What’s in it for me? A new perspective on the civil rights movement
Two documents bookend the American Revolution: the Declaration of Independence, adopted in 1776, and the American Constitution, ratified in 1788.
Both documents affirm human rights, proclaiming the equality of all citizens and their God-given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But who counted as a citizen? For many, the answer was clear. The right to shape the future of this political community would be restricted to white men.
From the beginning, African Americans and women challenged this exclusionary status quo, and Black women were at the vanguard of this struggle. They lobbied, litigated, and organized to abolish slavery and end the disenfranchisement of all women.
In these blinks, we’ll meet some of these remarkable women as we explore their quest for equality, justice, and a biracial democracy that lived up to the ideals of the American Revolution.
A short note before we begin: These blinks contain potentially upsetting material, including description of sexual assault in blink 4. Please take care.
Along the way, you’ll also learn:
why so many women participated in the anti-slavery movement;
what Black women did when Southern states prevented African Americans from voting; and
why the alliance between white and Black women was often an uneasy one.
The abolitionist movement appealed to women seeking their own emancipation.
The American Revolution was a struggle for liberty. Initially, that meant freedom from British rule. But as the war drew to a close, Americans began appealing to revolutionary ideas about the equality of all in their fight against another enemy: slavery.
Opposition to slavery was not new, but few had called for the immediate liberation of enslaved African Americans. Dismantling slavery, the institution’s opponents thought, would take decades, if not centuries. For now, all they could do was ensure that the law was properly applied and that the flagrant abuse of slaves was ended.
By the 1830s, though, campaigners started making more radical demands. Spurred on by the emancipation of slaves in a few northern states, they now pushed for the total abolition of slavery everywhere. This abolitionism was part of a wider push for social reform designed to close the gap between the rhetoric of the Revolution and the reality of life in the new republic.
The key message in this blink is: The abolitionist movement appealed to women seeking their own emancipation.
Abolitionism thrived in print. Dozens of Black- and white-owned newspapers sprang up around the country, dedicated to spreading the word and arguing the cause. But how could they appeal to the hearts and minds of Americans?
Well, they targeted likely allies. As the male editors of these newspapers saw it, no group was more open to the moral argument against slavery than women. Their articles thus emphasized the sexual exploitation of enslaved women and slave owners’ habit of breaking up families. The evidence was certainly on their side – these were excellent reasons to oppose slavery. But American women found even more reasons to side with abolitionists. They often drew on their own experiences.
They, too, were disenfranchised and subject to what was sometimes called the “slavery of sex.” Unable to dispose of their own property, tethered to abusive husbands by one-sided marriage laws, and lacking all political rights, many white middle-class women came to see parallels between their own lives and the plight of enslaved Americans. Both, after all, were examples of bondage and injustice that needed to be abolished.
These women would play an increasingly vocal part in the abolitionist movement. But where did that leave Black women? As we’ll see in the next blink, they found it harder to rise through the ranks of the movement than did their white counterparts.
Despite their immense contributions, Black women were excluded from leadership in the anti-slavery movement.
Hester Lane was born enslaved in Maryland. Little is known of her early years, but by 1820, she was a free woman living in New York. A successful entrepreneur with her own decorating business, Lane stood out in a city in which most Black women worked as laundresses and domestic servants.
Lane didn’t forget the people she had left behind in Maryland. A dedicated abolitionist, she used her money to bankroll the American Anti-Slavery Society, AASS for short, and buy the freedom of enslaved men and women at auctions. In her spare time, she helped run the Committee for Vigilance, a society dedicated to protecting Black New Yorkers and fugitives who sought liberty in the city.
Talented, ambitious, and a proven enemy of slavery, Lane was a natural fit for a leadership position in the abolitionist cause.
Here’s the key message: Despite their immense contributions, Black women were excluded from leadership in the anti-slavery movement.
In 1839, the AASS convened its annual meeting in New York. Members spent many hours debating one key issue: Did the word “person” in the Society’s constitution refer to men and women? This wasn’t mere linguistic hair-splitting. If women were “persons,” it gave them the right to sit, speak, vote, and, more vitally, hold office. Neither side prevailed, but a faction of 123 men lodged a formal protest stating that women’s leadership risked inviting “embarrassment to the cause of the enslaved.”
The following year, the matter was finally settled: women were “persons” with the same rights as men. Women like Lane would no longer be helpmeets working in the background of the society; they could finally claim positions that matched their talents. But when the time came for delegates to elect new members of the executive board, something curious happened.
Five women had been nominated – Lane and four white activists, including the well-known abolitionists Lucretia Mott and Lydia Maria Childs. Every woman was elected except Lane.
There was fierce debate within the AASS over what had happened. One member of the executive board, Charles Ray, was convinced Lane had been rejected because she was African American, stating that “the principle of women’s rights could not carry her color.” Despite the strenuous denials of other members, the fact of the matter was that four white women had risen to the highest ranks of the AASS while the sole Black candidate – Hester Lane – had not.
Black women charted their own path to equality.
“How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?”
This was the question Maria Miller Stewart posed in Boston in 1830. She knew from bitter experience how domestic drudgery dulled the talents of Black women. A native of Connecticut, Stewart was orphaned at five and “bound out” to a local family. They had given her food and lodging. In return, she had labored for them until this “debt” was repaid some 15 years later.
Liberating women wasn’t just about allowing gifted individuals to thrive, though – it was a political necessity. If racism were to be defeated, Stewart argued, Black America needed every talent at its disposal, and that required the equality of men and women. If men refused to grant equal rights, so be it. Women would claim them for themselves.
The key message in this blink is: Black women charted their own path to equality.
Jarena Lee had also been bound out. Born in the 1780s in New Jersey, she spent her early years as a maidservant. A religious child, Lee believed this was a punishment for her sins. One day, however, she had a revelation. She wasn’t being punished – she was being beckoned to her true calling. Lee was going to spread God’s message.
Lee faced formidable obstacles when she decided to become a preacher. Church elders didn’t accept the expertise of women in religious matters and doubted their ability to convert souls. Congregations, meanwhile, were skeptical about their long-standing traditions being upended so suddenly.
That didn’t deter Lee. During the 1820s and 1830s, she quite literally blazed her own trail, covering thousands of miles on foot and delivering hundreds of sermons every year. She spoke to anyone who would listen, Black or white. When a minister from the African Methodist Episcopal Church finally saw her in action, he was convinced of her gift, and authorized her to preach. She was the first woman in the United States to receive this official license.
There were also other trailblazers, like Philadelphian activist and teacher Sarah Mapps Douglass, who was born in 1806. The founder of the first Black women’s literary society and some of the earliest women’s anti-slavery societies, Douglass provided a blueprint for Black women struggling against racism and sexism. Her work would be emulated around the country as women excluded by the abolitionist movement’s male-dominated societies set about creating their own structures.
Abolishing slavery and emancipating women were two sides of the same coin.
On June 23, 1855, a 19-year-old enslaved woman named Celia grabbed a stick and struck the head of a man creeping into her Missouri cabin, killing him outright. For five years, this man – a slave owner named Robert Newsom – had repeatedly sexually assaulted her. Celia had told him to stop, begged his daughters to intervene, and finally warned him. He hadn’t listened.
In court, Celia’s lawyers appealed to Missouri law. Rape, they noted, was a heinous offense, and a woman had the right to defend herself against an assailant; if she killed him while doing so, she could not be guilty of first-degree murder.
The judge refuted their argument. Missouri law, he instructed the jury, applied to free women, which excluded Celia, who, legally speaking, was not a woman but her owner’s property. Newsom’s assault couldn’t be classed as a crime, and so Celia had no right to self-defense. It was a brutal illustration of the way sexism and racism intertwined in the lives of enslaved Black women.
This is the key message: Abolishing slavery and emancipating women were two sides of the same coin.
In the 1850s, a powerful voice emerged to hammer home this connection to a wider audience.
Sojourner Truth was born enslaved in the 1790s. She fled from bondage in 1827, making the harrowing decision to leave her children behind. After several years living in a utopian free-love community, she settled in Massachusetts. There, she experienced a religious awakening. Her life would be devoted to wandering America in search of moral and political truths. She abandoned her old name and called herself Sojourner Truth.
Truth was an unforgettable presence, and few who saw her speak forgot the experience. Six feet tall and dressed in a shawl and bonnet, she had a pronounced Dutch accent that recalled her youth in Upstate New York. Unable to read or write, she spoke extemporaneously. She was by turns eloquent and blunt, recalling the lofty rhetoric of the American Revolution one moment and baring her breasts to remind the audience of her womanhood the next.
At the heart of her message, though, was a lesson her own life had taught her and that she refused to allow the women’s rights movement to forget. It was this: As long as a Black woman could be hanged for doing what Celia had done, or forced to choose between liberty and family as Truth had done, no woman in the United States would be truly free.
The Civil War brought radical change, but Black Americans were still denied full equality.
At the time of the American Revolution, slavery was common across North America. As the United States expanded, however, it became increasingly concentrated in one region: the Southern States.
Eliminated in the Northern states by the early nineteenth century, slavery expanded rapidly across the Southern states. This wasn’t just a geographic divide – it was also the cause of a bitter political conflict. In 1861, the abolitionist Union and the pro-slavery Confederacy went to war.
Black America rallied to the Unionist cause. Free men fought in its armies; free women like Sojourner Truth ran recruitment campaigns and raised money for uniforms and arms. In the South, enslaved African Americans abandoned farms and plantations, racing northward to claim their freedom behind Union lines. They all sensed that emancipation was on the horizon.
Here’s the key message: The Civil War brought radical change, but Black Americans were still denied full equality.
The Civil War ended in the spring of 1865 when Southern forces surrendered at Appomattox, Virginia. Slavery wouldn’t outlive the fall of the Confederacy. A new nation was about to be born.
The Constitution was amended. In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. Three years later, the Fourteenth Amendment made all formerly enslaved people citizens of the United States. What were their rights? The Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870, answered that question, denying states the right to bar citizens from voting on the grounds of their race.
This was known as Reconstruction, the remaking of the United States. To reenter the Union, Southern states had to rewrite their constitutions and accept these amendments. In 1868, Black American men entered American politics. For the first time, they would have a say in who governed them. They elected over 2,000 Black officials to posts in Congress, the Senate, and local government.
This was the high-water mark of the Reconstruction era. By 1877, however, the tide was already turning. State by state, Southern lawmakers eroded Black men’s voting rights. They imposed literacy tests, poll taxes, and “grandfather clauses” that stated that only men whose ancestors had voted before 1867 could vote – effectively circumventing the Fifteenth Amendment. As well, violence, intimidation, and voter suppression laws kept Black men away from the polls.
Slavery had been abolished, but a new regime emerged in its place: Jim Crow legalized discrimination against Black citizens, and their segregation, in the South. A new front had opened in the struggle for a biracial democracy.
While other groups compromised, Black women continued to call for universal voting rights.
Mary Church Terrell was a formidable woman.
Born in Tennessee to formerly enslaved parents, she moved to Washington in 1890. She was the first Black woman to earn a college degree, and she spoke several European languages and traveled widely. But Terrell wasn’t just an intellectual force – she was also a prolific political campaigner.
In Washington, she used her friendship with sympathetic senators to push for anti-lynching legislation to combat mob rule in the Jim Crow South. A fierce advocate of biracial democracy, she founded an organization that would form the vanguard of a new civil rights movement: the National Association of Colored Women, or NACW for short. The NACW didn’t seek to advance only the interests of Black women, however – it spoke for all Americans.
The key message here is: While other groups compromised, Black women continued to call for universal voting rights.
Why was it necessary to create the NACW? There were two reasons. First, it had become clear that the women’s suffrage, or voting rights, movement would be led by white women. Organizations like the Woman Suffrage Party invited Black activists to join its ranks, but its leaders expected these recruits to dissolve their own societies and accept the Party’s rules and regulations. For Terrell, this could only mean one thing: Black women would be forced to take a back seat in the movement.
That brings us to the second reason. Terrell, like many other activists, was committed to universal voting rights and feared that supposed allies like white suffragists would sacrifice the interests of Black women to secure their own rights. This wasn’t an unfounded suspicion. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, for example, had repeatedly aligned with white supremacist ideals, hinting that if men gave white women the vote, they would be helping to secure a white majority at the polls.
Many Black organizations also opposed voting rights for Black women. Some activists, like the educational reformer Margaret Murray Washington, worried that associating with the radical suffrage movement would place Black women in the firing line.
Terrell had little time for Washington’s arguments, but she was truly incensed about the male-led organizations that opposed Black women’s suffrage on the plainly misogynistic grounds that they had no place in public life. Was it not absurd, she asked with reference to these men, that one group of human beings who were denied rights was working to prevent another group from obtaining those same rights? Plenty of Black women agreed with Terrell: it was absurd.
Mary McLeod Bethune took the fight to the Jim Crow South after women won the right to vote.
In 1913, James Vardaman, Mississippi’s senator-elect, arrived in Washington. He had come to power after pledging to exclude Black Americans from politics.
Sensing an opportunity to do just that, Vardaman took up the question of women’s right to vote. He proposed a “compromise.” Women, he argued, should be allowed to vote, but the Fifteenth Amendment – the safeguard against states excluding voters on the basis of their race – must be repealed.
Nineteen senators voted for Vardaman’s proposal; the opposition of forty-eight others ensured its defeat. Black activists breathed a sigh of relief, but the episode was a reminder that expanding the franchise wouldn’t necessarily secure the advancement of Black Americans.
This is the key message: Mary McLeod Bethune took the fight to the Jim Crow South after women won the right to vote.
Women won suffrage in 1920 when Tennessee became the last state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. This barred states from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of their sex.
On paper, men and women were now equal members of the American political community. In the Jim Crow South, however, racism undermined that equality. Like Black men before them, Black women faced a raft of restrictive local laws that prevented them from exercising their constitutional rights.
The National Association of Colored Women led the fightback against this new round of disenfranchisement. Few women were as heavily involved in this struggle as Mary McLeod Bethune, the president of the Association’s Florida chapter.
Born in South Carolina in 1875, Bethune was the fifteenth of seventeen children, and the only member of her family to receive an education. She completed her education at Scotia Seminary, North Carolina, and dedicated the first half of her life to the education of African American children.
In 1920, Bethune founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls. The school became a center for Bethune’s political work. She hosted seminars to teach Black women how to register to vote and trained activists to ensure polling stations allowed Black women to cast their ballots. When the Ku Klux Klan staged a show of force at her school, she was defiant, gathering her students and singing hymns until they left.
By 1922, however, the intimidation of white supremacist groups like the Klan was having its intended effect in states like Florida. The Black vote had once again been suppressed. Something had to be done. It was time for Bethune to go to Washington.
Winning influence in Washington broke new ground for the civil rights movement.
Racist local laws and the violence of white supremacist groups had so far held grassroots civil rights movements in check. Black Americans were still unable to vote in the Jim Crow South.
It was a catch-22 situation. If you couldn’t vote in your state, you couldn’t control local government. And if you couldn’t control local government, you couldn’t enforce federal laws designed to ensure that Black Americans could vote in those states. Was there a way out of this double bind?
Mary McLeod Bethune and like-minded activists thought so.
The key message here is: Winning influence in Washington broke new ground for the civil rights movement.
In 1935, Bethune founded a new civil rights group called the National Council of Negro Women. This would become the institutional vehicle that allowed her to leverage her influence in the nation’s capital.
Bethune’s name was already well-known to civil rights activists and the movement’s sympathizers. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the reform-minded Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was one of those sympathizers. She had followed Bethune’s work as an educator and campaigner from afar for several years. In 1938, the two women met at a conference after the First Lady asked to be seated next to Bethune – a symbolic act of defiance aimed at supporters of segregation.
Eleanor encouraged her husband to appoint Bethune to the Federal Council of Negro Affairs, a group of African American intellectuals and activists who advised the administration on policy. Bethune used her position to push back against Jim Crow and to promote an unprecedented number of Black women. It was in part thanks to her influence that people like Jane Bolin, the first Black judge in the United States, and Crystal Bird Fauset, an activist who was appointed to the Office of Civilian Defense, rose through the ranks during these years.
Bethune and other members of the Council of Negro Affairs broke new ground. They didn’t just create a new center of power for the civil rights movement at the heart of government – they also helped push the Democratic Party toward full-throated support for civil rights. It would take another two and a half decades before their work was translated into legislation, but the movement now had wind in its sails.
The breakthrough came in 1965, the year the Voting Rights Act was passed. This Act ensured that no one would be prevented from voting on the basis of their race, color, religion, or sex. It followed on the heels of a legislative agenda that had desegregated the military, government, education, and public life.
Jim Crow had been beaten. America was finally on the path toward the biracial democracy African Americans had spent more than 200 years fighting for.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks:
The American Revolution created a new nation that promised equality and liberty for all. African Americans appealed to these values first to challenge slavery. The abolitionist cause they spearheaded found a ready ally in the movement for women’s rights, but it soon became clear that Black women would be expected to remain silent. They responded by establishing their own organizations. They founded societies, lobbied, and litigated for their rights as African Americans and as women. While others compromised with racism and sexism, the movement they built remained steadfast in its commitment to universal rights.
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What to read next: Hidden Figures, by Margot Lee Shetterly
We’ve seen how Black women forged their own paths as campaigners, educationalists, writers, and politicians. But they were at the forefront of more than the civil rights movement.
During the Second World War, labor shortages in the aeronautics industry created an opening for Black women previously relegated to teaching math in the South’s segregated schools. Suddenly, they had a chance to prove themselves at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Virginia.
And that’s just what they did. Langley’s all-black “West Computing” group not only laid the foundations for NASA’s greatest triumphs but also helped the US win the Cold War space race. To find out about these women’s fascinating stories, check out our blinks to Hidden Figures, by Margot Lee Shetterly.