Lesser Known Women Civil Rights Activists
“But while male leaders like King and Malcolm X are renowned for their contributions to the influential movement, the role women played in the civil rights struggle goes largely unnoticed. Americans may know the names of Rosa Parks or Coretta Scott King, but the numerous other women who played key roles in the fight for equal rights are too often wiped from the history books,” writes Alison Durkee.
“There’s a Chinese saying, ‘Women hold up half the world,”‘ the late civil rights historian and NAACP chair Julian Bond told NBC News in 2005. “In the case of the civil rights movement it’s probably three-quarters of the world.”
Do you know these women who have played important roles in movements for civil rights over the past 2 centuries?
- Ida B. Wells-Barnett
- Dorothy Height
- Maya Wiley
- Ella Baker
- Amelia Boynton Robinson
- Mary Church Terrell
- JoAnn Robinson
- Diane Nash
- Fannie Lou Hamer
- Claudette Colvin
- Septima Clark
- Pauli Murray
- Anna Arnold Hedgeman
- Mary McLeod Bethune
- Shirley Chishom
- Anna Julia Cooper
- Marian Wright Edelman
- Majora Carter
- Flo Kennedy
