by Gail Collins
It was the old story. Women worked behind the scenes; they were not expected to head organizations or give important speeches. Lucy Murray, whose father was a black labor activist in Washington during the 1960s, remembered hearing him say that the only woman in the “inner sanctum” of the movement was Dorothy Height, the head of the National Council of Negro Women. Septima Clark felt the established black leaders “didn’t have any faith in women, none whatsoever.” For the younger generation, the resistance to women leaders was perhaps more complicated. Andrew Young, who was one of Martin Luther King’s top aides, said that Ella Baker and other strong women in the movement made him feel defensive. “They were too much like my mother. Strong women were the backbone of the movement, but to young black men seeking their own freedom, dignity, and leadership perspective, they were quite a challenge.”
Baker’s response was to found a charismatic leader–free organization that would reflect her ideas of what the civil rights movement should be all about. She threw her lot in with the students, helped them organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and kept them out from under the arm of Dr. King and the ministers. Unsurprisingly, SNCC (which was always referred to as “Snick”) was more open to women’s leadership than any of the groups that had gone before. Its heyday lasted only a few years, but while it did, SNCC was not only fighting for civil rights but also struggling to create, within itself, a “Beloved Community” in which blacks and whites, men and women, poor and middle class, lived and worked together as equals. “Remember, 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,” Baker told the students.
The idea of a leader-free, star-free organization was natural for many of the students. The Nashville contingent had picked Diane Nash as their coordinator in part because she was so ego-free, so good at letting everybody have a say. But Baker’s vision was far more demanding than a simple sharing of power. She was suspicious of quick fixes such as the lunch-counter sit-ins, or any strategy that involved appealing to the federal government to save black Americans from white racists. “People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves,” she said. Her first speech to the students was called “More Than a Hamburger,” and it puzzled her audience of young people, who were sure their restaurant sit-ins would bring the world’s attention to the rightness of their cause and solve the problem of black oppression rather quickly. “To our mind lunch-counter segregation was the greatest evil facing black people in the country,” said Julian Bond dryly.
Baker wanted the students to challenge more than the white segregationist power structure; she also wanted them to take on the class lines within the black community itself, to bypass the black leaders who had risen by mimicking the values they saw in white society, such as snobbishness and self-promotion. She had loved the black neighborhood she lived in as a child, where everyone knew and took care of one another. “Where we lived there was no sense of hierarchy, in terms of those who have, having a right to look down upon, or to evaluate as a lesser breed, those who didn’t have,” she said. Both she and the students wanted to live that way forever.
While it worked, SNCC was an experience so powerful that many of the people who were there for the early years seemed to live out the rest of their lives in quiet mourning for the thing they lost—the “adrenaline high” of working at fever pitch on something so charged with risk and excitement and so much greater than themselves. “There was terror in the work—but such joy and passion as well,” remembered Penny Patch, a young white woman who was one of the early volunteers. “I remember dancing to the Twist one night in Maryland, high as could be. No alcohol, at least not for me. But I was just flying. We all were.” Unita Blackwell, a former plantation worker from rural Mississippi, tried to explain what the SNCC experience in 1964 felt like to her:
Nobody had to say that all of us were equal; we could feel it. These were the first moments of my life when I knew that people outside my family respected me for what I knew and what I had to offer. They wanted to know my ideas, to get my advice about what they should do. I was telling them what to do. Even in my own community, as a woman my opinion didn’t mean much unless it was in agreement with a man’s. I had been beat way down, and the realization that I had something of value to give someone else was a powerful sensation. At the time, I didn’t even know how to describe it but it gave me strength.
Ella Baker, who SNCC leaders called “our Gandhi,” set the example of how to proceed. There were endless stories about her willingness to do whatever was needed, no matter how mundane. She never accepted an official position with SNCC or a salary, stitching together an income from side jobs here and there. “How did I make a living? I haven’t. I have eked out existence,” she said later. She stayed up with the young members until late at night and sat uncomplaining through endless meetings in smoke-filled rooms. (Baker was asthmatic in an era when it was not yet regarded as acceptable to ask people to refrain from smoking. One former SNCC member said his most vivid memory of her was “sitting in on these SNCC meetings that ran for days—you didn’t measure them in hours, they ran days—with a smoke mask over her nose, listening patiently to words and discussions she must have heard a thousand times.”) She traveled with the students, sharing their casual and substandard living conditions even though she was nearly 60. She dressed in unmemorable gray suits or brown dresses that masked the radicalism of her vision. For the young SNCC organizers, she was the answer to all the parents and teachers who had ever told them that they would settle down and get over their wild ideas when they got a little older. “To me she was just a very special person in my life,” said Lenora Taitt-Magubane. “We bonded and we never unbonded till the day she died.”
Baker was an inspiration to the students who worked with her—independent, intelligent, comfortable in her own skin, and totally self-confident. That was especially true for the young black women who had come from middle-class families where girls were expected to be demure and submissive. The fact that Baker refused to ever talk about her marriage (a ten-year commitment she kept extremely private until her death) was a revelation to young women who had been raised to believe the central question of their lives would be the identity of their husbands. To fight for equal rights in SNCC did not require the perfection of a Marian Anderson or a Rosa Parks. They could be themselves and make a difference.
“IF I DON’T COME BACK, HERE’S A NUMBER TO CALL.”
There was something about segregated buses and trains that had driven black women particularly crazy for more than a century. Even before the Civil War, there had been spontaneous eruptions of resistance against the system that confined them to bad accommodations and poor service. Elizabeth Jennings, a Manhattan schoolteacher, had gone into a meltdown in 1854 when a white streetcar conductor had told her to wait for a car that took colored people. She resisted furiously, was arrested, and hired the attorney Chester Alan Arthur, the future president, to press a suit that led to the integration of all mass-transit systems in New York City. Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman were each arrested when they insisted on riding in the same accommodations as middle-class white women. The resistance never really stopped. Pauli Murray was once barred from using the women’s room at a rest stop on a long bus ride and was told “to relieve myself in an open field in full sight of the highway. My alternative was to ride in sheer agony for the remaining two hours of the journey.” On a subsequent trip, she simply fell into the mind-set of Elizabeth Jennings, staging a resistance that left her spending Easter weekend in a Virginia jail.
While the Supreme Court had declared segregation unconstitutional in buses and trains that traveled across state lines, the practice was still enforced throughout the South in the early 1960s. The first group to challenge it through civil disobedience (or civil obedience, if you were paying attention to the Supreme Court) was organized by the Congress of Racial Equal
ity. In the spring of 1961, an integrated group of ten male and three female Freedom Riders boarded two different buses in Washington, DC. They ignored seating rules and used the whites-only waiting rooms between stops. Their trip, which was supposed to end in New Orleans, got only as far as Alabama. There, one bus had its tires slashed, and when it broke down, a mob set it on fire, attempting to pen the demonstrators inside. “Oh my God, they’re going to burn us up!” screamed Genevieve Hughes, a 28-year-old white civil rights worker who was separated from the other volunteers by impenetrable smoke. When they escaped through a side door, some were attacked with bats and bricks. A 12-year-old white girl from the neighborhood ran back and forth through the crowd, bringing water to the choking Freedom Riders. (As a result, her family was targeted by threats and eventually had to leave town.) The second bus made it as far as Birmingham, where another mob dragged the Riders off and beat them so badly that one man was left permanently paralyzed. The rest of the ride was canceled.
The Nashville students, led by Diane Nash, picked up the crusade. Warned that any new Riders could well be killed, Nash said, “We fully realize that, but we can’t let them stop us with violence. If we do, the movement is dead.” Another group of Freedom Riders took off for Alabama, where they were met in Montgomery by hundreds of men, women, and children, screaming and waving bats and tire irons. Susan Wilbur, 18, and Susan Hermann, 20, two white students, were surrounded by a mob. White women bashed them with their pocketbooks while a teenage boy, “dancing like a boxer,” kept hitting Wilbur in the head. John Seigenthaler, a Justice Department official, saw the mayhem and drove onto the sidewalk, yelling for the women to get in the car. “Mister, this is not your fight! Get away from here! You’re gonna get killed!” yelled Wilbur, who thought Seigenthaler was simply a well-meaning passerby. One of the rioters hit Seigenthaler on the head with a pipe, fracturing his skull. Meanwhile Lucretia Collins, a volunteer who was fleeing the scene in a commandeered cab, saw Jim Zwerg, a 21-year-old divinity student, being held against the wall and repeatedly punched. “Some men held him while white women clawed his face with their nails,” she said later. “And they held up their little children—children who couldn’t have been more than a couple years old—to claw his face.”
The Riders spent the night with their supporters at Montgomery’s First Baptist Church, surrounded by a howling mob that set the author Jessica Mitford’s car on fire, threw rocks through the windows, and threatened to incinerate the church, while federal officials begged black leaders for a cooling-off period. The negotiations between the Justice Department and Martin Luther King and his lieutenants did not include Nash. (Years later, she would tell the author David Halberstam that if everything had happened fifteen years down the road, after the women’s movement, she would never have stood for being excluded.) Whether the older men liked it or not, however, Nash announced that the volunteers were going forward. “We can’t stop now, right after we’ve been clobbered,” she said. A new group of Riders got back on the bus and headed for Jackson, Mississippi.
All the Riders were arrested in Jackson, and as word of the arrests spread and the media coverage of the Freedom Rides increased, new volunteers rode Greyhounds into Jackson from different parts of the country, strode right over to the whites-only waiting room in mixed-race groups, and joined the growing population of prisoners inside jammed cells. Outside, there was… Diane Nash. With no office and decades before the age of cell phones, she walked around a hostile city with change for the pay phones in her pocket. Many of the newly arrested volunteers were strangers, and Nash was terrified that she would lose track of someone, leaving him or her adrift in the Mississippi prison system. Outside of Medgar Evers, the head of the local NAACP (who would be assassinated in front of his family in 1963), she found virtually no one willing to help. Most of the city’s black establishment gave a wide berth to the Freedom Riders, who they regarded as a sure source of trouble. When a local resident did step forward, it was Claire Collins Harvey, the owner of a local funeral home who saw some of the female Riders shivering in court and began collecting warm clothing for the prisoners.
The possibility of imminent death was always present on the Freedom Rides, and many of the students made out wills before leaving. “I remember saying to someone, ‘If I don’t come back, here’s a number to call,’ ” said Lenora Taitt-Magubane, who was in graduate school when she volunteered to participate in a ride from Atlanta to Albany, Georgia. Her “train group” of four blacks and four whites made it to Albany and through the whites-only waiting room before being greeted by cheering black supporters and white hecklers in the parking lot. They were all arrested and taken to a jail. She was released on bond until her court appearance and spent the time attending mass meetings with supporters. Seeing Lenora enter a church for one of the gatherings, Bernice Johnson, an Albany student who had known her previously, was stunned by Taitt’s transformation. “I had never seen anybody’s face that was glowing like that. She was just beaming. I had never seen anybody smiling like that.”
That was the joyous side of the movement, the almost physical sense of connection among kindred souls risking everything for what they firmly believed would be a historic and successful crusade. The other side came crashing down on Taitt days later, when she and the other Freedom Riders appeared in court and were taken back to a prison that was crammed with people who had been arrested during the demonstrations of the preceding week. “We had sixty people in three cells which were only meant to hold six people. The clothes we wore going in were the same clothes we wore when we came out. The jail was the worst I’d ever been in. It was filthy, decrepit. You could see the rodents. I said, ‘Oh boy, a hunger strike would be easy here.’ ” In less than two weeks, she lost ten pounds. After her release, she discovered she had developed a throat condition that left her unable to speak above a whisper for months. In jail, the Freedom Riders would sit on the floor, reading, wearing coats in the unheated winter air, until the jailers confiscated their books. They took one woman’s glasses away, and the woman, who suffered from migraines, lay moaning as Taitt rocked her between her legs.
By the end, over four hundred Freedom Riders would wind up in jail—more than a quarter of them women. The images of brutal mob violence disgusted most of the nation and eventually helped push the federal government into enforcing court rulings against segregated buses and trains. The Riders themselves did not win national sympathy overnight. At the time the demonstrations were under way, 63 percent of respondents told George Gallup’s surveyors that the Riders were going too far, pushing too fast and starting trouble. But in Washington, a dying Eleanor Roosevelt begged to disagree. “Never has a tinier minority done more for the liberation of a whole people than these few youngsters,” she said.
“… A ‘TRIBUTE TO WOMEN.’ ”
The SNCC students eventually did elect a chairman, and to the surprise of some the choice was Marion Barry (the future deeply controversial mayor of Washington) rather than Diane Nash. “Diane was a devoted, beautiful leader, but she was the wrong sex,” said Congressman John Lewis, who later served as SNCC chair. “There was a desire to emphasize and showcase black manhood.” Whether it was among the students or the old-guard ministry, men continued to get the vast majority of leadership posts in the civil rights movement. And that was fine by many black women. “If the Negro woman has a major underlying concern, it is the status of the Negro man and his position in the community and his need for feeling himself an important person, free and able to make his contribution in the whole society in order that he may strengthen his home,” said Dorothy Height, the president of the National Council of Negro Women. African-American women, particularly those in the South, were aware of how long black men had been demeaned and kept in their place by the threat of physical violence against themselves and their families. “My father could not protect my mother, unless he risked his life,” said Joyce Ladner. “He could be killed for saying something to a white man who said something ter
rible to my mother.”
If black men wanted to be in the spotlight, many women concluded, maybe they were due. Others felt that kind of thinking was a trap. Ella Baker was particularly irritated by the idea “that black women had to bolster the ego of the male” by playing “a subordinate role.” In Mississippi, one male civil rights leader who was concerned about the shortage of men in the state’s Freedom Democratic Party made the error of suggesting the women “step back a little and let the men move in now.” Baker quickly warned him not to “make the mistake of substituting men in quantity for women of quality.”
It was an argument that would go on for more than a decade. But on occasion, things would happen that would make women on both sides of the debate wonder if black men were simply trying to appropriate all the advantages of the patriarchal rule that white men had been enjoying. A dramatic example occurred during the preparations for the great March on Washington in the summer of 1963. Called by Martin Luther King Jr. to focus attention on Southern intransigence and brutality against civil rights workers, the march is remembered as the moment in which the nation finally came to grips with the breadth and sweep and moral urgency of the civil rights movement. Washington, DC, which had feared a mob of thousands of unruly black protesters, saw instead a joyous, disciplined, multiracial mass movement of a quarter million people, where everyone from sharecroppers to movie stars came together to hear King deliver his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech.