15 Remarkable Women Who Powered The Civil Rights Movement

Deborah Douglas: “Pauli Murray was a woman before her time, an Episcopal priest, attorney, and civil rights and women’s rights activist whose Howard University School of Law paper formed the foundation of the winning argument in 1954 Brown v. Board of Education.”

DD: “Georgia Gilmore was a Montgomery, Alabama, cook and midwife who organized a secret kitchen to feed and fund the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, helping Black residents access alternative transportation than the city bus system.”

DD: “Dwania Kyles was among 13 Black first-grade boys and girls who desegregated Memphis schools, and her journey was documented by photographer Ernest Withers, whose body of work is on display in the Withers Collection Museum & Gallery on Beale Street in Memphis.”

DD: “Integrating nine students into Little Rock Central High School resulted in high schools closing altogether the following year. In 1959, Sybil Jordan Hampton was a part of the second group to integrate the school—permanently—and was the youngest of the youthful integrationists.”

BONUS: Read an interview with Hampton, looking back on her days at Little Rock Central High School via UChicago Magazine.

DD: “Look forward to the October arrival of Prof. Keisha N. Blain’s Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America that will delve into Hamer’s strategies and how they link to current issues, such as voter suppression, police violence, and economic inequality.”

DD: “In 1960, Ella Baker was working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when she deftly empowered college students in figuring out how they wanted to lead: This resulted in the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during a weekend retreat at Shaw University in Raleigh.”

DD: “Well before the movement, Ida B. Wells was on the case with her brand of accountability journalism. After her Memphis publishing operation was destroyed in 1892, she pressed on from her perch in Chicago. Her great-grandaughter, Michelle Duster, amplifies Wells’ life and work.”

DD: “Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit mom, was murdered by Ku Klux Klan members on U.S. Highway 80, about 20 miles east of Selma where she was volunteering to help with the voting rights effort. A memorial marker stands in her honor on the National Park Service’s Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail.”

BONUS: Read more about Liuzzo’s activism, via The Washington Post.

DD: “Diane Nash emerged as a natural leader as a Fisk University student turned formidable civil rights activist during the Nashville Movement.”

DD: “Myrlie Evers, Annie Devine (Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party), and Flonzie Brown Wright (first Black woman elected to office in Mississippi since Reconstruction) are just a few activists who laid it on line in Mississippi. Delve into the movement here at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum where you’ll see a story quilt made by Hystercine Rankin that describes the aftermath of her father’s murder by a white man. He never got justice.”

BONUS:

Listen: Annie Devine in her own words, via Washington University in St. Louis.

Watch: Voices of the Civil Rights Movement spotlights Flonzie Brown Wright.

Read: Like her husband Medgar, Myrlie Evers was always in it to win it, via AARP.

DD: “Selma, Alabama, resident JoAnne Bland was a child activist — she was 11 years old when she marched in the Bloody Sunday voting rights effort in 1965.”

DD: “Lucille Simmons was a Black laborer during Charleston’s 1945-46 Cigar Factory Strike who led protestors in singing ‘I Will Overcome,’ retooled to later become the civil rights movement anthem, ‘We Shall Overcome.’”