September 2023 - Remember the Women
This past summer, my blogs focused on my trip to Selma, Montgomery, and Atlanta. They featured civil rights leaders and foot soldiers, but most of them were men. Sadly, Black women activists - carrying the burden of multiple forms of oppression, marginalization, and minimization - are often overlooked.
A classic example of minimization is Rosa Parks. Everyone knows how she refused to give her seat to a white man, sparking the Montgomery bus boycott. She’s usually portrayed as a passive and demure victim, simply too exhausted to move to the back of the bus. Rarely is Parks given credit for her lifelong determination and initiative. She was a seasoned justice worker, trained in organizing at the Highlander Center, employed by the NAACP, and fed up with white supremacy. Parks explained, "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically … No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
I visited the Rosa Parks Museum near the bus stop where, after a day of work at Montgomery Fair department store, she boarded that famous bus. At the museum dedication in 2000, Parks was praised by other accomplished women including Coretta Scott King, Juanita Abernathy, and Mamie Till-Mobley. They urged attendees to carry Parks’ work forward. A sculpture by Erik Blome is in the front lobby, symbolically inviting people to join Parks. Her bronze likeness sits on a bus bench next to an open seat.
Many other women engaged in desegregation work. For example, nine months before Park’s 1955 civil disobedience, Claudette Colvin was arrested for not giving up her seat on the bus. Organizers decided not to make her the poster child of a desegregation effort due to her advanced age and because she was charged with assaulting the arresting officer. Unquestioned nonviolence was the preferred way forward.
Parks quietly refused to give in, women flocked to support her. They made up the majority of boycotters and did most of the organizing, from publicity to organizing taxi carpools. Jo Ann Robinson worked with students creating flyers that put the bus boycott on the front page. Robinson explained, “Women’s leadership was no less important to the development of the Montgomery Bus Boycott than was the male and minister-dominated leadership.”
Rosa Parks did justice work a decade prior to the boycott. She worked to support Recy Taylor who was kidnapped and gang-raped by white men in Abbeville, Alabama. Authorities refused to prosecute them despite their confessions. Taylor turned to the NAACP where Parks worked as a secretary. Soon Parks, promoted to investigator, ignored threats in a protracted effort to get justice for Taylor. Not until 2011 did the Alabama legislature apologize for the state’s failure to prosecute her attackers.
Parks, along with many other women in the rights movement, was willing to be up front. One such woman was Amelia Boynton Robinson who was injured at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. This year, on a March 7 Facebook post, the museum honored her for ignoring danger by marching with John Lewis at the front of the line, receiving vicious billy club blows for her courage. Though she attended President Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, like so many other women she remained unknown.
Strong Black women working for justice are no longer so easily overlooked. They are prominent leaders in all walks of life, such as Rep. Barbara Lee, lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw, author Luvvie Ajayi, Director of Communications for Ms. Foundation Raquel Willis, and Black Lives Matter founders Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Khan-Cullors, to name just a few. Let’s hear their voices and remember the women.
Further actions:
1) Share with others Parks lifetime of work. Bryan Stevenson explains, “…what most people don’t know. After the boycott was declared officially over, and black people were sitting on the buses, there was unbelievable violence. There were a dozen people who were shot standing waiting on buses. We had white people going around Montgomery shooting black people who dared to get on the buses.” I taught about the Montgomery boycott for twenty years but didn’t know of this sad legacy. While my ignorance cost me nothing, the price is higher for activists of color. Their survival depends on never letting their guard down. In seeking racial justice, the work continues.
2) Appreciate that women traumatized by violence often bear their wounds alone. There are still too many roadblocks to healing and redress. Parks was all alone after being threatened by a white male neighbor. In a letter Parks wrote in 1931 she explained, “I was trapped and helpless. I was hurt and sickened through with anger and disgust.” She later described her thoughts while resisting the attack: “I was ready to die but give my consent, never. Never, never.” To assure that other women would not be alone, Parks established the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor. Hear more about the early sexual violence activism of Rosa Parks in the last third of a podcast accessible here.
3) Support institutions like the Rosa Parks Museum that teach the history of Black women in the civil rights movement. Let the National Women’s History Museum know you support their honoring Willie Pearl Mackey King. While she was not related to Martin Luther King Jr., she did help lift up his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” When working as a secretary at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, she traveled with MLK to dangerous places, including Birmingham where she helped piece together and transcribe notes smuggled out of the jail. Later, when working with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Atlanta, she helped open field offices despite threats of violent reprisal.