
          Women and the Civil Rights Movement: Roles Too Long
Unexamined
          By Hannon, SharronSharron Hannon
          Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, pp. 4-5
          
          The year 1988 wee a time for looking back. Twenty-five years ago a
church was bombed in Birmingham, thousands marched on Washington and
the President was shot in Dallas. Twenty years ago, assassins' bullets
felled Robert Kennedy and Martin_Luther_King, Jr. These are not happy
anniversaries in our nation's history but they must be marked.
          "Those who cannot remember the peat are condemned to repeat
it," said philosopher George Santayana. That's motivation enough
to look back. But there are other compelling reasons.
          We look back because history is cyclical and because you can't know
where you're going if you don't know where you've been. We look back,
too, because we are disillusioned with the present. How did we get
here, in this poet-Reagan era, about to install George Bush as our
President far the next four years? What wrong turn did we take and
when?
          By searching the peat perhaps we'll find pieces of the puzzle that
we need to make sense of the world and our lives today.
          But that will only tee possible if we look in the right places and
ask the right questions. And we don't do that. No, twenty-five years
later, the burning unanswered question from the Sixties (to judge by
the number of prime-time TV specials) is whether or not Lee Harvey
Oswald acted alone.
          Meanwhile, who is exploring what makes men and women put aside
personal concerns for the collective goof, as so many civilrights
activists did back then? Who is trying to figure out what confluence
of personalities or events produced such a readiness for social action
in the Sixties?
          Fortunately, these questions aren't being altogether ignored. In
Atlanta in 1988, two conferences were held which explored such topics
while providing a generous dose of the "herstory" of the civil_rights
movement. The first conference was sponsored by the Carter Center last
February, the second by the King Center in October. Georgia State
University co-sponsored both.
          What'a the difference between history and herstory? A lot. The
former focuses on the headlines, the big events, the men out in front
of the crowds. The latter looks at the day-to-day workings of people's
lives, the behind-the-scene activities that produced the big events,
and the women who, unheralded, carried them out.
          The Carter Center conference was titled: "Women and the
Constitution: A Bicentennial Perspective" and was wideranging in its
scope. But an underlying theme was the interconnectedness of the civil
rights and women's rights movements. Coretta Scott King spoke on "The
Civil Rights Movement's Impact on Women's Rights," while Mary King
tied the package together during the closing session. I sat in the
audience with a friend from the University of Georgia, a well-read
woman who works in women's studies. During Mary King'a speech, she
leaned over to me and said, "This woman is amazing! I can't believe
I've never heard of her before." Ah, if only we knew more
herstory. If only every school child in America grew up with stories
of amazing' women. Instead, we get these stories in bits and
pieces--if at all. And we have to put the pieces together
ourselves. I've been collecting pieces of the puzzle for ten years
since moving to the South and getting actively involved in the women's
movement.
          I started the search incredibly ignorant, having passed the summer
of '63 in sheer oblivion to national events. I was l6 years-old, had
just gotten my driver's license and had little else on my
mind. Perhaps the images of marchers and police with dogs and fire
hoses flickered past on our TV screen in a suburban Boston town, but I
don't remember them. It wasn't until I was in college that I began to
catch up with the civil_rights movement.
          The year was 1968 and I was attending Purdue University in West
Lafayette, Ind., not exactly a hotbed of activity. But few campuses
were untouched by the times. That spring the black_students at
Purdue--every last one of them, I believe, even the football
players--marched to the administration building with bricks in
hand. There they presented a fiat of demands and unfurled a banner
reading, "Or the fire next time."
          It wee a powerful demonstration and as a wide-eyed reporter for the
campus paper, I was significantly impressed. Especially by the fact
that it had been largely organized by a female student, Linda Jo
Mitchell.
          Among the demands presented that day was a need for courses in
Afro-American studies, and so it happened that the next fall Linda Jo
Mitchell came to be teaching a course' labeled Industrial Management
590A. The course had absolutely nothing to do with industrial
management, met at night and was discontinued after one semester. But
what a semester that was! Our class was composed of students and a few
professors as well, and was integrated by sex, race and age. We read
James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X and
Martin_Luther_King, Jr., and had hot and heavy discussions that lasted
well past our scheduled hour.
          What I didn't notice at the time was that all these authors were
men. It wasn't until almost twenty years later that I learned about
women like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer and the significant roles
they played in those times. At the King Center conference, titled
"Trailblazers and Torchbearers: Women in the Civil Rights Movement,"
one participant noted: "This conference has done something I didn't
know needed to be done. Using the lens of memory, I look back and see
women."
          Overlooking women in history is a shame. It denies half the
population role models of courage. But it does more damage than
that. It clouds our understanding of how things come to be. For when
we overlook women, we overlook grassroots activism. And then we begin
to think that the only way things happen is from the top down. And we
sit and wait for a leader to come along and change things, relieved of
the responsibility of doing anything ourselves. That's not the lesson
we should be taking from the Sixties.
          I left both Atlanta women's conferences inspired to take
action. And with Black History Month in February and Women's History
Month in March, the time seems ripe: Let's share stories of the women
of the civil_rights movement and learn from them. Fortunately, some of
these women have been telling their stories lately. Does your local
library have a copy of Mary King's Freedom Song,
(Quill, 1987) or JoAnn Robinson's The Montgomery Bus Boycott
and the Women Who Started It, (University of Tennessee Press,
1987). If not, ask them to order these two intriguing memoirs.
          Tell friends about these books. And let's get herstory into the
schools. The National Women's History Project (P.O. Box 3716, Santa
Rosa, CA 95402) is a great source for books and other materials for
elementary through high_school years. Looking through last year's
catalog, I spotted Selma, Lord, Selma about the
girlhood memories of Sheyann Webb and Rachel West, and Ready
From Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement, a
first-person narrative.
          But let's go beyond books. In our communities across the South,
there are women with stories to tell. Let's find them and listen to
them and honor them. They have something to say to all of us.
          
            Sharron Hannon is a freelance writer end former editor
and publisher of Southern Feminist
newspaper.
          
        
