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Thuy Nguyen
Professor: Tina Mrouri
Govt 2306 Online
December 1, 2014
The role of Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement
In the Civil Right, gender played a large role in how the members of the movement were
treated. Splits along racial lines between women further disrupted how different women were
seen and treated throughout that era. Since the Civil War, black women had endured the pain of
segregation, the terror of white violence, the weight of discrimination in employment and
education. They had also felt the urge to liberate themselves from economic, political, and social
oppression just as deeply as black men, and perhaps, at times, more deeply. Black women played
more than incidental roles in the civil rights movement no way diminishes the importance of
male civil rights figures.
The role of black women in the civil rights movement has received scant attention from
historians. (Crawford, Rouse, Woods 183). The reason was that women were the secret weapon
of the civil rights movement. For the most part, the men made the speeches and did the press
interviews, and the women did the work. If they hadn’t, all those great plans would not have
gotten past the talking stage. Most studies of the movement have examined all of whom were
men and the list of important leaders also all of men such as Martin Luther King,, Jr, James
Forman and John Lewis … It is true that most women who participated in the movement were
volunteers who stayed in the background cooking meals, raising funds and handling logistics.
However, women participated in the movement at every level. Women also played leadership
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roles in the movement. They were educators who developed literacy programs, strategists who
organized protests and writers who fought racism with their words.
For as long as women of African descent have been in the United States, they have
resisted oppression. Enslaved in the Americas, they organized themselves and others to fight for
freedom. Black women fought for inclusion in the women’s suffrage movement after the
abolition of slavery. There were a lot of black women leader in the Civil Rights. Some women
have been some of the bravest and most committed activists in the fight: Ella Baker (1903 –
1986), Daisy Bates (1914 – 1999), Prathia Hall (1940 – 2002), Fannie Lou Hamer (1917 – 1977)
… Ella Baker worked with many famous civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr., Thurgood Marshall and A. Philip Randolph. In 1957, at King’s request, she
became executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Hogan). Daisy
