The untold story of Black girls leaders within the Civil Rights Motion – Baptist Information World

It seems that African American men who worked tirelessly to reverse the status of the “invisible man” (a term coined by Ralph Ellison) have found ways to keep women in the leadership of the Church as invisible as possible.

Nothing illustrates this better than the list of speakers at the 1963 March in Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his now famous “I Have a Dream” speech; the phrase may have been borrowed from Prathia Hall. The march was sponsored by so-called Big Six civil rights groups, including:

• The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by Martin Luther King Jr.
• The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, headed by John Lewis.
• The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, led by Roy Wilkins.
• The National Urban League, led by Whitney Young.
• The Racial Equality Congress, directed by James Farmer.
• The National Council of Negro Women, led by Dorothy Height.

Marvin McMickle

All male leaders were given a speaking role on the march on Washington, but Dorothy Height was not allowed to speak that day. During part of the program on August 27, 1963, she stood next to King. However, while all men were allowed to speak on behalf of their respective sponsoring organizations, Height was the only leader denied that opportunity and visibility. She later said, “Your male colleagues were happy to take women into the human family, but there was no question of who ran the household.”

In 2011, Clarence Jones, speechwriter and advisor to King, reflected on the role of women during the March on Washington. He observed:

Women were practically banned from the podium … Not Daisy Bates, president of the Little Rock Chapter of the NAACP, not even Rosa Parks, although both were there … Most of the women in The Movement at the time had some sort of religious glass ceiling – you could have a glass one Name the steeple … The movement was dominated by men, and these men were selfish. There were certainly no female clergymen at Martin’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference … They would be interested in what they had to say, and I wish we had given them that opportunity.

“I wish we had given them this opportunity.” This phrase sums up the nature of sexism and all of the other forms of oppression and marginalization that are at the heart of liberation theology. There is a group with the power to include or exclude other people based on race, class, or gender. By denying individuals the chance to make their contribution to the movement and hearing their voices from their unique position in society, the world will never know what talents have been marginalized and silenced because male leaders were determined to take the limelight to focus on yourself.

“Without women, there would have been no civil rights movement.”

Male civil rights leaders had not only the power, but the best of all reasons, to include women in the March on Washington. Without women there would be no civil rights movement. “I wish we had given them this opportunity.” This is how privileged people speak of those whose lives they consider less valuable than their own.

Jamie Eaddy is a Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School graduate in 2020 as a Doctor of Service. She wrote her dissertation on the microaggressions of women in their pursuit of equality in society in general and in the black church in particular. In this dissertation, Eaddy states: “If your struggle for liberation stops once you are free, then it was not liberation you wanted, but a privilege.”

In her thesis, Eaddy refers to Johnetta Cole, who was the first female president of Spelman College in Atlanta. Cole captures the irony of people who fight against racism but are openly committed to sexism. She says:

Every imaginable human atrocity has been committed against blacks in the name of white supremacy. Now, in an all-black situation, we are experiencing a terrifyingly similar type of oppression, we are seeing various acts of inhumanity directed against black women … the centuries of slavery and racism and the struggle to overcome them have made humanity the Blacks do not inform men when it comes to black women … the oppressive experiences of black men have not stopped them from being oppressors themselves.

The exclusion of women from any role in the March on Washington was clearly a case of male privilege. The fight against racism was on, while sexism was in sight. “I wish we had given them this opportunity.”

“The exclusion of women from any role in the March on Washington was clearly a case of male privilege.”

“You.” Who was Clarence Jones referring to? Who were the people whose voices were deliberately and unanimously silenced? One of them was Rosa Parks, who got on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., On December 1, 1955. Their independent action started the bus boycott in Montgomery. It was this boycott that brought King into national leadership.

They included Daisy Bates, president of the NAACP’s Little Rock Chapter and the leader in efforts to integrate Central High School into the city in 1957.

An FBI photo of Fannie Lou Hamer after she was beaten in prison.

They included Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi tenant who, in 1963, while King and the other civil rights activists were planning the March on Washington, was brutally beaten in a prison cell by another black prisoner on orders from white police officers for seeking the right to vote. In 1964 she was the leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought recognition at the 1964 Democratic Congress and challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation.

“They” contain Ella Baker, who not only worked for King at SCLC in the 1950s, but also helped organize the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in 1960 and orchestrate the Freedom Rides from 1960–1961.

Among them was Diane Nash, who was a student at Fisk University in Nashville in 1960 and was one of the leaders of the sit-in strikes at downtown Woolworth’s department store that made national headlines.

One of them was Septima Clark, who was removed from her position in the South Carolina public school system because she did not want to give up her membership in the NAACP. She used her teaching skills and passion for civil rights to work in the Citizenship Schools, eventually sponsored by SCLC, which taught black people the literacy they needed to become registered voters.

Dorothy Cotton also belonged to “Them”, who was the director of education of the SCLC and also belonged to the inner circle of the SCLC like Andrew Young or Wyatt Tee Walker. She later founded the Atlanta-based Citizen Education Program, which trained disenfranchised people to become civic and political.

One of them was Prathia Hall – who, as noted, coined the phrase “I have a dream,” which King popularized on that march.

Marvin McMickle is a past president of the Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School. He is a graduate of Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Case Western Reserve University, and is a frequent speaker and preacher. This column is an excerpt from his new book Let the Oppressed Go Free, Copyright © 2021 by Judson Press and courtesy of Judson Press.

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