HOW WOMEN ADVANCED THE CIVIL RIGHT MOVEMENT

Lecture by Percy E. Murray, Professor of History

North Carolina Central University
Welcome to Learn More - Teach More. The title of this lecture is AHow Women Advanced
the Civil Rights Movement?@ World War II and the postwar decade were seedtime years for the
modern civil rights and women=s liberation movements. These two movements grew out of the
promises of social change that the wartime economy made but peacetime society failed to deliver.
Black working women stood much to gain from the dual challenge to the nations= caste system,
nevertheless, by the mid 1960s it had became abundantly clear that while black women of all ages
over the country embraced the struggle for racial justice, they felt little affinity for its sister cause that
professed to represent the interest of women regardless of race. Both black and white women=s
employment status improved during the war years, yet black women did not enjoy the luxury of being
able to balance work and child rearing. While some white women began to suffer what Betty Freidan
labeled Athe problem that has no name,@ black women found that more and more of their families
were crammed on top of each other and they could claim no mystique that inspired public celebration.
For women of two races, poverty and prosperity inspired separate strategies for change and, at least
during the third quarter of the 20th century, created histories that were separate and unequal.
When the March on Washington took place in August 1963, the women of the civil rights
movement were all but forgotten. Why? When the major male civil rights leaders: Martin Luther
King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, and Roy Wilkins marched down Constitution Avenue, no woman
marched with them. To add insult to injury, no woman went to the White House afterward to meet
with President John F. Kennedy. The impulse for change in America found women of all colors and
hues emerged in this significant struggle.
There was only one woman on the planning committee for the March on Washington, and she
prodded the male members to allow women to participate. So, as an after thought, the planners put
together a backhanded ATribute to Women.@ The plan called for A. Philip Randolph to introduce
some to the movement=s heroines for a quick bow at the Lincoln Memorial rally. None of these
women would be given a chance to speak.
So, there would be no voice for Rosa Parks, whose refusal to get up from her seat on a
Montgomery bus had set in motion a social revolution that would, in less than a decade, turn the
country upside down. Rosa Parks was more than a Atired seamstress who was too tired to move.@ In
fact, she had been a committed civil rights activist since the 1940s, a staunch member of the NAACP
with a history of rebellion against the casual cruelties of white bus drivers. She was both a workweary woman and a member of a black community dedicated to the fight against discrimination.
Pauli Murray, a lawyer and legal scholar who had been fighting restrictions based on race and
gender as far back as the 1930s, brought her ardent concerns for both of these causes to the civil
rights movement. A graduate of Howard University=s School of Law, Murray and her fellow students
had staged a sit-in in 1944, demanding to be served at Thompson=s, a white establishment. Pauli
Murray, while an important figure in the early history of the Civil Rights Movement came from a
long line of female soldiers of change, black and white, that stretched from the 19th century
abolitionist movement forward to the 20th century civil rights and feminism.
Daisy Bates, the major force behind the integration of Little Rock=s Central High School, had
braved mobs and death threats in 1957 to shepherd nine black teenagers through the hell of attending
a previously all-white school. By doing this, she had awakened the country to the violence of its
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racism. The students would meet at her home and talk about their experiences. Harry Ashmore,
editor of the Arkansas Gazette wrote that AI doubt that the black students could have withstood the
pressure of that disoriented school year without her undaunted presence.@ Bates and her husband did
have their lives virtually destroyed for their support of the Little Rock Nine and received little
recognition for their heroic efforts. Writing to Pauli Murray years later, Bates stated: ADuring these
hectic times while we were fighting for human dignity, and many times survival, one forgets the
contribution made by women@ to the civil rights movement.=@
Ella Baker, a North Carolina native served as an NAACP field organizer in the 1940s, and
later as executive secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) during the
1960s and was the Apolitical and spiritual midwife for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC),@ would not have a voice either. When she arrived in Atlanta to begin her work
with the SCLC, she looked mainly to women for help because the male ministers showed very little
respect for the organizational skills of women. Baker=s major contributions to the Civil Rights
Movement can be seen in two areas: organizing women across the South to teach basic reading,
writing, and political skills to illiterate blacks so they could register to vote was one contribution; the
other being the mother to the students who participated in the sit-ins and founded SNCC. A
compliment paid to her by Stokely Carmichael was that she was Athe most powerful person in the
struggle of the sixties@ for civil rights. There would be no say for Diane Nash, a former beauty
contestant with the delicate features of a porcelain doll, who had come to Nashville from Chicago in
search of an excellent education at the prestigious Fisk University after having attended Howard
University for two years. There are life changing experiences and Nash=s came in 1959 when she
attended the Tennessee State Fair. There she found herself face to face with Jim Crow when she went
to use a restroom and found them marked: WHITE WOMEN and COLORED WOMEN. This
indignity led her to learn more about segregation and eventually led to her joining Jim Lawson as he
worked with young black college students to end segregation in Nashville and the South. Nash
became a leader between the students and participated in many sit-ins in Nashville before becoming
more involved in the Freedom Rides. Some historians have argued that Nash should have been
elected the first chairman of SNCC, but when the voting took place in Raleigh, Nash was absent from
the meeting and the group instead elected Marion Barry, another Fisk student. Nash was called
upon to take command of the Freedom Rides in the spring of 1961. At twenty years of age, Nash, a
veteran of countless sit-ins and jail cells herself, dispatched a group of students to Birmingham to
take up where the first group had left off, then oversaw successive waves of Riders who poured into
the South. The revival of the Rides succeeded in reinvigorating the civil rights crusade. In summing
up per participation in the Civil Rights Movement, Nash commented that she had no regrets about her
all-consuming early commitment to the movement, a commitment whose tradeoff had been a future
with little material comfort or security. She was proud f what she had one, and reflected that she was
glad to have been involved in a movement that led to the Voting Rights Act, which in turn led to the
election of hundreds of black officials. In the end, she knew that she had made a difference on this
planet.
Those meets on that hot August day at the Lincoln Memorial were given little inklings of the
importance of women to the Civil Rights Movement. They did not know of the roles of Nash, Parks,
Murray or Baker to the cause for which they had gathered. Nor did they know of Septima Clark, the
tough but motherly former teacher whose adult literacy and citizenship schools were now the engine
for the movement=s voter registration work throughout the South. They did not know of Jo Ann
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Robinson, the demur college professor who was the real architect of the Montgomery bus boycott.
The history of the Civil Rights Movement makes no mention of the hundreds of poor,
unlettered women in Mississippi, Georgia, and the rest of the Deep South who daily were braving
bombs, beatings, and other forms of terrorism in their blazing determination too win the right to vote.
The countless number of young white women involved in the Civil Rights Movement felt isolated
and a sense of being cut loose from all familiar moorings. In the end, they found themselves rejected
by black activists and the white world. Writing about her participation in the 1990s, Joan Browning
stated that Amany southern white women, participation in the civil rights movement made them
outcasts, women without homes.
Ida Mae Holland, an eighteen-year-old prostitute in Greenwood, Mississippi, who had been
transformed into one of Greenwood=s boldest activists. There were older women who inspired
Holland Amamas like Mrs. Laura McGhee and Mrs. Bell Johnson, who according to Holland,
Awould walk their walk, and when they=d see the human barricade of police, they=d start talking their
talk and singing their songs and saying, >I ain=t scared of your jail because I want my freedom. Ain=t
going to let nobody turn me around. Going to keep on marching.=
Historians would agree with Lillian Smith, a white Southern writer that the images of women
had been crafted by men. She too had called for an end to racial segregation as early as 1941. She
believed that the woman=s role in the Civil Rights Movement was a Agreat and creative act@ of
discovering their identities.
Why and how women were or became nonentities in the Civil Rights movement is partially a
result of the way in which the press reported on this significant movement. The entire movement
focused on Martin Luther King, Jr., and other male civil rights leaders because there were no women
journalists and the men Asaw no visible women on the front lines.@ Historians have now discovered
and agree with a statement attributed to Stokely Carmichael during the movement that Athe ones who
came out first for the movement were the women.@
We are now better able to tell the role that these women played because over the past several
years there have been many scholarly studies on their lives. We have mentioned here, Septima Clark,
Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Diane Nash. The story of these women is a rich and vibrant one.
It=s a story about how women of all races made difficult choices, how they balanced lives as wives
and mothers. It=s about women defying presidents and sheriffs and the Ku Klux Klan, defying their
leaders= admonitions to be more cautious and more political, and defying society=s standards of proper
female behavior.
Of all of the movements of the last half of the 20th century, none touched more lives and had
more far reaching consequences than the civil rights movement. Women challenged America to live
up to her standard of equality and the Civil Rights movement while perhaps not achieving this over
riding goal did open up the closed society of the South. It eradicated legal segregation, brought black
Southerners into the political process, and created sweeping new educational and economic
opportunities for blacks throughout the country. To gauge the real impact that women played in the
Civil Rights movement, one need look no further than at the lives of two young women in
Mississippi; Jacqueline Byrd Martin, who along with 100 hundred other students staged the 1961
school walkout in McComb and Ida Mae Holland, who had gone from prostitute to activist during
her young life. These two young black women were told that they had at best dismal futures, yet they
achieved beyond the parameters that others had set for them. Ms. Martin went to be named the head
of administration for McComb city government and Holland earned a doctorate at the University of
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Minnesota in American Studies.

The women who played major roles in the Civil Rights movement of the 20th century
continued to advocate for social change and reform after the movement itself was over. They wore
the scares of hard-fought battles for social justice and paid heavy prices for their participation. They
continued the legacy of countless women who had fought so long and hard for freedom. From
Sojourner Truth to Ida Wells, and Mary Church Terrell, to Ella Baker and Pauli Murray, to Daine
Nash and Fannie Lou Hamer, the traditions of defiance, commitment, and community had long
passed away, from one generation of women to another, in a great, tightly linked chain. This is just
part of their story.