Civil Rights Movement
The success of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was in large part a result of the crucial role that women played in propelling and sustaining mass action. Women in communities throughout the South acted as leaders, organizers, and members of the rank and file from the movement’s beginnings. African American women already had begun organizing and protesting the discriminatory treatment of Blacks in urban transportation systems. Civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested on December 1, 1955. Parks’s action was not coincidental, but rather a response to years of organizing experience in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
In 1949, six years prior to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a group of Montgomery African American women organized the Women’s Political Council (WPC). Led by college professors Jo Ann Gibson Robinson and Mary Fair Burks, WPC initially focused on voter registration and citizenship education with the intent of mobilizing Blacks to protest segregation. Following Parks’s arrest, when the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) organized a yearlong bus boycott, WPC communicated the strategy and tactics essential for mass mobilization. Widespread support of the boycott was enabled not only by WPC members, who provided transportation alternatives to city buses, but also by the large number of working-class African American women who refrained from using the bus system to travel to jobs as domestic workers in white homes.
The boycott had its southern white supporters as well, though few in number. Virginia Foster Durr was an outspoken Alabama activist who opposed segregation in the 1940s, as did her husband Clifford Durr, a civil rights attorney who later represented Mrs. Parks after her arrest. Durr and another southern-born white woman, Anne Braden, remained active in the movement throughout the 1950s and 1960s. A native of Alabama, Braden became radicalized in the mid-1950s when she and her husband, Carl, purchased a home in Kentucky and later sold it to a Black friend. Outraged southern whites labeled them “communist agitators,” which compelled Braden to become involved in a range of civil and other human rights causes since that time.
Across the South, African American women were at the forefront of social change. In South Carolina, Septima Poinsette Clark struggled for racial justice before the 1960s. As a young schoolteacher in the 1920s, Clark’s political consciousness was shaped by witnessing the extreme poverty of residents on John’s Island, South Carolina. She conducted workshops there on literacy and health issues, which laid the foundation for more extensive activism in subsequent years. Later, after teaching for several years in the public schools of Charleston, Clark protested the unfair practice of paying Black teachers less than their white counterparts. The equalization of teachers’ salaries became law in 1945 as a result of Clark’s and others’ activism. After forty years of teaching, Clark was fired from her job in 1956 for refusing to comply with a state law that banned any city employee from joining a civil rights organization. Undeterred, Clark went to work at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, an interracial training school for labor organizers and community activists, and worked alongside Rosa Parks and her niece, Bernice Robinson, to develop a program of adult literacy and citizenship education.
Although the Brown decision outlawed segregated schools in 1954, it was not until years later that public schools in the South were forced to comply. Massive white resistance escalated amidst attempts to desegregate schools and colleges in the region. In 1957 Autherine Lucy became the first Black student to attend the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. By her side was NAACP regional director Ruby Hurley, one of the few women to hold a national position in the organization. In 1955 Hurley had traveled to Mississippi to investigate firsthand the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, a Black youth who was killed for allegedly talking back to a white woman. Other Black women desegregated southern schools that year–Charlayne Hunter at the University of Georgia and Vivian Malone Jones at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
By the end of the 1950s, white resistance in the South made no appeal to reason or legality. On February 1, 1960, the southern civil rights movement gained momentum with the lunch-counter sit-in led by students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. Following this action, veteran activist Ella Baker called upon student leaders from universities across the nation to participate in the Southwide Student Leadership Conference in April 1960, at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded here. Baker had worked in New York during the 1930s and 1940s organizing domestic workers and advocating cooperative buying campaigns before she served as a field secretary and later president of the New York City branch of the NAACP. Through her experience with the NAACP and later participation in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Baker developed a critique of bureaucratic, hierarchical leadership, a style favored by the predominantly male leadership in both organizations. Instead, she advocated a group-centered approach to decision making that would involve all organization members. She believed that “strong people don’t need strong leaders.”
From its inception, the interracial SNCC was largely influenced by Baker’s egalitarian vision and emphasis on participatory democracy. SNCC successfully increased voter registration in the most rural and impoverished communities in the Deep South. Among the young activists whom Baker influenced were two African American women who held key leadership positions within SNCC–Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, a Spelman College student from Atlanta, and Diane Nash of Fisk University. White college students were equally influenced by Baker. SNCC members Mary King, Casey Hayden, Jane Stembridge, and Dorothy Dawson, for example, came from strongly religious backgrounds. They followed in the tradition of an earlier generation of activist white women, including Virginia Durr and Anne Braden.
Sandra Casey Hayden, known as “Casey,” grew up in Austin, Texas, where she became politicized through work with the YWCA and the Christian Faith and Life Community, the only interracial student group at the University of Texas. She was recruited by Connie Curry, another white activist, to work with the United States National Student Association, where she met Ella Baker and went to work for SNCC. Hayden, along with Mary King, worked out of SNCC’s headquarters and developed news releases, pamphlets, and other communication. They remained with SNCC until 1964, when the organization shifted its emphasis from interracialism to advocacy of Black power and Black self-determination.
Although both King and Hayden recognized the importance of this shift in focus, they had begun to consider how women’s experiences paralleled those of Blacks. At a pivotal staff retreat on the future of SNCC held in November 1964 at Waveland, Mississippi, King and Hayden wrote a controversial position paper, “Women in the Movement.” Circulated anonymously, the paper argued that the position of women within SNCC had been analogous to the historical discriminatory treatment of African Americans. Because of gender, wrote King and Hayden, women had been denied leadership positions within SNCC and relegated to second-class status.
Even before Waveland, 1964 was a watershed year in the history of the civil rights movement. SNCC was immersed in organizing throughout the South. Along with other civil rights organizations, SNCC launched a full-scale cooperative effort to break open the racial caste system in Mississippi, the most oppressive of southern states. The Mississippi Summer Project was implemented to attract thousands of college students and young people from across the nation to register voters in the Deep South.
On the eve of the freedom summer, white resistance to the mass organizing effort resulted in the murder of three civil rights workers. James Chaney, a Black Mississippian, and two white organizers from the North, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, were found buried beneath eighteen feet of clay in the burned-out station wagon they had been driving. Yet, this violent incident did not prevent the project from proceeding. Controversial from the outset, the project had some successes, such as the innovative “freedom schools,” which taught Black history and citizenship skills to local Black residents.
Another important development in the summer of 1964 was the establishment of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Created as a grassroots, independent third party, the MFDP challenged the unconstitutional representation of the state’s all-white, Democratic electorate, which excluded Mississippi’s majority of Black voters. The leadership and rank and file of MFDP were decidedly working class. The party’s national representatives were three Black women–Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Belle Robinson Devine, and Victoria Gray. Fannie Lou Hamer’s role and political influence within the party were critical to the effectiveness of the organization from the outset. In 1963 Hamer had suffered a brutal beating in a Winona, Mississippi, jail cell after attending a voter registration workshop.
At the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, MFDP party delegates sought to unseat the all-white Mississippi delegation. The contingent drew nationwide attention when Fannie Lou Hamer gave compelling televised testimony, exposing the violence and poverty suffered by Mississippi’s Black citizens. She asked, “Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave?” The MFDP ultimately was unsuccessful in unseating the regular Mississippi delegates. In a political maneuver orchestrated by the Democratic Party’s top national leadership, the MFDP was offered a compromise of two at-large seats, which they refused to accept. Mrs. Hamer eloquently captured the party’s commitment to full equality, which, on principle, they were unwilling to relinquish. She remarked, “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats.”
Hamer’s remarkable courage and strength evolved from her experience living with the extremes of Mississippi racism. She was born as the twentieth child of sharecroppers in Sunflower County, Mississippi, where her family barely survived poverty and deprivation. The turning point in Hamer’s life occurred following the arrival of young SNCC workers in the state. After attending a voter registration workshop in 1962, she returned to the plantation where she had worked for eighteen years, only to be told that she and her husband were fired. Hamer then became relentlessly committed to dismantling Mississippi’s system of racial apartheid. She delivered powerful speeches, registered voters, and infused the movement with her gift of singing, which often galvanized the masses at civil rights meetings. Her extraordinary leadership derived from a deep spirituality and religious faith. Without the benefits of formal education, Hamer relied on biblical teachings to articulate the suffering and injustice of Black people. She confronted leadership, both Black and white, and was exceptional in her understanding of the interconnections of race, class, and gender in the United States. Remarking that “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired,” Hamer realized that the plight of poor Blacks in Mississippi was not solely the result of racism but of economic injustice as well.
Like Ella Baker, Mrs. Hamer had a strong impact on younger leaders and provided a generational bridge between their activism and her own. Unita Blackwell was a personal friend whose own activism was influenced by Hamer. Blackwell, too, was the daughter of Mississippi sharecroppers. Blackwell later worked for SNCC, organizing counties around voter registration and working tirelessly to challenge oppression. In 1976 she became the first Black woman mayor in the state of Mississippi, in the rural, delta town where only years earlier she had been denied the right to vote. Blackwell became involved in housing and economic development, working jointly with the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) to tackle the severe problem of rural poverty. In 1965 she initiated one of the most successful desegregation lawsuits in the state, Blackwell v. Issaquena County Board of Education.
As Ella Baker commented, “the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was largely carried by women” whose organizing skills and political consciousness evolved from years of unflagging involvement in social change. The success of the Black freedom struggle was a result of the courageous leadership and selfless commitment of women who dedicated their lives to the vision of a free and just society.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): September 6, 1957. Elizabeth Eckford, age fifteen, is harassed by a hostile white mob as she walks through a line of National Guardsmen to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her admission and that of eight other Black students had been ordered by a federal court following legal action taken by Little Rock NAACP.
Vicki Crawford, Jacqueline Rouse, and Barbara Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)
Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1979)
Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Dutton, 1993).
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Contributed by Vicki Crawford, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History Edited by Wilma Mankiller, Gwendolyn Mink, Marysa Navarro, Barbara Smith, and Gloria Steinem. Copyright © 1998 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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