Chapter 9
A WAY TO EXPRESS THEMSELVES… AND MAKE CHANGE
Struggles for political power had always put Black women’s bodies on the front lines. The post–World War II civil rights movement called upon them to do more. They wrote and spoke in public. They organized, taught, strategized, marched, and sat-in. Black women also met the wrath of local officials, mobs, and party bosses. They clocked many more firsts along the way. Journalist Alice Allison Dunnigan became the first Black woman member of the congressional Press Galleries in 1947 and then the first to cover a president, Harry Truman, during his run for office. Constance Baker Motley was the first woman to join the NAACP Legal Defense Fund litigation team and, in 1965, she became Manhattan Borough president, the first woman to hold that office. The following year, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Motley as the first Black woman federal judge in US history. State legislatures seated Black women for the first time in West Virginia, Michigan, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, and Indiana. In 1952, newspaper owner and editor Charlotta Bass became the first Black woman nominated for national office, the vice presidency. With the 1965 Voting Rights Act in hand, Black women showed once again that they were the vanguard, blazing a trail to the ballot box and bringing the nation closer than ever to its ideals.1
THE 1965 VOTING Rights Act topped a series of victories for the modern civil rights movement won following World War II. The nation lurched toward the ideal of an interracial democracy by giant steps that put Jim Crow’s principle of separate but equal in the past. President Truman desegregated the military. The US Supreme Court declared segregated public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. A decade later, with passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Congress outlawed discrimination based in race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in schools, employment, and places of public accommodation. Political rights came in 1965, with adoption of the Voting Rights Act, which promised to Black women and men power at the polls as voters and in legislatures as office holders. It set in place the rights that African Americans had been struggling toward since the years of Reconstruction, nearly a century before.2
Black Americans brought the nation to these changes. They litigated, making the courts a forum for resetting power. They lobbied in state legislatures and in Congress, making the argument that affirming the rights of Black Americans would benefit the whole nation. They organized at the grass roots when officials shut them out of the halls of power. Black activists did this work in the face of great personal risk. The story of the modern civil rights movement is draped in mourning cloth, set there in honor of those who fought and died for justice.3
The movement had its architects. Many of them stood before the cameras, while others labored behind the scenes, taking on racism through varied strategies and tactics: nonviolence, direct action, and by any means necessary. The movement was never the sum of its high-level strategists alone. Millions of Black Americans—many of their names known only in families or local lore—picked up the burden that the generations before had borne. They marched. They sat-in. They picketed. They sang and provided the response to a speaker’s call. They filled jails and they crowded public offices. They provided a safe haven and they practiced self-defense. They submitted to photographers’ lenses and television’s cameras, which broadcast their images to the nation and the world from Selma and Greensboro, Birmingham and Topeka, Little Rock and Memphis.4
When the interests of Black Americans matched the interests of public officials, civil rights victories were nearly guaranteed. The stage for this meeting of the minds was set when the close of World War II brought on a new conflict, the Cold War. The Marshall Plan remade a world destroyed by fascism and bombs, and the United States became a global powerbroker as wartime allies divided Europe into spheres of interest. A battle for global influence began, and the United States vied with another emerging power, the Soviet Union, for alliance with and even dominion over the peoples of Eastern Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The Soviets did not waste any ammunition when it came to the war of propaganda. They saw in Jim Crow—and the deeply rooted racism that it grew out of—a potent repellant, one that might keep people of color around the globe from siding easily with the United States.5
Federal officials felt the sting of this Soviet offensive and began to rethink the terms of American inequality. The Soviet propaganda embarrassed them. News reports amplified instances in which diplomats and foreign service officials of color were discriminated against when they went to dine out in Washington, DC, restaurants. How, the argument went, could the United States be a good ally to Black and brown people around the world when it did not honor the human rights of its own citizens? Nonallied nations should expect that if they signed on to a US-led coalition, racism would follow along with military and economic aid. Members of the Eisenhower administration recalibrated their interests, and civil rights activists exploited the opening. At the US Supreme Court, the US Department of Justice filed a brief in support of Black schoolchildren in the Brown case. A consensus for dismantling Jim Crow emerged.6
Even with federal allies, every victory was hard won. Jim Crow’s advocates waged their own fight. Among white Southerners were those committed to resisting the full citizenship of Black Americans. In the wake of Brown, Southern states defunded public education and countenanced the establishment of private all-white segregated academies. Getting to integration required the direct intervention of federal officials and the National Guard, along with the courage of Black families that risked their children’s bodily well-being to defeat separate but equal in some districts. The Freedom Rides of 1961 put teams of Black and white activists on interstate buses, breathing life into court decisions that condemned segregated transportation. Still, as mobs attacked, police and public officials looked away, and in Washington the Justice Department intervened only reluctantly and with too little effect. In the US Senate, some lawmakers vowed to block the Civil Rights Act in 1964. When they failed, the opposition moved closer to the ground. In 1968, South Carolina highway patrol officers in Orangeburg opened fire on two hundred local college students as they attempted to desegregate a bowling alley. It was a brutal example of how painful and costly civil rights victories continued to be.7
When it resurfaced in the 1960s, the struggle for voting rights was as old as any cause. It was the latest chapter in the two-hundred-year-long story of how Black Americans had fought against laws and customs that kept them from the ballot box. History revealed the power of the vote—Black men had steered politics after Reconstruction and in some places Black women had influenced elections after 1920. Big changes fueled the quest for voting rights. In 1964, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution made it illegal to demand poll tax payments as a condition for voting in federal elections. Still, getting to the passage of a federal Voting Rights Act would require all the vision, organizing, and risk-taking that Black Americans could muster. Black women were on the front lines, as they always had been.8
BY THE LATE 1940s, Black women knew their way around politics. Whether casting ballots at the polls, knocking on officeholders’ doors, trading horses in party caucuses, or making grassroots efforts in clubs, they knew how it felt to hold the rough reins of power. Their lives were embattled by the snail’s-pace recovery from the Depression in Black communities. They watched as fascism took hold in Europe, and then they volunteered for military service out of a deep commitment to securing human rights, abroad and at home. They helped a new, modern civil rights movement gain a toehold—in courts, Congress, and the local meeting halls and churches that dotted the nation’s landscape. From the cosmopolitan salons of the nation’s capital to the cramped quarters of Southern sharecroppers’ homes, Black women showed what it meant to be full members of political culture.
Winning voting rights became a steady aim. Too many African Americans—women and men—were being kept from the polls by law, custom, and the specter of violence. But women’s activism still always mixed the fight for political rights with other long-standing concerns, including freedom from sexual violence, equality in the church, and the liberty to set the terms of work, wages, and family life. Black women were knit together by their critique of how racism and sexism truncated their access to political power. This was an old insight, one that had inspired Black women since Maria Stewart’s Boston speeches of the 1830s. But something was new by the 1940s. Black women aimed to secure their political power, and the impediments to that, they insisted, must be a central concern of any movement with which they were affiliated. They offered their allies a new lens through which to view injustice and to define human rights.
A century earlier, Harper’s Weekly had published another image of African Americans and “The First Vote” in 1867. It depicts African American men only, though a varied trio. The three are lining up before a solitary poll official, himself a plainly dressed, mature man with a generous gray beard. He stands over two jars, his gaze fixed upon the ballots being cast. The first, a working man, a patch on one knee of his loose-fitting pants and the tools of his trade—a mallet and a ruler—tucked in a jacket pocket, places his slip of paper in a jar. He appears modest but dignified, with a tie around his neck and hat in hand. The artist hints that he is a former slave by giving him white hair, a sign that he was born many decades before this post–Civil War moment. Behind him is a gentleman of means, sporting a finely tailored ensemble: jacket, slacks, and wide-brimmed white hat. In his pocket is a book, suggesting he is formally educated. His mustache is carefully groomed, and his stance is one of easy confidence. Perhaps he has been free a long time. Third in line is a soldier—still decked in his Union Army attire. Three stripes are visible on his left sleeve, marking him an officer. The medal on his left breast is a sign of his valor. Together—casting their first ballots—these figures explain that Black men were entitled to voting rights after the Civil War in recognition of their labor, education, and military service.9
A. R. Waud, “The First Vote.” Harper’s Weekly, November 16, 1867
GETTY IMAGES
The editors at Harper’s encouraged support for Black men’s voting rights. “Good sense and discretion, and above all modesty” characterized the Black men who, for the first time in the 1860s, exercised the “vast power that accompanies the privilege” of the vote. Artist Alfred Waud left Black women out of the scene, when in reality they had been very much present. Not only were Black women participants in the Reconstruction-era political conventions. They deliberated with men about politics. They stood guard at polling places while men voted. There is no echo of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who insisted that white women’s votes should come before those of Black men. There is also no sign of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who might have critiqued the scene for leaving Black women to be represented by their fathers, husbands, and sons. This veneration of Black voting rights left a great deal unsaid when it came to women.10
Fascination with first votes persisted long after 1867. More so than with other political rights, such as jury service or office holding, voting resides at the core of a democracy. Legitimate governance rests upon a mythical people who nominate, deliberate, and finally elect those who carry a sacred trust and bear a collective responsibility for the well-being of all. And so, images of individuals casting their inaugural ballots occupies an iconic place in the American political imagination. The first vote marks a crossing over into political adulthood and entrée into the political culture. Each is an affirmation and recommitment to the ideals of a representative government. Each time a first vote is cast, it is a new expression of faith in the nation. Black Americans have enacted this act of political faith—they have cast first votes—for generations.11
Still, many Black women waited longer than most Americans to cast their first votes. In 1965, Joe Ella Moore was nearly seventy years old when a federal official finally administered an oath that made her a registered voter in Prentiss, Mississippi. Federal officials took over twenty-four rooms in a local motel and, according to one report, they “cut connecting doors in the walls, moved out furniture and moved in registration desks.” When things there got too cramped, they took over the town post office. Black registration in Prentiss jumped from 5 to 19 percent in just one week.12
A local news photographer captured the sight of Joe Ella Moore just as she was being sworn in as a first-time voter. The image went viral, at least in 1965 terms, when the Associated Press distributed the photo to its network of regional newspapers. Bespectacled, with pen in one hand and the text of the oath in another, registrar Crawford A. Phillips of the federal Civil Service Commission welcomes Moore to the state’s roster of voters. Moore is dressed for a hot day, wearing a broad, low-brimmed straw hat that shields her face from the sun. A loose, sleeveless blouse is tied modestly, with a white ribbon, just below her chin. Her slender arm is uplifted, her right hand raised, signaling that she swears to the truth of those facts that made her eligible to vote.13
Moore had witnessed struggles for dignity and voting rights in Prentiss over many decades. Lynching persisted there until at least 1947, when Versie Johnson was killed by three white police officers who were charged and then found not guilty of manslaughter. In 1956, local officials purged minister Henderson Darby from the voters’ rolls in a sweep that cut the number of Black voters in Prentiss from 1,221 to just 60. Along with his wife, Darby attempted to reregister four times in 1957 before finally suing the officials who used an understanding clause to keep him off the rolls. He filed suit on behalf of himself and all those in Prentiss who were being kept from the polls, aided by the state NAACP head, Medgar Evers. Defending the state against Darby, Governor James Plemon “J. P.” Coleman remarked that he did not “believe Mississippi Negroes are ready to vote.” A three-judge federal court agreed, and Black voters in Prentiss would vote only after passage of the Voting Rights Act. In the interim, Evers was assassinated in front of his home in the early hours of June 12, 1963. He survived if only in memory as a martyr to the cause of voting rights in Mississippi. Joe Ella Moore kept the struggle alive.14
Winfred Moncrief, “Joe Ella Moore” (Prentiss, Mississippi, August 25, 1965)
MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY
That 1965 day in the Magnolia Motel was the first time Moore had successfully registered to vote. But she had spent years fighting for this. Like Darby she had already tried on seven occasions to get her name onto Mississippi’s voter rolls, only to be rejected at each turn. It was a dangerous and discouraging undertaking. Still, Moore took a final shot at registering, this time at the beckoning of federal officials: “She had heard the president say on the radio this morning that she could register.” And so, she appeared at a makeshift office before the federal registrars, one team among the many who arrived in Mississippi to enforce the Voting Rights Act.15
The dry language of the radio announcement masked its radical significance. Voting rights had arrived: “The U.S. Civil Service Commission at the request of the attorney general of the United States, acting under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, today started its program to list eligible voters in Prentiss and Jeff Davis County, Miss., without regard to race or color.” The political consequences would be wide-reaching, almost immediately. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party leader Fannie Lou Hamer had charged and Congressman William Ryan of New York had agreed that there was nothing legitimate about Mississippi’s last election because African Americans had been “systematically excluded.” Ryan called for the wholesale recall of the state’s delegation if things did not change. The entire nation watched as Black Mississippians like Moore breathed life into the Voting Rights Act. Each one understood the import of her raised hand.16
In the months that followed, scenes of first votes were enacted again and again. They may have become a regular sight, but they never became ordinary. It would always be extraordinary: thousands of Black Americans joining political culture. The mood was both jubilant and somber. A steep price had been paid for voting rights. In Mississippi, blood stained the fields, the roadways, and the hands of local officials and the ordinary men and women for whom white supremacy had been a cause worth killing for. Still, in the month after the act’s passage, Black enrollment increased by 120 percent and five years later, by 1970, 71 percent of eligible Black voters in Mississippi were registered. By 1971, Mississippi had elected a total of fifty Black officials, outranking Black office holding among the Southern states.17
DIANE NASH DID not come to the civil rights movement seeking to be a leader, though she certainly was one as a student at Nashville’s Fisk University. She had begun her journey many miles to the north, in Chicago, a city free from many of Jim Crow’s overt restrictions. Nash had been raised in the hometown of Ida B. Wells’s Alpha Suffrage Club, where Black women voters had helped elect an African American, Oscar DePriest, to Congress as far back as 1928. Nash knew that she had been sent to college for good reasons, perhaps to find a vocation. She had not been sent South to get involved with the “wrong bunch” and foment unrest, but with them she found her purpose. During an afternoon at the Tennessee State Fair, Nash was required to use a restroom marked for “colored women.” She realized how much work was yet to be done to undo segregation, and she never looked back.18
She took leadership seriously. Nash began to guide Nashville’s students in a series of sit-ins that intended to desegregate downtown eateries. She was already an organizer and a strategist at heart, more often found in meeting rooms than at the podium. She was not someone who led in front of the camera, in the spotlight, or through generating the adulation of crowds that charismatic leaders thrived upon. Her quiet, steely presence was often most effective just behind the scenes, where young Black Americans learned how to confront oppression together with the violence their protests unleashed.
Nash worked small and she aimed big. Service to others—fellow Fisk students, Black Tennesseans, and African Americans across the South—guided her efforts. In her, the philosophy of nonviolence and its deep and abiding belief in the power of peaceful direct action ran deep. But it was not a selfless approach to leadership. Nash’s own interests in dignity, rights, and power were bound up with those whom she served. Many of the images that survive from these early years capture her as part of a crowd, giving directions, and on the move—a blur of action. The best place to find Diane Nash is in the faces of the countless troops for justice that she mobilized.19
Nash was a true student of her vocation. She trained in nonviolent civil disobedience under Methodist minister and teacher of Ghandian nonviolence James Lawson, gaining the discipline needed to confront those who would taunt, and then assault, demonstrators who broke with law and custom in the effort to end segregation. Nash was among the students who defeated Nashville’s notorious Post House Restaurant—a major victory. She continued the sit-ins and then escalated the protests by being among those who, upon being arrested, refused bail. Nash spent time in solitary confinement and emerged more resolute. She would be arrested over and over, ensuring her place among the movement’s leaders for her willingness to put her body on the front lines of change.20
Segregation preoccupied Nash’s attention. In 1961, when Freedom Riders began to challenge segregation in public transportation she refocused. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) arranged for groups of travelers—Black and white, men and women—to ride interstate buses south from Washington, DC, to New Orleans. Mobs, encouraged by local officials, brutally attacked the riders, fire-bombing buses and savagely beating the CORE riders. Despite the intervention of federal officials, the assaults continued. When the riders were forced to abandon their route in Birmingham, Alabama, Nash leapt to action. She could not, Nash explained, permit civil rights to be stopped by violence, and she sent off young people from Tennessee to Alabama to continue the rides. Nash acknowledged that her young activists were putting their lives on the line and she was right. Violence continued in Montgomery even after Nash arrived there with Martin Luther King Jr. They were among those who passed a harrowing night in the city’s First Baptist Church, beset by a mob throwing tear gas. As a coordinator of the Nashville Freedom Riders, Nash broke down every night under the burden of having to put the lives of so many others in grave danger.21
When she is asked to explain how she came to the fight for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, Nash has always said it started with the girls. The news from Birmingham came from a familiar place, the city’s 16th Street Baptist Church, the headquarters for the city’s 1963 Children’s Crusade. In that moment, hundreds of young people had boycotted schools, marched on downtown streets, and demanded the integration of public buildings, businesses, and classrooms. Scores of arrestees filled the city’s jails, successfully pressuring local officials to negotiate with Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). A site of triumph soon became one of tragedy: Not so many months later, in September, four members of the United Klans of America planted dynamite at the church. When it exploded on a Sunday morning at nine a.m., four girls lay dead and twenty other worshipers were injured. News about the murders of Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair reached Nash and her husband, activist James Bevel, in Edenton, North Carolina, where they were taking part in a SCLC voter registration project.22
Nash and Bevel grieved, but their organizer’s instincts quickly kicked in. That same afternoon, the two drafted what became the Selma plan. Nash presented the strategy to King, but took many months to persuade the SCLC leadership to target Alabama. Nash began by writing pamphlets and collecting statistics. Soon she was on the ground in Selma, where she organized “people who needed and wanted a way to express themselves and wanted a way that they could make change.” Nash negotiated the tense relationship between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and SCLC. She spoke decisively to demonstrators at Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Selma campaign’s headquarters. When it came time for the fateful marches out of Selma, Nash mapped out where protesters would go and when, and ran the logistics. When state officials unleashed police billy clubs, fists, and hard-toed boots on marchers as they paused on the far side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, it was Nash who made sure that medics were soon on the scene. Later, as marchers finally reached Montgomery, Nash completed the last few blocks alongside King.
At Selma, Nash harnessed all of the principles that had brought her to that moment. She understood the bargain that would bring federal officials to the table when it came to voting rights. “The principles of nonviolence had left marchers especially vulnerable to violence. But it also won them supporters from those across the country, including in Washington, D.C.” There was a terrible price to be paid by those who put their bodies on the front lines and met brutality with nonviolence. She was emboldened by what transpired at Selma when a “peaceful demonstration” exposed “the brutal intransigence of anti-voting rights state officials.” Within just a few months of the Selma demonstrations, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. But it was Nash who brought about voting rights in Alabama on the ground.23
In August 1965, the SCLC held its annual meeting in Birmingham. The theme was “Human Rights, Basic Issues, the Grand Alliance.” It was, for Nash, a return to the city where murderous violence had sharpened her commitment to winning voting rights. She may have paid respect to the four girls killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church that day; no doubt they were on her mind. Nash surfaced only amid the crowd of four thousand that had gathered in the city’s Municipal Center. Many had come to hear Martin Luther King Jr., who had won the Nobel Peace Prize the previous year. King’s subject that night was the war in Vietnam, and he urged the nation to end its cycle of “mistrust, violence, and war” in Southeast Asia.24
The program at Birmingham also honored Black women’s leadership. The banquet speaker was former NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney Constance Baker Motley, who had since been elected to the New York State Senate and the “first” Manhattan Borough president. Rosa Parks was also honored, “for her most historical role in the civil rights movement,” in a ceremony presided over by Septima Clark, director of the SCLC’s Citizenship Schools. Women struggled within the SCLC to win authority and independence, but the force of their leadership was nearly irresistible.25
The conference “highlight” arrived when King presented the organization’s highest honor, the Rosa Parks Award, to James Bevel and Diane Nash, “SCLC workers in Alabama.” The two were lauded for being “at the forefront of almost every major civil rights campaign” and “long-time, front line ‘freedom fighters.’” There was a panel discussion during which Bevel pressed his commitment to nonviolence into the realm of international affairs, calling for the formation of a “peace team” comprising King, the pope, and Mrs. Nikita Khrushchev that would personally urge President Johnson to end the war. If Nash spoke even a word during the conference, it went unrecorded. Her force, however, lay only partly in words. Nash’s political leadership was most powerful behind the scenes, where she planned, maneuvered, conspired, and built cooperation among activists, all keys to the success of the Selma movement.26
DIANE NASH, AS a strategist and an organizer, avoided the limelight. Not all women were so retiring. Pauli Murray knew she wanted to be seen and recognized in the battle against what she came to call “Jane Crow,” that particular brand of racism that was cut through with sexism. Murray made plain how, even when men and women worked alongside one another, their challenges were not the same. Murray’s maneuverings through circles of law, politics, and religion illustrate how Black women, even as they were on the precipice of gaining political rights, continued to develop a kind of power that kept them nimble. It made them effective. Murray was an ally to those women who, like Nash, took up the quest for voting rights, but she charted her own path.27
As a young woman, Murray doubted the value politics of parties and candidates, and her first appearances at the polls were uneasy. She voted in her first presidential contest in 1932, an election that ended with Democrat Franklin Roosevelt resoundingly defeating the Republican Herbert Hoover. Murray cast her ballot in New York City, where she had recently graduated from Hunter College for Women. Hers was, as she later put it, “a vote of protest.” She could not bring herself to support either major party, and so she cast her ballot for the Socialist Norman Thomas. The next election cycle was no less fraught. In 1936, Murray was just ending her affiliation with the Communist Party Opposition, and she bridled against pressure to vote for the Communist candidate, Earl Browder. By the 1950s, her views had shifted and, in the wake of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Murray, by then a civil rights attorney, joined a team that defeated the exclusion of Black women from juries in the Lowndes County, Mississippi, case of White v. Crook. Murray came to see Black women’s power at the polls as critical. But that was only later.28
Murray’s real entrée into politics came in March 1940, when she joined the annals of women traveling while Black. It was the eve of an Easter Sunday visit with her Durham, North Carolina, family. Riding by bus from New York City, Murray and her friend, Adeline McBean, were required to change buses in a Virginia depot. The company relegated the two women to a vastly inferior bus, one brought out to accommodate heavier-than-usual holiday traffic demand; they found the seats for Black riders uncomfortable and in disrepair. The women asked the driver to rearrange a few white passengers to make room for them closer to the front. He refused “curtly,” and with his arm pushed Murray backward into the bus. After a heated back-and-forth with the driver, Murray and McBean were arrested pursuant to charges that shifted in the coming hours and days. This was not part of any plan or test case. With the support of civil rights attorneys, the women were found guilty of only a minor, disturbing-the-peace charge.29
Interstate buses did not set aside seats for “ladies.” Nor did Murray and McBean fit easily into how Black women were expected to appear in public. Murray did not carry herself as a woman, and initially other passengers, and perhaps the driver himself, believed her—slim, dressed in slacks and a shirt, and with her hair combed back—to be a man. This was, it is important to note, her aim. But in what followed, gender, as in womanhood, still mattered. McBean was the more compelling and sympathetic of the two, at least in the eyes of one observer. McBean’s unambiguous womanhood—along with an infirmity that had overtaken her aboard the second bus—gave her pleas for just treatment a persuasive quality that Murray’s words—practiced, professional, and appearing to emanate from a young man—did not.30
The confrontation on that Virginia bus activated Murray, ushering her into civil rights politics and law. The women’s legal wrangling brought them to Washington, where they met Thurgood Marshall and Link Johnson. They also met Judge William Hastie and Dr. Leon Ransom, members of the Howard University Law faculty. These were fateful encounters. The following fall, with the support of Ransom, Murray began her studies at Howard Law School. In that legendary setting—the crucible for the development of the NAACP’s civil rights litigation strategy—Murray’s expectations were high. Still, it took some happenstance, including a chance encounter with Ransom, who encouraged her application, to get her to Washington to enroll for the fall 1941 semester.31
At Howard, Murray’s education went far beyond any course or curriculum. She learned lessons about the double bind of racism and sexism. Murray was not wholly certain she belonged. Howard Law was already a fabled place by 1940, with a reputation that was well earned. There, Houston had trained young Black men—including the civil rights warrior Thurgood Marshall. Murray was as ambitious as any young man. She quickly demonstrated her intellectual prowess and ranked first in the class. As a woman in a law school populated almost entirely by men, she was tested as never before. Sexism at Howard Law sometimes came in the form of demeaning remarks or outright disregard. More often, it was more insidious: indifference and a failure to wholly see the young woman student and her capacities for lawyering and leadership.32
Murray’s refuge came about solely out of necessity. Her scholarship money did not add up, even when supplemented by the gift of a generous benefactor. To make ends meet, she accepted the offer from a cousin and Howard’s Dean of Women, Susie Elliott, of a space in the university’s dormitory for undergraduate women, Sojourner Truth Hall. For some students, a tiny room at the end of a first-floor corridor might have been a depressing if not demeaning circumstance. For Murray, it was the place that gave her purpose. In a small “powder room,” there in a hall named for a pioneer of Black women’s rights, Murray set up a study hall and meeting space. After hours, Howard’s young women students sought out Murray for her growing legal expertise and her willingness to share it. Sitting cross-legged, leaning against a nearby wall, or perhaps perched on the edge of a bed, Howard’s young women students gathered as Murray held court, serving as counselor, teacher, and organizer at the dawn of the modern civil rights era.33
It was a woman’s time at Howard. Of course, men still attended, and they dominated the faculty. But those who were draft-eligible, along with some who voluntarily heeded the call to enlist, were absent. Sixty percent of the university’s students were women, but for Murray, any number of men was new. Howard’s atmosphere was distinct from the women-only undergraduate scene at Hunter. Sexism was, for the first time in her formal education, a regular part of her daily strife, even as racism receded there on a predominantly Black campus. Murray may have felt disoriented and disappointed, but she pushed back. When a call to join the Phi Alpha Delta law fraternity invited only men students, Murray confronted her beloved professor and mentor, Leon Ransom, only to be dismissed. He told her that if she desired such a professional opportunity, she was welcome to begin a parallel sorority. Ransom’s words stung, but they also contributed to Murray’s self-awareness of how gender worked, and how it could work against her. Murray’s excellence would ultimately be recognized when the Law Students Guild elected her Chief Justice of the Court of Peers. Still, her thinking was forever changed.34
At Howard, a community of women surrounded Murray, and she grew to depend upon them for emotional, intellectual, and political sustenance. Caroline Ware, a history professor, became a friend and guide through a world of new ideas, especially those about inequality and the law. National Woman’s Party member and sculptor Betsy Graves Reyneau arrived at Howard to produce a portrait of the school’s first African American president, Mordecai Johnson. Reyneau introduced Murray to the long history of women’s rights and their entanglement with slavery and racism. Ruth Powell, an undergraduate from Massachusetts, headed Howard’s NAACP Direct Action Committee and befriended Murray. Nearby, Pauline Redmond, who had joined the staff of the National Youth Administration, was a confidante who encouraged Murray to take her concerns to Washington’s highest officials. The two shared an afternoon at the White House with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt that led to enduring alliances. Murray’s political identity coalesced as she adopted a more conventional vantage point—that of a woman—even as internally she wrestled with being a man in a woman’s body and experiencing desires for which she did not yet have words.35
In collaboration with Howard’s young women students, Murray was about to receive an education outside the classroom. She had been a student of nonviolent direct action through the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, and she had even developed her own version of the approach, one that combined nonviolence with what she called “American techniques of showmanship.” An opportunity to test her theory arrived in winter of 1943, when three sophomore women insisted on being served at a Pennsylvania Avenue food counter. It took a police officer’s directive to finally get them their cups of hot chocolate—the young women were breaking no local law by demanding service. But when the bill arrived, the students were overcharged. Upon exiting, they paid only the regular price, giving police a reason to arrest and jail them.36
Murray soon learned that among the three protesters was her friend Ruth Powell, who had been quietly waging her own sit-in campaign for nearly a year. From Massachusetts, Powell was a newcomer to the capital’s Jim Crow routines and later explained that she believed “all these little bits of agitation would go toward that vital… awakening process” that would enlighten white Americans. Powell’s strategy became the core of Murray’s plan, and her tiny quarters in Truth Hall buzzed as the young women prepared for direct action. They surveyed campus attitudes about segregation. They researched and publicized pending civil rights legislation. Pep rallies and town hall meetings built support. In-class discussions led to deeper insights. Among the lessons were those derived from Black women’s respectability politics: dress, decorum, and dignity, at all times. Powell headed the committee that sponsored weekly actions at local restaurants “sitting quietly, requesting service.” They rebuffed Howard’s president, Mordecai Johnson, who feared for the school’s future funding should students upset the admittedly unjust racial etiquette of the District of Columbia.37
The full weight of their planning was brought to bear on a rainy Saturday afternoon in April. A dozen or so students sat down at tables in the Little Palace Cafeteria. They waited to be served. A second group assembled outside and formed a picket line: “Our Boys, our Bonds, our Brothers Are Fighting for YOU! Why Can’t We Eat Here?” It was a long forty-eight hours before the restaurant capitulated and agreed to serve Black customers.38
Murray later considered these moments as critical to sharpening her analysis of Black women’s political power. Most of those who emerged victorious after the Little Palace Cafeteria action were women. Still, it was the strategic linking of two strains of African American contributions to the war—young men’s service abroad and young women’s action at home—that was fundamental to their success. In this, they borrowed from the logic of the Double V campaign: “Democracy—Double Victory, at Home—Abroad.” The long-term effects were real. The student actions were not mere outbursts, nor were they episodes of youthful exuberance. Murray later looked back to appreciate how the young women she came to know so well in the early months of 1943 went on to lead in social service, education, government administration, and civil rights politics. It was a signature feature of Murray’s work—she was often both protégée and mentor, blurring generational lines to broaden the movement’s aims.39
At Howard, Murray’s most influential idea was born: Jane Crow. Jim Crow had long before entered everyday parlance as a phrase that captured the elements of American disenfranchisement, segregation, and violence. Murray was searching for a similar kind of phrase, one that would offer a framework that recognized the burdens borne by women. How could the civil rights movement better speak to contests over the ladies’ car or the ubiquity of sexual assault? How could activists better account for the subordination of women in their own circles and for the disabilities women faced in courthouses? It would be two decades more before Murray would publish her defining article: “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII.” But it was at Howard, in Sojourner Truth Hall, that Murray came to understand how her analysis needed to meet the challenges that she and other Black women were living.40
Murray’s life was nothing short of extraordinary in the decades that followed her years at Howard Law. Her work singularly shaped the rights of American women. Still, none of her many accomplishments resonated more with the long history of Black women’s politics than her ordination to the priesthood in 1977. Had she read the memoirs of nineteenth-century women like Jarena Lee and Julia Foote, Murray would have recognized how the same thinking that had kept Lee and Foote from the pulpit still animated church debates more than a century later. Murray battled over the rights of women in the place that had been her spiritual home nearly her entire life. She agitated on the issue first in her local parish—St. Mark’s-on-the-Bowery on New York City’s Lower East Side—and continued through her time, starting at age sixty-two, as a student at the General Theological Seminary.41
The Episcopalian hierarchy was debating the future of women in the church, and Murray was not shy about calling for change. In a final year spent at the Virginia Theological Seminary, where overall thinking was more compatible with hers, Murray confronted women’s ordination head-on. The debate grew heated as women were ordained by progressive bishops, and then denied licenses by conservative others. In September 1976, the church-wide General Convention finally concluded that “no one shall be denied access” to ordination on the basis of sex, effective January 1, 1977. Murray became the first Black woman elevated to full privileges in the Episcopal Church. Preceding her investiture at Washington’s National Cathedral, Murray understood the historic nature of her ordination: “It appears I am the first Negro (my preference) woman to be approved for admission to the priesthood in the Anglican communion in the USA, some 172 years after Absalom Jones, the first Afro-American to be ordained a priest—in 1804 at the age of 58.”42
On the day of her ordination, Murray ensured that she would be seen, in every sense of the word. She dressed herself that morning in a simple white smock with a priest’s collar around her neck, its distinctive tab covered by a collaret of black that left just a small square of white visible at the front of her throat. The ceremony itself was held in the nation’s most prominent house of worship, the Episcopal Church at the Washington National Cathedral. Murray was among six candidates, or ordinates, affirmed by the bishop for the Diocese of Washington, the Right Reverend William F. Creighton. News outlets gave Murray’s latest distinction broad coverage. She might have especially appreciated the irony in the Washington Post’s wording, which noted that she was the only “regular” woman candidate; the two others were “irregularly ordained” women who were finally being recognized. The Chicago Tribune noted that among the thirty Episcopal women slated for ordination that same month, one was “an acknowledged lesbian in New York City,” though the article referred to someone other than Murray.43
Perhaps most striking of all was how Murray came to see herself. Through faith, she discovered another view that transcended the man-made differences that too often troubled the lives of Black women: “All the strands of my life had come together. Descendant of slave and of slave owner, I had already been called poet, lawyer, teacher, and friend.” In faith and her identity as a priest, Murray looked past how others saw her: “Now I was empowered to minster the sacrament of One in whom there is no north or south, no Black or white, no male or female—only the spirit of love and reconciliation drawing us all toward the goal of human wholeness.” It was a concern for all of humanity that ensured that Black women would continue to claim Murray as their sister. Her concerns were theirs, too.44
Murray did not take singular credit for her ordination. Instead, she encouraged others to regard her achievement as reflecting women’s broader struggles for power. She was, for example, a founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), a manifestation of her commitment to winning women’s equality that fit with her church activism. Murray’s ordination bookended a tale that began with the first Black men who had been made ministers in the same church at the start of the nineteenth century: “One-hundred and seventy-two years after ordaining the first Black man into the priesthood, the Episcopal Church admitted its first Black woman, the Reverend Pauli Murray.” Murray characteristically offered her own reinterpretation, clarifying that she was not a “first”: “I supported the women who went ahead of me (in the church ministry) and it was their agony which made my own ordination possible.” She was part of a collective and a longer effort, a story of which she was but one part. And although she knew she was a first at many things, being ordained “is the end of a long series of firsts for me,” she explained. But that alone wasn’t enough to humble Murray in light of her lifetime of accomplishments. Being a woman, she believed, was not her defining qualifier in all things: “It isn’t being the first Negro woman (priest), it is being a priest that frightens me.” Perhaps she had transcended.45
Even in the heyday of voting rights activism, Pauli Murray was singular. She lived by a brand of nimbleness and versatility, and no movement defined or contained her. Instead, Murray, the intellectual, crystallized Black women’s thinking in the civil rights era when she proposed Jane Crow as its own brand of discrimination, one that required distinct thinking and tactics. At each phase of her life, she self-consciously aimed for the cutting edge and intersected with other Black women at many junctures, from segregated buses and lunch counters to courthouses and churches. Her distance from the center of voting rights activism, through this lens, demonstrates how old frameworks for Black women’s politics, alongside new ones, persisted.
IF PAULI MURRAY believed she saw the civil rights revolution coming, nobody told Rosa McCauley Parks, growing up in Montgomery, Alabama, that she was destined for a life in politics. Parks came of age in the grass roots of Black America, where the challenges faced by her family and friends determined her concerns. Parks shared with Pauli Murray a keen sense of how women fit within the broader Black freedom struggle, and she would develop a similarly deft approach, one that let her move easily between issues and tactics on the road to human rights. Parks is best known for refusing to give up her bus seat and launching a game-changing boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. But it was her early training in the politics of sexual violence and voting rights that meant Parks never separated the rights of women from those of Black Americans. When invoked as a symbol of women’s modest, commonsense contributions to the civil rights movement, what is left unacknowledged is Parks’s identity as a sophisticated activist and tactician, for whom women’s rights and civil rights were one and the same struggle.46
Born in 1913 in south-central Alabama, Rosa’s education came about through a patchwork of experiences. Her mother, a teacher, wove learning into her everyday life. Her grandfather taught Rosa lessons about self-defense, self-determination, and the pan-African philosophy of the Garvey movement. Nothing about her elders’ aspirations shielded Rosa from hard work, and her fingers knew the sharp edges of the cotton boll that inflicted cuts and slices during hours spent picking. At the white-run Miss White’s Industrial School for Girls, among the African American students, Rosa prepared for a life of domestic labor. She did not earn a diploma, but she did make lifelong friends.47
Life soon taught Rosa the purpose of Black women’s rights when an encounter in an employer’s kitchen drove home the threat of sexual violence. It was 1931, the midst of the Depression, and Rosa, still a teen, thought herself lucky to have a position as a maid and babysitter, even if it required she work seven days and many nights. An otherwise ordinary day ended with Rosa alone in the house. She settled into the living room, where her habit was to read the newspaper, listen to the radio, or hear records on the phonograph. It was the time of day she most looked forward to. A knock on the back door brought Rosa face-to-face with the household’s maintenance man, who uttered a pretense about having left behind his coat. Rosa did not find a coat, but she did recognize that over his shoulder stood a white man—someone she identified with the generic “Mr. Charlie”—who then entered the kitchen. Her coworker disappeared and the intruder poured himself a whiskey while Rosa began washing dishes. She offered him a seat in the living room, where he might wait for the homeowners, but the visitor continued to hover. It was only another moment before the man’s intent became plain. He had come to see Parks, not her employers. Finding his hand on her waist, Rosa was “just plain scared nearly to death.”48
She knew she was in danger as a thin ritual of seduction unfolded: he offered her a drink, reassured her that she would not be “hurt,” professed affection, promised to cure her loneliness, pled for sweetness, and offered money. Emotions—from hurt and helplessness to anger and disgust—coursed through Rosa: “I felt filthy and stripped naked of every shred of decency.” Assessing that her “puny” body was no physical match for the “tall, heavy set man,” Rosa also judged that white supremacy framed the confrontation: “The white man’s dominance over the Negro’s submissive subjection through the history of chattel slavery—semi-freedom to this moment.” Her thoughts turned to God, and then Rosa reached for history as a weapon. She “talked and talked of everything [she] knew about the white man’s inhuman treatment of the Negro.” By law and custom, Black women and white men were intended to be separate in all things intimate, Rosa reminded her assailant. She intended to honor the color line drawn by antimiscegenation laws and he should do the same.49
Rosa revealed her careful thinking about how Black women figured in a world fractured by lines of race and sex. For example, when her assailant asserted that her coworker had said it was “alright for him to be there with her,” Rosa was indignant and shot back a proclamation of her autonomy as a woman. Her coworker, she said, “had nothing to do with me of what I chose to do or not do. He did not own me and could not offer me for sale.” She intended to set the terms of her intimate life by the principles of choice and consent. Rosa continued: “I hoped to marry and live a decent respectable life rather than be a white man’s tramp.” She was unafraid, Rosa explained, “ready and willing to die, but give any consent, never. Never. Never. It was absolutely unthinkable.” In those fraught moments, Rosa chose dignity over life: “If he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body, he was welcome.… While I lived, I would stand alone in my belief, no matter who was against me.” Rosa once again insisted that her assailant leave the house, emphasizing that the encounter was over by sitting herself in an armchair, opening a newspaper, and beginning to read. The experience haunted her.50
By 1932, Rosa had met and married barber Raymond Parks, the husband with whom she enjoyed a partnership that stretched from family life to politics. She quickly became his ally in the defense of nine young men accused of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama. The Black defendants were charged with sexually assaulting two white women aboard a freight train traveling between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee. In rushed trials and without adequate counsel, all but one of the young men were convicted and sentenced to death. Harassed and coerced, their records included confessions of wrongdoing, but ultimately, they asserted their innocence. Their story revealed how white supremacy victimized the South’s Black working poor, and both the legal arm of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the NAACP stepped in to defend the accused.51
Black Southerners risked being branded dissidents when they supported the Scottsboro defendants, especially after the CPUSA International Labor Defense took over the case. Public support could lead to the loss of employment, harassment, and worse. Still, there is no sign that Parks hesitated when she joined her husband as he organized support for a lengthy series of appeals and retrials. The case spoke to her own experience, another example of how sexual violence threatened Black Americans. In the Scottsboro case, the direct victims were not Black women, though the young men’s mothers would go public to encourage support for their sons’ freedom. In Scottsboro, the victims were young men for whom a false charge of committing sexual assault against white women promised death, be it by a lynch mob, a hangman’s noose, or the electric chair. In Parks’s world, the issue of sexual assault cut two ways for Black Americans. Encounters with predatory white men placed women’s dignity at risk, while false accusations threatened the well-being of Black men.52
As she made sense of the twisted logics of sexual violence, Parks charted her own course through politics. She drew upon examples of those who came before her, many of them women. There were those in her own family, including Parks’s great-grandmother: “In slavery days [she] could not do more or know more than to be used and abused by the slave owner. She was bred, born and reared to serve no other purpose than that which resulted in the bastard issue to be trampled, mistreated and abused by both Negro slave and white master.” Parks read the histories of influential Black activists from Crispus Attucks, the first man to fall during the American Revolution, to the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s founding bishop, Richard Allen. She admired her Baptist Church contemporaries, pastor Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and his son, the minister and member of Congress, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Her models among Black women stretched across nearly two hundred years, from the eighteenth-century enslaved woman and poet Phillis Wheatley, to the nineteenth-century advocates of abolition and women’s rights, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. Among her twentieth-century contemporaries, Parks singled out Mary McLeod Bethune as among the women whose work informed Parks’s activism.53
Parks might have chosen to settle into an ordinary life in Montgomery. But even the ordinary was anything but that in Alabama. Parks’s schoolmate Johnnie Carr described the city as the state capital and “the Cradle of the Confederacy and the Heart of Dixie.” Discontent simmered in Montgomery, “a place where Negroes seemed very polite to the other group. Always giving up their rights for peace. But this kind of peace was only on the surface; way deep down inside they were sick at heart of the many humiliating experiences which led to deep resentment.” Parks’s own grievances led her to make a fateful decision. In 1943, she spotted a photo of Carr in attendance at a local NAACP meeting, a branch of the venerable civil rights organization. When the next meeting was called, Parks headed to the hall. With a quick scan of the room, she confirmed that she was the only woman present and set about to make herself useful. Before the proceedings concluded, she was selected branch secretary and took a seat among the leadership.54
That same night, she met E. D. Nixon, a Montgomery-based Pullman porter and union activist who was spearheading a voter registration campaign. Nixon’s Montgomery Voters League aimed to grow the woefully small number of Black voters in the city: just thirty-one Black residents, out of thousands, were on the rolls. The state of Alabama’s application demanded that prospective voters disclose their employer, business, education, and history of drug or alcohol use and declare their loyalty to the government. All registrants were asked if they had previously attempted registration. Officials demanded that those who did not own property pass additional tests. When successful, the names of registrants were published in the local newspaper, inviting retribution. And, even after all that, registrants were required to pay retrospective poll taxes, placing voting nearly always out of reach.55
Parks tried more than once to register and when, in 1944, Nixon assembled 750 people to add their names to the rolls, Parks and her mother joined the group. They succeeded, though she was required to pass the state tests and then pay back poll taxes. In 1945, she voted for gubernatorial candidate James Folsom, an integration moderate and modest advocate of Black civil rights. Her work continued with the local Youth Council through which she encouraged voter education and the registration of young people. It had all been an ordeal, and Parks described the “trying… hazardous conditions, such as being denied a number of times, and feeling that there was a threat just to become a registered voter and cast my ballot to elect offices.” Voting rights were the foundation of Parks’s political training.56
Through the lens of her early experiences, it is apparent how Parks continued to blend the concerns of women with those of Black men to arrive at an enduring commitment to collective human rights. The Montgomery challenge to segregated transportation began when city officials arrested Parks for failing to heed a bus driver’s order to move from her seat and culminated in a victory for all Black Americans: the US Supreme Court, in Browder v. Gayle, ruled that segregated transportation was unconstitutional in Alabama and across the nation. Women were the heart of the Montgomery movement, starting with the domestic workers who walked, carpooled, took taxis, or rode with employers and risked themselves on the streets of a city rife with tension. Members of the city’s Women’s Political Council roused support for Parks by framing the indignities of segregated buses as especially offensive when imposed upon women: “If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother.”57
Parks took her seat as President Lyndon Johnson’s staff attended to the final details of the 1965 Voting Rights Act signing ceremony. She had arrived there by Johnson’s special invitation, and a casual observer might have mistaken Parks for a seamstress whose tired feet had sparked a critical episode on the road to African American political rights. Parks came to Washington to celebrate expanding access to the polls, but those who knew Parks well were aware that she stood not only for Black women’s voting rights but also for their liberation from some of Jim Crow’s worst horrors. She was also there as a survivor of white men’s harassment and as an advocate for women who had not escaped the sexual violence that pervaded their work and their lives. She was an icon from the past, but Parks was also a harbinger of Black women’s futures.
FANNIE LOU HAMER had been rebuffed, harassed, beaten, and sexually assaulted at the hands of local officials. Her experiences as an activist in the early 1960s was a testament to why Black women needed the vote and needed it immediately. Without political power, they could not expect the state to address their concerns or take up their interests in fair wages and equitable work conditions, along with decent housing, public schools, and municipal services. Hamer’s approach to power rejected benevolence and meager accommodations that white Mississippians might dole out. If sociologists or demographers might cast Hamer as a lesser, she held herself out as an equal. Her work was to awaken her home state and the nation to those places in American politics that Black Americans intended to inhabit. She began at the polls, but traveled all the way to the heart of the Democratic Party. And she brought with her thousands of Black women who would never again retreat.58
When Hamer spoke of voting rights, history ran through her thinking. Early in her days as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, she testified about registering as a Black woman in rural Mississippi. Violence, intimidation, and retaliation were ever present—running through many of Hamer’s days and rendering most of her nights harrowing. Important to Hamer’s thinking was a historical perspective: she and others labored for African American freedom during one of western Mississippi’s most haunted chapters, and they were making history. When she told her story, as she often did with eloquence, Hamer explained her voting rights activism of the 1960s and 1970s as one chapter in the same African American freedom struggle that had touched the generations that preceded her.59
The youngest of twenty children, Hamer was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi, in 1917 and spent the first part of her life raising a family and picking cotton as a sharecropper. She began to talk of rights in 1962, when local officials prevented her and a group of neighbors, all rural Mississippians, from registering to vote. Racial discrimination was an offense, as Hamer put it to a Harlem audience, “based upon the violation of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, which hadn’t done anything for us yet.” As Hamer analyzed inequality in Mississippi and across the nation, the US Constitution was important. She believed that its principles guaranteed Black Americans voting rights, and her aim as an organizer was to compel the nation to make good on that promise.60
Hamer spoke on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Black Americans who, like her, were denied voting rights, even one hundred years after Reconstruction’s constitutional revolution. She noted how denial of the ballot persisted, particularly in the Deep South, because Mississippi’s election authorities were using literacy and understanding tests to disqualify Black men and women. Hamer was quick to explain that the imposition of such qualifications and the related terror were violations of their rights as citizens and of equal protection before the law. Law mattered. But Hamer never spoke of the Nineteenth Amendment the way she did of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Yes, she was a woman. But she did not see the terms of the Nineteenth Amendment—the one that constitutionalized women’s voting rights—as protecting her.
If the ballot box was a battleground, so too was Hamer’s body. Even before she became an activist, racism exacted a brutal price when, without her knowledge, doctors performed a hysterectomy on her. That started a long-standing confrontation between Hamer, her body, and the state. Another encounter with racist brutality in 1963 left her permanently damaged. Traveling home by bus from an SNCC conference, Hamer and colleagues stopped in Winona, Mississippi, for a bite to eat and to use the restroom. Local police confronted the group and, rankled by their refusal to defer to the white men’s authority, arrested them all. Harrowing days followed, nearly costing Hamer and others their lives.61
Hamer described what happened when it was her turn to be interrogated in jail. She was alone with one highway patrol officer and two Black prisoners:
The state highway patrolmen ordered the first Negro to take the Blackjack. The first Negro prisoner ordered me, by orders from the state highway patrol man, for me to lay down on a bunk bed on my face. And I laid on my face and the first Negro began to beat me. And I was beat by the first Negro until he was exhausted.… After the first Negro had beat until he was exhausted, the state highway patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the Blackjack. The second Negro began to beat me to sit on my feet to keep me from working my feet. I began to scream and one white man got up and began to beat me in my head and tell me to hush. One white man—my dress had worked up high—he walked over and pulled my dress, I pulled my dress down and he pulled my dress back up.62
Hamer later disclosed that a sexual assault followed.
She sustained “devastating and permanent injuries” and was forever changed. Hamer lost sight in her left eye and suffered permanent kidney damage. The limp she had long lived with, one she believed was the result of a childhood bout with polio, worsened. In this way, Hamer wore the struggle for voting rights for all to see. The injuries she sustained were one price Hamer paid for her insistence on her rights. As her public reputation grew over the years, when Hamer took the podium across the nation, the injuries inflicted at Winona were her first form of testimony about the price that Black women paid for the vote.63
In 1964, Hamer’s image was broadcast into thousands upon thousands of American homes, live from that summer’s Democratic National Committee (DNC) convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Hamer arrived there as a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegation, a dissenting body that sought to displace the state’s party representatives, all of whom had been designated without the input of Black citizens who had been denied the ballot during the state’s primary election in 1963. The MFDP’s unwavering insistence upon being seated inaugurated a series of complicated negotiations. Behind the scenes, Hamer went back and forth between party officials, agents of the Johnson administration, and civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. At some moments she was nearly cut out from the wrangling. But she managed to steer her party throughout.64
Hamer prepared herself to stand and speak before an audience that extended far beyond the DNC’s 110-member credentials committee. Television viewers watched as NBC broadcast Hamer’s civil rights initiative into living rooms across the nation. By the 1960s, live television news ensured that images circulated with unprecedented speed, and women in the Black freedom struggle understood that viewers would assess them in part through their comportment and their dress. This was not the era of respectability politics. Instead, Black women had a broadening repertoire upon which to draw as they dressed to buttress their political authority. The backdrop for Hamer’s appearance was a new “soul style” of dress that signaled, even before they spoke a word, how women who donned it were practicing the politics of liberation.65
Hamer made no secret of her origins. She said that she began life as a working person and that her body bore the signs of countless hours spent picking cotton—the ache of a back too long bent over in the fields and the rough skin of hands too often cut by the sharp pod that held cotton bolls. But in Atlantic City, Hamer did not don a sharecropper’s signature denim coveralls—even as many of her young women allies in SNCC did so as a gesture of solidarity with women like her. Nor did Hamer don a scarf or head wrap, which would have suggested how she had been impoverished as local white people retaliated against her family for her political activism.
News cameras panned to capture Hamer as she stepped to the DNC credentials committee witness table, self-styled as a middle-class woman, finely dressed for the occasion. Most prominent was Hamer’s light-colored handbag, hooked over her forearm, prominently carried, a sign of her membership in a class of women for whom a purse signaled the possession of accouterments, from a pack of mints and a cosmetic case to a wallet with cash and perhaps a credit card. Hamer’s short-sleeved dress was belted at the waist, complementing her full figure. Its elaborate pattern, light flowers set along dark, scalloped, horizontal borders, suggested that it was deliberately chosen—a dress for a special occasion—making Hamer stand out amid a sea of men’s dark suits and light shirt sleeves. Hamer’s head was bare, her hair in a natural bob, neatly tucked behind her ears, and earrings dangled from her lobes. She might have been headed to a lunch or on a shopping excursion, though the badge that identified her as a MFDP delegate marked her plainly as on political business rather than an afternoon’s leisure.66
Hamer recited her often-told story of losing her job and her home after first attempting to register as a voter in Mississippi. Then, abruptly, the television broadcast cut over to remarks by Lyndon Johnson. The president’s timing was intended to draw attention away from the MFDP testimony. But the full committee remained in their seats, rapt, during the eight or so minutes when Hamer recounted the terror of her time held and then brutally assaulted by officials in Winona. Later that day, Hamer’s full remarks were broadcast for the world to watch. She was briefly lifted by an outpouring of support—both from the committee and from across the nation.
Compromise proposals deeply undercut the goals of the MFDP—which included winning real influence for its members—and would leave them with little more than symbolic inclusion. Negotiations soured in the hours that followed, and Hamer and the MFDP walked away, refusing to settle. They returned to Mississippi to continue the struggle for voting rights. Still, Hamer had managed the unthinkable. She had elevated her person, her story, and the politics she embodied—that of a Black woman sharecropper turned handbag-toting political operative—to national consequence. Americans were tuned in to the struggle for voting rights as never before, and had Hamer to thank for it.
THREE BLACK WOMEN stepped forward, illuminated by the flash of camera bulbs, during the signing ceremony for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Photographers swarmed and jockeyed to capture just the right pantheon of faces from among those gathered to mark the moment when federal law committed the nation to protecting Black Americans’ access to the ballot. Not since the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 had the United States so boldly affirmed that racism must not compromise membership in political culture. These were images that not only would circulate on the pages of the nation’s newspapers but also would be preserved in archives as a patrimony, evidence of how a new political order had been forged out of an old struggle.
While the women’s names were nearly lost by those who otherwise preserved the moment, the men in the scene are well remembered for their roles in the quest for voting rights. There was President Lyndon Johnson, signing the act into law, handing out ceremonial pens, and shaking hands. For Johnson, this event punctuated his victory over Southern Democrats, who had long aimed to block civil rights legislation. Standing to Johnson’s left were a trio of Black leaders, men who stood at the helm of the movement’s establishment. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy represented the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and were credited with sponsoring Selma’s decisive voting rights campaign. Clarence Mitchell was the chief lobbyist for the NAACP and was responsible for behind-the-scenes work in Washington, DC, that transformed an ideal into the text of a congressional act.67
Signing of the Voting Rights Act, August 6, 1954, featuring Patricia Roberts Harris, Vivian Malone, and Zephyr Wright (l. to r.)
LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON PHOTO ARCHIVES, LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON ARCHIVES
The three women standing just to the left of Clarence Mitchell had their own stories to tell about voting rights. First, their names: Patricia Roberts Harris was a law professor at Howard University and a party ally to Lyndon Johnson, having seconded his nomination for president at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Harris’s political education began under the mentorship of Pauli Murray—the two had collaborated on the sit-ins led by Howard University students in 1943. Standing to Harris’s left was Vivian Malone, who staffed the Voter Education Project at the US Department of Justice. She had recently migrated from Montgomery, Alabama, to Washington, DC, one of two Black students who defied Governor George Wallace and integrated the University of Alabama. Two years later, in 1965, Malone became the school’s first Black graduate. And the third woman: Zephyr Wright was the Johnson family’s cook, having long traveled between their homes in Texas and Washington, DC. When Wright sat with the Johnson family during the president’s first address to Congress, just weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, it signaled that her advice extended beyond culinary preparations to issues of race and justice. Commentators tried to characterize Wright as a servant in an effort to illustrate the Johnson family’s home life. But Wright, a graduate of Wiley College, had long advised the president about the discrimination she endured when traveling and in Washington’s restaurants. Her story was part of Johnson’s own and a foundation for his commitment to civil rights. These three women were a tableau all their own, drawing together diverse strands of Black women’s history and activism.68
Zephyr Wright’s story reflected how so much of Black women’s political activism had its origins in the educations they earned as domestic workers. From Jarena Lee and Maria Stewart, who began their lives as indentured servants, to the trials of Harriet Jacobs and Sojourner Truth as enslaved women, to Nannie Helen Burroughs as an organizer and advocate through her training school and the National Baptist Women’s Convention, and Rosa Parks in a Montgomery, Alabama, kitchen, Black women defined their political goals through the gritty and often troubled realm of work. Their concerns about wages and working conditions coupled with their vulnerability to sexual harassment and assault defined a key facet of what the right to vote meant and why it was worth fighting for. Wright’s relationship to the Johnsons and her capacity to influence their thinking on civil rights signaled how working women also maneuvered along their own routes to power. A kitchen was a place to prepare meals and a place from which to plot the future.
Vivian Malone, the youngest among the three, underscored how Black women’s struggle for voting rights stretched across generations. As teachers, women like Maria Stewart, Susan Paul, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Hallie Quinn Brown, Mary Church Terrell, and Fannie Williams had invested in their daughters and granddaughters as new agents of change. As institution builders, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Mary McLeod Bethune built schools in which younger women studied and thrived. Black women’s classrooms were safe spaces and training grounds where the lessons might begin with textbooks. But the learning always included teachers who were role models that showed young women like Malone that they were entitled to a place in political culture. Malone, when she presented herself in the dormitories, cafeterias, and classrooms of the University of Alabama, took part in a long-standing necessity. Black women put their bodies on the front lines and in the line of fire, finding a capacity to confront those who overlooked or otherwise outright denied them.
Patricia Roberts Harris was linked to a story about Black women “firsts,” especially those who broke into circles that had long been closed to them. This took education and—like Mary Church Terrell’s years at Oberlin or Frances Williams’s studies at Mount Holyoke or Pauli Murray’s legal training at Howard Law School—Harris came to voting rights with credentials and networks that furthered her cause. It also took the building of alliances, oftentimes across difference. Harris in her relationship to Lyndon Johnson was not unlike Mary McLeod Bethune’s collaboration with Eleanor Roosevelt.
Shortly after signing the Voting Rights Act into law, Johnson appointed Harris US Ambassador to Luxembourg. She became the first Black woman to hold that high foreign service post. Secretary of State Dean Rusk presided over Harris’s swearing in. Newspapers nearly reduced Harris to her attire: “An ensemble in blue, consisting of a raw silk dress and jacket, and matching straw hat.” But at the podium, she made a short speech that reset the terms of her appearance: “She was delighted on the basis of race and sex to have the opportunity, but… considered both sex and race irrelevant to the job.” Harris credited her mother, a federal worker in Chicago, with instilling in her confidence and a philosophy of women’s rights, and she disarmed the small crowd with feigned naivete. “The question of the role of women in the world,” she chided, “is one that is relatively new to her.” It was to her self-evident how she had come to be appointed a United States representative to the world. Generational wisdom had been passed down: “Her very competent mother had never told her that women weren’t supposed to be confident.” Whether fact or mere prophesy, Harris planted a flag for Black women and their futures. Her mother, who rose from her nearby seat to place a kiss on her daughter’s cheek, endorsed her vision.69
The sight of Patricia Harris, outfitted in fine fabric in a flattering shade of blue, might have misled those present. Her body, the center of much pomp in a State Department reception room, remained in the crosshairs of a world in which political power required Black women to take risks. Harris knew that her position was vexed, and she confessed that there was a “sad side” to being a “first.” She lamented that her distinction rested upon a history that had kept Black women from many quarters of political influence: either they lacked the formal training or “extrinsic factors” kept Black women at a distance from leadership. There was, indeed, something akin to hazing in the press’s preoccupation with her wardrobe. Would Harris dress the part of US Ambassador, was the question. Could she? She repeatedly resorted to gentle humor mixed with studied modesty. Harris explained she had but a single formal dress, the one she had worn to President Johnson’s inaugural ball. She then confessed to being frugal, but also discerning: “I buy my clothes to wear forever.” She deflected, observing that foreign service appointments should be made on the basis of “qualifications” rather than an appointee’s “estate.” She had broken down yet another barrier. Still, no post was so high that a Black woman would not be exactingly read as she came to occupy it.