Working in the Black Man's Shadow: Mary Church Terrell and Anna Arnold Hedgeman's Fight Against Jim Crow

In 2016, Joan Quigley and Jennifer Scanlon published biographies of civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell and Anna Arnold Hedgeman, respectively, with Oxford University Press. These monographs are not a first foray into the genre for either author. In 2009, Scanlon, Interim Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at Bowdoin College, published Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, the first biography of the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. That same year, lawyer, journalist, and recipient of the J. Anthony Lukas Works-in-Progress Award, Joan Quigley, published The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy, telling of the events surrounding the coal mine fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania. Both authors remain true to their respective styles for their current publications; Scanlon digs deep into Hedgeman's life to understand her trajectory and achievements, and Quigley uses Terrell as a point of entry to examine the struggle for desegregation in the nation's capital.

Practitioners of African American women's history, in particular, have used biographies to fill in the gaps where often primary sources were lacking. These personal stories serve as an entry point into the complex history of activists who faced the double burden of being both black and women. While Mary Church Terrell has been the subject of several biographies and studies in the past, Anna Arnold Hedgeman remained an elusive figure of the civil rights narrative, and for cause. As Scanlon astutely points out in Until There Is Justice, Hedgeman's contributions to the Civil Rights Movements were obscured by the achievements of her male counterparts—A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr., among others. Scanlon's important monograph is long overdue and fills in the gap left by the absence of Hedgeman in the literature. Through the lives of their subjects, each of these books increases our understanding of black women's activism from both a local and a transnational perspective, and each challenges the ways in which we include them in the Civil Rights Movement's narrative.

Until There Is Justice follows Hedgeman from her youth in Minnesota to her first experience as an educator in rural Mississippi and on through her work for the YWCA, her political activism in the nation's capital, and her work with the women's movement. Throughout the monograph, Scanlon grapples with a question long considered but often avoided in the field: how did black women confront gender discrimination within the Civil Rights Movement? Furthermore, she examines how Hedgeman's several identities—as religious practitioner, political activist, civil rights leader, social worker, policymaker, educator, and wife—informed her leadership and helped her develop such a broad social justice agenda.

We learn in Scanlon's book that Hedgeman played a critical role in the long Civil Rights Movement. She was instrumental in the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, organized the March for Jobs and Justice, and coordinated efforts for the March on Washington. A proponent of Social Christianity, her work also extended to the National Council of Churches and to the General Commission on Religion and Race. She organized the African American vote during her time as a Democratic Party strategist for the 1948 election, and she joined the Health and Human Services Department after World War II. In the 1960s, she came together with other civil rights and women's rights leaders to form the National Organization for Women (NOW).

While much of Hedgeman's work met with success, often new challenges brought with them a small amount of frustration and disappointment. As a black leader, she was tasked to do more with fewer resources...