African-American Women in the Civil Rights Movement
The Civil Rights Movement encompasses the rousing forces for racial equality specific to the 1950s and 1960s in American history. The distinctive protests, writings, speeches, and demonstrations of the era produced progress thanks to the efforts of certain remarkable individuals. Perhaps frequently overlooked, these African-American women made specific contributions that powerfully invigorated this movement.
- Ella Baker
A charismatic labor organizer and longtime leader in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She believed the movement should not place too much emphasis on leaders.
Source: "Women had key roles in civil rights movement" - Fannie Lou Hamer
A Mississippi sharecropper, beaten and jailed in 1962 for trying to register to vote. She co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and gave a fiery speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
Source: "Women had key roles in civil rights movement" - Frankie Muse Freeman
The first woman in 1964 on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Freeman was instrumental in creating the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights founded in 1982, and has been a practicing attorney in state and federal courts for nearly sixty years.
Source - Gloria Richardson
The leader of the Cambridge Movement (Maryland), a human rights struggle in the town of Cambridge, Maryland during the mid-1960s. Her rationale for a boycott of the polls rested on her belief that people's human rights were not something that should be voted upon by the general population, especially one that was so hostile to Black people.
Source - Ida Wells-Barnett
Wrote articles about lynching in local black newspapers. She toured Europe trying to bring international pressure to bear on the United States to end segregation. She was one of two black women to sign the call for the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. Believed agitation, activism, and protest were the only means of change.
Source: "American Women Who Shaped the Civil Rights Movement Explored Through the Literature of Eloise Greenfield" - Mary Church Terrell
In 1890, Terrell spoke about black women's handicaps, that of race and gender, at the National Woman Suffrage Association convention in Washington, D.C.. Terrell worked for suffrage and interracial understanding and cooperation but her greatest contributions came in the field of the black club movement. Terrell was instrumental in forming the National Association of Colored Women and establishing socially progressive institutions such as kindergartens, day nurseries, and Mother Clubs. Her militant activist actions led to the 1953 Supreme Court decision that ruled that segregated eating facilities in Washington, D.C. were unconstitutional.
Source - Mary Fair Burks
As a co-founder of the Women's Political Council of Montgomery, Alabama (WPC), helped organize and maintain the historic Montgomery bus boycott of 1955.
Source - Mary McLeod Bethune
In Daytona, Florida, she founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls. In 1924, became president of the National Association of Colored Women. In 1935, Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women.
Source - Modjeska Monteith Simkins
An important leader of African American public health reform, social reform and the civil rights movement in South Carolina.
Source - Rosa Parks
The "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement", she became became the symbol that the Montgomery NAACP and the Women's Political Council needed to challenge the law. Rosa continued to work behind the scenes for the NAACP and the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Source - Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander
One of the first African American women to obtain a Ph.D., and the first woman to hold a national office in the National Bar Association.
Source - Septima Poinsette Clark Often called the "queen mother" of civil rights- an educator and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People activist decades before the nation's attention turned to racial equality.
Source - Vivian Malone Jones
Defied segregationist Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace to enroll in the University of Alabama in 1963 and later worked in the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department.
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