Soul Sisters

A few years ago, I stood at the front of a cavernous lecture hall that, at the University of California passes for a classroom. I was describing legal segregation in the South and the impact of Jim Crow laws.

A young woman politely raised her hand and asked when Jim Crow had lived and where he had been active in the South. I looked out at the sea of young faces and decided I needed a reality check. I asked if anyone knew the name of any civil rights activist other than Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Eyes glazed over. “Has anyone ever heard of Medgar Evers, Ella Baker, Pauli Murray, John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael, Jo Ann Robinson, Andy Young, Bob Moses, or Fanny Lou Hamer?” Silence. “Does anyone know the name of any white activist who played a major role in the civil rights movement?” More silence.

That is when I put away the rest of my lectures for a course on 20th-century American history and decided to spend the next few weeks introducing my students to the mid-20th century movement that desegregated the South, inspired all the other social movements of the 1960s and irrevocably transformed American culture and society.

It’s not lack of information that has caused such ignorance of this glorious movement. Bookshelves groan with the weight of biographies and historical monographs that have documented the moral clarity of the civil rights movement that turned many young people into crusaders and stirred the nation’s conscience.

It is a question of what we choose to remember. America has canonized Martin Luther King Jr., but we have forgotten the most important truth of all-that it took a movement of millions, not just one great leader who happened to be a brilliant orator, to challenge America’s legacy of slavery and racism. Historical amnesia cramps the collective memory of Americans in a singular way; we like to pay homage to individuals rather than to movements, to one man rather than many.

And what about the women whose leadership has been ignored but who, in effect, sustained the movement? Or the white segregationists who fought what they viewed as the last battle of the Civil War? Theirs are among the many other voices and perspectives that remain hidden when our collective memory collapses a movement into one heroic figure.

During the last decade, a number of journalists and historians have begun to excavate the hidden history of women in the civil rights movement. Biographies of Ella Baker, Fanny Lou Hamer and Jo Ann Robinson have started to fill in some of the gaps. But the task is far from complete.

Now, three new books bring back some of the distinctive voices that belong to this history. That women have always played a central role in civil rights movements is convincingly argued and vividly portrayed in Lynne Olson’s “Freedom’s Daughters,” a comprehensive history (1830-1970) of the “unsung heroines” of the civil rights movement. Building on the scholarship of historians, as well as on her own new research, Olson provides vibrant portraits of the many women who have devoted their lives to racial equality.

Here are riveting stories of black and white women who worked together-sometimes in harmony, often in tension-to challenge race relations in America: Ida B. Wells, who launched a national anti-lynching crusade; Pauli Murray, who launched the first sit-in at a lunch counter; Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Alabama State College, who led the community challenge to end bus segregation in Montgomery; Ella Baker, who mobilized thousands of young students into Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activists; and Fanny Lou Hamer, who forged the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta in the summer of 1964.

Why don’t we know about these women and their leadership in organizing some of the most widely publicized events of the civil rights movement? Part of the answer lies with the way the media covered the original events.

To be sure, historians habitually exclude the voices and perspectives of women. But Olson also grasps that it was the media that anointed the movement’s leaders and that their decisions have affected historical scholarship and memory.

Quoting longtime civil rights activist Murray, she explains, “News coverage, which the leaders sought, was ... a matter of men reporting on men. Stories on the movement often read like accounts of sports contests or keeping score of who was up and who was down, who won and who lost.... The behind-the-scenes activity that women specialized in-organizing, building consensus, sustaining a sense of community-did not make good television, nor did it lend itself to dramatic newspaper or magazine headlines. There were no reporters around, for example, when Ella Baker sat in a corner of Albany’s Shiloh Baptist Church ... writing down the names and addresses, and the amount of money needed by ... hundreds of protesters who had just gotten out of jail, many of whom had been fired from their jobs. Nor was any attention paid to Septima Clark, who stood at the door of the Albany courthouse from morning until late afternoon urging blacks to register to vote.”

The Montgomery boycott is a similar case. Jo Ann Robinson and the Women’s Political Council had planned the boycott for more than a year. It was women who prepared the community for the strike and who scheduled the carpools that would drive black domestic workers to their white employers’ homes. But it was King who became the symbol of the boycott’s success when he was practically dragged into the fray.

‘Freedom’s Daughters” also documents the birth of the modern women’s movement, a heightened awareness of gender discrimination ignited by the struggle that had just begun to question the normalcy of race relations.

Just before the famous 1963 March on Washington, D.C., for example, Murray became enraged when the all-male National Press Club refused to permit women reporters to cover the historic speeches given by civil rights activists. She asked A. Philip Randolph, who had organized the March, to condemn this discrimination against women. He refused. “While male reporters,” she later remembered, “sat in the audience and were served lunch and could question the speakers; female reporters were confined to a narrow balcony, with no food, no chairs, no access to phones, and no chance to ask questions.”

On the day of the March, now commemorated as one of the most hallowed days in our recent past, discrimination against women only worsened. Such luminaries as Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates and other female leaders, segregated from the men and given a different route, “marched unnoticed down Independence Avenue with the wives of the male leaders. [Roger] Wilkins, King, Randolph, John Lewis, and the rest of the men, meanwhile, strode along Constitution Avenue, while television cameramen and newspaper photographers cruised ahead of them on flatbed trucks to record the scene. At the Lincoln Memorial, the only women heard were Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson, who raised their magnificent voices in song.” Thirty years later, Rosa Parks mused, “Those of us who did not sing didn’t get to say anything. Nowadays women wouldn’t stand for being kept so much in the background.”

Elegantly written, “Freedom’s Daughters” is an eloquent and compelling testimony to women’s perennial struggle for civil rights. Faithful to the historical record, it is filled with suspense, adventure and mystery, and is the most stunning synthesis of women’s role in America’s endless and episodic struggle for racial equality to date.

A magnificent companion to this history is “Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement,” an inspiring collection of chapter-long memoirs written by white women who joined the civil rights movement early, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some who had grown up in a Southern world simply took segregation for granted. In every case, some personal observation or religious conviction caused these women to question the status quo of the segregated South.

Through these compelling first-person accounts, we revisit the early days of SNCC; the Students for a Democratic Society; the violence and terror of the Albany Freedom Ride; the brave but futile voter registration drives; Freedom Summer, the project that brought about 1,000 Northern students into the battles of the South; the rise of black power and the early stirring of gender consciousness that would lead to the modern women’s movement.

Every one of these stories brims with intelligence, eloquence and courage. Before they had reached their mid-20s, these women had left their homes (in some cases, they were disowned by their families), embraced integration, stared down violence, spent time in prison and learned how to run an organization, write and speak in public. In essence, they became the women they never expected to be.

SNCC gave them a home, provided them with the love and support of a surrogate family and taught them to be leaders, but the dream couldn’t last. By 1965, black separatism was in the air, and white women-many already estranged from their families-now suffered a second loss as black power eroded the bonds of the “beloved community.”

These are unforgettable stories. Elegant editing has permitted distinct voices to evoke the confusion and clarity of those years, providing deeply intimate and personal views of what it was like to be white, young and coming of age in the 1960s within the civil rights movement. At the same time, resonant themes echo in different melodies, reminding us that this is a collective experience as well as individual stories.

As we learn more about the extent to which blacks were excluded in the 2000 Florida presidential election, both white and black Americans need to remember how much some white people sacrificed-and were transformed-by their struggle for racial justice.

Diane McWhorter, who grew up in Birmingham, never knew any of these remarkable young activists. Nor did she know that her family, as well as most white people she knew as a child, had worked actively to prevent the Southern freedom movement from integrating the South. ‘Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution” is another invisible story from the front lines of the civil rights movement. However hateful and ugly, the perspective of the white business aristocracy that resisted, with all its power, every effort to change the class and race relations of its city is a much-neglected part of the story of the civil rights movement.

McWhorter uses the city of Birmingham to give us first-hand accounts of all sides that clashed in a climactic battle in 1963. As an investigative journalist, McWhorter returned to the city of her youth and, through history and personal memoir, reveals the collusion that existed between the city’s business establishment, public officials such as Police Commissioner Bull Connor and the klansmen who met nonviolence with ropes, bombs and guns.

A daughter of Birmingham’s white elite, McWhorter was the same age as the four 10-year-old black girls killed by the bomb that blasted through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church basement in 1963. In the same year, she witnessed the series of battles that took place after King targeted Birmingham-then considered the most segregated city in America-as the last stand against American apartheid.

In spring of that year, King staged huge nonviolent demonstrations that Connor resisted with police dogs and fire hoses. Televised across America, such visible hatred inflamed public opinion and helped solidify Northern support for federal legislation to end Southern segregation in 1964.

Powerfully written, vividly recounted, McWhorter’s intimate yet magisterial narrative adds important insights to our understanding of the Ku Klux Klan and its connections with official power in the South. “I was growing up on the wrong side of the revolution,” she writes. “In my quest to understand how a family of Ivy League-educated country clubbers could have produced a vigilante spirit like my father, I ended up discovering that the elite establishment of the city itself had nurtured the Ku Klux Klan and created the brutal conditions that incited a magnificent nonviolent revolution.”

McWhorter’s own revelations are as powerful as those she reveals from the history of “The Year of Birmingham.” She knew that “civil rights” were bad, and so she wondered why her father spent so much time at “at one of his civil rights meetings.” ’Papa assumed the transcendent yet noncommittal look of Victor Laszlo in Casablanca.... I vaguely sensed some connection between his mission and the pistol stowed under his car seat.... Soon those sensations of anxiety and shame would crystallize into a concrete fear: that my father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.”

McWhorter also reminds us how important industrial labor was in parts of the New South. By examining Birmingham’s past as the Pittsburgh of the South, McWhorter offers a persuasive interpretation of the connections between class and race relations in this city. “The civil rights movement,” she writes, “was created from the rib of organized labor, and the industrialist answered it with a ‘grassroots’ counteroffensive of hooded vigilantes.... The conflict that made Birmingham America’s racial Armageddon in 1963 was the ‘class warfare’ that had always threatened the confidence of a young nation founded on the preposterous principle of equality.”

Every war produces different stories. Taken together, these extraordinary books offer compelling and complementary reflections and insights. We need to know these stories. We need to hear these voices. As McWhorter writes in her introduction, “The saga of African-American liberation is perhaps the most thrilling in our country’s history, biblical in its subtexts and angles of moral instruction.”

Two generations after the civil rights movement began, we have just begun to uncover the truth about the people and events that challenged the legacy of slavery and transformed mid-20th century America. It is wise to remember that the power of that legacy lives on, without legal segregation, permeating our culture and society in every imaginable way.