Sisters in the Struggle: The Long View of Black Women and Civil Rights

Presenter: Sheryl Felecia Means

19th Century Movements

Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society

Active: 1833-1870 Auxiliary to American

Anti-Slavery society; started by Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister and white abolitionist

Black Founders: Sarah McCrummel, Charlotte Forten (pictured), Grace Bustill Douglass and her daughter Sarah Douglass

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin

(1842-1924)

“If laws are unjust, they must be continually broken until they altered.”

Mary Church Terrell(1863-1954)

“Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored have to

bear.”

Anna Julia Cooper

(1858-1964)“The cause of freedom is

not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class – it is the cause of human kind, the very birth right of humanity.”

Ida B. Wells-Barnett(1862-1931)

“One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap.”

Women’s Groups

New Jersey State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs

1915Reverend Dr. Florence Spearing Randolph, pictured, called together

30 women’s clubs in Trenton, New Jersey

Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

-Founded in 1908 at Howard University-Created the AKA Non-Partisan Council on Public Affairs under

Norma Elizabeth Boyd (pictured)

(1906-1975)

Josephine Baker

Mary McLeod Bethune(1875-1955)

“Whether it be my religion, my aesthetic taste, my economic opportunity, my educational desire, whatever the craving is, I find a limitation because I suffer the greatest known handicap, a Negro – a

Negro woman.” – from the speech “Closed Doors”

National Council of Negro Women

Founder: Mary McLeod Bethune

“… the mission of NCNW is to lead, develop, and advocate for women of African descent as they support their families and communities. NCNW fulfills this purpose through research, advocacy, and national and community-based services and programs on issues of health, education, and economic empowerment in the United States and Africa….”

Founded: 1935

Dr. Dorothy Irene Height

(1912-2010)

“I want to be remembered as someone who used herself and anything she could touch to work for justice and freedom… I want to be remembered as one who tried.”

Black Women Organized for Political

Action Founded 1968 “… BWOPA’s primary

goal is to educate, train, and involve as many African American women as possible in the political process…”

Feminist Organizations

The UmbrellasNational Black

Feminist Organization 1973-1976 Disbanded to form other,

smaller organizations like The Combahee River Collective

National Alliance of Black Feminists

Founded in 1976

Combahee River Collective

1974-1980 “… we are actively

committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking…”

Male Dominated, Woman Organized

Amy Euphemia Jacques Garvey

(1895-1973)“Women of all climes and races have as great a part to play in the development of their particular group as the men.” – “Women As

Leaders” (1925)

Septima Poinsette Clark

(1898-1987)

“I have a great belief that whenever there is chaos, it

creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift.”

Fannie Lou Hamer(1917-1977)

“What was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a

little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”

Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005)“You don’t make progress

by standing on the sidelines whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”

Elaine Brown1943, age 71

“You can jail a revolutionary, but you cannot jail the revolution.”

Marian Wright Edelman

1939, age 75 President of the

Children’s Defense Fund“Service is the very

purpose of life. It is the rent we pay for living on the planet.”

Ella Baker(1903-1986)

“Until the killing of black men, black mother’s sons, becomes as important to the rest of the

country as the killing of a white mother’s son, we who

believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.”

– 1964

Angela Davis1944, age 70

“We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.”

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Black Women’s Liberation Committee

Third World Women’s Alliance

1968-1980

“We represent black and third world womens, the most

exploited and oppressed in the human race.”