21. Women and the Civil Rights Movement
The bold actions and sacrifices made by many women involved with the Civil Right Movement are frequently overlooked or overshadowed by the contributions of their male counterparts. The pivotal impacts made by notable women like Rosa Parks and JoAnn Robinson are too often credited to figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. Female civil rights activists were subjected to unlawful detainment, assault, torture, and murder. These heroic women, and their stories, generated momentum for the cause, often with little to no acknowledgement.
Trigger warning: this section discusses rape.
How to cite this source?
Remedial Herstory Project Editors. "21. WOMEN AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT." The Remedial Herstory Project. November 1, 2025. www.remedialherstory.com.
When we think about the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, names of prominent Black men often come to mind. And they’re great! But! Alongside those men--or other times off on their own initiatives--were women of color. Black women were a fearless force to be reckoned with in the Civil Rights Movement, and their work for social justice began well before the white press began paying attention.
Black people had been working for Civil Rights since the Civil War ended--through Reconstruction, after the Supreme Court upheld segregation in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, and through the Great Migration surrounding WWI. But it was the aftermath of WWII that finally pushed Civil Rights to bold national, white, awareness. Black folks found the American rhetoric about the mistreatment of European Jews deeply hypocritical. Many could clearly see parallels between the ghettos of Europe and the redlined cities of the US. Americans and the American government were obsessed with condemning prejudice overseas, but were often reluctant or indifferent to the prejudice in their own backyard.
Black women especially had been dealing with horrifying prejudice for generations, and some of the earliest civil rights activists were fighting for legal protections in the aftermath of sexual assaults against Black women.
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Rapes of Recy Taylor and Gertrude Perkins
Rape and sexual assault of Black women has a long history in the United States. Enslaved women were often terrorized sexually while working on plantations. That trauma persisted for decades. In the South, most states developed laws that incentivized the rape and sexual assault of their female slaves by defining the children of enslaved women as the property of their white owners. With a foundation of race and gender relations like that, many white men simply didn’t see women of color as equal human beings. They saw these women as bodies that could give birth to greater wealth. Specifically, many white men didn’t understand Black women had rights to their own bodies--a concept called bodily integrity.
The predominant perpetrators of rape in Southern communities were white men. But for some reason, a fear of Black male sexuality grew in the public dialogue during the Reconstruction era. Black men were regularly and often falsely accused of sexual assault of white women, usually resulting in convictions and the death penalty, or vigilante justice by lynching. Meanwhile white men, accused of the same crime, might never see the inside of a jail cell–or might argue that the rape was actually consensual sex. This double standard in southern courts led women of color to often staying silent in the face of sexual harassment and assault. However, as it became more clear Black men were unable to defend “their women” because of white terrorism, Black women eventually realized they would need to use their own voices.
Although not the first and certainly not the last, Recy Taylor stands out as a woman undeterred by white male aggression. On September 3rd, 1944, when she was 24-years-old, she was walking home from church in Abbeville, Alabama, with her friend and her friend’s teenage son when she was abducted and raped by six white men. Dumped from the car blindfolded, she was miraculously able to stumble home, bloodied and terrified, and turned that fear into action. She reported the account to her family and the Sheriff investigated. Taylor couldn’t identify the assailants but could describe the car and only one man in town had a car fitting the description. The driver named names and all the men stated that it wasn’t rape. They claimed to have paid her for sex.
During the fallout, white terrorists set Taylor’s porch on fire to intimidate her. Her family moved in with her parents and the Black community set up a guard in a nearby tree at night.
Of the encounter, Taylor said, “The peoples there — they seemed like they wasn’t concerned about what happened to me, and they didn’t try and do nothing about it. I can’t help but tell the truth of what they done to me.” Even though she worried pushing for justice was putting her family in danger, she couldn’t help but tell the truth.
The NAACP sent a young female activist from Montgomery, Alabama to investigate the case. She was also a sexual assault survivor, and her name was Rosa Parks. The story was published in the Black press and African Americans around the country demanded that the men be prosecuted. The police attempted to intimidate Parks and threatened her in order to get her to leave town, but Parks–who, later, will become more well known for once again staying where she wanted–didn’t leave.
Taylor’s case resulted in a Grand Jury procedure, but none of the white men were arrested or indicted. Eugene Gordon, a Black writer for The Daily Worker, said, “The raping of Mrs. Recy Taylor was a fascist-like brutal violation of her personal rights as a woman and as a citizen of democracy.”
Soon famous leaders of Black liberation and suffrage like Mary Church Terrell worked for Taylor’s case too, but a second grand jury resulted in the same inaction. Although Taylor never got the justice she deserved, her fierce boldness was an inspiring piece of the collective movement. Taylor’s case would not be the last of this sort.
On March 27, 1949, Gertrude Perkins was walking home when two white Montgomery police officers arrested her for “public drunkenness.” They threw her in the squad car, drove to a secluded spot, and raped her at gunpoint. Perkins first reported the crime to a Reverend who wisely had her account notarized. “We didn’t go to bed that morning…I kept her at my house, carefully wrote down what she said,” he reported. Perkins then bravely, with supportive escorts, reported the crime to the all white police. The police chief flat out refused to investigate claiming, “my policemen would not do a thing like that.”
Again, Rosa Parks was called in. It seemed like case after case of assault on the bodies of Black women, but little was done by the white establishment. Black women did not benefit from gendered assumptions about sexual virtue and purity because of white supremacy.
Recy Taylor 1944, Public Domain
Women’s Political Council
Finally, the women of Montgomery, Alabama had enough. They organized the Women’s Political Council under the leadership of JoAnn Robinson. They decided to direct their anger against racist bus drivers--white men who threatened or harassed Black women daily, as they headed to and from work. Plus, drivers had police authority back then, so they carried weapons--obviously making it difficult to confront them. One specific driver would expose himself to Black women as he pulled up to their stop. Clearly many of these drivers felt untouchable.
It was dangerous to file a complaint against one of these drivers. And yet! In 1953 alone, Black citizens of Montgomery filed over thirty formal complaints of abuse and mistreatment on the buses.
As early as 1954 Robinson threatened a boycott of the city buses. She wrote in a letter to the mayor, “Mayor Gayle, three-fourths of the riders of these public conveyances are Negroes. If Negroes did not patronize them, they could not possibly operate. More and more of our people are already arranging with neighbors and friends to ride to keep from being insulted and humiliated by bus drivers… Please consider this plea, and if possible, act favorably upon it, for even now plans are being made to ride less, or not at all, on our buses.”
Jo Ann Robinson, Public Domain
Colvin and Parks Protest
But, of course, the situation continued. On March 2, 1955, Claudette Colvin, a teenager from Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus. She was removed from the bus by two police officers and kept in a jail cell until her mother and pastor posted her bail. She hoped word of her experience would help elevate the cause of integration, but she became pregnant. Because most people had negative attitudes toward unmarried mothers, her actions did not receive public attention.
While, the NAACP geared up for direct action against segregation in Montgomery, the local male chapter leadership did not feel that the community was ready. So it was actually the actions of individual women--like Lucille Times--that pushed Montgomery’s Black community to the soon to be historical bus boycott. On June 15, 1955, Mrs. Times was driving to her local dry cleaners when the driver of a city bus tried to force her off the road. She and the driver exchanged angry words and even punches. When the police were called she was lucky not to have been arrested or beaten. When her complaints about the driver’s actions were ignored, Lucille Times mounted a one-woman boycott of city buses. She used her own car to offer rides to people waiting at bus stops, explaining why it was important to strike an economic blow against segregation.
Six months later, the Black community in Montgomery was up and ready for action. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, now a veteran in the struggle for bodily integrity, refused to give up her seat. She was arrested.
Overnight JoAnn Robinson threw the community into action. She wrote and distributed with the help of the Women’s Political Council 35 thousand copies of this leaflet:
“Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped. Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate.” Translation: you think we’re bluffing? Try us.
The next day women and men walked to work. Historian Danielle McGuire comments on how the root of the bus boycott came from the earlier assault on Black women’s bodies. She says, “These experiences propelled African American women into every conceivable aspect of the boycott. Women were the chief strategists and negotiators of the boycott and ran its day-to-day operation. Women helped staff the elaborate carpool system, raised most of the local money for the movement, and filled the majority of the pews at the mass meetings, where they testified publicly about physical and sexual abuse on the buses.” While those initial assault losses were brutal, they set the scene and propelled the Black community toward the most well-known event of the Civil Rights era.
Scenes from the Montgomery Bus Boycott were broadcast throughout the nation. Images of people walking to work inspired activists throughout the South to continue challenging segregation, but the women who started the movement were pushed to the side when the male leaders and reverends in the community took over the boycott and became their figureheads.. Names like the then 26-year-old Martin Luther King overshadowed the women, and in some cases took credit for their efforts.
Rosa Parks being fingerprinted in 1956, by Lt. D.H. Lackey as part of the Montgomery bus boycott, Public Domain
Linda Brown, Little Rock Nine, and Ruby Bridges
Of course, Montgomery was only the beginning of the movement. Quietly in the courts a little girl named Linda Brown was fighting a battle for equal education. In 1951 she was denied entrance to Topeka’s all-white elementary schools. She recalled being a “very young child when I started walking to school. I remember the walk as being very long at that time… it was very frightening to me…I remember walking, tears freezing up on my face, because I began to cry because it was so cold.”
The NAACP was seeking a case to challenge segregated schools and hers was the ticket. They sent their best, Thurgood Marshall, to argue the case. In 1954 the Supreme Court adjudicated Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. Marshall argued against decades of standing legal precedent from Plessy v. Ferguson, stating that separate was inherently unequal.
Marshall’s victory in the Supreme Court led to schools across the country desegregating. However, states in the South refused. Daisy Bates, the president of the Arkansas NAACP chapter, led the NAACP to sue the Little Rock School Board after recruiting nine students to integrate into the high school. In 1957, the Little Rock Nine were met with white violence and threats of lynching. Bates guided and prepared the students to face resistance and taunts, but the situation escalated to the point of real danger.
In the wake of the violence, President Dwight Eisenhower sent the famous 101st Airborne division to Little Rock. Soldiers occupied the school and protected the students for the entire school year.
In 1960, Ruby Bridges was just six years old when she became the first Black student to integrate an elementary school. Ruby and her mother were escorted by four federal marshals to the school every day that year because of the violent mobs who would appear to protest the education of a child. Bridges later said she once saw a woman holding a black baby doll in a coffin.
The choice to integrate was hard on Ruby and her family. She spent her first day in the principal’s office, whites withdrew their children permanently, and only one teacher, Barbara Henry, a white Boston native, was willing to teach Ruby. Northerners sent money to support the family, but it was tough. Her dad lost his job and whites refused to do business with the family. Still, Ruby never missed a day of school.
Robert F. Wagner with Little Rock students 1958, Public Domain
US Marshals with Young Ruby Bridges on School Steps 1960, Public Domain
Sit Ins and Freedom Rides
In February 1960, college men and women staged sit-ins at Woolworth store lunch counters. Students sat peacefully for hours as they were refused service by nervous waitresses. Diane Nash Bevel was a leader within the student movement at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her family was horrified, and she was nervous, not wanting to go to jail, but she said, “When the time came, I went.”
Women, including Nash, were also active participants in the Freedom Rides. They rode interstate buses and attempted to integrate local restrooms, waiting areas, and restaurants. The Freedom Riders were brutally beaten and one of their buses was set afire. Riders were also imprisoned at Mississippi’s Parchman Prison, where they were subjected to brutal treatment. Nash knew that if they let the violence stop them the cause would be lost. She said, “We recognized that if the Freedom Ride was ended right then after all that violence, southern white racists would think that they could stop a project by inflicting enough violence on it… we wouldn’t have been able to have any kind of movement for voting rights, for buses, public accommodations or anything after that, without getting a lot of people killed first.”
Nash would go on to co-found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Alabama Voting Rights Project. Her work helped to ensure passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, federal legislation that sought to ensure black people could vote.
As we saw with Ruby Bridges, age was not a deterrent for white violence. In 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed by terrorists. The only victims were five young girls who had been in the basement, two of them sisters, gathered in the ladies room in their best dresses, happily chatting. One of the girls survived but lost her eye. Their deaths took Civil Rights international--with people all over the world arguing for the end of racism in America. The girls became martyrs to the movement, and the grief galvanized the movement, which at last solidified the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But of course, though the Civil Rights Act was an important victory, it did not magically end prejudice in the US.
In the summer of 1964, students from northern colleges joined civil rights activists to organize voter registration drives in Mississippi. In spite of their efforts to register Black voters, white primaries and intimidation made it difficult for Black people to exercise political power. In response, Fannie Lou Hamer and others established the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that challenged the regular party for seats at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. Unfortunately, the challengers lost their battle for representation and returned to Mississippi frustrated. In the process, many people were arrested. In one incident, white police officers forced two Black prisoners to savagely beat Hamer, and she almost died.
The violence and intimidation clearly continued. Women civil rights workers of all races were not immune from beatings, or murder. Viola Liuzzo, a white housewife from Detroit, joined Dr. King after witnessing the brutal “Bloody Sunday” march across the Edmund Pettus bridge on television. She attended the later completion of the march. Afterwards, as she shuttled other marchers back, she was ambushed and shot from a passing vehicle by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Civil Rights Activists considered her yet another martyr for their cause. Racists denigrated her–describing her as a sexually promiscuous woman who abandoned her family. If she had just stayed home, they argued, she would still be alive.
In 1967, the federal government intervened with Civil Rights again in the Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia. Richard and Mildred Loving challenged Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act. The Act, which dated back to 1924, banned interracial marriage. The Lovings won in a unanimous ruling–the Court finding laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional–thus overturning all race-based marriage restrictions across the country.
March in memory of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing victims 1963, Public Domain
Black Power and Nonviolence
Many participants in the Civil Rights Movement expressed frustration at the slow progress of the peaceful demonstrations. SNCC expelled its white members, asserting that it was time for Black rights to come from Black action. Stokley Carmichel articulated the idea of Black Power in 1966, and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in the same year in reaction to the Assassination of Malcolm X. By the time Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968 the Black Panthers had roughly 2000 members around the country and were growing. However, not all Black people, including women, were convinced to depart from nonviolence.
Coretta Scott King was one such contrarian--even though peaceful protest had obviously been very hard on her family. When her husband Dr. King was attacked or hospitalized, she was the one in the hospital caring for and supporting him. Coretta, along with her children, was in the house when it was bombed in 1956. She was often stuck between her father, who was concerned about her safety, and her husband who wanted her to be with him. She personally came under attack when the FBI mailed her tapes alleging her husband's affairs, a disclosure intended to destroy King’s marriage and thus dismantle the support system underneath him. In the aftermath of her husband’s assassination, King doubled down on nonviolence and became heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement. She founded the King Center for nonviolent social change and led as president and CEO.
But back to the Black Power movement. It did grow, despite being sometimes polarizing. Clearly, the violence against Black people topped the movement’s list of priorities. In 1968 the average age of a Panther was 19 and half were women. Female Panthers often worked 18-hour days to actualize the party’s vision. Women didn’t dominate headlines or get media sound bites, but they were the soul of daily operations and the community survival programs–particularly their medical programs (their clinics and sickle cell blood testing programs) and their breakfast programs.
Although the party had community building aims, it was not portrayed that way in the press. It was also under constant surveillance and attack by the police and FBI. On June 15, 1969, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared that “the Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to internal security of the country.” By 1970, many of the party’s leaders had been imprisoned or killed in gun battles with police.
Angela Davis, a respected scholar and professor, was very active in Black Power. In 1970, she was accused of supplying guns to a group that staged an armed takeover of a California courtroom. She was kept in prison for more than a year, and then acquitted of all charges in 1972. Davis’s struggle against the legal system was a symbol of the continuing efforts by the government to repress unpopular views, especially when such views were held by Black women.
A Panther named Akua Njeri, then 19, was engaged to the charismatic Fred Hampton, the leader of the powerful Chicago chapter. On December 4, 1969, she was nine months pregnant when a group of police stormed into their apartment on Chicago’s West Side to execute a search warrant for illegal guns. They came in shooting and instantly killed one of the Panther men. Njeri woke to bullets flying past her and Hampton, but he was somehow still asleep. We now know he was drugged by an FBI informant within the Panther ranks. She recalled straddling Hampton’s body to protect him from the barrage of bullets, which only momentarily stopped when another person in the apartment yelled, “Stop shooting, stop shooting, we have a pregnant woman, pregnant sister in here!" By several accounts the officers then entered the bedroom and shot Hampton dead, point-blank. Njeri was jailed, supporters paid her bail, and she gave birth under extreme stress to her son Fred Hampton, Jr.
Angela Davis 1974, Public Domain
Sexism in the Panthers
Despite being active in social reform and civil rights, the Panthers, like many other civil rights groups, were not immune to sexism. Party leaders favored promoting men members, sexualized women members, and had double standards. While in general the party adopted the free love movement and embraced diverse sexualities, some heterosexual male Panthers expected and demanded sexual favors from women. And some women definitely resented that.
Only one woman became leader of the organization in its history, Elaine Brown in 1974. Her statement to the organization made her dominance clear, “I have all the guns and the money. I can withstand challenges from without and from within. ” Brown put women in key administrative positions, which made some men in the party upset. After a short service Brown left the party when a female administrator, Regina Davis, was beaten and hospitalized by members of the party at the approval of Huey Newton. “The beating of Regina would be taken as a clear signal that the words ‘Panther’ and ‘comrade’ had taken on gender connotations, denoting an inferiority in the female half of us.”
Conclusion
The inequities both in the Panthers and the wider Civil Rights Movement drove many women toward intersectional feminism. The Civil Rights Movement was an empowering but incredibly difficult time for Black women. The work of activists and countless protesters of all races brought about new legislation to end segregation, voter suppression, discriminatory employment, and housing practices. Yet today, so much still remains to be done.
By the end of this era, so much remained in question. How can social equality for people of color be achieved in this country? What effect did Black women have on improving sexism within Civil Rights ranks? Did women’s participation in the civil rights movement contribute to the emergence of second wave feminism?
