Women's Role In The Civil Rights Movement

The 1960s welcomed a wave a civil rights movement in the American society.
Many citizens of the United States were motivated to protest against segregation and instead promote a racially integrated system in the country. These activist were not only the African American who were the ones suffering from the discrimination, but Caucasians also joined in. That seemed to be the strongest indication that there was a unified stance that race division was not something that was going to be tolerated for decades to come. According to an article written by Tiffany D. Joseph, “the 1963 March on Washington was one of the most memorable events of the Civil Rights Movement. Thousands of U.S. citizens of various racial backgrounds gathered in the nation's
As the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)1 predominantly planned the March on Washington, women became concerned about their visibility in the March (Height, 2001). Some of these women were members of the National Council of Negro Women, an organization that became more active in the Civil Rights Movement after the assassination of Civil Rights Activist Medgar Evers in 1963 (Height, 2001). Dorothy Height and Anna Arnold Hedgeman, both National Council of Negro Women members, raised concerns regarding women's participation in the March with Bayard Rustin of SCLC, who told them that by virtue of their participation in various organizations, women were in fact represented in the March (Height, 2001). According to Height: ‘There was an all-consuming focus on race. We women were expected to put all our energies into it [the March]...there was a low tolerance level for...questions about women's participation (Height, 2001, p. 85).’ Because the women asked gender-related questions, men often felt that women were side-tracking the movement's focus on race: “It was thought that we were making a lot of fuss about an insignificant issue, that we did not recognize that the March was about racism, not sexism...we wanted to hear at least one woman in the March dealing with jobs and freedom...We knew...most [Civil Rights] organizations were
That’s because, in the 1970s, the movements shifted from intending to eradicate racial discrimination to seeking to rid gender discrimination. From that period developed the Women’s Liberation Movement which challenged “women’s secondary status and ranged far and wide as it examined all aspects of female experience, including gender, race, class, sexuality, work, family, religion, law, and culture,” (Breines, 2006).By the end of the 1970s, African American women from these social movements were critical of the fact that their Caucasian counterparts weren’t genuinely bridging the