When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

by Gail Collins

  It was a glorious day, and very few people noticed that black women had been almost completely cut out of the event. Anna Arnold Hedgeman—the only woman on the nineteen-member planning committee—had been complaining that there was no role for female civil rights leaders. Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates, and the others who had stepped up when men had quailed were assigned to march with the wives of the male leaders. (“Nowadays, women wouldn’t stand for being kept so much in the background,” Parks said years later.) No woman was on the speaking list, although the entertainer Josephine Baker was eventually asked to say a few words. No woman was invited to the meeting President Kennedy held with civil rights leaders at the conclusion of the march. A. Philip Randolph, one of the chief organizers, gave his major address at the National Press Club, which not only did not allow women to be members but barred from the audience women reporters who were trying to cover the speech.

  “Nothing that women said or did broke the impasse blocking their participation,” said Dorothy Height. While Height wanted to make black men feel they were important, she did not believe that required making black women feel they were invisible. “I’ve never seen a more immovable force…. The march organizers proffered many excuses. They said, ‘We have too many speakers as it is. The program is too long. You are already represented.’ ” Bayard Rustin, the chief organizer, told Height that women were already included since “every group has women in it—labor, church.” In the end, the only concession to protests from Hedgeman, Height, Pauli Murray, and others was a “Tribute to Women” in which Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates, Diane Nash, and a few other leaders were introduced by Randolph while sitting silently on the podium. Hedgeman proposed that at least a woman should do the introducing—she nominated Nash or the widow of the slain Medgar Evers—but nothing happened. The men kept pointing out that they had, after all, asked Marian Anderson to sing.

  “THAT’S THEM!”

  Of all the heroines of the civil rights movement, some of the bravest were undoubtedly black women who lived in small, rural Southern towns. Time after time, when young organizers arrived, it was local women who stepped up and volunteered to shelter them and to help them recruit others, and who agreed to register to vote. Unita Blackwell, a sharecropper who lived in little Mayersville in a remote part of the Mississippi Delta, worried that the organizers would never come to her town, and when she saw two strangers walking past her house one day, she nudged her neighbor and announced excitedly, “That’s them!” When SNCC called a meeting to look for volunteers to register to vote, Blackwell’s hand was the first in the air.

  In the world of the Mississippi Delta, the burden of being African-American was so brutal that it would have been hard to notice that women were being restrained by their gender as well as their race. But when Blackwell, a lively young woman from Memphis, moved to Mayersville with her husband and small baby, she discovered she was “about the only black woman drinking and going places that the town had ever seen who wasn’t a slut.” She had been used to a great deal of independence while her husband was gone on long trips with the Army Corps of Engineers, where he worked as a cook. But women in Mayersville only went out with their husbands. They did not drive cars, and their sole social outlet was the Home Demonstration Club, where they heard lectures on housekeeping and made crafts. Blackwell tried to fit in, and she was struggling to glue cloth and macaroni on a cigar box—an effort that was supposed to create a jewelry case—when she succumbed to boredom. “I got up my macaroni and went home and cooked it. That was my last time at the Home Demonstration Club,” she wrote later.

  Her sense of emptiness, the fear of a future limited to chopping cotton and going to church, was beginning to endanger her marriage. That was what made her so eager when the two very young SNCC organizers walked past her shabby little house. Blackwell’s friend Coreen advised her not to get mixed up with them: “You liable to be dead.”

  “I don’t know what difference it would make. I’m dying anyway,” Blackwell said.

  Blackwell’s story is more spectacular than that of most women who held up their hands and volunteered to register to vote—she was eventually elected mayor of Mayersville, served twenty years, and got a MacArthur “genius” grant for her work as a community organizer. But she was also part of a second story—that of the postwar American women of all races who loved their families but still felt a desperate need to belong to something larger. “To have wonderful new friends—black and white, educated, people of means, some of them, who’d been places and done things I’d never even dreamed of—sitting on the floor or in the old broke-down furniture in my front room, talking about our lives and times, gave me a feeling I’d never had before,” she wrote.

  The organizers offered poor, rural blacks the opportunity to become an important part of a great national drama of liberation, but at a cost. Their homes were often destroyed. They and their relatives could be fired from their jobs. Rifle shots smashed into their children’s bedrooms; crosses were burned on their front yards. They were beaten and arrested. (Unita Blackwell estimated she was jailed about seventy-five times in her attempts to register voters.) Yet they kept going. “Violence is a fearful thing. People don’t realize how frightened you get,” said Avon Rollins, a male SNCC organizer who recalled moments “when the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth, where my teeth were just crushing together, chattering because the fear was so strong in me, not knowing what was going to happen. Then I’d see these black females out there, and I knew I couldn’t let them take the beating, and the words would come out and I would make my stand.”

  Black women were much more likely to step forward than men in rural communities such as Mayersville. Some estimates put them at three or four times more active in the civil rights movement of the early ’60s. No one has ever been sure why that was so, although there are plenty of theories. The most common one is that black women could simply get away with more, since the white racists found them less threatening. Almost all the people who were killed during the protests and voter-registration drives were men. But Charles Payne, a Duke University professor who studied the SNCC organizing projects extensively, noted that black women were often beaten as badly as the men, and their homes and businesses were shot at and burned down. And in all his interviews with people who had been involved in the SNCC movements in Mississippi, Payne said, “No woman to whom I spoke ever suggested, even indirectly, that her own involvement could be explained in such terms.” Payne himself suspected that black women’s close ties to the community and their strong network of family and friends had the effect of pulling in others once one woman stepped forward. And he felt their religious faith gave them the courage to simply do what they thought was right and trust in the Lord to protect them.

  The fearlessness of some of the women was astonishing. Laura McGhee, a widow who had a farm in Greenwood, Mississippi, invited any plantation workers who were left homeless after they tried to register to vote to move onto her land—which she also put up as security for bail so many times that the authorities finally stopped accepting it. When the white night riders shot into her home, she slept during the day and sat up on the porch all night, cradling her shotgun. Once, when she tried to visit one of her sons who had been arrested in a demonstration, a policeman tried to bar her way. McGhee, who had another son in the hospital with a bullet in his jaw, lost her interest in nonviolence and simply slugged him in the eye. “And he’s losing consciousness, sliding down the door,” recalled Bob Zellner, the SNCC organizer who had accompanied her. “Meanwhile, Mrs. McGhee is following him on the way down. She’s not missing a lick—boom, boom, boom! And every time she hits him, his head hits the door.” Although she was arrested, she was never tried for the assault, and Zellner decided that “a new day is coming when a black woman can just whip the yard-dog shit out of a white cop and not have to account for it.”

  Fannie Lou Hamer, who was working as a sharecropper in Ruleville, Mississippi, was the most legendary of the local women who ste
pped forward. The youngest in an impoverished family of twenty children, she was childless herself, having been sterilized without permission by a white doctor who was operating on her for a benign tumor. When the SNCC workers arrived and asked for volunteers to register to vote, Hamer, too, had her hand up right away. As a result, she and her husband were thrown off the plantation where they lived. The home of the friend who took them in was riddled with bullets. When Hamer finally passed the test to register—a daunting process in a state where the test for black citizens was not only complicated but also arbitrary in the scoring—her tumbledown house received a $9,000 water bill although it had no running water. But Hamer—a natural orator who soon became SNCC’s star speaker—was unstoppable. She was arrested in a bus station, taken to the jail, and beaten savagely, leaving her with injuries that would torment her for the rest of her life. “She told me they had one black prisoner sit on her feet, and one with a blackjack beat her and the white guard fondled her and there was nothing she could do,” said Lenora Taitt-Magubane. “But she never gave up, even after she got sick. She kept speaking, with her sixth-grade education and her powerful voice. She never lost her faith and her will to fight.”

  In 1964 Hamer and Blackwell became delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the presidential convention—a SNCC plan to challenge the seating of the regular Mississippi delegates on the grounds that black Mississippians had been denied the right to vote. Hamer’s testimony before the Credentials Committee, in which she described white harassment and her beating in jail, became the most riveting moment of the convention. “All of this is on account we want to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” she concluded. It was so compelling that President Johnson, who was planning on being nominated without totally alienating the white voters of the Deep South, suddenly called a press conference at the White House to divert the TV networks from broadcasting her appearance.

  The negotiations over who would get the Mississippi seats at the convention were carried on between Senator Hubert Humphrey—the civil rights champion who wanted desperately to be Lyndon Johnson’s running mate—and male black leaders. They zeroed in on a compromise that would leave the white delegates in place and give the Freedom Democrats two symbolic seats, but Fannie Lou Hamer wanted no part of it. “At first Mrs. Hamer, as vice chair of our delegation, was invited to the meetings,” Blackwell wrote later. “But she was excluded after she told Humphrey to his face that he wanted to be vice president more than he wanted to do what was right and that she was going to pray for him.” The only politician who “stood with us all the way,” Lenora Taitt-Magubane remembered, was Representative Edith Green of Oregon.

  The true import of the Freedom Democratic Party was not in what they did or did not accomplish when it came to seating delegates. It was the impact on viewers, who watched while Hamer’s testimony was replayed over and over on TV. Emma Jordan, a black college student in California, was thrilled. “I remember looking at her and thinking, you know, she spoke so powerfully. I mean, it just made me choke to listen to her…. She was confronted by some of the most powerful politicians in the world. And she stood up. Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, they were all putting enormous pressure on her to take a deal and cave.” The commentary on TV, Jordan noticed, seemed to assume that in the end the powerful men would win out. “The news reporters were reporting behind the scenes, ‘This is the deal. We think it’s going to be resolved this way.’ And she stood up and… she was not going to take a deal.”

  Hamer’s will was strongest, and negotiations collapsed. The convention seated the regular Mississippi Democrats, who then promptly walked out anyway. The Freedom Democrats, who had been given floor passes by delegates from other states, stole onto the floor and gradually occupied those empty places, successfully resisting any attempts to dislodge them. They had the seats physically if not legally. “The spotlight was on us that night in the hall,” Blackwell said. “And I had a feeling I had never had before: It was a sense of history. I felt a part of history. I felt free and significant and very much a part of the United States of America.”

  “THAT WAS OUR UNIFORM.”

  Blackwell looked on what happened to her at the convention as a triumph, while the young civil rights organizers saw it as a terrible defeat, and proof that no matter how noble their cause and how much pain they endured, the white liberal Northerners they had counted on were not really going to respond. Perhaps it was the difference in expectations that allowed Blackwell to keep growing stronger throughout the tumultuous ’60s, while SNCC began to slide into an angry cynicism. “I don’t think that anybody envisioned the long years of struggle and violence and… anguish,” said Connie Curry, a white SNCC official. In 1960, when SNCC was formed, the students declared their commitment to the creed of nonviolence, vowing to remain “loving and forgiving even in the midst of hostility.” But by 1964 the students—many by then ex-students—were growing dubious about nonviolence and less willing to put their bodies on the line just in the hope that someone in power would notice and intervene. Being beaten and thrown into jail “and trying to love everybody while they did it to you… ,” Curry said, “was bound to mess you up.”

  Dressing up for demonstrations was definitely over. The students who had worn their best clothes to sit-ins and jail were now in denim pants and work shirts. “That was our uniform,” said Joyce Ladner. “I had an overall skirt I wore. That was fashionable among the movement women. The guys wore overalls, and we wore the overall skirt.” The transition from dress-up to workers’ clothes did not come without controversy. While some argued that wearing jeans was a sign of solidarity with the working class, others thought it was a sign of disrespect. Marian Wright Edelman said she would never forget “the disappointed looks” of rural black Mississippians “who heard there was a Black lady lawyer in town… and who came to look for and at me. When they saw me in blue jeans and an old sweatshirt, they were crestfallen. I never wore jeans in public again in Mississippi.” Back in Atlanta, Ruby Doris Smith, who had taken over the day-to-day operations of SNCC, offered a compromise: “It isn’t so much what you wear but the condition of the clothes worn.” (Smith herself generally stuck to skirts and blouses.)

  Carefully straightened hair gave way to natural Afros, some of them just a small halo around the head, others great explosions of hair. The new style created enormous generational conflicts, from Northern college towns to rural Mississippi. Unita Blackwell was disturbed when Muriel Tillinghast, the young SNCC organizer assigned to work with her on voter registration, arrived in town wearing a short Afro. “Me, I called it nappy-headed,” she recalled. “I had been straightening my hair for years, and all the other black women I knew had been, too. By the time I was 7 or 8 years old, my mother and grandmother were ‘warm-combing’ my hair to get the kinks out. As far as I knew, there was no such thing as a black woman not straightening her hair.” She found Muriel’s hair embarrassing—particularly since “all the women in church kind of sniggled about it”—and kept dropping hints about going down to the local hairdresser.

  The idea of letting your hair “go natural” had begun with black artists and actresses in the 1950s, and in 1963, Cicely Tyson wore her hair in an Afro or in cornrows when she appeared in the TV series East Side/West Side. But the civil rights workers were the ones who brought the style into the college campuses and black neighborhoods around the country, much to the horror of their parents and teachers. When Emma Jordan got married in California, her mother made it clear that the ceremony would not go on unless the bride had her hair properly straightened. Jordan dutifully began her wedding day in compliance. Then at the last minute she went into the bathroom and put water in it, allowing it to revert to “the cutest little Afro.” Her mother burst into tears, Jordan said, “but there was nothing she could do.” Valerie Bradley, a black journalist, said that when she returned home to visit her family in Indianapolis, her mot
her refused to meet her Afro-wearing daughter at the airport. At Spelman, Gwen Robinson was already letting her hair grow natural in the early ’60s. She was called into the dean’s office and told she was a “disgrace” and had no hopes of finding a husband.

  “The hair thing made a huge difference… ,” said Mary Helen Washington, who was a graduate student in Detroit when she let her hair go natural. “First of all it was a real power statement: I have all that hair walking around. But it was very freeing to have a style that white people couldn’t wear that made you look gorgeous.”

  The Afro was an early sign of a coming explosion of anger over the standards of beauty in the black community, which had long valued features, color, and hair that looked as “white” as possible. Those standards were particularly important at the elite black colleges. It was hard to avoid noticing that Spelman girls were not only extremely well-behaved; they were also, in general, extremely light-skinned. “The best of all possible worlds is that you are light as you can be, you have green eyes, or light brown, and you have long straight hair,” said Gwen Robinson, who was dark-skinned and who found that the male students from neighboring colleges were cruelly dismissive. “Some of the Morehouse guys were so nasty to a person who looked like myself. Overt, I mean, straight up.” Diane Nash was universally admired for her organizing skills, but virtually every description of her by colleagues in Nashville included a reference to the fact that she was very beautiful in that traditional way—so light-skinned that if the movement needed information on what was going on inside segregated waiting rooms or restaurants, she could walk in and pass for white. “The first thing you have to say about Diane—the first thing anyone who ever encountered her noticed, and there is no way not to notice—is that she was one of God’s beautiful creatures, just about the most gorgeous woman any of us had ever seen… ,” wrote John Lewis in his memoirs. “But none of this turned Diane’s head. She was dead serious about what we were doing each week, very calm, very deliberate, always straightforward and sincere. As time passed, she came to be seen more as our sister than as an object of lust.”