4.7 - Black Women's Leadership and Grassroots Organizing in the Civil Rights Movement
Black Women as Central Civil Rights Leaders
Black women were absolutely central to the Civil Rights Movement's success, even though they frequently faced gender discrimination within the very organizations they helped build. Leaders like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer insisted that the movement address both racial and gender discrimination together, building on a long, deep tradition of Black women's activism that stretched back well before the 1950s and 60s.
Ella Baker, often called the "mother of the Civil Rights Movement," championed grassroots organizing and inclusive, group-centered leadership over the more top-down, leader-centered model many organizations relied on. She actively encouraged young people to get involved in social justice work that confronted both racism and sexism simultaneously, treating the two as inseparable struggles rather than competing priorities. In her speech at SNCC's founding in 1960, Baker argued that peaceful sit-ins at lunch counters represented far more than simple access to goods and services, they demonstrated the deeper need for African Americans' full inclusion in every aspect of American life, reframing a seemingly small protest as a statement about the entire structure of American society.
Fannie Lou Hamer was a sharecropper from Sunflower County, Mississippi, who was thrown off the plantation where she worked after she tried to register to vote in 1962. She became a SNCC field secretary, and in 1963 she was brutally beaten in a jail in Winona, Mississippi, after attending a voter registration workshop. In 1964 she helped lead the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and her televised testimony at that year's Democratic National Convention, where she asked, "Is this America?", brought national attention to the violence against Black voters. Hamer also spoke out about the forced sterilization of Black women (she had been sterilized without her consent in 1961), showing how racism and sexism worked together in her own life.
Dorothy Height led the National Council of Negro Women for an extraordinary 40 years, and throughout that tenure, she was routinely involved in major civil rights initiatives, including the March on Washington, providing a consistent, steady leadership presence across decades of activism.
Gloria Richardson also holds a significant distinction in this history: she became the first woman to lead a civil rights organization outside of the South, the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, based in Maryland. Under her leadership, the Committee advocated for the Treaty of Cambridge in 1963, which aimed to address housing discrimination and unemployment. Richardson didn't limit her activism to Maryland either, she also participated in the Freedom Rides and the March on Washington, connecting her local organizing work to the broader national movement.
Grassroots Organizing Beyond the South
The Civil Rights Movement's grassroots energy wasn't confined to the South, it showed up powerfully in Northern cities too. In the mid-1960s, the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations was established specifically to protest school segregation in Chicago. Before it disbanded in 1967, the organization expanded its focus to address other pressing issues facing Black Chicagoans, including employment and housing discrimination, showing how school segregation was often just one visible piece of a much larger system of inequality.
The CCCO's biggest action was a one-day school boycott in October 1963, when more than 200,000 Chicago students stayed home to protest overcrowded, segregated schools. In 1966 the CCCO joined Martin Luther King Jr.'s SCLC in the Chicago Freedom Movement, which marched against housing discrimination in white neighborhoods and was met by violent white mobs.
Perhaps most strikingly, in 1964, an astonishing 464,000 students, nearly half of New York City's entire student body, boycotted school to protest racial segregation in the city's schools. This New York City school boycott stands as the largest single-day civil rights protest in United States history, a powerful reminder that the fight against school segregation was hardly limited to the South, it reached into the largest city in the country as well.
Required Sources
SNCC Position Paper: Women in the Movement, 1964
This paper was written anonymously for a SNCC staff retreat in Waveland, Mississippi, in November 1964, when SNCC was debating its future after Freedom Summer. It is usually credited to Casey Hayden and Mary King, two white women on SNCC's staff. The paper lists examples of women in SNCC being assigned typing and other clerical work, left out of decision-making, and passed over for leadership. It compares the way men in the movement assumed women were inferior to the way white Americans assumed Black people were inferior. The paper shows that gender discrimination existed inside the major civil rights organizations, the problem that leaders like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer pushed the movement to face.
SNCC Position Paper: Women in the Movement, written anonymously for the SNCC staff retreat in Waveland, Mississippi, November 1964 (usually credited to Casey Hayden and Mary King)
The paper lists ways women in SNCC were kept in typing and office jobs and left out of decisions, even when they were the most qualified people on staff. It compares the men's assumption that women were inferior to white Americans' assumption that Black people were inferior. The CED includes it to show that gender discrimination existed inside the civil rights movement itself, the problem Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and other women leaders pushed the movement to face.
SNCC Position Paper: Women in the Movement (1964). Source: The Sixties Project, University of Virginia
"Boycott Cripples City Schools; Absences 360,000 Above Normal, Negroes and Puerto Ricans Unite," The New York Times, 1964
The New York Times ran this report on February 4, 1964, the day after the boycott. The headline's number (360,000 absences above normal) is different from the 464,000 in the notes because the city counted about 464,000 students absent that day, and about 360,000 of those absences were above a normal school day. The boycott was organized by Reverend Milton Galamison and a citywide committee of parents and activists, with help from Bayard Rustin, to demand a real plan to integrate the city's schools. The headline's point that "Negroes and Puerto Ricans Unite" matters too: Black and Puerto Rican families, whose children were crowded into the same underfunded schools, protested together, a clear example of grassroots civil rights organizing in the North.
"Boycott Cripples City Schools; Absences 360,000 Above Normal, Negroes and Puerto Ricans Unite," The New York Times, February 4, 1964
This report covers the February 3, 1964, boycott of New York City's public schools, when hundreds of thousands of students stayed home to demand a real plan to integrate the schools. The boycott was organized by Reverend Milton Galamison and a citywide committee, with help from Bayard Rustin, and Black and Puerto Rican families protested together. The CED includes it as an example of mass grassroots organizing in the North, much of it led by parents and local activists.
The New York Times, "Boycott Cripples City Schools" (February 4, 1964). Source: The New York Times archive (a Times subscription may be needed)