Women in the Civil Rights Movement
During the early 20th century the first feminists emerged, who were dedicated to obtaining for women the legal rights that men took for granted (Rosenberg, 63). The National Women’s Suffrage Association and the American Women’s Suffrage Association were two rival groups that split after the Civil War over the 15th Amendment. NAWSA opposed the amendment because it didn’t include women, while AWSA were willing to sacrifice women’s voting rights for the time being (Robertson, 10/4). The two groups differed on many other issues as well: AWSA wanted to remain a single-issue organization, focusing solely on suffrage, while NAWSA focused on a wide variety of issues, including women’s property rights, divorce and education (Robertson, 10/4). Similar to the anti-slavery groups, these women’s rights groups also, for the most part, excluded black women. The groups also ignored racial problems such as lynching, making their progress seemingly important to white women only (Robertson, 10/4).
Depression-era women were helped in part by New Deal programs such as the Wagner Act, but this was largely the case for middle-class white women. Black women were hit hardest by the Depression, had the worst jobs, and received the least benefits from the New Deal (Robertson, 10/25). Black women earned less than white women, even in factory jobs, and over 90% of blacks were employed in agricultural labor or domestic service, an unchanging statistic from years before (Rosenberg, 106). Despite these occupational setbacks, the origins of the civil rights movement were being founded around this time. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1909, and from its inception it focused its efforts on equality for people of all races and ethnic origins (naacp.org). In the 1910s and 1920s, the organization made huge strides in advancing the position of blacks and other minorities. In 1917 the NAACP fought and won a battle to enable African-American soldiers to be commissioned for battle during World War I. In 1918 the organization persistently persuaded Woodrow Wilson to make a public statement against lynching. And in 1935 NAACP lawyers Thurgood Marshall and Charles Huston won a legal battle to get a black student admitted to the University of Maryland (naacp.org).
During the 40s and 50s women were becoming involved in the civil rights movement more than ever. Women such as Pauli Murray, Septima Clark and Modjesta Simkins were trailblazers who made women more welcome to the movement. Murray became active in the civil rights movement through her activism in the labor movement, and in 1943-44 she and fellow Howard Law students conducted a series of sit-ins in Washington restaurants (Rosenberg, 169). She also wrote an important paper arguing against the ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which stated that states could impose “separate but equal” facilities. Her paper would prove useful in the NAACP’s briefing of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (Rosenberg, 170). Septima Clark worked with Thurgood Marshall, South Carolina civil rights lawyer Harold R. Boulware and others to prepare a court case to equalize teachers’ salaries. In 1945 it was ruled that South Carolina’s teachers should receive equal pay for equal education (McFadden, 89). Modjesta Simkins was a central activist of the movements of the South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, especially in challenging segregation in public schools (Woods, 99-105).
In the 1954-55 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, it was ruled that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional in public schools, and that desegregation must continue with “deliberate speed”. After this case President Eisenhower essentially let race matters alone for the next couple of years (Brands, 79). But his reluctance to recognize a growing dissatisfaction of blacks toward institutionalized racism did not halt their equality efforts. Beginning in 1955 with the Montgomery bus boycotts, the issue of racial inequality was brought to international attention (Brands, 79). In her refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man, Rosa Parks’s action became the catalyst that would define the entire movement. The bus boycott was not a plan devised by solely by Parks to bring attention to the movement; the Women’s Political Council, started by Mary Fair Burks in 1946, played a crucial role in developing this plan (Burks, 71-74). The boycott of “bus abuses” had been in the works for many years, thought up by women like Jo Ann Robinson, who is often attributed with the entire boycott idea (Burks, 74-75). The bus boycotts also brought to international attention Martin Luther King Jr., who would, of course, become a crucial leader to the civil rights movement (Brands, 79).
Eisenhower would be forced to become involved in the racial issue during 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas used the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine black students from attending Little Rock’s Central High School (Brands, 80). Although Eisenhower didn’t agree with integration, he did agree with upholding the rulings of the United States Supreme Court, and vowed not to let personal opinions get in the way (Brands, 80). The president sent soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division to restore order to Little Rock. In Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High, Beals describes the harsh physical and emotional torment that she endured in the year that she attended Central High, despite the 101st’s presence. “One of them kicked me in the shins so hard I fell to the floor. A second kick was delivered to my stomach…I struggled to my feet. More white students gathered around and taunted me, applauding and cheering: ‘The nigger’s down.'” (Beals, 148). The white citizens of Little Rock were clearly opposed to integration, and Eisenhower tried to dissuade the segregationists by saying that American’s communist enemies were using the Little Rock example to misrepresent the country, saying that it was against human rights (Brands, 81).
In 1957 Martin Luther King Jr. and a group of southern black ministers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Rosenberg, 175). Until they hired Ella Baker, the group made little progress. Baker, the head of the New York chapter of the NAACP, would bring organization to the SCLC, and was considered the “most qualified person in the country to serve as director of the SCLC, but King refused to grant her that authority,” (Rosenberg, 176). Instead, he made her administrative assistant, which Baker and many others saw as “simple sexism,” (Rosenberg, 176). Despite this, Baker managed to do more for the organization and for the civil rights movement than anyone else, except possible King (Rosenberg, 176). Baker used her organization skills to mobilize blacks all over the country. She traveled to Highlander Folk School to inform Septima Clark on how to enable black Southerners to exercise their voting rights. One of Baker’s most important roles in the civil rights movement, however, was helping to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960 (Rosenberg, 177). Baker encouraged the students to be their own leaders, and the immediately began breaking the segregation statutes by conducting sit-ins at churches, public pools and lunch counters (Rosenberg, 177-178). Members of SNCC also turned to voter registration projects in the deep South. Fannie Lou Hamer was one of the most important players in these projects (Rosenberg, 178).
Hamer was involved in SNCC and in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (Locke, 27). In 1962 she risked her life when she registered to vote in Mississippi. After registering, she was fired from her job and informed that she did not pass the required literacy test (Locke, 29). She returned to retake the test every thirty days until she passed it in January of 1963, but was prevented from voting again because of the poll tax (Locke, 29). Her insistence to exercise her voting rights meant that she and her family would face intimidation and harassment on a daily basis. Her husband and daughter were arrested and lost their jobs, she was shot at from a speeding car, and police entered her home without a search warrant (Locke, 29). Hamer was a founding member of the MFDP and was actively involved in the party. She became nationally known in 1964 after her televised appearance at the Democratic Convention (Locke, 30-31).
Upholding Johnson’s idea for a Great Society, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin and sex, and among private institutions with interstate commerce. The following year the Voting Rights Act was passed, which gave the federal government the ability to supervise the voting process in southern states. These acts meant the end of Jim Crow laws and a victory for civil rights activists from all over the nation.
In her article The Role of Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement, Anne Standley states, “The role of black women in the civil rights movement has received scant attention from historians. Most studies of the movement have examined such organizations as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and accordingly have focused on the black ministers who served as officers in those organizations, all of whom were men.” (Standley, 183).
What the author says is true. Women are usually just a footnote or a small paragraph in history books. This leads people to believe that women did not play a significant role in anything that has ever happened. This is mostly due to the fact that women simply weren’t allowed to participate in certain activities, organizations and occupations. Some women, however, the women that do end up in history books, payed no mind to what they could or could not do. Women like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer and others may not be household names, and will probably never be as famous as other civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr. But this does not negate all the work they did and all that they accomplished in order to gain civil equality.
