Honoring Women of the Civil Rights Movement

History and today’s social media platforms are joining forces to tell the story of the women in the Civil Rights Movement. Familiar names like Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, Ella Baker, and Daisy Bates have been part of the roll call for years, and now Georgia Gilmore and others are being recognized.

“The men are often shown at the forefront in images of the Movement, but the Movement would not have been possible without the work of women,” Dr. Shenette Garrett-Scott says.

Garrett-Scott, an associate professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi, states that Ella Baker’s influence is well-known, adding “she is widely recognized as an architect of SNCC’s (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) direct action protests.”

Rosa Parks’ great niece, Urana McCauley, shared her memories of the beloved icon who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus with a writer for the website created by Hollywood producer, Shonda Rimes. In the Shondaland op-ed, McCauley described Park’s lifelong commitment to civil rights as “as a passion she felt in her soul.”

Montgomery’s bus boycott brought the culinary gifts of Georgia Gilmore into the spotlight. National Public Radio and The New York Times have profiled Gilmore’s grass-roots activism as helping to sustain the year-long boycott. Gilmore raised money by selling food at boycott meetings.

And, there were others who worked tirelessly and courageously to advance a cause they believed in for themselves and future generations.

Garrett-Scott adds, “They provided critical work both behind the scenes and on the front lines. They arranged transportation, prepared food, and distributed fliers.”

The Social Justice Gene

Kansas Citian Cecelia Belser-Patton recently paid homage to her grandmother, Frances Belser, another one of the brave and dedicated women in Montgomery during the boycott.

“She helped to HANDWRITE the flyers announcing the Montgomery Bus Boycott & delivered them across the city with her friends & co-conspirators,” Belser-Patton wrote on her Facebook page. “She poured into the people of Montgomery, Alabama as a secretary of Holt St. Baptist Church; she mentored young women at the HBCU Alabama St. She and my grandfather, Caesar Belser, Sr. raised two college graduates, my father and my aunt, their only children. She was sweet & spicy, she was smart, she was kind, she was beautyFULL, and she was funny…I loved her laugh.”

Social media posts similar to the one written by Belser-Patton, who much like her grandmother is actively involved in social justice work, and news reports featuring previously unknown women add context to the role of women during the Civil Rights Movement.

“They also organized and trained protestors,” explains Garrett-Scott. “They plotted strategy, provided meeting spaces away from white surveillance, and raised money.”

And, in the words of Frances Belser’s proud granddaughter, we “will never forget.”