Women's Role In The Civil Rights Movement

During the 1960s and before, life was harsh being African American in America. African American children only had half the chance of completing high school, one-third the chance of completing college, and one-third the chance of entering a profession when they grew up but they were twice as likely to be unemployed. Those that were employed earned half of what White Americans earned. African Americans could not vote, serve on grand juries or serve on trial juries. Signs were put up to separate facilities saying “whites only” and “colored” or “Negroes” in parks, public bathrooms, waiting rooms, movie theaters, restaurants and water fountains, beaches, and hotels. Whites owned everything. African Americans were denied the right to vote. African
Women were less educated because it was untraditional for a woman to receive as good of an education as men. Men feared intelligent women because of they could think for themselves and disagree with them. If she wanted to voice an opinion, it was not allowed. Women were to speak in a low or soft manner and to be seen and not heard. It was very risky for women to be involved in the Civil Rights Movement because they would lose their jobs, be beaten in jail, clubbed at demonstrations, and had their house shot into regularly. Also many black women were invisible to whites but one important Civil Rights activist during the Civil Rights Movement was not only African American but also a woman and made sure not to be invisible. Fannie Lou Hamer spent the later half of her life fighting for equal rights for all people. She worked for political, racial and economic equality for herself and all African Americans. She fought to integrate the national Democratic Party, and became one of its first black delegates to a presidential
Her parents, Jim and Lou Ella Townsend, were sharecroppers who only got little to no money each day to feed their family off of. Her family struggled financially, and often went hungry and therefore when she was six years old; she began working in the fields when the plantation owner promised her goods from the commissary store. At that time, it was common for bosses to lure workers into debt in that way and soon she realized that she was trapped and would never get out of his debt. By the time Fannie Lou Hamer was 12, her family had saved up enough to rent some land and buy a tractor of their own but a white neighbor, resenting their small success, poisoned their cattle. When asked about her childhood later on in life, she said, "Life was very hard; we never hardly had enough to eat; we didn't have clothes to wear. We had to work real hard. I didn't have a chance to go to school too much, because school would only last about four months at the time when I was a kid going to school. Most of the time we didn't have clothes to wear to that; and then if any work would come up that we would have to do, the parents would take us out of the school to cut stalks and burn stalks or work in dead lands or things like