MUCH OF THE national memorialization of the civil rights movement maintains a “great man” version of history. Women regularly appear in tributes to the movement, but a clear sense of their leadership, lives, and organizing efforts is often missing. The women who are celebrated, such as Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, are too often shrunken versions of themselves, and these limited images at times reproduce gendered silences in the movement itself. When Parks died in 2005, she was eulogized as the “accidental matriarch of the civil rights movement” and incessantly referred to as “quiet,” “soft-spoken,” and “not-angry.”1
A similar phenomenon occurred three months later when Coretta Scott King died. As flags flew at half-mast, Scott King’s body lay in honor in the Georgia state capitol (a far cry from thirty-eight years earlier, when then governor Lester Maddox refused to close state offices and stationed state troopers outside to make sure the capitol wouldn’t be contaminated by her husband and prevent mourners from storming the capitol). Scott King was praised as “kind and gentle,” “obedient,” and “beautiful,” and defined principally as her husband’s “helpmate,” rather than as the peace and economic justice activist she was for her entire life.2 President George W. Bush journeyed to Georgia for her funeral, where he praised her strength and her beauty: “In all her years, Coretta Scott King showed that a person of conviction and strength could also be a beautiful soul.”3 When Bush decided to attend the funeral, longtime King family friend and Bush critic Harry Belafonte, who’d been scheduled to give a eulogy, was disinvited—perhaps because he would serve as a potent reminder of Scott King’s enduring critique of US racism and war making.
Through such two-dimensional renderings, much of the national memorializing and eulogies to Parks and Scott King implicitly prescribe the right way to be a woman activist. By rendering Parks and Scott King as passive and meek, they neuter them for a new generation of freedom fighters. Stripped of their long histories of activism and continuing critique of American injustice, both become self-sacrificing mother figures for a nation who would use their deaths for a ritual of national redemption. Celebrating these women’s “quiet” and “unassuming” natures also erases gender issues within the movement, along with government interests, that often sought to keep these women quiet. By casting them as gentle, beautiful, and accidental, these tributes obscure their substantial leadership roles and those played by many other women, ignore the marginalization women at times experienced, and implicitly castigate most other women as too poor or loud or angry—and therefore not worthy for national recognition. By honoring these individual women outside the broad networks of women they worked within, they miss the collective power of women’s organizing and strategic action that were brought to bear in the movement.
Too often when sexism in the civil rights movement is acknowledged, it becomes another blinder to the leadership, vision, and organizing skill of a broad group of Black women in the struggle, as if gender inequity and women’s leadership could not exist in tension and in tandem.4 In other words, sexism in the movement and in American society more broadly did not prevent women from organizing, envisioning, prodding, and leading. There were numerous barriers, and yet a variety of women led, organized, agitated, fund-raised, and showed up anyway. They played myriad roles, and many critiqued and challenged the gender roles they were, at times, placed into during the movement. Civil rights women were charismatic leaders and behind-the-scenes organizers, visionary thinkers, and pragmatic doers. In challenging the great man view of the movement, we need to both examine and critique the gender roles and assumptions that were embedded in it and to grapple with the full expanse of women’s organizing efforts, leadership, and intersectional vision within the struggle itself.
An interesting thing happened a few weeks into the Trump presidency. Attempting to read a 1986 letter by Coretta Scott King opposing the nomination of Jeff Sessions to a federal judgeship, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren was silenced by the Senate. According to Scott King, Sessions had used “the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens.”5 Citing these words and a rule that senators must not impugn colleagues, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell interrupted Warren, and Senate Republicans voted to prohibit her from speaking for the remainder of debate on Sessions’s nomination for attorney general. Leaving aside the differential and gendered treatment of Warren (Senator Tom Udall read Scott King’s entire letter into the record the next day without censure), part of what was interesting about the episode was how McConnell and his fellow Republicans recognized the power of Coretta Scott King’s words.
Many expressed shock that Republican leaders would treat Scott King like that. Former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders proclaimed on the Senate floor the next day, “The idea that a letter and a statement made by Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr. . . . could not be presented and spoken about here on the floor of the Senate is, to me, incomprehensible.”6 But elevating her to some sort of sainthood as the widow of Martin Luther King, hasn’t necessarily meant Scott King has been taken seriously as a political thinker in her own right. As horrifying as it was, the censoring of Warren backhandedly acknowledged the substance of Scott King’s letter—not to mention that it brought the letter to the attention of millions more Americans than would have heard it if Warren had simply read it on the Senate floor.7
During her life, Coretta Scott King lamented how she was too often seen but not heard, admired but not considered in her substance. “I am made to sound like an attachment to a vacuum cleaner,” she explained, “the wife of Martin, then the widow of Martin, all of which I was proud to be. But I was never just a wife, nor a widow. I was always more than a label.”8 Her memorialization as wife and helpmate, and the corresponding backgrounding of her lifelong commitments, misses the wider critique of social injustice that underlay her life’s work. Not simply an accessory of her husband’s, Coretta’s activism complemented and at times led Martin’s politics. Active in racial-justice politics and the peace movement before marrying King, she spoke up earlier and more forcefully against American involvement in Vietnam than her husband did, and her critique of American economics and war making continued for decades after his death. An examination of her political commitments highlights the international dimensions of the Black freedom struggle and the long-standing commitment to nonviolence, anticolonialism, and human rights around the world held by her and many civil rights activists. And it returns a much fuller and more militant picture of her husband’s activism to public view, particularly the ways Coretta Scott King helped shape his antipoverty work and his opposition to the war in Vietnam.
Born on April 27, 1927, in Marion, Alabama, Coretta Scott graduated valedictorian from Lincoln High School. Her childhood was marked by racial violence: as a teenager, her home and her father’s sawmill were burned down. Attending Antioch College, she became politically involved in the campus NAACP, the Race Relations and Civil Liberties Committees, and various peace activities.9 Majoring in music and elementary education, she encountered discrimination at Antioch when the college sided with the local school system’s decision not to allow her (or any Black person) to student-teach in the city’s schools. “This . . . made me determined to become more involved in addressing issues of social and political injustice.”10 A strong supporter of racial progressive Henry Wallace’s 1948 third-party bid for the presidency, she attended the Progressive Party convention, one of 150 Black people in attendance.
An accomplished singer, she earned a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music, where she received her bachelor of music degree. It was in Boston where she met Martin Luther King Jr., who was working on his doctorate at Boston University. Scott, according to King biographer Clayborne Carson, “was more politically active at the time they met than Martin was.”11 Independent and “ferociously informal,” according to James Baldwin, Scott worried about how “circumscribed” her life might become if she married a pastor.12
Part of the attraction between Coretta and Martin was political, as letters between the two of them reveal. While they were courting, Coretta sent Martin a copy of Edward Bellamy’s socialist utopian novel, Looking Backward, with the note: “I shall be interested to know your reactions to Bellamy’s predictions about our future.” She later told Baldwin that her emerging relationship came to feel “somehow, preordained.” And she made clear, “The media never understood Martin so they will never understand Coretta. I didn’t learn my commitment from Martin, we just converged at a certain time.”13 They married in June 1953, Coretta insisting that “obey” be removed from their wedding vows.
In September 1954, they moved to Montgomery, where Martin had received his first pastorship at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Montgomery would be where Martin’s civil rights commitment first caught national attention, when he emerged as the young leader and spokesman of the Montgomery bus boycott. But Coretta played a decisive role there as well. Seven weeks into the boycott, the Kings’ house was bombed. Coretta and ten-week-old baby daughter Yolanda were at home when the bomb went off, but they escaped uninjured. Terrified by this violence, both Martin and Coretta’s fathers traveled to Montgomery to pressure the family—or at least Coretta and baby Yolanda—to leave. She refused. As she explained later, “This was a very trying time, when everyone seemed frightened. I realized how important it was for me to stand with Martin. And the next morning at breakfast he said, ‘Coretta, you have been a real soldier. You were the only one who stood with me.’”14 Had Coretta flinched in this moment, the trajectory of the bus boycott and the emerging civil rights movement might have been very different.
While the Montgomery bus boycott is customarily seen as the advent of Martin Luther King’s leadership, Coretta was vital to its emergence. “During the bus boycott I was tested by fire and I came to understand that I was not a breakable crystal figurine,” she said. “I found I became stronger in a crisis.”15 During the year of the boycott, their phone rang incessantly with hate calls, and Coretta often had to answer them. She took to quipping, “My husband is asleep. . . . He told me to write the name and number of anyone who called to threaten his life so that he could return the call and receive the threat in the morning when he wakes up and is fresh.”16
Coretta Scott King’s peace activism and global vision continued after her marriage as well. In many ways, her commitments to global peacemaking helped inspire Martin’s, since he had not been active on these issues before meeting her. In 1957, she was one of the founders of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. In 1958, Scott King spoke on her husband’s behalf at the Youth March for Integrated Schools. Drawing inspiration from India’s march to the sea, led by Mohandas Gandhi, and from the Underground Railroad, she praised the young people for “proving that the so-called ‘silent generation’ is not so silent.” In 1959, she and her husband traveled to India for five weeks to learn from Gandhi’s work, meeting with India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and dozens of local leaders and activists. In 1962, she was a delegate for the Women’s Strike for Peace to the seventeen-nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.17 Joining the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, she became even more vocal on peace issues as US involvement in Vietnam escalated in the early 1960s.
With four kids, Scott King had to contend with her husband’s contradictory beliefs on women’s roles—his appreciation of her politics and his conviction that she should stay home to raise the children. Forced to scale back her singing, she continued to do benefit concerts for the movement: “I once told Martin that although I loved being his wife and a mother, if that was all I did I would have gone crazy. I felt a calling on my life from an early age. I knew I had something to contribute to the world.”18 After he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, she stressed to him “the role you must play in achieving world peace, and I will be so glad when the time comes when you can assume that role.”19 Following the award, she pressed him to make the international dimension of the philosophy of nonviolence more prominent; their belief in nonviolence and commitment to human rights necessitated speaking out on global human rights as well as domestic ones. The work and responsibility that came with the award were clear to her: “I felt pride and joy and pain too, when I thought of the added responsibilities my husband must bear and it was my burden too.”20
The death threats and continued harassment took their toll. In 1966, she explained the effect of John F. Kennedy’s assassination to reporter Trina Grillo: “It seemed worse than seeing a member of my own family dying . . . a feeling of complete despair. After that, Malcolm X’s assassination disturbed me more than anything else. I was depressed for several days.”21
While her husband wavered in publicly speaking out against the Vietnam War, having been attacked severely for his early criticisms of US military escalation, Coretta Scott King remained steadfast in her public opposition to the war. In 1965, two years before her husband’s famous sermon against the war at Riverside Church, she addressed an antiwar rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, the only woman to address the crowd. Late in 1965, when her husband backed out of an address to a Washington, DC, peace rally, she kept her commitment to speak.22 Following her appearance, a reporter asked Martin if he had educated his wife on these issues. He replied: “She educated me.”23
Coretta continued to push her husband to take a stronger public stand against the war.24 In April 1967, Martin Luther King made his public declaration against the war at Riverside Church, decrying the resources being diverted from the War on Poverty to wage war in Vietnam, and the deployment of Black soldiers to a conflict thousands of miles away when their rights were not guaranteed at home—and was lambasted for it. When Martin spoke in New York at the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, Coretta flew to San Francisco to speak at a peace demonstration attended by sixty thousand. In January 1968, missing celebrations of her husband’s birthday in Atlanta, she joined five thousand women in the Jeanette Rankin Brigade in Washington, DC, to protest the war. At the end of March, she presided over a conference in Washington, DC, organized by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, where she called for a cease-fire in Vietnam.25
Along with peace activism, issues of poverty and economic justice motivated both Coretta and Martin. After her husband’s assassination in Memphis, where he had gone to take part in a sanitation workers’ strike, Coretta Scott King stepped in to fill the political void and lead the march he was supposed to have headed. “I gave a speech from the heart and some people ‘saw’ me for the first time,” she recalled.26 As historian Michael Honey observes,
[Coretta and Martin’s] partnership came not only from personal love but also from a joint political commitment. . . . True to the patriarchal society in which they had been raised, Martin felt she should devote herself primarily to making a home and raising the children. She did that, but she did it in the context of two lives absolutely committed to changing the world. . . . Now, as the King family reeled from tragedy, Coretta began to demonstrate her own quiet and steely commitment to nonviolence.27
Understanding the tremendous work to be done in the wake of Martin’s assassination, she committed to carrying on the fight for racial and economic justice, making clear that this was how his death was to be honored: “The day that Negro people and others in bondage are truly free, on the day want is abolished, on the day wars are no more, on that day I know my husband will rest in a long-deserved peace.”28
Her leadership was not always recognized. According to biographer Barbara Reynolds, after Martin’s assassination, “Many of the men told her she should step aside, and let them run things” but she refused.29 Four days after her husband’s assassination, she traveled to Memphis to continue the planned march on behalf of the striking workers, stressing, “Every man deserves a right to a job or an income so that he can pursue liberty life, and happiness.”30 Indeed, Scott King was resolute that an appropriate memorial for her husband’s death was to continue the struggle they had both committed their lives to.
And for the next four decades, that is exactly what she did. On April 27, 1968, Coretta Scott King delivered a speech at an antiwar demonstration in Central Park that Martin was supposed to have given. She linked her opposition to the war to antipoverty activism at home, drawing out what would be a persistent theme of hers on the multiple manifestations of violence in American politics. She saw the war abroad and economic injustice at home as “two sides of the same coin.”
Our policy at home is to try to solve social problems through military means, just as we have done abroad. The bombs we drop on the people of Vietnam continue to explode at home with all of their devastating potential. There is no reason why a nation as rich as ours should be blighted by poverty, disease and illiteracy. It is plain that we don’t care about our poor people, except to exploit them as cheap labor and victimize them through excessive rents and consumer prices.31
She ended her speech with a call to the power of women to “heal the broken community now so shattered by war and poverty and racism.”
Even though her husband had kept a distance from welfare rights, Coretta linked the struggle for economic justice to the need for a real safety net for poor families. She decried a proposal before Congress to cut welfare benefits as misguided and un-American: “It forces mothers to leave their children and accept work or training, leaving their children to grow up in the streets as tomorrow’s social problems.” She called for a guaranteed annual income for all Americans as a moral imperative—and encouraged people to join welfare mothers for Mother’s Day at the nation’s capital to “call upon Congress to establish a guaranteed annual income instead of these racist and archaic measures, these measures which dehumanize God’s children and create more social problems than they solve.”32
Coretta Scott King helped kick off the Poor People’s Campaign the month after her husband’s death. Martin had been working to build a poor people’s movement to descend on Washington and engage in massive civil disobedience to make poor people unignorable and force Congress and the president to action. But it was Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy, and a host of other antipoverty activists across the country who took up the task of actually enacting the plans. On May 1, Scott King launched the southern caravan of the Poor People’s Campaign from the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, singing “Sweet Little Jesus Boy.” She declared her own dream, “where not some but all of God’s children have food, where not some but all of God’s children have decent housing, where not some but all of God’s children have a guaranteed annual income in keeping with the principles of liberty and grace.”33 Coretta Scott King’s dream was not ephemeral but one rooted in economic justice. Her Christianity was not an otherworldly religion but a living theology that understood Jesus as an advocate for the poor and oppressed.
On May 12, she joined seven thousand welfare recipients and their allies from twenty cities at Cardozo High School in Washington, DC, to decry the violence of poverty, call for the fulfillment of the spirit of the original 1935 Social Security Act, and kick off the events in the city. The next month, on Solidarity Day, June 19, 1968, in the midst of the Poor People’s encampment on the National Mall, she gave a powerful speech to fifty thousand people at the Lincoln Memorial calling on American women to “unite and form a solid block of women power” to fight racism, poverty, and war.34
The stand-by-your-man image of Coretta Scott King thus misses the extended critique of injustice that underlined her political work before and during her marriage, and long after her husband’s assassination. “I am not a ceremonial symbol,” Scott King made clear. “I am an activist. I didn’t just emerge after Martin died—I was always there and involved.”35 At both the Mother’s Day March and then again on Solidarity Day, she criticized the hypocrisy of a society “where violence against poor people and minority groups is routine.” She reminded the nation of its own acts of violence: “Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. . . . Ignoring medical needs is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence. Even the lack of will power to help humanity is a sick and sinister form of violence.”36 Coretta reframed the political language of the time, foregrounding issues of economic violence that were prevalent in American society. “More forcefully than her husband had articulated,” King biographer Thomas Jackson explained, “Coretta King connected poverty and policy neglect to systemic social violence.”37 She critiqued the stereotypes of poor Black women as lazy, loud, castrating figures as a way to further disfigure women who advocated for themselves and their families and to take attention away from the structural causes of Black poverty. Indeed, Coretta Scott King’s analysis of poverty highlighted the intersections of race and gender that often kept Black women poor and disregarded.
Her activism did not simply uphold her husband’s legacy but expanded it. Scott King understood the need for a unified Black power and, according to historian Komozi Woodard, was a key driving force behind the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana. She struggled with being marginalized in SCLC, in part because she was a “strong woman, not one to be pushed aside. . . . Most thought that women should stay in the shadows; however I felt that as women, we had much to contribute. In fact for the longest time, way before I married Martin, I had believed that women should allow our essence and presence to shine, rather than letting ourselves be buried or shunted to the sidelines.”38
In a way similar to how she was treated in those years, there has been a tendency in popular histories of the movement to marginalize her work and focus only on her efforts to preserve her husband’s legacy. Books allude to the fact Coretta Scott King spoke at a rally against Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan in 1972; attended the National Black Political Convention; and joined marchers in Boston in 1975 to support school desegregation. In descriptions of those events, Scott King’s attendance is mentioned but not elaborated on, as it would have been for other activists who were keeping the kind of political schedule that she was and building the kinds of connections between movements and issues that she did. Indeed, in 1976, she told a friend, “Sometimes I wish I could get at least four hours of sleep a day.”39
As historian David Stein documents, Scott King played a pivotal role in the push for governmental guarantees relating to full employment in the 1970s.40 Alongside her commitment to welfare rights, Scott King stressed unemployment as a crucial issue to be addressed: “if we could solve the unemployment problem most of the social problems we have could be solved. In fact, most of the social problems stem from unemployment.”41 Guaranteed jobs, Scott King believed, was a way to link the needs of Black and white workers, who were often pitted against each other. In 1974, she founded the National Committee for Full Employment/Full Employment Action Council, which, according to Stein, “was the energetic lobbying force behind the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978. The law set the goal of getting the country down to 3% unemployment within five years and attempted to hold the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve accountable to elected officials.”42 Their efforts did not succeed.
In the 1980s, she took an active role in the anti-apartheid movement and in 1984 was arrested outside the South African embassy. She traveled to South Africa, and subsequently met with President Reagan to urge divestment. To the end of her life, she continued her international peace work. In the months leading up to the second Iraq War, Scott King came out against the invasion: “A war with Iraq will increase anti-American sentiment, create more terrorists, and drain as much as 200 billion taxpayer dollars, which should be invested in human development here in America.”43
She also became a vocal advocate of gay rights and a supporter of same-sex marriage. In the late 1990s, despite criticisms from civil rights leaders and her own children, she reminded the nation that “Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.”44 Scott King saw the struggle for gay rights as intimately connected to the one for racial justice and stood firm against those who would cast the battle for gay rights as dishonoring the spirit of the civil rights movement. In 2001, at the SCLC convention, she highlighted the threat of AIDS as “one of the most deadly killers of African-Americans. And I think anyone who sincerely cares about the future of black America had better be speaking out.”45 Decrying the dangers of legalized injustice, she opposed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and reminded Americans that “gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil unions.”46
Coretta Scott King’s political commitments and activism around international peace, economic justice, and human rights extended past her husband’s and far beyond the 1960s, yet many of the memorials continue to place her in Martin Luther King’s shadow. The erasures of Coretta Scott King’s broader life and activism dovetail with public erasures of Black women’s leadership at the time. While women took on key roles in the Black freedom struggle, there were numerous moments when their contributions were marginalized. Scott King herself had noted these gender inequalities in a 1966 article in New Lady:
Not enough attention has been focused on the roles played by women in the struggle. By and large, men have formed the leadership in the civil rights struggle but there have been many women in leading roles and many women in the background. Women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement. . . . Women have been the ones who have made it possible for the movement to be a mass movement. In Montgomery, it was mostly women who rode the buses because most domestic workers were women. If a boycott is employed, women are the ones who must stop buying.47
In this 1966 piece, she highlighted a problem that had run through the movement: while women played crucial leadership and organizing roles throughout, at points that leadership was denied or dismissed by men in the movement. In other words, it wasn’t that women weren’t leading, organizing, and strategizing; it was that their work wasn’t always recognized or respected.
One key example of that marginalization took place at the 1963 March on Washington. The crucial roles Black women played and the ways they were sidelined at the march have received limited mention in the ways the march has been memorialized. Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, John Lewis—these names rang out in fiftieth-anniversary celebrations for their significant roles in the march. In August 2013, the White House announced a posthumous award for Bayard Rustin, largely for his key role in organizing the March on Washington. But where were the women? What about Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the only woman on the march committee, who was largely responsible for the significant presence of white Christians at the march?
Raised in Minnesota and a graduate of Hamline University, Hedgeman worked for the YWCA and then the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. In 1954, she became the first Black woman to hold a cabinet position in New York City government before taking a job with the National Council of Churches. That role led to her inclusion on the march organizing committee, the only woman on it. With King and Randolph initially planning two separate events, Hedgeman arranged the meeting where the two civil rights leaders sat down and patched their differences and agreed to press forward with a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.48
As coordinator for special events for the Commission on Religion and Race, Hedgeman played a determining role in getting large numbers of white Christians to the march. Indeed, as Hedgeman’s biographer Jennifer Scanlon notes, the interracialism of the march wasn’t happenstance—Hedgeman organized to make the sizeable presence of white Protestants a reality.49 This was not a given; white Christian support of civil rights had been limited up to this point and needed to be shamed, cultivated, and brought out. Part of Hedgeman’s organizing genius was the way she managed to bring many white Christian leaders and laypeople into the civil rights struggle. The March on Washington would be the first mass civil rights event with a large percentage of whites (estimated at 25 percent of the marchers). Hedgeman also facilitated many of the day’s logistics, including Operation Sandwich, in which she commanded a massive volunteer effort to produce eighty thousand box lunches for marchers.50
From the outset, Hedgeman pushed for the inclusion of women on the organizing committee and in the program itself; however, no women were slated to speak. Increasingly frustrated at the last organizing committee meeting in Harlem, she read aloud a letter she had written Randolph, saying that it was “incredible” that not a single woman was slated to speak. National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) president Dorothy Height was not given a formal role in the events. Nor was she included in descriptions of the march leadership, despite NCNW’s considerable fund-raising for the march and Height’s having met with all the other leaders for more than a year as part of the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership.
Height, along with Hedgeman, pressed for more substantive inclusion of women in the program. According to Height, Rustin responded, “Women are included. Every group has women in it.” Height later observed: “Clearly there was a low tolerance level for anyone raising the questions about the women’s participation.”51
Angered at these oversights, civil rights activist lawyer Pauli Murray wrote A. Philip Randolph:
I have been increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role which Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grass-roots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions. . . . The time has come to say to you quite candidly, Mr. Randolph, that “tokenism” is as offensive when applied to women as when applied to Negroes.52
Murray was dismayed that Randolph was willing to speak at the gender-segregated National Press Club and that no woman was part of the delegation to the White House after the march.53 Graduating as valedictorian from Howard Law School in 1944, Murray had been a trailblazer for years in highlighting the twin harms of racial and gender injustice. Murray “coined the term ‘Jane Crow,’” according to historian Brittney Cooper, “to name the forms of sexist derision she encountered during her time at Howard” and afterward.54 Part of Murray’s work would be used by Thurgood Marshall and Spottswood Robinson in their legal brief in Brown. Indeed, it was as a law student at Howard that she made a bet with Robinson, her law professor, that Plessy would be overturned within the next quarter century and wrote a paper on how to do it.
In 1940, Murray had been thrown off a train when she refused to sit in the back; like Ida B. Wells, she hated—and challenged—bus segregation because it “permitted the public humiliation of black people to be carried out in the presence of privileged white spectators, who witnessed our shame in silence or indifference.”55 In the 1960s, Murray was one of the first to argue that the equal protection clause could be used for gender as well as race, but when she had brought up this legal reasoning at Howard, many laughed.
Over and over, Murray pushed against societal boundaries of race and gender that prevented Black women’s advancement, even in the plans for the march. Murray’s close friend Maida Springer allowed Murray to stay at her apartment and organize from there—but refused to take part in Murray’s protest, worrying that it would take away from the larger goals of what the march sought to accomplish.56 Murray had considered picketing the National Press Club, where Randolph was speaking, because of its prohibition against women sitting on the first floor.57 But Dorothy Height persuaded Murray not to do it.58
Hedgeman continued to object within the committee, asserting the march should really be called “Rosa Parks Day,” since Parks had started it all. Yet all their criticisms were treated as demands for inappropriate recognition, at odds with the spirit of the event. March organizers worried about how to pick one woman to speak, even though Hedgeman had offered to caucus and come up with a selection. (The idea that multiple women might speak was too far-fetched to contemplate.) Randolph and Rustin then circulated a memo with their proposed resolution to the problem:
The difficulty of finding a single woman to speak without causing serious problems vis-à-vis other women and women’s groups suggest[s] the following is the best way to utilize these women: That the Chairman would introduce these women, telling of their role in the struggle. . . . As each one is introduced, she would stand for applause, and after the last one has been introduced and the Chairman has called for general applause, they would sit.59
This “Tribute to Women” was slated to highlight six women—Rosa Parks, Gloria Richardson, Diane Nash, Myrlie Evers, Prince Lee (the wife of slain civil rights activist Herbert Lee), and Daisy Bates—who would be asked to stand up and be recognized. No woman would formally address the crowd. The wives of civil rights leaders would be allowed to sit on stage with their husbands.60
On August 28, 1963, the main march, led by men—with Randolph at the head and King and others a few paces behind—proceeded down Constitution Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial. The wives of the leaders were not allowed to march with their husbands. Scott King later wrote that she was “not pleased”61 but “had to accede to their wishes. . . . I felt that the involvement in the Movement of some of the wives had been so extensive that they should have been granted the privilege of marching with their husbands and of sharing this experience together, as they had shared the dangers and the hardships.”62
The women to be honored led a small, separate side march along Independence Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial. Cambridge Movement leader Gloria Richardson recalled that gendered treatment began even before the event started. The NAACP had called her beforehand, instructing her to not wear jeans but instead a hat, gloves, and a dress. Richardson did not appreciate the dress code requirements and scoured the Eastern Shore of Maryland till she found a jeans skirt.
Richardson had long refused the roles assigned to her. Born of a middle-class family, she attended Howard University and returned to Cambridge, Maryland, chafing under the racial restrictions of her hometown. The movement Richardson led in Cambridge had been inspired by SNCC. Richardson herself had joined initially because her daughter was involved. The movement she helped build married economic demands with calls for desegregation—they had surveyed the community for priorities and found housing and jobs were key needs for Black Cambridge. Using nonviolent civil disobedience, and with the participation of students and many working-class community members, they began conducting regular protests and sit-ins in 1963, employing personal self-defense when whites reacted violently to their activism. In response to the escalating situation, the governor ordered the Maryland National Guard into Cambridge, where it remained for nearly a year.63
This upheaval in Cambridge led US attorney general Robert Kennedy to convene a meeting with Richardson and other political figures in Cambridge. Richardson was able to negotiate an historic agreement, the “Treaty of Cambridge,” with him, which included implementation of federally funded job training, acceleration of public-housing construction, school desegregation, and an amendment to the city charter prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations. When whites reacted badly to that amendment and put a referendum on the ballot to change it, Richardson called for a boycott of the election. “A first-class citizen does not beg for freedom,” she said. “A first-class citizen does not plead to the white power structure to give him something that the whites have no power to give or take away. Human rights are human rights, not white rights.”64 Many civil rights leaders were aghast at her decision not to participate in the election.
That August day, these women of courage—Bates, Parks, Richardson, and Lee—sat silently on the dais. (Myrlie Evers wasn’t there—she was in Detroit for a previous engagement—nor was Diane Nash.65) “This was very upsetting to me, especially when there were so many battle-weary female veterans who deserved to speak. . . . But that’s how chauvinistic the leadership was at that time,” Coretta Scott King later observed.66 Dorothy Height later surmised that the more-feisty SNCC students got speaking roles even when no woman did: “They knew that the women were not going to turn over the Lincoln Memorial, but the students might.”67
Little Rock NAACP organizer Daisy Bates introduced the Tribute to Women—a 142-word introduction written for her by NAACP assistant executive director John Morsell: “Mr. Randolph, the women of this country pledge to you, Mr. Randolph, to Martin Luther King, to Roy Wilkins, and all of you fighting for civil liberties, that we will join hands with you, as women of this country.” Indeed, the only words spoken to acknowledge the role of women were written for Bates by a man and contained a pledge that women would support the men of the movement, despite the fact that the women on the dais and in the crowd that day had risked their lives for years—some even decades—to press for civil rights.68
Randolph himself seemed flummoxed during this portion of the program, at one point forgetting which women were actually being recognized.
“Uh, who else? Will the . . .”
[Someone behind him says: “Rosa Parks.”]
“Miss Rosa Parks . . . will they all stand.”69
Parks stood up and offered eight words of acknowledgment: “Hello, friends of freedom, it’s a wonderful day.” Richardson managed to get out a “hello” before the microphone was snatched from her.70 Hedgeman, on the dais that day, described the feeling of listening to the tribute: “We grinned; some of us, as we recognized anew that Negro women are second-class citizens in the same way that white women are in our culture.” Hedgeman was frustrated that Parks (or any other woman) was not invited to the meeting at the White House that followed the events.71
Right before Martin Luther King Jr. was to speak, Richardson found herself being put in a cab along with Lena Horne and sent back to her hotel. March organizers claimed that they were worried the two would get mobbed and crushed, yet no one else was sent back to the hotel. “They did this,” Richardson believed, “because Lena Horne had had Rosa Parks by the hand and had been taking her to satellite broadcasts, saying, ‘This is who started the civil rights movement, not Martin Luther King. This is the woman you need to interview.’” Richardson had helped her. “We got several people to interview Rosa Parks. The march organizers must have found that out.” Richardson also fought the pressure being put on SNCC chair John Lewis to tone down his speech.72 Also, Richardson’s politics were viewed as dangerous by some civil rights leaders and members of the Kennedy administration, who called Richardson “a whore” and said she “would find a way to disrupt the march and turn it violent.”73
After the rally, no women were part of a delegation of ten leaders who met with President Kennedy. Dorothy Height observed, “I’ve never seen a more immovable force. We could not get women’s participation taken seriously.” Rosa Parks was dumbfounded by the treatment of women that day, telling Daisy Bates she hoped for a “better day coming.” Awed by the assembled crowd, Hedgeman nonetheless reflected, “in front of 250,000 people who had come to Washington because they had a dream, and in the face of all the men and women of the past who had dreamed in vain, I wished very much that Martin had said, ‘We have a dream.’“74
Defying Randolph’s request for marchers to leave the city upon the march’s completion, Height convened an interracial gathering of women the next day to raise the interlocking issues of race and gender and women’s participation in the struggle.75 The dual experiences of the march—the power of the experience and the marginalization of women—stayed with many women activists. Pauli Murray addressed Height’s National Council of Negro Women in November 1963, where she noted the “deliberate” omission of women at the march. Her speech and the continuing outrage around the treatment of women at the march, and in the movement more broadly, formed the bedrock of a rising determination. Black women activists, according to Height, became “much more aware and much more aggressive” in calling out the sexism of the male leadership of the movement. While white women are often credited with the flowering of the feminist movement of the mid-1960s, Black women sowed these seeds in the civil rights movement and in the wake of the March on Washington.
But this history of women’s leadership and marginalization is largely absent from many movement memorials. John Lewis was repeatedly described as the only living speaker during the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations—even though Gloria Richardson was alive and well in New York City.76 The public memorialization of the march, in many ways, has repeated the marginalization of women of fifty years ago, with little mention of Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Dorothy Height, Pauli Murray, and Gloria Richardson—despite the important roles Black women played in the march’s organization and their attempts to challenge their marginalization at the event.
Leadership, vision, marginalization, contention, and challenge all characterized the experiences of women in the movement. Rethinking the Black freedom struggle thus requires interrogating a narrative of the movement that casts women in supporting roles. There was sexism, but women played crucial leadership, organizational, and intellectual roles in the struggle, and challenged sexism at the time. Recognizing this means jettisoning the tendency to cast the fight for gender justice as occurring largely outside of the Black freedom struggle, rather than as interwoven in it. And it demands moving women out of the background of civil rights history and into the center.