typical. Black women led, organized and endured throughout the civil rights movement, often as the bridge between national organizations and local communities, yet popular memory still gives most of the credit to men.

Why women's leadership was hidden

According to scholar Belinda Robnett, much of the movement's work in the 1950s and 1960s was organized by gender. Men — especially religious leaders — became the formal, national leaders, while Black women took on crucial strategic roles locally but were often kept from visible roles and top national leadership. Even the Southern Christian Leadership Conference kept women out of leadership positions.

Mainstream histories also flatten the women they do remember. Rosa Parks is often reduced to an image of obedient femininity or an "accidental" heroine — what historian Jeanne Theoharis calls "gendered silences" — which strips her of agency and hides the misogyny Black women faced inside and outside the movement. Coretta Scott King's activism, which began before her marriage and continued after her husband's death, is often reduced to her role as his wife and widow; she herself said that women had been the backbone of the movement and had made it a mass movement.

Black women's organizing long predated the modern movement, through churches and women's clubs from the late 19th century, and organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs and the National Council of Negro Women. For women raised in the church, where men held the pulpit, the movement was transformative: women who led it were seen stepping into the pulpit for the first time.

Three kinds of leadership

Scholar Janet Dewart Bell identifies three modes of Black women's leadership in the movement:

Four leaders

Dorothy I. Height (1912–2010). Born in Richmond, Virginia, she campaigned against lynching as a high school student and won a national oratory competition and a college scholarship. Barnard College accepted her, then refused to admit her, saying it had filled its quota of Black women; she earned a bachelor's in education (1930) and a master's in psychology (1932) at New York University instead. She led the National Council of Negro Women through the late 1950s and 1960s; became the YWCA's national interracial education secretary in the 1940s and, in 1955, the first director of its Center of Racial Justice; and in 1971 helped found the National Women's Political Caucus with Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994.

Septima Poinsette Clark (1898–1987). The daughter of a formerly enslaved father and a free-born mother in Charleston, South Carolina, she refused to hide her NAACP membership when the NAACP was pushing to integrate schools in the 1950s — and was fired. She then gave all her time to activism, coordinating Citizenship Schools with fellow educator Bernice Robinson. Modeled on Tennessee's Highlander Citizenship School, they taught adult literacy and voter registration, along with political parties, school boards, taxes and Social Security, connecting everyday struggles to structural inequality; Rosa Parks and Diane Nash were among those who attended. When Tennessee forced Highlander to close, the SCLC took over its Citizenship Education Program and made Clark director of education and teaching — though, she said, the men in charge "didn't respect women too much."

Ella Baker (1903–1986). Born in Norfolk, Virginia, she graduated at the top of her class at Shaw University in 1927, moved to New York, and worked as a waitress, community organizer and journalist. With George Schuyler she co-founded the Young Negroes Cooperative League, becoming its national director in 1931. By the late 1940s, as an NAACP field secretary chartering branches across the South, she was the organization's most effective organizer. Over her life she took part in more than 30 organizations and campaigns, and her work refutes the stereotype that Black Southerners were passive before the modern movement.

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977). Born Fannie Lou Townsend in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the youngest of twenty children in a sharecropping family, she rose to national prominence during 1964's Freedom Summer and co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that year, when the state's Democratic Party barred Black participation. At the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, her testimony about life for Black Mississippians reached television audiences nationwide, even though President Lyndon B. Johnson called an "emergency" press conference to keep it off the networks live. She ran for Congress in 1964 and 1965, and at the 1968 convention, as part of Mississippi's delegation, protested the Vietnam War.

Sources

Based on "Women in the African American Civil Rights Movement: An Historic Context," National Park Service Park History Program; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It draws on the work of Belinda Robnett, Jeanne Theoharis and Janet Dewart Bell.