Sisters in the Struggle

African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement

Bettye Collier-Thomas, V. P. Franklin

• Éditeur: NYU Press
• Année: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780814772348
• Sujet: Ciencias sociales
• Sous-sujet: Estudios afroamericanos

Women were at the forefront of the civil rights struggle, but their indvidiual stories were rarely heard. Only recently have historians begun to recognize the central role women played in the battle for racial equality.

In Sisters in the Struggle, we hear about the unsung heroes of the civil rights movements such as Ella Baker, who helped found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper who took on segregation in the Democratic party (and won), and Septima Clark, who created a network of "Citizenship Schools" to teach poor Black men and women to read and write and help them to register to vote. We learn of Black women's activism in the Black Panther Party where they fought the police, as well as the entrenched male leadership, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where the behind-the-scenes work of women kept the organization afloat when it was under siege. It also includes first-person testimonials from the women who made headlines with their courageous resistance to segregation—Rosa Parks, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, and Dorothy Height.

This collection represents the coming of age of African-American women's history and presents new stories that point the way to future study.

Contributors: Bettye Collier-Thomas, Vicki Crawford, Cynthia Griggs Fleming, V. P. Franklin, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Duchess Harris, Sharon Harley, Dorothy I. Height, Chana Kai Lee, Tracye Matthews, Genna Rae McNeil, Rosa Parks, Barbara Ransby, Jacqueline A. Rouse, Elaine Moore Smith, and Linda Faye Williams.

Part I
Laying the Groundwork
African American Women and Civil Rights
Before 1950

The essays in Part I focus on the period before 1950 and examine the civil rights activities and concerns of African American women and their organizations. In many ways, the activities of these women laid the groundwork for the modern phase of the Civil Rights Movement that began in the 1950s. Elaine M. Smith in her introduction to the speech “Closed Doors” points out that during her lifetime, Mary McLeod Bethune was sometimes referred to as the “First Lady of the Race.” Widely known as an educator, institution builder, and civil rights activist, Bethune was one of several black women leaders who often worked in a variety of mixed-gender and feminist organizations to eliminate legal segregation and discrimination from American life. In “Closed Doors,” Bethune described the conditions under which African Americans were forced to live and work, and the barriers they confronted in their effort to achieve first-class citizenship. Using her own personal experiences as a black woman, Bethune dramatically expressed the frustrations and hindrances African Americans faced in an American society supposedly committed to “liberty and justice for all.”

V. P. Franklin and Bettye Collier-Thomas’s essay, “For the Race in General and Black Women in Particular: The Civil Rights Activities of African American Women’s Organizations, 1915–1950,” describes how black women’s organizations attempted to pry open the “closed doors” confronting African Americans. We point out that contrary to the arguments presented in some of the emerging scholarship on black feminism, African American women did not define an exclusively feminist agenda for advancing the race. The women’s groups had as part of their overall mission a commitment to engage in activities for the advancement of the African people at the local, national, and even the international levels. Through an analysis of the activities of the New Jersey State Federation of Colored Women, a division of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), and the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority’s Non-Partisan Council, we explain how African American women systematically organized social welfare services in black communities and worked for the passage of legislation to eliminate segregation and discrimination in education, voting rights, the military, employment, and other areas. Civil rights activism became part of these women’s group identity, and the social and political agenda they pursued was meant to benefit African Americans in general and black women in particular.

Unlike Mary McLeod Bethune, who received great acclaim and formal recognition for her contributions to black advancement, Ella Baker for many years was an unsung hero of the Civil Rights Movement. Several recent publications have begun to document Baker’s influence within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); however, Barbara Ransby’s essay, “Behind-the-Scenes View of a Behind-the-Scenes Organizer: The Roots of Ella Baker’s Political Passions,” presents an intimate portrait of Baker’s early years in North Carolina, her relations with her mother, and her circle of friends in the 1930s and 1940s who helped develop and sustain her radical democratic humanism. Baker’s experiences in the 1930s with the Worker’s Education Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Young Negroes Cooperative League, and other leftist groups introduced her to economic alternatives to the capitalist system, while her travels throughout the South in the 1940s as field secretary for the NAACP provided her with the personal knowledge needed for organizing the black working classes. Ella Baker’s passionate attachment to her political and economic principles inspired a new generation of men and women to look beyond what is, and to work selflessly to bring about what ought to be.

Chapter 1
“Closed Doors”
Mary McLeod Bethune on Civil Rights

INTRODUCTION

Elaine M. Smith

Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) stands as an eminent American and one of the country’s most distinguished women. Like about a half dozen other African Americans, she transcended a field to make “an essential contribution to the development of Black America.” Especially in relation to black women, her contributions to major historical developments warranted often-repeated encomiums as “First Lady of Race.” She achieved this status despite an unpromising beginning, including an extremely dark complexion. Her farming parents were slaves, as were most of her sixteen siblings. She attended two missionary-supported black schools: one five miles from her home outside rural Mayesville, South Carolina; the other, Barber Scotia, a residential girls’ seminary, in Concord, North Carolina. Afterward, she spent a year at the integrated Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Returning to the South, she launched a teaching career. Inspired in part by educational role models Emma J. Wilson and Lucy Laney, this career choice blossomed into much more. Along the way, she experienced marriage and motherhood, but they proved minor hindrances to a public life, even though initially, the public frowned on black or white women in that arena. Bethune, however, would not be deterred because of her passionate belief in the leadership ability of black women and their need to fulfill their essential functions in advancing the race.

In the decades before the U.S. Supreme Court repudiated the “separate but equal” doctrine (1954) and virulent, legalized, and pervasive racial subordination sometimes made black militancy a matter of “you walked down the street with your head up,” Bethune understood the centrality of the civil rights struggle to American democracy and to the world. Bethune also helped to blaze the way to the Civil Rights Era (1954–1965) by providing encouragement to people of African descent, using the political system to her advantage, and participating in freedom-fighting organizations. With highly acclaimed accomplishments, oratory, and courage, she inspired her racial kin to hold on and fight for the time when color was irrelevant to opportunity. With regard to achievements, this formidable woman worked wonders. She founded and developed an initially small, nondescript elementary school into Bethune-Cookman College, a baccalaureate institution which thrives today. She engineered new military and public service opportunities for black women both nationally and internationally. While a bureaucrat in the nation’s capital during the desperation and anxiety of depression and war, like the “Mother of the Race,” she succored youth with social services, educational grants, vocational training, and government-facilitated jobs. Also, she became an at-large leader of Black America, as indicated by her organizing and sustaining the mostly male Federal Council on Negro Affairs, better known as the “Black Cabinet.” This involved bringing “together for unified thought and action all the Negroes high in government authority” in service to the race.

In addition to her triumphs, African Americans took heart from this remarkable woman through her magnificent oratory. Speaking in choice diction, free of regional flavor, she used her “organ-chimed voice” to fire up occasions in ways most listeners found memorable. Consequently, she was much sought-after. Bethune’s raw courage, another attribute inspiring the masses, caused the Washington Post to editorialize that it was “equal to any crisis.” Certainly the white-robed Ku Klux Klan could not intimidate her, even while marching twice in front of her school in Daytona Beach, Florida: once to retaliate for her sitting in a railway car for whites only; the other, to prevent her and other black women from registering to vote.

Besides dispensing greatly needed encouragement to people of color, Bethune advanced civil rights through the political system, first as a Republican, and after the 1932 presidential election, as a Democrat. Aubrey Williams, the director of the Depression-spawned National Youth Administration in which Bethune reigned over “Negro Affairs,” attested, “She was a damn good politician. She knew how to use other people for ends she wanted to achieve … She had good goals … She used any means at hand to achieve them.”¹ Bethune put her celebrity to work in the political campaigns of several liberal Democratic politicians, including presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, U.S. Senator Herbert Lehman from New York, and California Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas. She campaigned nonstop, however, for the effective enfranchisement of African Americans and their use of the ballot to advance an agenda that embraced antilynching, employment, education, health care, and housing.

Bethune pressed for an end to discriminatory policies and practices through organizations. She worked in and with many, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, Commission on Interracial Cooperation, Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Southern Conference Educational Fund, National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, and National Committee for Justice in Colombia, Tennessee (1946). Her earliest and dearest freedom-fighting organizations, such as the National Association of Colored Women and the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, were “womanist,” so named because these black sister groups addressed gender and race issues simultaneously without necessarily criticizing black men. Although these activist black women eagerly endeavored to work with white women’s groups, sometimes racism sparked friction, as in 1925 when the International Council of Women sponsored an entertainment in Washington, DC, with segregated seating. Bethune, president of the National Association of Colored Women, worked with others in reversing the practice. This experience proved valuable in mounting larger assaults against legal segregation, especially during her tenure as president of the National Council of Negro Women, which she founded in 1935.

While helping to blaze the path to civil rights by inspiring a race, using the political process, and participating in numerous progressive organizations, at intervals Mary McLeod Bethune addressed predominantly white audiences. “Closed Doors,” the speech that follows, targets such northeastern groups in the latter half of 1936. She declares therein that white racism has produced the greatest handicap known: to be black, and then to be a black woman. Moreover, she intimates that if most whites had their way, they would even consign people of color to a segregated eternity. This titan engages her audience diplomatically, however, using the metaphor “door” for civil rights. Even though African Americans confront “Closed Doors,” they want to enter “every door.” She understands that in her era some “doors” were shut so tightly that they could not be opened; but “with tact, skill, and persistence,” others would. Additional doors would give way because African Americans would batter them down. Bethune attributes President Franklin D. Roosevelt with an inclination “to open doors to the Negro.” Scholars would later emphasize that in the 1930s, Roosevelt’s administration did not exclude African Americans from the New Deal programs. Knowing what the federal government needed to do, what African Americans were doing and would do, Bethune challenged white America to open these doors. Otherwise, this places blacks in a position analogous to the patriots who fought in the American Revolution. From a fount of democratic ideology, Christian principle, and human decency, Bethune joins a long black continuum of freedom-seeking voices—male and female—speaking to the conscience of America.

“CLOSED DOORS”

Mary McLeod Bethune

Frequently from some fair-minded speaker who wishes his platform utterances to fall on pleased ears, comes this expression: “Do not continually emphasize the fact that you are a Negro, forget that,” and quite as frequently there is always the desire to hurl back this challenge, “You be a Negro for just one short twenty-four hours and see what your reaction will be.” A thousand times during that twenty-four hours, without a single word being said, he would be reminded and would realize unmistakably that he is a Negro.²

These are some of the experiences he would have that would be exactly as mine often are: One morning I started to catch a train. There was plenty of time to make the train with ease. Although several taxicabs passed as I stood on the corner trying to hail one, several minutes passed before one would stop to serve me, and so caused me to be three minutes late in catching that train.

On another occasion with time to spare, with sufficient money in my pocket to have every comfort that was necessary, I found that I was compelled to take a “jim crow” car in order to reach my destination in Mississippi. As a passenger on that “jim crow” car there was no service that I could receive in securing a meal, although from every other coach accommodations could be had.

When last winter a nu...