28 Days of Black History: Beyond Rosa Parks: 7 Lesser-Known Women of the Civil Rights Movement
The names of Dorothy Height, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Daisy Bates don’t often come to mind as notable women in the civil rights movement. Still, with their cardinal achievements in voting rights, women’s rights, anti-discrimination efforts, education, and more, they deserve to be known.
To recap how these women uplifted the civil rights movement, we look back on their revolutionary strides.
Claudette Colvin
Before Rosa Parks, 15-year-old Montgomery native Claudette Colvin, now 85, declined to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus. The incident, which happened just nine years before Parks’ December 1955 bus refusal and subsequent arrest, led to Colvin’s brief detainment in a city jail and the Montgomery Improvement Association deciding not to champion the teen. However, Colvin’s mission was still noteworthy, and in December 1956, following the 13-month-long Montgomery Bus Boycott, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated bus seating was unconstitutional.
Daisy Bates
Born to a mother who was sexually assaulted and murdered by three white men, Arkansas journalist and civil rights activist Daisy Bates made it her mission to fight racial discrimination. In Little Rock, Arkansas, Bates was known as an advocate for school integration through her close documentation of the Little Rock Nine and pressuring the city’s school board to allow Black students into local, predominantly white schools promptly.
Diane Nash
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Diane Nash was a powerful student leader and civil rights activist at Fisk University in Nashville. In 1960, the now-86-year-old participated in lunch counter sit-ins with the Nashville Student Movement as a push towards desegregation. With the group bravely facing attacks from racist patrons, Nashville would become the first southern city to desegregate lunch counters. However, Nash’s assignment didn’t end there; she later became a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where she partly led the Freedom Riders.
Dorothy Height
The late Dorothy Height, who was born in Virginia, received a jolt of inspiration from academic, humanitarian, and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune to join the National Council of Negro Women, ultimately becoming the organization’s fourth president. Holding the title for 40 years, Height’s responsibilities were both in Black rights and women’s rights, and famously, she co-organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made the “I Have a Dream” speech.
Ella Baker
The Virginia-born, North Carolina-raised Ella Baker would evolve into becoming a dynamic member of the NAACP, first as field secretary in 1940, before serving as a director of branches from 1943 to 1946. The headstrong Baker courageously traveled the Jim Crow South to recruit those interested in the civil rights movement. By the 1950s, she was made organizer in the Dr. King co-founded Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). However, where others were taken with Dr. King’s charisma as a leader, Baker challenged him to take a group-focused approach and largely inspired SNCC for her turn towards sit-in demonstrations by 1960.
Fannie Lou Hamer
Mississippi voting and civil rights crusader Fannie Lou Hamer used her traumas as the driving force for wanting better for Black Americans. A victim of forced sterilization, it was in the aftermath of the procedure in 1961 that Hamer would become an SNCC organizer and regularly led political organizing efforts. Among her motivations for desegregation and Black Southerners to exercise their right to vote, Hamer would go on to co-found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and women’s liberation group National Women's Political Caucus.
Septima Poinsette Clark
Getting her start as a NAACP member, Charleston, South Carolina native Septima Poinsette Clark was an educator and social activist determined to enrich other Black Americans' lives. After protesting her way into the Charleston City School system–which she would be forced out of after the revelation of her NAACP joining–Clark noticed the impossible voting system for Southern Black residents. He led initiatives for the community to learn how to read and write. Clark’s advocacy later made her a cornerstone in SCLC.