Women in the Civil Rights Movement

Have you heard of the book Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers 1941-1965 by Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse and Barbara Woods?

It’s a remarkable book with story mountains each woman has to climb on heroic journeys to create a better, more human world for ALL of us.

I highly recommend it as we make our way through Black History Month.

I read and reflected on it with a group of students in a Civil Rights history class at Converse College.

You will meet Fannie Lou Hamer (one of my heroes), who was beaten mercilessly in a Sunflower County, Mississippi jail cell for her efforts to register African American voters. 

Later, she would speak eloquently before the 1964 Democratic Convention and the nation on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in opposition to Mississippi's all-white delegation to the convention. 

She hoped and worked, stayed and fought.

You will meet Ella Baker, who worked toward the idea that the Civil Rights Movement was about PEOPLE struggling TGETHER in a society to make it more democratic and more equitable (and democratic, equality work is indeed a struggle) rather than about Moses type leaders leading oppressed people to a promised land. 

A movement is about the people, not about a person.

She thought and fought with mind and heart.

You will meet Modjeska Simkins, who taught high school at Booker T. Washington High School in Columbia in my own state of South Carolina and was forced to resign after eight years of educating students because married women weren't allowed to be teachers. 

She moved on to become the secretary of the S.C. branch of the NAACP from 1941-1957 and help write the court case Briggs v. Elliott in Clarendon County, S.C. that grew into the Brown v. Board of Education lawsuit that ended legalized segregation in public schools and in the United Stated.

She persisted.

These women and so many others - Septima Poinsette Clark who helped create the Citizenship Schools upon which the Civil Rights Movement was built, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson who helped lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and so many others - persisted, too.

The rows they hoed were long and hard but look at their harvest - you, me and the students we teach!

Let this book help you remember that your work is a seed in fallow ground that brings life to all people, regardless of color, nationality, socio-economic status, sex, ability, or sexual orientation. 

Your life is showing us, WE the people, that we are human beings of inestimable worth.