Mingo, AnneMarie. 2024. Have You Got Good Religion? Black Women’s Faith, Courage, and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement

Journal Article Remembering the Dream: Alice Walker, Meridian and the Civil Rights Movement Get access Roberta M. Hendrickson Roberta M. Hendrickson University of Wyoming Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 24, Issue 3, September 1999, Pages 111–128, https://doi.org/10.2307/468042 Published: 01 September 1999

12 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 82, NO 2 82 No.2 November 1968. Four years later, she launched a presidential bid that, though unsuccessful, received national attention and support. Since then, more than seventy women of color have been elected to Congress, including Carol Mosely Braun, the first Black woman elected to the Senate, in 1993 (and only the second Black senator since the Reconstruction era). It is important to note that after close to a hundred years of political mobilizing and activism, Black women are still not fully represented in Congress, and this country has never elected a Black woman to serve as the governor of a state or the president of the country. Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement The years 1954-1972, more commonly known as the modern Civil Rights Movement, were a time when Black people increased their effort and pressure to force the government to end segregation, both in theory and in practice.6 As they were during the antislavery movement of the nineteenth century, Black women were instrumental in the success of the Civil Rights Movement. Although their contributions and struggles may not be a part of the greater discussions, they must be noted and recognized in order to gain a true understanding of the role women played to advance the cause of civil rights.7 Though there are a number of Black women from the Civil Rights Movement who could (and should) be profiled—Ada Sipuel, Diane Nash, and Gloria Richardson immediately come to mind8 —this paper will specifically narrow the scope to look at those women whose contributions to strengthening the political power of the Black community were so extensive that any civil rights conversation that does not include them is not accurate, complete, or exact. These women, in a sense, are the lenses through which one can see how the Civil Rights Movement was shaped and nurtured by the commitment and contributions of Black women, as a whole. Two of the women, Dorothy I. Height and Coretta Scott King, are familiar names, but their contributions to the Civil Rights Movement may not be as well-known as they should be.9 The other three, Ella Jo Baker, Septima Poinsette Clark, and Fannie Lou Hamer, are names that may not be as familiar, but their contributions must be included (evaluated and critiqued) in the greater discussion about the Civil Rights Movement.10 Ella Jo Baker EllaJosephineBaker(December13,1903–December13,1986) worked as a field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), acting executive director for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and mentor for the students who founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).11 Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1903, Baker was the granddaughter of slaves, and thedaughterofawaiterandateacher.In1927,afterchallenging school policies and procedures, she graduated at the top of her class from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and moved to New York City. She quickly became involved in the struggle for Black political and economic equality and later joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL). One year later, she was elected as the league’s first national director. In 1941, Baker began working as the assistant field secretary for the NAACP. Two years later she was promoted (without her NEVERTHELESS, THEY PERSISTED: BLACK WOMEN AND THE FIRE WITHIN THEM Examining the Legacies of Ella Jo Baker, Septima Poinsette Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Irene Height, and Coretta Scott King By: Karsonya Wise Whitehead “Too long have we been silent under unjust and unholy charges; we cannot expect to have them removed until we disprove them through ourselves.” —Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin1 Black women have historically been actively involved in political and social action. From voter registration to community activism, they have effectively organized from within and on behalf of the community. During the early days of the Women’s Movement, even though their participation was not always included in the history books, they were at the meeting tables helping to organize, fundraise, and demonstrate for change.2 They fought multiple battles, including working to end American enslavement and working to establish the right to vote for Black people. When the Civil War ended...

Challenging Historical Iconography:A Look at Women's Everyday Political Mobilization Crystal R. Sanders (bio) Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 255 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $34.95 Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 352 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography and index. $34.95 Rebecca Tuuri, Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xii + 313 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography and index. $29.95 Iconography in history can be a dangerous thing. It encourages the deification of men such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X as lone freedom fighters in the long civil rights movement. It codes Pan-African strategists as male and reduces the long and wide geographical arc of white supremacy to the actions of a few men such as George Wallace and Ross Barnett. The danger with historical iconography is that it leads to inaccurate and reductionist accounts of history. It often marginalizes women's leadership or excludes them altogether. Three recently published monographs about black and white women's everyday political mobilization, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom; Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy; and Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, push back against historical narratives that center exclusively on men. These works show that from civil rights struggles and massive resistance in the United States to global black nationalist movements, women have played pivotal roles. Together, the books complicate our understanding of gender and the ways in which women have attempted to make sense of the world they live in and transform. The works also challenge male-dominated narratives about civil rights activism, black emigration, and American conservatism. While these books are not the first [End Page 629] to put female actors at center stage, they expand our knowledge of women's political work in various arenas. In Strategic Sisterhood, Rebecca Tuuri introduced readers to the longstanding political and social justice work of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), an elite black women's organization formed by Mary McLeod Bethune in 1935. The esteemed black woman educator and activist sought to unite black women's sororities, professional organizations, and auxiliaries to improve black women and their communities. Under Bethune's tenure from 1935 until 1949, the council focused on obtaining federal government jobs and military opportunities for black women but failed to shed its elitist image. In addition to Bethune, other powerful black women who held NCNW leadership positions include Sadie Alexander, the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in economics in the United States, and Patricia Harris, the first African American woman to serve in a United States presidential cabinet and to serve as a United States ambassador. While NCNW membership has consisted mainly of middle-class black women, the council supported both moderate and radical black activism throughout the twentieth century, partnering both with interracial groups and groups committed to black separatism. While it is now expected that scholarship on the civil rights movement include the contributions of women, studies that focus on women's civil rights organizations remain rare. Historian Tiyi Morris's Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi (2015) is one notable exception. Tuuri's scholarship on the NCNW, the largest black women's organization in the United States at the height of the civil rights, Black Power, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, helps to fill the void and complicates traditional understandings of radical political organizing. Dorothy Height assumed the NCNW presidency in 1956 and used the position to ensure that black women's voices and perspectives were included in civil rights leadership gatherings throughout the 1960s. When March on Washington organizers denied women a major speaking role at the historic event in 1963, Height, under the auspices of the NCNW, organized a women's conference the very next day. She convened...

moving account of a key figure in American history contributes greatly to our understanding of the past. It also informs our vision of the servant leader needed to guide the 1990s --Marian Wright Edelman, President, Children's Defense Fund First-rate intellectual and political history, this study explores the relations between the practical objectives of SNCC and its moral and cultural goals. --Irwin Unger, Author of These United States and Postwar America Moses emerges from these pages as that rare modern hero, the man whose life enacts his principles, the rebel who steadfastly refuses to be victim or executioner and who mistrusts even his own leadership out of commitment to cultivating the strength, self-reliance, and solidarity of those with and for whom he is working. Eric Burner's engrossing account of Robert Moses's legendary career brings alive the everyday realities of the Civil Rights Movement, especially the gruelling campaign for voter registration and political organization in Mississippi. --Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities, Emory University, author of Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South Next to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Bob Moses was arguably one of the most influential and respected leaders of the civil rights movement. Quiet and intensely private, Moses quickly became legendary as a man whose conduct exemplified leadership by example. He once resigned as head of the Council of Federated Organizations because my position there was too strong, too central. Despite his centrality to the most important social movement in modern American history, Moses' life and the philosophy on which it is based have only been given cursory treatment and have never been the subject of a book-length biography. Biography is, by its very nature, a complicated act of recovery, even more so when the life under scrutiny deliberately avoids such attention. Eric Burner therefore sets out here not to reveal the secret Bob Moses, but to examine his moral philosophy and his political and ideological evolution, to provide a picture of the public person. In essence, his book provides a primer on a figure who spoke by silence and led through example. Moses spent almost three years in Mississippi trying to awaken the state's black citizens to their moral and legal rights before the fateful summer of 1964 would thrust him and the Freedom Summer movement into the national spotlight. We follow him through the civil rights years -- his intensive, fearless tradition of community organizing, his involvements with SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and his negotiations with the Department of Justice --as Burner chronicles both Moses' political activity and his intellectual development, revealing the strong influence of French philosopher Albert Camus on his life and work. Moses' life is marked by the conflict between morality and politics, between purity and pragmatism, which ultimately left him disillusioned with a traditional Left that could talk only of coalitions and leaders from the top. Pursued by the Vietnam draft board for a war which he opposed, Moses fled to Canada in 1966 before departing for Africa in 1969 to spend the next decade teaching in Tanzania. Returning in 1977 under President Carter's amnesty program, he was awarded a five-year MacArthur genius grant in 1982 to establish and develop an innovative program to teach math to Boston's inner-city youth called the Algebra Project. The success of the program, which Moses has referred to as our version of Civil Rights 1992, has landed him on the cover of The New York Times Magazineemphasizing the new, central dimension that math and computer literacy lends to the pursuit of equal rights. And Gently He Shall Lead Them is the story of a remarkable man, an elusive hero of the civil rights movement whose flight from adulation has only served to increase his reputation as an intellectual and moral leader, a man whom nobody ever sees, but whose work is always in evidence. From his role as one of the architects of the civil rights movement thirty years ago to his ongoing work with inner city children, Robert Moses remains one of America's most courageous, energetic, and influential leaders. Wary of the cults of celebrity he saw surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and fueled by a philosophy that shunned leadership, Moses has always labored behind the scenes. This first biography, a primer in the life of a unique American, sheds significant light on the intellectual and philosophical worldview of a man who is rarely seen but whose work is always in evidence.

"This moving account of a key figure in American history contributes greatly to our understanding of the past. It also informs our vision of the servant leader needed to guide the 1990s movement." — Marian Wright Edelman, President, Children's Defense Fund "First-rate intellectual and political history, this study explores the relations between the practical objectives of SNCC and its moral and cultural goals." — Irwin Unger, Author of These United States and Postwar America "Robert Moses emerges from these pages as that rare modern hero, the man whose life enacts his principles, the rebel who steadfastly refuses to be victim or executioner and who mistrusts even his own leadership out of commitment to cultivating the strength, self-reliance, and solidarity of those with and for whom he is working. Eric Burner's engrossing account of Robert Moses's legendary career brings alive the everyday realities of the Civil Rights Movement, especially the gruelling campaign for voter registration and political organization in Mississippi." — Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities, Emory University, author of Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South Next to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Bob Moses was arguably one of the most influential and respected leaders of the civil rights movement. Quiet and intensely private, Moses quickly became legendary as a man whose conduct exemplified leadership by example. He once resigned as head of the Council of Federated Organizations because "my position there was too strong, too central." Despite his centrality to the most important social movement in modern American history, Moses' life and the philosophy on which it is based have only been given cursory treatment and have never been the subject of a book-length biography. Biography is, by its very nature, a complicated act of recovery, even more so when the life under scrutiny deliberately avoids such attention. Eric Burner therefore sets out here not to reveal the "secret" Bob Moses, but to examine his moral philosophy and his political and ideological evolution, to provide a picture of the public person. In essence, his book provides a primer on a figure who spoke by silence and led through example. Moses spent almost three years in Mississippi trying to awaken the state's black citizens to their moral and legal rights before the fateful summer of 1964 would thrust him and the Freedom Summer movement into the national spotlight. We follow him through the civil rights years — his intensive, fearless tradition of community organizing, his involvements with SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and his negotiations with the Department of Justice —as Burner chronicles both Moses' political activity and his intellectual development, revealing the strong influence of French philosopher Albert Camus on his life and work. Moses' life is marked by the conflict between morality and politics, between purity and pragmatism, which ultimately left him disillusioned with a traditional Left that could talk only of coalitions and leaders from the top. Pursued by the Vietnam draft board for a war which he opposed, Moses fled to Canada in 1966 before departing for Africa in 1969 to spend the next decade teaching in Tanzania. Returning in 1977 under President Carter's amnesty program, he was awarded a five-year MacArthur genius grant in 1982 to establish and develop an innovative program to teach math to Boston's inner-city youth called the Algebra Project. The success of the program, which Moses has referred to as our version of Civil Rights 1992, has landed him on the cover of The New York Times Magazineemphasizing the new, central dimension that math and computer literacy lends to the pursuit of equal rights. And Gently He Shall Lead Them is the story of a remarkable man, an elusive hero of the civil rights movement whose flight from adulation has only served to increase his reputation as an intellectual and moral leader, a man whom nobody ever sees, but whose work is always in evidence. From his role as one of the architects of the civil rights movement thirty years ago to his ongoing work with inner city children, Robert Moses remains one of America's most courageous, energetic, and influential leaders. Wary of the cults of celebrity he saw surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and fueled by a philosophy that shunned leadership, Moses has always labored behind the scenes. This first biography, a primer in the life of a unique American, sheds significant light on the intellectual and philosophical worldview of a man who is rarely seen but whose work is always in evidence.

On the Novel and Civic Myth

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

The freedom struggle for Black Americans has cycled through American history. This reflection aims to recount lessons from the civil rights movement through a Black feminist lens from three scholars that grew up in South Carolina, home to years of racial tension and divide. To connect the Civil Rights Movement to the current Black Lives Matter movement, it is imperative to address the unsung heroes who made strides to dismantle the anti-Black narratives, laws, and policies that reinforce notions of racial inferiority. As such, Black women have been in the pits of the anti-Black struggle during both the civil rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. Black women have the unique lived experience of being Black and women, when race and gender are often focused on separately. These intersections are extremely important in considering the behind-the-scenes roles of women during the civil rights movement compared to women's roles at the forefront of the current Black Lives Matter movement. This work applies Black feminist thought toward a historical discussion on movements of social change for Black people. Additional reflections on the current role of Black women and adult education on voter rights toward the 2020 election and reflections on the recent Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as the first Black and South Asian woman to hold that title are included.

Reviewed by: The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture by Deanna M. Gillespie Evan Faulkenbury The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture. By Deanna M. Gillespie. Southern Dissent. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2021. Pp. xviii, 260. $95.00, ISBN 978-0-8130-6694-3.) Across Savannah, Georgia, in 1963, Black women educated community members about taking collective action against Jim Crow. Cassie Pierce led discussions that tackled current issues, noting, “The project has . . . awakened the individuals that were asleep and caused interest and understanding” (p. 89). Another teacher, Daisy P. Jones, similarly observed in her students how the material covered “changed [a student’s] attitude toward voting and helping his people and himself instead of always kowtowing to someone” (p. 89). And another instructor, Dorothy Boles, found that after Black men and women took citizenship classes, “They walk, talk, and act like new people with determination and more courage to face the future” (p. 89). Stories like these populate historian Deanna M. Gillespie’s important book, The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture. Gillespie focuses on the history of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), which originated in 1957 and ended in 1970. The CEP, Gillespie argues, was a vital, though underappreciated, component of the Black freedom movement [End Page 184] in the South. According to Gillespie, “Everyone and no one knew about CEP classes,” because they were such a regular part of Black community life across the American South (p. 3). As a result, the CEP has remained in the background of the historiography of the movement. In CEP classes, Black men and women learned how to read, write, advocate, vote, and participate in a democracy. In so doing, the CEP “contributed to the groundswell for social justice” (p. 2). The CEP first took shape in the South Carolina Lowcountry during the late 1950s. Teachers received training at the Highlander Folk School and brought their knowledge, handbooks, and course materials to local communities. They led classes in churches, community centers, and beauty salons, with a staggering amount of local interest. Students learned how government functioned, how they could get involved in political life, what they could do to maximize their citizenship capability, and how best to use their individual and collective voices to decry the racial caste system. In 1961, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took over from Highlander to administer the CEP. Operating throughout the South, the CEP, its teachers, and its students laid the groundwork for local civil rights movements in many communities. “This was subversive work in the Jim Crow South,” as Gillespie writes, “because reading, writing, and calculating was empowering” (p. 2). Drawing on oral histories, administrative files, attendance records, narrative CEP meeting reports, and other primary sources, Gillespie reconstructs this behind-the-scenes history of the civil rights movement. She focuses on several case studies from the states where the CEP was most active, including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The chapters trace the CEP’s growth, impact, and eventual decline during the late 1960s as monetary contributions dwindled and momentum shifted. But even though the program remained in the background and ended with little fanfare, Gillespie shows why we must take the CEP into account when we consider the sweep of the Black freedom struggle in the South. She quantifies the program’s impact: between 1961 and 1970, the CEP cultivated 2,349 teachers who taught 7,280 classes with an enrollment of 26,686 people. Women like Cassie Pierce, Daisy P. Jones, and Dorothy Boles were crucial to the success of not only the CEP but also the larger civil rights movement. By advertising their services, gathering around tables, teaching neighbors how to fill out forms, and informing them about their rights as citizens, these Black women sustained the movement. Gillespie’s book does their story justice. Evan Faulkenbury SUNY Cortland Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Over the past few decades, scholars of the post-World War II civil rights movement have revisited key issues related to the goals, strategies, ideologies, participants, and periodization of black freedom struggles. As part of this conceptual remapping, historians of the African American experience have rethought how and where to locate the civil rights movement. This has geographically broadened the movement's scope to include previously understudied struggles in the North as well as in the South during the movement's heroic, “classical” period. Notwithstanding its significant insights, this emphasis on “nationalizing” the civil rights movement narrative carries the risk of flattening meaningful differences of historical place. Among other things, this approach can oversimplify the varying modes of white racial control and black agency across regions. This essay responds by suggesting that the task of theorizing the significance of region and place in movement narratives requires historians to more clearly delineate regional distinctions with regard to forms of black racial subordination, political and economic processes, and structures of opportunity and constraint on black mobilization and resistance during the 1960s and preceding decades. It argues in favor of the historical particularity of the South, especially the Deep South, and distinguishes this region historically from the Midwest. Finally, using St. Louis, Missouri as a focal point, the essay asserts the significance of the border South in histories of the civil rights movement more generally. Identifying this region illustrates simultaneously the instability and concreteness of regional distinctions in Black Freedom Studies.

Reviewed by: Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud, Cary D. Wintz Dolph Briscoe IV Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West. Edited By Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. 322. Illustrations, bibliography, index.) Too often we confine our study of the modern civil rights movement to the South and the cities of the North. While such a focus is understandable, the African American freedom struggle of the mid-twentieth century in fact occurred in locales throughout the United States. Historians Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz have assembled a remarkable group of scholars to expand our knowledge of civil rights in the states west of the Mississippi River. Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West [End Page 248] is a collection of articles that ponders this critical yet understudied topic. Its editors hope the book will serve as an opening dialogue to inspire further research into this often overlooked region of the country. (The essays about Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico were published previously.) African Americans throughout western states bravely organized in order to win racial equality. Events of national consequence, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision (1954), the Watts riots in Los Angeles during August 1965, and the 1966 founding of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, receive detailed coverage. The authors recover forgotten stories of ordinary black men and women, making grassroots organizing on the local level a theme in many of the essays. Not forgotten is the fact that other racial and ethnic groups, including Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, encountered discrimination and violence in the West. African Americans both cooperated and at times found themselves in conflict with other groups in this increasingly diverse region of the United States. Several of the authors begin their articles before the modern civil rights movement (defined in the book as the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s), tracing the black equality struggle in the West back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West begins with an introduction and a study of the pre-Brown period, features regionally organized overviews of different western states, and concludes with a discussion of the post-1970 years. “The Far West” section consists of chapters on the Pacific Northwest, California, and Nevada. “The Mountain States and the Desert Southwest” covers Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. “The Upper Midwest” includes articles on the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska. Perhaps most interesting to readers of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly will be “The South and the West Collide” about Oklahoma and Texas. Alwyn Barr’s essay, “The Civil Rights Movement in Texas,” is an excellent overview by a pioneering scholar of African American history in Texas. Barr particularly explains how the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People utilized the court system to attack segregation and barriers to voting in Texas. Barr further discusses black efforts to achieve equality in political representation, employment, and housing, and the challenges in these areas that persist to the present day. In editing this volume and securing contributions from numerous experts in African American history, Glasrud and Wintz have made a major contribution to historiography; it should be required reading for historians of the civil rights movement and would be worthy of assignment in undergraduate and graduate courses. Most importantly, Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West illustrates the resilience of African [End Page 249] Americans throughout the United States in the long struggle for racial equality. Dolph Briscoe IV Texas A&M University-San Antonio Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association

76 No.2 Understanding the Local Context of the Civil (lights MovementiUsing Service Learning to Develop an Oral History of Our Community By Robert Weldon Simmons III Growing up in Detroit as the son of a mother who attended Speiman College in Atlanta, I was keenly aware of the significance of the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the lives of African Americans. What's more, I was also aware of the links that the Civil Rights Movement had to Detroit. Noting the conversations that my mother had when describing life at Speiman during the late 1960s and my uncles discussing their experience watching Detroit burn during the 1967 social uprising (or riot, as some have suggested) on 12th and Claremont (walking distance from our family home), I knew that the local context of the Civil Rights Movement and the impact of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were often overshadowed by the bigger issues presented in various history textbooks in schools. Accordingly, I have worked with pre-service teachers and co-taught with teachers in middle and high schools to understand how service learning can be utilized to create oral history projects that focus on local communities. All discussions with students regarding the local context of the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 begin with reading from Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s.1 As my teacher education students read the text, they are amazed at the complexity of the Civil Rights Movement and the story behind the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Middle and high school students seem surprised to find that the struggle for freedom and justice wasn't just a "southern thing with people fighting against the Confederate flag," as suggested by one high school student. Exposure to readings that focus attention on the Civil Rights Movement in cities like Detroit, Chicago, Boston, or Gary, Indiana, as well as how the local community was impacted by the Civil 14 I BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN Vol. 76, No. 2 Rights Act of 1964, leaves students' eyes wide and their mouths open in amazement. As one student said to me in Detroit, "I didn't know we got down like that in the D." To him I said, "We sure did and still do." For students in grades 6-12 who don't find their cities located in the text, they routinely wonder, "What was happening here during that same time period?" Accordingly, I use this type of student curiosity as an opening to educate these students not only about the Civil Rights Movement, but about the work that was done during that era in their own cities. While I was studying the impact of service learning in urban schools in a school in the Midwest, I listened to "You Must Learn" by Boogie Down Productions with a group of African American students in a high school classroom.2 As the music played and the students nodded their heads and took notes on the historical names they recognized, I realized how little they knew about the personal narratives generated by everyday African Americans associated with the Civil Rights Movement. I tossed out a name of a local legend in the Civil Rights Movement and asked them to explain who this person was. Silence fell over the room. Certainly they knew of Rosa Parks sitting on the bus and Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, but they had little knowledge of their local community's participation in the Civil Rights Movement. As my co-teaching partner and I pondered our next series of lessons, we decided to co-construct them with our students. When we initially approached our students about developing a series of lessons focusing on the local context during the Civil Rights Movement, the students were confused. One student said, "Y'all think we know something about teaching?" My response was, "Perhaps you do, but you for sure know something about learning. Now tell me what you want to learn about as it relates to your local community and the Civil Rights Movement...

The Evolution of Identity Politics

Reviewed by: Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle by Rebecca Tuuri Sariah Orocu Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. By Rebecca Tuuri. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 338 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-1-4696-3890-4. When reflecting on the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the largest Black women's organization at the time often remains unheard of or forgotten. The National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) fought and struggled against racism, poverty, and sexism, alongside other influential civil rights groups and leaders. Rebecca Tuuri's book, Strategic Sisterhood, accounts for this organization as well as the accomplishments and failures of the women who led it in their fight for equal rights. Tuuri starts by discussing the early history of the Council and its activism, which focused on placing Black women in positions of power throughout society along with lobbying for racial change. The Council initially tried to recruit women from lower classes into its organization. However, college-educated sorority women were its most pronounced members, and the organization's emphasis on networking and professionalism was unrealistic and unattainable for many impoverished women. The early composition of the membership hindered the group. Since the majority of the members were of a higher economic status, they struggled to advocate effectively and support Black women who fell below the poverty line. Dorothy Height was the group's president and most influential leader. She played a major role in the inclusion of Black women in the Civil Rights movement. Height was no stranger to racial discrimination, which in turn shaped her life in academia and activism. As a child she witnessed her mother, a trained nurse, experience professional and personal constraints that Black women all over America faced. Height grew up with these frustrations, and they fueled her desire to excel. Yet, Height also experienced racial discrimination in her academic career. In 1929, she was accepted into Barnard College [End Page 269] but was denied admittance on the basis that the school's quota of two Black women had already been met. Following her denial from Barnard, Height enrolled at New York University, where her academic excellence and achievements exposed her to social and political causes and led to her involvement in activism throughout her career. Another factor that influenced Height's equal rights work was her frustration with the disregard Black women faced from male civil rights activists. Tuuri notes an important event that triggered Height's mission was her exclusion from participating or speaking at the 1963 March on Washington, even though she was the president of the NCNW, the lone female-centered organization at the time. "Height argued that women's exclusion from the March on Washington leadership," Tuuri writes, "was 'vital to awakening the women's movement'" (34). Tuuri argues that, at that particular moment, Height was not particularly forthright about the sexism that she and other Black women encountered. Instead, "she looked for an alternative strategy to circumvent these limitations. There was still plenty to be done, with or without the support of men" (34). Height applied the mindset that change could be accomplished without relying on male support to further the mission of the NCNW. Tuuri highlights the shift in the NCNW towards a more discrete, but effective, method of activism. The Council applied a strategy of eliminating racism through the moral persuasion of whites, leading to an interracial delegation within the organization. The NCNW's first major project in this regard was Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS). Initially, white and Black women from the North traveled to Mississippi and spent three days observing the Jim Crow South and making connections with southern Black women. These visits exposed the rest of the nation to what was going on in segregated Mississippi, the most racially violent state in the country with the greatest number of known lynchings. Two-thirds of the members in WIMS were white and the remaining one-third Black, and it included upper- and middle-class northern women who were Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. Tuuri examines the WIMS and NCNW strategies of cooperation across...

736 Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Carol Giardina MOW to NOW: Black Feminism Resets the Chronology of the Founding of Modern Feminism The first meeting of feminist protest in the 1960s was called to order by Dorothy Height, the president of the 800,000-member National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), in Washington, DC, on August 29, 1963. It was the day after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (MOW).1 “We could hardly believe that after all we were doing in the Civil Rights Movement,” Height recalls, “the women came to feel that they were getting a kind of runaround” as they sought and were denied fair representation in the march because of their sex.2 “I was determined,” she said in her 2003 memoir, “to bring wise women together to learn and gather strength from the experience.”3 As “women talked freely of their concern about women’s participation,” Height observed, “we began to realize that if we did not . . . demand our rights, we were not going to get them. The women became much more aware and much more aggressive in facing up to sexism in our dealings with 1. Dorothy Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 146. 2. Dorothy Height, “We Wanted the Voice of a Woman to Be Heard,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 88. 3. Height, Open Wide, 146. Carol Giardina 737 the male leadership in the movement.”4 “That moment,” Height recalled, “was vital to awakening the women’s movement.”5 Black women’s fight for representation in the MOW appears narrowly framed in scholarly literature as a specific and isolated reaction to the sexism of male MOW planners. I argue, however, that the campaign of feminist protest meetings surrounding the MOW—and the political lessons that emerged—was a starting point in the chronology of the rebirth years of feminist upheaval in the 1960s. Why? Because the lessons of that campaign provided the crucial conceptual model of an “NAACP for women” that would be consciously and purposely adopted by the newly forming National Organization for Women (NOW). Together with Height, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the only woman on the MOW planning committee, and longtime co-conspirator Pauli Murray, who spearheaded the MOW protests, were critical actors in NOW’s formation and brought the model to NOW’s more well-known white organizers. This model, and the Black women who developed it, opened the trajectory that led to NOW’s establishment in 1966, the first feminist organization of the decade. Black scholar activist Bernice Johnson Reagon called the Civil Rights Movement the “borning” struggle of its time.6 By the early 1960s, the impact of this phase of civil rights mobilization was felt nationwide from lunch counters in small towns to Congress and the Supreme Court. Since at least the 1955–1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, many thousands of African American women had been protesting, organizing, staging sit-ins and jail-ins, writing treatises, and giving speeches for Black civil rights. Although some white women did participate in the Civil Rights Movement, there were far fewer of them than African American women. Because of African American women’s collective confrontation with white supremacy, more of them were positioned to grasp the systemic nature of male supremacy and the need to fight it collectively. They understood sexism sooner than most white women because they 4. Height, “We Wanted the Voice,” 88–89. 5. Height, Open Wide, 145. 6. Mary King, Casey Hayden, Jean Wheeler Smith, Joyce Ladner, Prathia Hall, Kathie Sarachild, Michael Thelwell, and Bernice Johnson Reagon, “SNCC Women and the Stirrings of Feminism,” in A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC, ed. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 150. 738 Carol Giardina had already learned the operations of power and exploitation. They were best prepared to challenge female oppression, as were the white women who participated in the Civil Rights Movement. After all, if the established order could be pushed back when it...