- Radical Women in the StruggleA Review of Recent Literature on the Civil Rights and Black Freedom Movements
Who were the women who fought for freedom in the liberation struggles [End Page 95] of the early and mid-twentieth century that encompassed the civil rights movement?
They were teachers, domestic workers, lawyers, welfare recipients, and sharecroppers …
They were students, activists, organizers, and political leaders …
They were mothers, daughters, sisters, lovers, and friends …
They were straight and queer, young and old …
They came from the north, south, west, and east …
They were poor and they had means …
They were black, Asian, Latina, white, indigenous, and biracial …
They were Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and agnostic …
They were communists, conservatives, and liberals …
They fought for voting rights, welfare rights, women’s rights, economic rights, and above all, for a vision of human rights that would ensure the dignity of every person.
Sitting in their variegated reality, we ought quickly to realize that the dominant or popular narrative of the US civil rights movement (CRM) that began with the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision or the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, declined with the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act, and culminated with the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. is a history too narrowly defined. The master narrative constructed around the actions of prominent male figures, the legal battles waged against racial discrimination and segregation, the institutional resources of the black church, the geographical location of the southern United States, and alliances of blacks with middleclass white liberals presents a lens too exiguous to encompass the radical social program pursued by this diverse collective of women. Over the last twenty years, research from an interdisciplinary body of scholarship has emerged to expand, contest, and reformulate the master narrative through which the CRM has become a prototypical example for “new social movements” that dominate our political imagination and interpretation of social change.1 The growing body of scholarship attempting to redefine the civil rights narrative pays particular attention to the ways women’s leadership, and in particular black women’s leadership, is made invisible by interlocking systems of oppression. Positioned [End Page 96] within the variegated lives of these women, this scholarship encourages us to recognize a connective thread between the radical social activism that began in the 1920s and the movement-building work that continued through the 1980s. Mining this relationship questions the dichotomy created between class-based and identity-based movements within social movement theory. It is a struggle for empowerment and a fight against systemic domination at the heart of these social change strategies that are revealed when the texts of these women’s lives are interwoven. I will focus on some of the most recent emergent literature in this body of scholarship, research that continues to deepen our analysis of these struggles beyond the confines and scope of any solo leader or isolated front of struggle...