The Civil Rights Movement: Race and Gender

The 1960’s was a decade in which some of the most defining moments of the Civil Rights Movement came to pass. Martin Luther King’s peaceful war against racial discrimination reached its summit, arguably peaking even further after his death on April 4^th 1968, which gave way to mass riots and violent protest in retaliation and brought attention to the struggle of black Americans to the forefront. The events which transpired in Birmingham, 1963 at the hands of Bull Connor saw black students violently hosed down by streams of water powerful enough to rip the skin. This kind of reaction however, is precisely what was expected by Martin Luther’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the publicity of these events shocked America and the World.

Too often however, the activists of the Civil Rights Movement have been criticised for doing little to acknowledge the issues faced by Black American women, evident in both their words and the actions they took. Through Randolph’s Messenger magazine it was made abundantly clear that the fight for Civil Rights was a fight for the ‘New Negro Man’ and not the ‘New Negro’ in general. Women were relegated to the background and expected to aid their partners by rallying support for the movement, as opposed to being granted any real responsibility or role within it. The issue of gender and race in the Civil Rights Movement has been explored more frequently in recent years, and scholars such as Steve Estes, in studying African American methods of protest among activists alongside the methods of their white opposition concluded firmly that both groups ‘framed their actions in terms of claiming or defending manhood’ instead of their race in general. The significance of this is that black women effectively faced discrimination from multiple fronts, from the white racists who condemned all blacks unanimously, to the black African American activists in their own communities who claimed to lead the fight for freedom, despite overlooking the capabilities of black women. Those women that were members of civil rights organisations such as the SNCC and the NAACP were often subject to unfair, ill treatment in favour of their black male colleagues, whom demanded first pick on resources and were not beyond sexual harassment. The implications of this suggests that there were multiple movements at work within the black community and provides a clear explanation as to why a large number of Black American Women would make the shift to the Feminist movement during the 1970’s.

Sam Aldorino Flett

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Simon Wendt, ‘They Finally Found Out that We Really Are Men’: Violence, Non-Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era, Gender and History vol. 19 no. 3 (Wiley-Blackwell November 2007)

https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/articles-and-essays/women-in-the-civil-rights-movement/