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The New York Times
OPINION
The Women Behind the
Men
By Gail Collins,
Op-Ed Columnist, nytimes.com on the Web, September 22, 2007
Daisy Bates had to march with the
wives.
When the nation observes the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock school
desegregation on Monday, there will undoubtedly be a great deal said about
Bates, who was head of the city’s N.A.A.C.P. chapter. She helped recruit
nine black teenagers and escorted them through irate mobs of white adults and
into their first classes. As a result, she and her husband, Lucius, lost
their business. She was jailed, threatened and the Ku Klux Klan burned an
8-foot cross on her lawn.
Bates was invited, of course, to the famous March on Washington in 1963, when
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Rosa Parks
was invited, too, and Pauli Murray, the lawyer and feminist who had staged the
first sit-in at a Washington restaurant during World War II.
When they got there, they were all assigned to walk with the wives of the male
civil rights leaders, far away from the cameras. “Not a single woman was
invited to make one of the major speeches or be part of the delegation of
leaders who went to the White House. The omission was deliberate,” Murray
said later.
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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Gail Collins |
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Dorothy Height, the head of the
National Council of Negro Women, and others begged that at least one woman be
included among the speakers. They nominated Diane Nash, the student leader
who had been perhaps the one person most responsible for the success of the
Freedom Riders in the South. No dice.
“Nothing that women said or did broke the impasse blocking their participation.
I’ve never seen a more unmovable force,” Height wrote. The men kept
telling her that women already had participation — both Marian Anderson and
Mahalia Jackson were going to sing. In the end, A. Philip Randolph
delivered a “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom” while the female civil
rights legends sat on the stage.
We’ve learned, with some pain, to celebrate all our national heroes through
clear eyes, as people whose great hearts and minds still did not take the dream
of freedom and equality past their own immediate cause. The Declaration of
Independence is our noblest piece of prose even though Thomas Jefferson kept
slaves. Susan B. Anthony is my favorite Founding Mother, but I know she
broke her old friend Frederick Douglass’s heart when she lashed out at a
government that would give the vote to “Sambo” and ignore well-educated,
middle-class white women. Dr. King and the other male leaders and martyrs
of the civil rights movement are always going to be a beacon in the center of
our history. But they generally believed women’s place was in the home,
and most were privately looking forward to the moment when they would all go
back there.
The women of the civil rights movement who are most celebrated tend to be the
brave victims, like Rosa Parks, who dutifully played the simple seamstress too
tired to give up her seat on the bus, even though she had in fact been an
activist for longer than almost any of the men. Still, in her
autobiography she remembered that March on Washington and noted that these days
“women wouldn’t stand for being kept so much in the background.”
The women who men were less enthusiastic about were the ones who led.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s first triumph as the public face of the Montgomery bus
boycott was possible because a group of middle-class black women led by a
college teacher, Jo Ann Robinson, had organized it. They had been
preparing for the opportunity so long that when Rosa Parks went to jail, they
had 35,000 fliers ready the next morning, to deliver to black households through
their children at school. Yet now they have practically vanished from our
history.
You do not have to dismiss the men to believe that Ella Baker was the greatest
organizer the civil rights movement ever knew. When she was passed over
for the directorate of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which
she helped found and ran as acting director, she attributed the rejection to the
fact that “I was female; I was old. I didn’t have a Ph.D.” Then she
went right on organizing, guiding the black college students into forming the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which she would direct throughout its
glory years as adviser and unpaid spiritual leader.
Baker also got it — the moment of recognition that all the previous movements
for American social justice had not quite grasped. “Remember,” she told
the young people, “we are not fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone, but
for the freedom of the human spirit, a larger freedom that encompasses all
mankind.”
You watch the reports from Jena this week and you wonder where women like Bates
and Baker and Robinson would be if they were alive today. Wherever it was,
it would be at the front of the parade.
Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of
the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became
the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the
beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a
sequel to her book, "America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and
Heroines." She returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007.
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