Black Women Voices from the Black Freedom Movement in the 1960s
Due to popular White narratives about the Black Freedom Movement, we think about the movement from the 1950s to the 1970s as the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement. The main problem with this framing is that White media, the very people who we are fighting against, are the ones who decided it should be this way. Many Black people who were active during this time took issue with this framing. Malcolm X talked about the dangers of this framing on multiple occasions with an example being one of his most famous speeches, the Ballot or the Bullet. Another freedom fighter who was active during this time, Vincent Harding, speech writer and friend of Martin Luther King, said that calling it the Civil Rights Movement didn’t fully capture the “tremendous expansion of the human spirit” that was active in the movement. Peep the second part of this interview and check out his book There Is A River: The Black Struggle for Freedom. He convincingly argues that we are in a Black freedom struggle that didn’t start in the South in 1954, rather a “river” that started in Africa and flowed throughout the diasporas fighting for our freedom. The way he explains it is so fire that I need to quote it here:
At first, as the river metaphor took life within me, I was unduly concerned about its apparent inexactness and ambiguity. Now, with the passing of time and the deepening of our vision, it is possible to recognize that we are indeed the river, and at the same time the river is more than us—generations more, millions more. Through such an opening we may sense that the river of black struggle is people, but it is also the hope, the movement, the transformative power that humans create and that create them, us, and makes them, us, new persons. So we black people are the river; the river is us. The river is in us, created by us and this entire nation. And at its best the river of our struggle has moved consistently toward the ocean of humankind's most courageous hopes for freedom and integrity, forever seeking what black people in South Carolina said they sought in 1865: “the right to develop our whole being." (Harding, There Is a River, xix)
The White narrative of the Black Freedom movement ain’t talking like that. It focuses solely on the Black male leaders such as King, X, Carmichael and so on. This White narrative primarily played a role in silencing Black women and LGBTQIA people. Let's talk about what really happened and refocus on the Black Freedom Movement. In this way, we can account for all the Black people that make up the river, especially Black women. Black feminists have made claims, based on the White framing of the movement, that Black women primarily experienced sexism from Black men in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. While it is clear that they are looking at the movement incorrectly, how sexist and patriarchal were Black men in the movement?
This collection of voices of Black women does not definitively answer the question. Based on White Supremacy and the colonized society that we live in, it would be foolish to say that no Black men in the movement weren’t sexist or didn’t adopt the ways of the colonizer and mistreated Black women. But, what we will soon see from the voices of Black women, that was not always the case. Contrary to popular narratives, their stories might surprise you.
Dorothy Height : My Experience In The Civil Rights Movement
Interviewer: “How difficult was it for you, occasionally, to be the only woman in that group.”
Heights: “I have to honestly say, I felt that we were a group of peers. I felt at home in the group. … I never had to fight in that group.”
Kathleen Neal Cleaver Women, Power, and Revolution (1998)
“In fact, according to a survey Bobby Seale did in 1969, two-thirds of the members of the Black Panther Party were women. I am sure you are wondering, why isn't this the image that you have of the Black Panther Party? Well, ask yourself, where did the image of the Black Panthers that you have in your head come from? … Could it be that the images and stories of the Black Panthers that you've seen and heard were geared to something other than conveying what was actually going on?”
Elaine Brown slams Bourgeois Feminists
"People think the Black people, that we had some kind of animalistic thug boys and that all the women were bitches in the kitchen. No. It was not like that.
But it caused that stereotype. So I'm checking it now."
Here is David Ponton’s explanation of Panther Sisters on Women’s Liberation
Shout out to Omowale Afrika for this clip.
Excerpt from Tommy Curry’s Man-Not
Think of Stokely Carmichael’s statement, “The only position for women in the SNCC is prone,” for instance.33 … Mary King, a member of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the author of Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, offers a vastly different account of this oft-cited statement. …
King fondly accounts that Carmichael made fun of everything that crossed his agile mind, and this position paper was no different. When he came to the not-so-anonymous women’s paper in the meeting, King recounts, “Looking straight at me, he grinned broadly and shouted, ‘What is the position of women in SNCC?’ Answering himself, he responded, ‘The position of women in SNCC is prone!’”37 According to King, the now infamous statement by Carmichael was a joke. She remembers that “Stokely threw back his head and roared outrageously with laughter. We all collapsed with hilarity. . . . It drew us all closer together, because, even in that moment, he was poking fun at his own attitudes.”38 … King says, “Casey and I felt, and continue to feel, that Stokely was one of the most responsive men at the time that our anonymous paper appeared in 1964.”39 Several years later, Hayden confirmed King’s recollection of events in SNCC. Even in 2010, Hayden remembered the SNCC as a “womanist, nurturing, and familial” organization. In fact, Hayden went as far as to state, “Women’s culture and [B]lack culture merg[ed] for me in the southern freedom movement, especially in SNCC, free of constraints and the values of white patriarchy.”40
Tommy Curry, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017) pg. 13
Written by OUR DIRECTOR OF BLACK REVOLUTIONARY EDUCATION - Dr. Travis “HOOD SCHOLAR” HARRIS
He wants to especially acknowledge ibfa’s core team “Mama” julia davis aka ayaba sibongile and tory russell for their contributions to this article. hood scholar also wants to show appreciation to dr. tommy curry for bringing up the voices of black women that are usually silenced.