4.7 Black Women’s Leadership and Grassroots Organizing in the Civil Rights Movement

Black women organized boycotts, ran meetings, taught citizenship classes, raised money and risked their lives. Yet men usually held the public leadership roles, and women often faced gender discrimination inside the major organizations. Leaders like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer insisted on fighting both racial and gender discrimination, carrying on a long tradition of Black women activists (2.14, 3.8).

Ella Baker, sometimes called the mother of the Civil Rights movement, worked for the NAACP and the SCLC before helping students found SNCC in 1960. She believed in grassroots organizing and group-centered leadership: rather than relying on one famous leader, ordinary people should develop their own leadership.

At SNCC's founding conference in 1960, Baker argued that the student sit-ins at lunch counters were about more than the right to buy a hamburger. They were a demand for the full inclusion of African Americans in every part of American life. She encouraged young people to take on both racism and sexism.

Fannie Lou Hamer was a Mississippi sharecropper who was fired and evicted after she tried to register to vote in 1962, and later brutally beaten in jail. She became a SNCC organizer and a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Her televised testimony at the 1964 Democratic National Convention described the violence Black Mississippians faced for trying to vote.

Dorothy Height led the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years and worked on major civil rights projects, including the March on Washington, often behind the scenes.

The required 1964 SNCC position paper, 'Women in the Movement', was written anonymously for a SNCC staff retreat. It argued that women in the organization were often given clerical and support work and left out of decisions, and it compared these assumptions about women to the racial assumptions SNCC was fighting. It's an early example of activists naming sexism inside a movement for racial justice.

The movement was national. In Chicago, the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), formed in the early 1960s, protested school segregation and later took on job and housing discrimination before disbanding in 1967. In Cambridge, Maryland, Gloria Richardson led the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, the first civil rights group outside the South led by a woman, which fought housing discrimination and unemployment.

On February 3, 1964, about 464,000 students, nearly half of New York City's public school students, stayed home to protest segregated schools. It was the largest single-day civil rights protest in US history. The required New York Times article reported that Black and Puerto Rican families joined together in the boycott.