Civil Rights Movement

By: Wim Roefs

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Civil Rights Movement

When Rosa Parks in December 1955 refused to give her seat to a white man on a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, she was not a tired little old lady turning accidental hero, as many have perceived her. She was only forty-two years old and no more tired than usual after a day's work. More importantly, Parks was an experienced local civil rights activist who had defied bus segregation laws several times before 1955. She had been an official in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which she had joined in 1943. She had worked in voter registration campaigns. Parks did not just stumble into history. She already was an impo rtant, albeit not the most important, example of the many black women in the struggle against white supremacy and for racial equality in the United States.

Other African American women also were politically active in Montgomery. Jo Ann Robinson, for instance, was the president of Montgomery's Women's Political Council (WPC), an organization of professional black women active in voter registration and against segregation. Robinson and the WPC initiated the bus boycott following Parks's arrest. The boycott thrust Martin Luther King Jr. into the limelight and toward national leadership in the civil rights movement. It also provided one of the most important sparks for nationwide civil rights activism and reform.

Parks's role is often misunderstood, but Robinson is among the many African American women activists who have long been ignored altogether by media and historians. As a result, most of these women have remained virtually unknown to the public. But black women since the nineteenth century have initiated civil rights campaigns. They established black women's organizations that improved conditions for African Americans. As teachers, they took the lead in improving living conditions in the communities in which they taught. They organized black consumers, supported labor unions, and worked in politics and journalism. They joined, and were leaders of, civil rights organizations and other black interest groups. They were the plaintiffs in many civil rights court cases and the lawyers in several. In the1960s, during the height of the civil rights movement, they were the backbone of the movement. All over the South, black women were crucial as grassroots leaders, stimulating mass participation in the movement.

Arrest of a protester.  Such scenes were typical during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This photograph by Dick De Marsico, dated 20 August 1963, is part of the New York World Telegram and Sun collection.

Library of Congress

view larger image

African American women were, however, not usually the official leaders of organizations other than those with an exclusive black female membership. Typically, black women were not the ones featured and quoted in the media or consulted by mainstream, white politicians. Inhistorians' accounts of civil rights activism, black women's contributions for a long time remained obscure. The historical invisibility of these women, the sociologist and historian Charles Payne wrote in 1995, may well be the best example of how the image of the civil rights movement does not match historical reality.

To their civil rights activism, African American women brought multiple identities as black women, as blacks, as women, and as members of their socioeconomic class. They had to navigate the difficult terrain where the interests of the various groups they were part of interfered with one another. As African Americans, they faced abuse similar to what black men endured under white supremacy and Jim Crow, the legally sanctioned, southern system of discrimination and segregation. As women, they shared with white women sexual discrimination and male chauvinism, even though the resentment black men expressed toward them in part was triggered by the pressures of racism. Black women also clashed along class lines with other African Americans. No other group in the country faced this particular combination of race, gender, and class issues.

Fighting for the Race

The potential tension between race, gender, and class never stopped black women from activism on behalf of the whole race. To black club women around the turn of the twentieth century, the historian Deborah Gray White has shown, working for poor black women was identical to improving the position of all black women, and working for black women was identical to working for the race. Club women, who in 1896 formed the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), believed that, in White's words, “a race could rise no higher than its women.” The emphasis then among black leaders, male or female, on self-help and uplift rather than demanding equality enforced that notion. Self-help and uplift involved, after all,the home, family, and community, which were all women's domains.

Some club women also were active in civil rights. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, for one, in the late nineteenth century initiated one of the country's earliest modern civil rights campaigns against lynching. She was one of the most radical black voices of the era. Black women in Marcus Garvey's Black Nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the 1920s enthusiastically supported its focus on race but battled male chauvinism and domination within the UNIA. In the late 1930s and 1940s, the Ladies Auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was an advocate for working black women but did not put gender issues before race. Mary McLeod Bethune's National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), formed in 1935, supported civil rights campaigns even as it emphasized gender over race. In the 1950s and 1960s, African American women played crucial roles in modern civil rights organizations that placed race above gender concerns. These organizations included Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).

To the struggle for civil rights, black women applied the skills, experience, and connections they had acquired through church organizations and as members of the club movement. Within the church, the central institution in the African American community, women did most of the legwork and organizing, including fund-raising and community outreach. But they seldom found a place behind the pulpit or on the boards. Churchwomen also learned to fight discrimination as they challenged male authority within the church to gain official positions, even the right to preach, and established women's organizations within the church.

Civil rights activism had become prevalent among club women by World War I. Wells-Barnett and the first NACW president, Mary Church Terrell, were two of only a few women at the organizing meeting of the NAACP in 1909. Club women also played a major role in developing and maintaining that organization. Women in Tennessee and Louisiana had campaigned to desegregate railroad cars. Club women were active in the suffrage movement and against lynching. During World War I, black nurses protested the U.S. Army Nurse Corps' refusal of their services.

During the 1920s, black women were politically active in a wide range of organizations. Their activism reflected the new assertive mood among African Americans that accompanied their great expectations after World War I. Many southern blacks had moved North before and during the war for a better life. African Americans also hoped their support for the war effort would erode white racism and extend to African Americans at home some of the democracy many of them had fought for abroad.

Instead, African Americans lost jobs to returning white veterans. Black veterans had trouble finding even unskilled work. In general, blacks got caught up in the country's reactionary mood, reflected in a “Red Scare,” anti-immigrant sentiment, and flourishing white supremacy, including a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. They were also on the receiving end of urban race riots and a surge in lynchings in the South.

African Americans did not back off. During the riots, they, more than before, fought back. The NAACP openly confronted racism. During the 1920s, Garvey's UNIA became a mass movement. In 1925, Pullman porters organized the first successful black union. Leaders in the Harlem Renaissance, a creative burst among black writers and artists, confidently proclaimed the emergence of the “New Negro.”

Women related to Pullman porters formed an independent auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) and became the union's main fund-raisers. Black women formed the backbone and at least half the membership of the UNIA and were active on all levels of the movement. In the NAACP, black women helped in campaigns, and Mary McLeod Bethune and Nannie Helen Burroughs were on the NAACP's board of advisers. Catherine Lealtad became assistant director of branch organizations.

Mary Talbert, who led the NACW by the end of World War I, became a NAACP board member and vice president until her death in 1923. She was the national director for the organization's antilynching campaign and a typical example of a club woman using her organizational experiences and contacts to build the NAACP. As the president of a local club in Buffalo, New York, she worked for an NAACP branch, too. She also established NAACP chapters in two southern states, Texas and Louisiana.

The Depression Years

The struggle for civil rights and equality intensified in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, as did the impact of black activism on national politics. The depression triggered a radical political movement with an antiracist agenda. Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs offered hope by providing help not just to whites but blacks as well. New Deal programs facilitated activism by making blacks, especially in the rural South, less dependent on whites for jobs and loans. The programs also resulted in black protest when they discriminated against blacks.

A massive switch of black voters from the Republicans to Roosevelt's party in the 1936 presidential elections made northern blacks a force in the Democratic Party, undermining the party's white supremacist southern wing. The considerable number of black officials in the Roosevelt administration created new opportunities for advancing civil rights. Bethune was the highest-placed and perhaps most-influential African American. She became Director of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration, a New Deal agency. She also had the ear of Eleanor Roosevelt, the President's wife.

While Bethune's NCNW and the International Ladies' Auxiliary also pushed a civil rights agenda, the NAACP took its campaign to new levels. Black women continued to play a vital role as fund-raisers and recruiters. The veteran Pennsylvania activist Daisy Lampkin was a regional, then the NAACP's national field organizer. The Atlanta NAACP official Lugenia Burns Hope in the early 1930s set up citizenship schools that taught courses on voter registration, democracy, and the Constitution. Atlanta's Ruby Blackburn became an influential community organizer and in the early 1940s would lead a successful NAACP membership drive.

Maryland's Juanita Jackson became the NAACP's national youth director. In the 1950s, as the first black woman to practice law in Maryland, she became a tenacious civil rights lawyer. Virginia's Ella Baker in the 1930s was a community activist in Harlem, and in the early 1940s became a main organizer for the national NAACP. She would be one of the core civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s.

North Carolina's Pauli Murray was a civil rights activist in the 1930s. In 1938, she unsuccessfully tried to desegregate the University of North Carolina Law School, only to receive law degrees from Howard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Yale University instead. South Carolina's Modjeska Simkins campaigned against discriminatory New Deal practices and became an official in the Columbia NAACP. In 1938, she was one of the cofounders of the South Carolina Conference of Branches of the NAACP. Jackson, Baker, Murray, and Simkins, who all started long civil rights careers in the 1930s, would be joined soon by the next wave of black women activists.

World War II and Beyond

Rosa Parks was among that next wave. So was Jewell Stradford in Chicago, where in 1942 she was a founding member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and a participant in the organization's early sit-ins. In Washington, DC, three female Howard University students in 1943 demanded service at a segregated lunch counter near campus, triggering further sit-ins there. In Little Rock, Arkansas, Daisy Bates and her husband in the early 1940s started the State Press, a crusading black weekly. Bates joined Charlotta Spears Bass, editor of the California Eagle, as one of the country's premier female black newspaper editors. In 1952, Bates also would become president of the Arkansas NAACP.

In Montgomery, Alabama, Viola White in 1944 refused to sit in the back of a segregated bus and was arrested and beaten. In South Carolina, Septima Clark helped Simkins and other state NAACP leaders with a successful lawsuit to equalize black and white teachers' salaries. The plaintiff was another woman, Viola Duvall of Charleston. Clark, in the1950s and 1960s, would take Lugenia Hope's concept of citizenship education to new heights.

These black women were part of a new civil rights offensive during World War II. The United States' involvement in a war against an openly racist Nazi Germany again put into sharp focus America's treatment of its own black citizens. Black Americans' loyal support for the war effort, at home and in the military abroad, made the hypocrisy especially glaring, as did the discrimination against black soldiers and military nurses. Victory abroad over fascism and at home over racism became the battle cry among African Americans in what was termed the “Double V” campaign.

Black nurses scored one of the biggest wartime victories. The National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses and its director, Mabel K. Staupers, strongly protested the quotas on black nurses in the U.S. Army and their exclusion from the Navy. After a two-year campaign and a nurse shortage, both branches lifted the restrictions. The car porters union leader A. Philip Randolph and the NAACP successfully fought the exclusion of black soldiers from combat positions, but desegregating the armed forces failed mostly and discrimination remained widespread.

Black women, again, played an important role as the NAACP's membership grew from 50,000 to 450,000 during the war, much of it in the South. The women organized local groups that pressed for the desegregation of restaurants, swimming pools, hospitals, public transportation, and higher education. Ella Baker was pivotal as the NAACP field secretary and director of branches between 1940 and 1946. She conducted successful regional conferences to develop leadership at the grass roots. Rosa Parks was profoundly influenced when she attended Baker's 1945 conference in Atlanta.

Black members of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps were among the many black veterans returning from World War II energized and eager to change things at home. There, black women were among the 1,500,000 African Americans who had moved from the South to cities throughout the country during and after World War II, often finding better jobs as men were off to war, while the war effort itself created new employment. Expectations were high after the war, even though many blacks lost their new jobs and despite another surge of antiblack violence, especially in the South and against veterans.

Toward Brown v. Board of Education

Black women were in the thick of postwar activism, albeit not focused on women's issues. Civil rights activism took priority over feminist concerns, which many increasingly considered divisive in the struggle for black equality. The NCNW, as an interest group especially for black women, would struggle until it adapted to this mindset in the 1960s.

In 1946, after Irene Morgan defied seating arrangements on a Virginia-to-Maryland Greyhound bus, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregated interstate buses unconstitutional. That same year, Constance Baker Motley joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to become one of the country's premier civil rights lawyers. When Ada Sipuel was rejected at the University of Oklahoma School of Law because she was black, Motley took the case to the state courts. She then assisted Thurgood Marshall before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning a verdict that undermined Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 case that had established legal segregation through the “separate but equal” doctrine.

In Montgomery, Alabama, in 1949, Jo Ann Robinson experienced what many black women had as major city bus patrons—a screaming white bus driver. The man verbally abused Robinson as he tried to send her to the back of the almost empty bus. Robinson felt humiliated and decided that the local Women's Political Committee should make seating practices and abusive drivers on city buses a priority. With Robinson as its president in the early 1950s, the organization did.

In South Carolina, Eliza Briggs and Maisie Solomon were among the parents filing in Briggs v. Elliott, the case that in 1954 became part of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Briggs and Solomon lost their jobs over the case, but in Brown the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated education unconstitutional, overturning Plessy. Brown combined cases from five states, including the one that the Virginia high school student Barbara Johns triggered by calling a strike against conditions at her school. The Kansas case itself was filed on behalf of seven-year-old Linda Brown. Constance Motley was part of the legal team pleading Brown before the Supreme Court. The case eventually resulted in dismantling segregation in education, swimming pools, public parks, transportation, housing, and elsewhere.

Brown had to be enforced state by state, with most southern states resisting strongly. Black women did part of the enforcing. Juanita Mitchell, by then a lawyer, won the case that made Baltimore desegregate its schools immediately after Brown; by then, she had already forced the desegregation of Maryland swimming pools and beaches. In 1956, Autherine Lucy, hindered by thousands of whites but assisted by the NAACP regional director Ruby Hurley, became the first African American to enroll at the University of Alabama. She was expelled a few days later, officially because of statements she made about race relations.

In 1957, the Arkansas NAACP president Daisy Bates led the charge to desegregate Little Rock's Central High School, the key post-Brown school battle. Bates selected and prepared the six girls and three boys involved. She tried several times to take the students to class, only to be stopped by the hostile crowds and violence outside the school. President Dwight Eisenhower sent an Airborne Division and federalized National Guard troops to ensure the students' safety. In a resulting court case, the Supreme Court ruled that states were obliged to enforce Brown.

In 1961, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, with Hamilton Holmes, desegregated the University of Georgia. In 1963, Henri Montieth, a grand niece of Modjeska Simkins, was among the first three black students since Reconstruction to enroll in the University of South Carolina. Constance Motley, by then the NAACP's principal trial lawyer, tried both cases, as well as desegregation suits against the University of Mississippi and Clemson University.

Black women became key players as the civil rights struggle changed dramatically in the second half of the 1950s. Increasingly NAACP lawyers were sharing the stage with grassroots activists, who in the next decade took to the streets, restaurants, and department stores to battle segregation and discrimination. Black women were the main organizers and grassroots leaders at this stage of the struggle widely known as “the civil rights movement.”

The 1955 lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi provided an important impulse to the movement. Till was tortured, then killed for a slight breach of white supremacy's racial etiquette. The crime's ghastliness, the publicity surrounding it, and his mother's insistence on displaying her son's abused body in an open casket made the episode a defining moment for a new, young generation of black activists.

Mass Action

Later that year, the Montgomery bus boycott following Rosa Parks's arrest signaled change. The year before, JoAnn Robinson and the WPC had threatened Montgomery's mayor with a boycott if conditions on city buses didn't improve. The WPC was ready for a boycott when teenager Claudette Colvin in March 1955 was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. The local NAACP leader E. D. Nixon feared, however, that Colvin's pregnancy would make her case ineffective as a rallying point. Meanwhile, in July, a federal court decided in a South Carolina case involving Sara Mae Fleming, a black maid, that segregation on all buses, not just those crossing state lines, was unconstitutional.

After Parks's arrest, Robinson spent the night mimeographing a flyer calling for a bus boycott the next Monday, when Parks had to go to court. Using a distribution system they established well in advance, Richardson and other WPC women spread the flyers throughout the city's black neighborhoods. That Monday, few African Americans rode the buses. Monday afternoon, civil rights leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to oversee the boycott. The organization's executive committee included several women, among them Robinson, Parks, Irene West, Euretta Blair, and Erna Dungee. It selected Martin Luther King Jr. as its president.

Robinson was an organizer and negotiator for the boycott and edited the MIA newsletter, but otherwise most of the women stayed in the background. King, Nixon, and other black men took over much of the public leadership, including the contacts with the white establishment. Female MIA leaders organized the highly effective fleet of privately owned cars that enabled the bus boycott to last more than a year by providing rides for local blacks. Other women organized clubs to sell baked goods to raise money for the MIA. When Parks's trial got held up in state court, the MIA and NAACP filed a suit on behalf of Claudette Colvin and three other black women. In that suit, the U.S. Supreme Court in November 1956 ruled that Alabama's segregation laws were unconstitutional. The next month, with the ruling in effect, the boycott ended, as did old seating arrangements on the buses.

The organizing and leadership patterns in the Montgomery boycott, including the position of the WPC women, exemplified well the civil rights movement over the next decade. Black women got the boycott going, mobilized support, and created a stable base to sustain it, the sociologist Belinda Robnett has argued. They used their connections in the community to raise money for the MIA and the boycott. Their efforts were as crucial to the movement as E. D. Nixon's negotiation efforts and the cooperation of King and other black ministers.

Moreover, these black women provided the impetus for the formation of the MIA rather than being led into the organization by male leaders. Their reasons for becoming involved were both personal and political. They built the movement as an emotional response to inequality—in this case, the humiliating treatment on city buses. Their response led to spontaneous action, using preexisting networks and organizations to build a movement. It is one of the many examples of the importance of emotions in civil rights activism, Robnett argued. It also showed that emotions and spontaneity could lead to rational and effective actions.

The women mostly were excluded from formal leadership positions and understood that men, especially ministers, were more easily perceived and accepted as leaders. That did not stop the women from taking initiative and using their leadership abilities. By selecting for themselves leadership roles formally below those of male leaders, these women provided what Robnett defined as “bridge leadership.” Their leadership remained obscured from media and scholars but provided the crucial link between the formal, male MIA leadership and the grassroots constituency in the community, which the women had already mobilized.

Bridge leaders, mostly black women, promoted and facilitated mass involvement as the civil rights movement went beyond court cases to sit-ins, protest marches, boycotts, and widespread voter registration campaigns. These women developed and led a movement of sustained grassroots political activism that also gave real power and legitimacy to the formal and famous leaders of such organizations as the NAACP, the Urban League, and King's SCLC. Female bridge leaders were usually excluded from formal leadership positions because of their gender. Men who were bridge leaders were usually excluded because they had limited formal education.

Grassroots Leaders

Different tiers of bridge leaders in and near local, often rural, communities provided the link between these communities and the larger movement. Bridge leaders did not just organize, Robnett showed. They cultivated people at the grass roots who had no direct access to the politics of the formal organizations. They recruited new formal leaders. They translated the message of the larger movement to the local level and local needs, to the goals of the movement. Because bridge leaders usually were not formal leaders in the NAACP or SCLC, they could be advocates for grassroots concerns without being hampered by the tactical needs of organizations working toward compromises with the mainstream political establishment. Bridge leaders could sustain local movements even when people at the grassroots were disappointed by the compromises of formal leaders.

The exclusion of women from formal leadership, Robnett observed, provided the civil rights movement with exceptionally effective, well-educated, and articulate grassroots leaders. In Oklahoma City, the teacher Clara Luper was a quintessential bridge leader. In 1958, she initiated and led a wave of sit-ins aimed at desegregating stores, parks, pools, and such that would last six years.

Daisy Bates had a formal leadership position as Arkansas NAACP president but functioned very much as a bridge leader, not in the least during the Little Rock Central High episode. Bates organized local support for desegregating Central High but had no access to national government officials, including President Eisenhower, who met with SCLC, NAACP, and Urban League leaders. Bates, Robnett wrote, represents many of the women who were longtime local formal leaders and activists but who seldom were included in negotiations on a national level.

Two other exceptional bridge leaders were Ella Baker and Septima Clark. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, they were crucial organizers for the SCLC. By that time, desegregation had come to a halt in the South. There had been early successes in the wake of Brown, especially in states bordering the South, but in the region itself success was stymied by massive white resistance, including intimidation, political manipulation, and widespread government prosecution of the NAACP. By the late 1950s, only a handful of southern school districts had desegregated.

The SCLC developed from the Montgomery boycott after Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Stanley Levinson had discussed the need for such an organization, and the two men consulted with King. The SCLC tried to coordinate emerging local movements in the South but focused above all on voting rights for blacks. The organization had trouble, however, sustaining voter registration drives and grassroots mobilization. This changed when Ella Baker came on board.

Pushed by Rustin and Levinson, King and the other leading SCLC ministers accepted Baker, albeit with great reluctance. They made her the acting executive director while they looked for a minister, a man, to fill the post. The organization, Baker's biographer Barbara Ransby wrote, had “a patriarchal ethos.” It ignored such women as Rosa Parks and Joanne Robinson for leadership roles.

SCLC leaders largely ignored Baker, too. Baker nevertheless continued where she had left off with the NAACP in the 1940s. She tried to create a more decentralized and democratic SCLC that would be driven by active mass participation. She wanted an organization that for sustained action wouldn't have to rely on King's persona and celebrity. “Strong people,” Baker argued, “don't need strong leaders.” Voting rights activism and legislative victories were to Baker not an end in themselves but opportunities for organizing, providing a potential focus and catalyst for direct action.

To develop mass participation, Baker turned to Septima Clark and her Citizenship Education Program at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Clark had begun towork for Highlander in 1956, after her activism and NAACP membership got her fired from her teaching job in South Carolina. Clark, Esau Jenkins, and Bernice Robinson, with the help of Highlander's Myles Horton, opened in 1957 the first Citizenship School, on Johns Island near Charleston. The school's immediate purpose was to prepare blacks for the literacy tests South Carolina required of voters. The long-term goal was, however, to empower rural African Americans and create local leadership. Clark believed that literacy and liberation went hand in hand, that literacy would make the rural masses aware of their citizenship rights.

Citizenship Schools

Clark, Robinson, and Jenkins did not just teach their adult students to read well enough for the tests. They also used for instruction daily tasks the students wanted to master, including writing a money order, balancing check books, or completing a catalogue order form. Students' personal needs and the movement's strategic needs went hand in hand. As the number of registered voters on Johns Island grew, black residents of other South Carolina Sea Islands became interested. Robinson recruited more teachers and took them to Highlander workshops. With Johns Island as the prototype, African Americans on other islands opened citizenship schools, too.

The Johns Island school “laid the foundation for mass organizing in the modern Civil Rights Movement,” according to the historian Jacqueline Rouse. Between 1957 and 1961, Clark traveled the South, training hundreds of teachers, who taught thousands of people, many of whom registered to vote. To Baker it was clear that Clark's program was what the SCLC needed. At her urging, and after Tennessee state troopers harassed Highlander, King and Horton discussed moving the Citizenship School Program to the SCLC in 1959.

In 1961, after Tennessee closed Highlander, Baker and Horton finally persuaded King to hire Clark. With Dorothy Cotton and Andrew Young as staff members, Clark replicated her Highlander program for the SCLC, creating the base on which, according to Young, “the whole Civil Rights Movement was built.” The program established almost nine hundred schools between 1961 and 1970, some in private homes, barber shops, beauty parlors, or just outdoors. Workshop participants would go back to their hometowns, teach others, and often become local leaders, replacing local black ministers at times. Hosea Williams, eventually a formal SCLC leader, came through the Citizenship Schools. So did Mississippi's Fannie Lou Hamer, who would be vital in the movement.

Clark's program was crucial to the SCLC's successful voter registration campaign of 1961 and 1962 and that of other organizations in the next few years. Within the SCLC, her work and that of Baker was merely considered “supportive” of the male leadership. In reality, Clark and Baker undermined the hold of charismatic, hierarchical leadership on the movement. By developing alternative forms of leadership, especially on a local level, they facilitated the kind of grassroots expansion of the movement that a centralized, formal leadership alone would have been hard pressed to produce.

Student Activism

By the time the SCLC hired Clark, Baker, unhappy with its leadership, had left the organization. In 1960, Baker turned her attention to black students, who, frustrated with the slow pace of desegregation, were conducting sit-ins. The sit-ins started with four male North Carolina A&T College students in Greensboro requesting lunch counter service at Woolworth's. Their immediate supporters included female black students from nearby Bennett College. When Greensboro happened, Diane Nash and Gloria Johnson were among the students at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, training for nonviolent action. Soon they were involved in Nashville sit-ins. In Atlanta, the Spelman College student Ruby Doris Smith initiated sit-ins before Julian Bond and Lonnie King of Atlanta University organized several of them.

The highly effective direct attacks on segregation created a new, militant civil rights vanguard. Eager to sustain its momentum, Baker in April 1960 organized a conference for the students at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. She wanted the young activists to connect with each other and stay out of the grip of existing civil rights organizations. From the conference emerged the interracial Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which would change the struggle dramatically.

Baker, her biographer Ransby wrote, became “resident elder and intellectual mentor of SNCC during its first six years of existence.” Baker took care of the logistics and administration of the fledgling organization and was a confidante to Diane Nash, Bob Moses, and other SNCC leaders. Under Baker's influence, SNCC became a decentralized organization in which decisions were made through group discussion, not by a few, and where leadership positions were not just reserved for educated, middle-class men.

Baker steered SNCC away from the NAACP and SCLC leadership, afraid the young activists' egalitarian, democratic impulse and militancy would be stifled by the older leaders. She pushed SNCC beyond the lunch counters and campuses toward grassroots organizers, local NAACP activists included, and poor blacks in the rural and small-town South. She also facilitated SNCC's expansion from direct action to voter registration. Baker taught the young activists to work with local communities and sincerely include ordinary people in the decision-making process to politicize and empower them. Following Baker's model, SNCC became a bridge organization between the grass roots and the NAACP and SCLC.

SNCC activists sustained, revived, or initiated civil rights projects throughout the South, particularly in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. With its local allies, the organization put the movement into “civil rights movement” where white opposition was most brutal, including Selma, Alabama, where SNCC activists undertook a voting rights campaign with the longtime local NAACP leader Amelia Boynton. In addition to empowering communities, SNCC provided King and other formal leaders with much of the masses they ostensibly led. In Atlanta, Selma, Albany, Georgia, and elsewhere, SNCC developed campaigns that King and the SCLC could step into at critical junctures.

In effect, SNCC expanded the formal leaders' power base well beyond those leaders' own organizational capabilities, increasing their clout in negotiations with authorities. SNCC also kept up the pressure to act on both formal civil rights leaders and the federal government in the first half of the 1960s. During that period, the struggle moved from the sit-ins to Freedom Rides, voter registration campaigns, Birmingham's violent desegregation, the March on Washington, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Freedom Summer, the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), Selma's “Bloody Sunday,” and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Women, including black women, rose to powerful positions within SNCC. Because the organization was decentralized and nonhierarchical, Robnett argued, for women, young folks, and poor people there was more individual autonomy and room to move up than in other civil rights groups. SNCC was not immune to gender norms, and the highest formal positions usually went to men, but generally, SNCC women, Robnett wrote, saw “themselves as unhampered by sexist constraints.”

Moreover, women's official position did not always reflect their real power. Baker was officially just an outside consultant. When Nash was officially an office manager, she was in reality an influential leader. Later, she became head of SNCC's direct action wing. As manager of SNCC's central office in Atlanta, Ruby Smith was an imposing figure and in control. In 1966, she became SNCC's executive director.

The many African American women organizers in SNCC included Roberta Yancy, who became southern campus coordinator. Prathia Hall and Peggy Dammond both worked in southwest Georgia. Bernice Johnson Reagon in Albany formed the SNCC Freedom Singers. Gloria Richardson led a grassroots movement supported by SNCC in Cambridge, Maryland. There were many others.

Freedom Rides

Diane Nash and Ruby Smith were among those who went to jail rather than pay bail after a 1961 desegregation protest in Rock Hill, South Carolina, introducing a tactic aimed at burdening authorities while conserving money for other actions. That same year, Nash led SNCC activists who sustained the Freedom Rides against segregated interstate buses when CORE activists, who started that campaign, pulled out after a white Alabama mob severely beat them up. The SNCC-led group of riders took over and reached Montgomery, where they, too, received a brutal beating.

The violence made headlines and triggered action from the Justice Department to protect the riders. SNCC activists, including Smith, then made it to Jackson, Mississippi, where local police arrested them. Baker kept close contacts with the activists. Nash was the coordinator for the SNCC rides and the liaison with the press and Justice Department. Nash would later join the SCLC as a field organizer and become instrumental in the 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 voting rights campaign in Selma.

By late 1961, SNCC also had joined the NAACP, SCLC, and CORE in the Voter Education Project, a campaign that registered a half million new southern black voters over the next two years. SNCC was responsible for Alabama and Mississippi, where it benefited from Baker's connections. Among the core Mississippi activists that SNCC recruited was sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer, then in her forties. In the wave of white violence that met SNCC's successful Mississippi campaign, Hamer was shot at and later beaten to a pulp during three days in a jail.

Hamer became one of the most legendary grassroots civil rights leaders, famous for her inspiring speeches and singing, her organizing and fearless leadership. She and two other black women, Annie Devine and Victoria Gray, were in 1964 among the key founders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The MFDP came out of Freedom Summer, the massive, SNCC-led Mississippi voter registration campaign involving local activists, CORE, the SCLC, the NAACP, and black and white college students from all over the country. The new party was a grassroots alternative to the regular Democratic Party in Mississippi, which excluded African Americans and advocated segregation.

Spurred by Ella Baker, the MFDP challenged the seating of the regular Mississippi Democrats at the 1964 National Democratic Convention. Hamer, Gray, and Devine were officials in the MFDP convention delegation. Hamer's dramatic televised testimony caught the nation's attention, but the Democrats needed the white southern vote in that year's presidential election and seated the Mississippi regulars as usual. Democratic officials offered the MFDP a token compromise. The proposal angered most MFDP delegates, as did the position of King and other formal national black leaders, who argued for its acceptance. Disillusioned and urged by Hamer, Gray, and Devine, the delegates rejected the compromise. The next year, Congress dismissed a seating challenge to Mississippi's congressional delegation by the three leading MFDP women.

The MFDP convention challenge helped create support for the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibited discriminatory voting procedures. The party helped voter registration skyrocket in Mississippi after 1965. Black women were as vital to the MFDP as they were to SNCC, and for similar reasons. Hamer, Gray, and Devine were examples of homegrown bridge leaders who used their longtime community involvement to create potent local activism.

At the grass roots, in the rural South during the early 1960s, black women were more active in civil rights than black men, Charles Payne has argued. Payne studied the Mississippi Delta and concluded that the gender difference was especially pronounced between men and women ages thirty to fifty. The difference existed even though the women faced similar reprisals as men in terms of violence, loss of employment, and such. SNCC's openness to women facilitated their involvement but does not explain why they took advantage of the opportunity.

Women dominated in the Delta and probably elsewhere, Payne suggested, because of their religious beliefs, church activities, and family and friendship networks. In cities with SCLC activities, where the movement grew out of the church, women may have exceeded men's involvement because women were more active in church. In the Delta, where the movement often developed despite churches' resistance, many black women thought they were doing God's work and were drawn in by family or friends.

Joining the movement was an act of faith itself in a period when activists knew they would suffer while quick results were unlikely. Religion, Payne proposed, also provided African American women with a sense they could actually accomplish something, which increased their willingness to get involved. Since men were not as religious as women, these factors may not have affected black men in the Delta as much.

Furthermore, many Delta women followed friends and family, especially teenage family members, into the movement. Rural communities' strong social bonds enabled activists to draw in others. Since women are thought to be more invested in kin and community then men, Payne argued, their high level of participation in the movement is no surprise. Black Delta mothers and aunts seem to have been more affected than fathers and uncles by the activism of sons and daughters, nieces and nephews.

Diminishing Role

The large number of women in the movement may have helped King and other advocates of nonviolence keep demonstrations peaceful—on the part of the demonstrators, that is. The presence of so many women also may have helped create an atmosphere of trust and less competitive, more nurturing relationships within the movement. Local activist women, Payne has argued, looked at SNCC workers and out-of-town volunteers as their children. The sense of family must have created “a relatively supportive and empowering political environment,” according to Payne, which helped to sustain activists during difficult times.

Black women's important role at the grass roots stood in stark contrast with their absence on a national level. The NCNW president Dorothy Height was usually the only woman at talks between the heads of national civil rights organizations. Anna Arnold Hedgeman was the lone woman on the planning committee for the 1963 March on Washington, where King spoke of his dream. Despite Hedgeman's and Height's stringent efforts, black male leaders didn't allow a black woman to speak at the event.

The focus on race was all-consuming in preparations for the Washington march, according to Height, who in the 1960s had redirected a substantial part of the NCNW's attention from women's issues to civil rights. “Clearly, there was a low tolerance level for anyone raising the questions about the women's participation, per se.” Many black women shared that low tolerance, Height wrote. Pauli Murray, a few months after the march, called the experience “bitterly humiliating for Negro Women.”

After 1964 and 1965, black women's role diminished with that of the southern civil rights grass roots as SNCC turned toward Black Nationalism and northern inner cities. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act seemed to provide political promise, but grassroots activists became disillusioned after the failed MFDP challenge and the crucial 1965 voting rights demonstration in Selma. In Selma, they felt betrayed by King when the SCLC leader, during a volatile situation, secretly reached a compromise with federal authorities and stopped a march after a few hundred symbolic yards.

These episodes created feelings of hopelessness among SNCC and MFDP activists. The failure of the MFDP congressional challenge further suggested that playing by the rules didn't yield results. All this added to the frustration of young activists already radicalized by the nonstop terror against them in the South and what they perceived as marginal and slow progress. Many SNCC workers began to leave the South.

Increasingly, young activists, especially in SNCC and CORE, questioned racial integration, nonviolence, King's moderation, and the good faith of white liberals. They became attracted to Black Nationalist and separatist messages of leaders such as Malcolm X and the new SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael, who popularized the slogan “Black Power.” As young blacks in the North and West began to vent their frustration through urban riots, both SNCC and CORE moved their southern operations to northern cities. In 1968, in the name of Black Power, both organizations would eject their white members.

Black Power undermined the position of black women in the movement. It stressed racism and white supremacy's virtual emasculation of black men. As a prerequisite for empowering all black people, Black Power prescribed that, in the historian Cynthia Griggs Fleming's words, black men “assume leadership roles and reclaim their masculinity.” Black women were expected to take on traditional female roles and support their men. This meant a backlash against black women's leadership, as they were told to step back.

Many black women embraced Black Power, and several played important, at times even leading roles in post-1966 SNCC and the Black Panther Party, formed in 1966. Nevertheless, male chauvinism put enormous pressure on them, which included accusations of being domineering. Male CORE members called Gloria Richardson a “castrator” when she wanted to address a crowd of people she had led for years. Male chauvinism also came with a newly imposed hierarchical and centralized structure dominated by men, which took away the relative autonomy black women previously had enjoyed in SNCC. That left them with less room to establish themselves as leaders.

As power became centralized, SNCC also lost its egalitarian, group-centered approach. Community action and empowerment were replaced with a decision-making process dominated by central leaders, whose beliefs were to be followed. Ella Baker and Ruby Smith were among the southern bridge leaders criticizing SNCC's failure to develop programs, local leadership, and grassroots political power. As SNCC left the rural South and got away from Baker's and Clark's teachings, the organization became ineffective as a grassroots mass movement.

The consequences were dour for black female leaders in the Deep South. The departure of SNCC and its activists left local communities without representation to the larger movement. It also left local bridge leaders with a fraction of the resources that had previously been available to them. When SNCC abandoned its coalition with poor, rural southern blacks and the many black women who led at the grass roots, the civil rights movement began to unravel from the bottom, Belinda Robnett has argued. This was well before the early 1970s collapse of SNCC itself and well before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

See also Baker, Ella Josephine; Bates, Daisy Lee Gatson; Bethune, Mary McLeod; Civil Rights Organizations; Clark, Septima Poinsette; Hamer, Fannie Lou; Luper, Clara; Murray, Pauli; Nash, Diane; Parks, Rosa; Political Resistance; and Wells-Barnett, Ida B.

processed xml | source xml