Though historians acknowledge that women, particularly African-Americans, were pivotal in the crucial battles for racial equality, Rosa Parks’ death highlights the fact that she was one of the few female civil- rights figures who are widely known.
Most women in the movement played background roles, either by choice or because of bias, since being a women of color meant facing both racism and sexism.
“In some ways it reflects the realities of the 1950s: There were relatively few women in public leadership roles,” said Julian Bond, a civil-rights historian at the University of Virginia and chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “So that small subset that becomes prominent in civil rights would tend to be men. But that doesn’t excuse the way some women have just been written out of history.”
For many, the wives of the movement’s prominent male leaders, including Coretta Scott King, Betty Shabazz and Myrlie Evers Williams, were among the most visible women in the struggle.
But scan historical images of the most dramatic moments of the civil-rights movement – protesters blasted by fire hoses and dogs lunging at blacks – and women and girls are everywhere.
There is a 1964 image of Mississippi beautician Vera Piggy styling hair and educating her customers on voter registration.
And there’s a 1963 photo of students at Florida A&M University, a historically black college, in which hundreds of people, mostly women, answer court charges for protesting segregated movie theaters.
Six of the so-called Little Rock Nine, black teenagers whose lives were threatened when they integrated that Arkansas city’s high schools in 1957, were young women.
In 1955, Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., sparking a mass boycott by thousands, mainly black female domestic workers who had long filled the buses’ back seats.
Immediately, black women activists who had for years urged city officials to integrate the buses rallied to Parks’ cause, said Lynne Olson, author of “Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970.”
The women arranged carpools and sold cakes and pies to raise money for alternate transportation. The boycott lasted more than a year until the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling in favor of four black Montgomery women who had earlier refused to comply with bus segregation.
Saturday, hundreds viewed the body of Parks at a Montgomery church.
A memorial service is planned today before Parks’ body is flown to Washington to lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol.
