Women in the Civil Rights Movement

I wish that Coursera had been invented eight years ago when I first retired, but now that it exists, I can only begin to describe how wonderful a site it is for offering university level classes in many, many subject areas.

I have taken several classes so far (it is very easy to take too many classes at one time) but the one that I'm discussing in this post is Women and the Civil Rights Movement, taught by Elsa Barkley Brown, who is an Associate Professor of History and Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland. The introduction to the class is on YouTube, as are the intros to at least 246 other classes.

Barkley Brown's website lists some of her published articles under Research, with links to just a few of the full papers online. I'll leave exploring the rest of the links on the homepage to the viewer - exploring those trails and getting distracted is half the fun of the web.

One of the things that I have found out while taking this class is that I knew nothing about the early female activists in civil rights. By early, I mean in the early and latter parts of the 19th century, when black and white women worked against lynching in the United States. For an idea of what these women did, see the January 1936 issue of the Bulletin of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching at the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - a good site to search and browse since their online collection of archival material seems to be pretty extensive.

Another site documents the persistence of Black Women in the NAACP in working against lynching. Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000, is a wonderful resource with a substantial amount of material on women's rights.

One of these early women activists was Ida B. Wells. Her family maintains a memorial foundation, with biographical and other information under the 'About Ida B. Wells' tab.  One of her books is The Red Record at Project Gutenberg. This link is to the full-text version; you can do an author search on the homepage to see her other two available books. 

Another young woman to learn about is Barbara Johns - read the Wikipedia article to see just how important one voice, along with organized support, can be in changing history.