Women of the Civil Rights Movement

By Jmccabe006

  • Jo Ann Robinson

    Jo Ann Robinson
    Robinson joined the Women's Political Council, which Mary Fair Burks had established three years earlier, in Montgomery, Alabama. The WPC was a group whose goals included encouraging African Americans to rise above the mediocrity they had been taught to accept, combating juvenile delinquency, raising voting turnout among African Americans, and enhancing their status as a community.

  • Dorothy Irene Height

    Dorothy Irene Height
    She concentrated on issues affecting African American women, such as voter awareness, unemployment, and illiteracy. Height is acknowledged with being the first figure in the civil rights movement to acknowledge inequity for African Americans and women as issues that needed to be taken into account as a whole. For 40 years, she served as the National Council of Negro Women's president.

  • Rosa Parks, Civil Rights, Equal Pay

    Rosa Parks, Civil Rights, Equal Pay
    On a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, black seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white man. The action is a catalyst for the civil rights movement.

  • Ella Baker

    Ella Baker
    Baker attended a conference in Atlanta in January 1957 to create a regional organization to build on the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama. A second gathering in February founded the Southern Christian Leadership gathering (SCLC). This was a loose coalition of Southern civil rights leaders.

  • Coretta Scott Kings

    Coretta Scott Kings
    Although Coretta Scott King is best known as the wife of renowned civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., she also left her own mark on the fight against injustice. After her husband's passing, she also worked to carry on his legacy. On April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee. Days after his funeral, King participated in a labor strike and continued to support a number of causes.

  • Dorothy Cotton

    Dorothy Cotton
    The achievements of Dorothy Cotton, one of the most significant unsung heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, are proof of the crucial but much undervalued contribution of women to that and other liberation movements. Her leadership played a significant role in a movement that changed the place of African Americans and all people of color in civic engagement and leadership while she served as Education Director for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

  • Septima Poinsette Clark

    Septima Poinsette Clark
    The "Mother of the Movement" and the ideal example of a "community teacher, intuitive fighter for human rights, and leader of her unlettered and disillusioned people," Septima Clark was a pioneer in grassroots citizenship education.

  • The Feminine Mystique

    The Feminine Mystique
    The National Organization for Women (NOW), which Betty Friedan helped found, uses "grassroots activism to promote feminist ideals, lead societal change, eliminate discrimination, and achieve and protect the equal rights of all women and girls in all aspects of social, political, and economic life." Betty Friedan is the author of The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963.