Women and Civil Rights in America

Rethinking how we frame Black women’s activism during the African American Civil Rights movement means rethinking the narratives that have taken hold in popular memory. The women who led, organized, challenged, and endured, deserve to have their experiences moved from the periphery of the movement’s history to its center.

A successful dressmaker and clubwoman, Alice Casneau had an active professional and public life in Boston during the turn of the 20th century.

Alice was born around 1875. She was co-founder of the Kentucky Association of Colored Women’s Clubs and Louisville Women’s Improvement Club, a member of the Black women’s suffrage movement, a music teacher in Louisville Colored Schools, and supported the Kentucky Negro Educational Association Scholarship Fund.

A revolutionary social activist, Alice Stone Blackwell played a significant role in women's suffrage movement. Blackwell served as a leader in the Boston and Massachusetts movements, and she raised her voice nationally through her work as editor of "The Woman's Journal." She also participated in other 20th century social justice issues that defended the civil rights and liberties of others.

Amelia was born in Savannah, Georgia on August 18, 1911. She was one of ten children. Her father, George, was a skilled construction worker and owned a wholesale woodlot. Her mother, Anna, was a seamstress. When she wasn't working, Anna traveled to rural Black communities to promote women's suffrage. She often took 10-year-old Amelia with her as she knocked on doors and accompanied women to the polls to cast their votes.

Bessie Bruington Burke is an American Hero. She was the first African American teacher and principal hired in the Los Angeles public school system. Burke held influential, powerful, and redeeming responsibilities for over 40 years in California.

Carrie Chapman Catt (1859 -1947) began her career as a national women’s rights activist when she addressed the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890 at their national convention in Washington DC. She quickly became a dedicated writer, lecturer, and recruiter for the suffrage movement. She also worked for peace and was a co-founder of the League of Women Voters.

Charlotte Forten Grimké was an abolitionist, a poet, and an educator. In addition to writing poems, she also taught African American children in the Sea Islands of South Carolina during the Civil War. She also helped found the National Association of Colored Women in 1896.

Crystal Eastman was one of the most visible Progressive reformers of the early twentieth century United States. She described herself as a “militant idealist.” She worked for suffrage and socialism and against war. Eastman was a feminist who believed that voting was only the starting point for the real work of liberating women.

Daisy Bates is an African American civil rights activist and newspaper publisher. Through her newspaper, Bates documented the battle to end segregation in Arkansas. For her amazing career in social activism, we celebrate her as an American hero.

Dolores Huerta was born Dolores Clara Fernández on April 10, 1930, in the mining town of Dawson, New Mexico. She was the daughter of Juan Fernández and Alicia Chávez. Her father was a farm worker, miner, and union activist elected to the New Mexico legislature in 1938. When she was three, her parents divorced. Huerta moved with her two brothers and mother to Stockton, California, where she spent most of her childhood and early adult life.

The Daisy Bates House, a National Historic Landmark, was the command post for the Central High School desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was the first time a President used federal powers to uphold and implement a federal court decision regarding school desegregation.

The Auditorium Building, a prominent Chicago hotel and theater, provided convention space for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU) in June 1916. This convention coincided with the Republican National Convention.

Charlotte Forten Grimké was a prominent abolitionist and women's rights advocate. During the Civil War, Forten taught newly freed blacks on the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Her writings and poetry showed her commitment to battling racial and gender inequality. From 1881 to 1886, she resided in Dupont Circle, Washington, DC.

The Beaux-Arts Hermitage Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee is a significant site of women's suffrage history.

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett lived in Chicago in this late-19th-century Romanesque Revival style stone residence while fighting to end lynching, segregation and the economic oppression of African Americans. She and her husband bought the building in 1919 and lived there until 1929.

Maggie L. Walker was the first African American woman to charter a bank in the United States. The park protects her home and the surrounding setting.

The Marian Anderson House is significant for its association with Marian Anderson, an African American contralto who had a ground-breaking career in classical music from the mid-1920s through the late 1950s.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary was one of the most outspoken and articulate female abolitionists of the 19th century. She played many roles--writer, teacher, lawyer, and mother. The first black newspaperwoman in North America, Shadd Cary’s writings show her lifelong commitment to racial and gender equality. Located Washington, DC, Shadd Cary’s brick row-house is a lasting reminder of her extraordinary civil rights activism and her defiance of societal constraints.

Ms. Bethune was a Civil Rights leader from the 1930s until 1955. She founded the National Council of Negro Women, a powerful organization that united a variety of African American women's groups for Civil Rights. The Mary McLeod Bethune memorial in Lincoln Park was the first memorial to an African American built on public land in Washington, DC, and it was the first portrait statue of an American woman on a public site in the city. Sculptor: Robens BerksInscriptionsfrontMar

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin's 103 Charles Street home served as the center for the Woman's Era Club of Boston. A primarily Black women's club, the Woman’s Era Club focused on both the intellectual engagement of its members as well as the social needs of its community.

The humanitarian efforts of the Women’s Service Club have uplifted Boston for over a century. Piloted by generations of Black women, the Club’s activism paralleled broader efforts to eliminate second-class citizenship in American society.

Members of the Woman's Era Club, a Boston-based African American women's club, lived the club's motto to "make the world better" by devoting their lives to numerous causes. Members advocated for women's suffrage and education for African American women, aided the less fortunate and oppressed, and fought racism and discrimination against African Americans.

When Carrie Lane Chapman Catt was 13-years-old and living in rural Charles City, Iowa, she witnessed something that would help to decide the course of her life. Her family was politically active and on Election Day in 1872, Carrie’s father and some of the male hired help were getting ready to head into town to vote. She asked her mother why she wasn’t getting dressed to go too. Her parents laughingly explained to their daughter that women couldn’t vote.

The Woman Suffrage Procession along Pennsylvania Avenue on March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's presidential inauguration, used pageantry to raise awareness about women's exclusion from the nation's political process. The publicity following the event re-energized the woman suffrage movement in the United States.

Los latinos han residido en Norteamérica desde antes de la llegada de los europeos del norte a Jamestown y Plymouth. Ellos ya vivían en las tierras que después fueron colonias británicas, para acabar convirtiéndose en los primeros estados de la República de los Estados Unidos (EE.UU.).

During my lifetime Black people were deeply entrenched in the struggle for voting rights. As a child of the 1960s I heard a constant emphasis on how important it was to vote. To make our voices heard. I went with my parents to polling places when they voted, where I was surrounded by adults who grew up in the Jim Crow South and knew that voting was not something to take for granted. Michelle Duster is the great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells.

Prior to the 1830s, American antislavery organizations were formed and controlled by white men. This changed in December of 1833 when African American men were invited to participate at the first convention of the American Anti-Slavery Slavery Society (AASS) held in Philadelphia. Some women were also invited to the convention, but as spectators rather than as members. Excluding women from full participation was customary of the period’s social conventions.

Some abolitionist women found the confidence needed to reject social conventions and participate in public activities by denying the authority of clerical rules. Abolitionist feminists also found resolve to contradict gender roles in the abolitionist belief of the common humanity of all people. The belief in common humanity was used by abolitionists to argue for the definition of African American slaves as people, not property.

The abolition movement helped form and influence those who built and led the women’s rights movement. The beliefs and practices of the abolition movement provided a backdrop against which antislavery women could challenge gender roles and leave the woman’s sphere to enter the public sphere.

The abolition movement was one of the leading factors in the formation of the 19th century women’s rights movement. This series explores the connections between the abolition movement and the women’s rights movement to reveal the relationship between the two campaigns.

Explore the struggle to maintain a school for African-American women in Canterbury, Connecticut three decades before the Civil War.

Explore school integration through the experience of Cynthia Lewis Gaines, one of the first Black students to integrate an all-white high school in New Kent County, Virginia.

Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator and activist, founded the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) in 1935 and served as its president until 1949. Learn more about Bethune and this organization intended to give African American women a collective national voice in this article.

Students will identify locations on a street map using accompanying text. They will search a database to find historical photos of the corresponding locations. Using what they have discovered, they will analyze the connection between location and methods of working for change. Taking it further, the students will identify an issue they would like to advocate for and describe a corresponding location to work for that change.

Manzanar is most frequently associated with Japanese incarceration; however, its story stretches back thousands of years as part of the homelands of the Owens Valley Paiute and other Native peoples. Just thirty-four miles from Manzanar, Alice Piper, a 15-year-old Paiute student, made history in 1924 by successfully suing the Big Pine School District to integrate their classrooms and allow Indigenous students to attend their newly built school.

Meet Dr. Manassa T. Pope, an African-American doctor and entrepreneur in the early 20th century, and learn about his efforts to gain civil rights well before the modern Civil Rights Movement.

Before the end of legal slavery in the United States, free African Americans migrated to Canada to find greater security and liberty. After the Civil War, some returned to the U.S. to aid emancipated people and rebuild the South. Mary Ann Shadd Cary was a business woman, abolitionist, and suffragist.

The lesson is based on Little Rock Central High School and the Prudence Crandall Museum, both listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Both properties have been designated National Historic Landmarks. Understand the magnitude of the struggle involved in securing equal educational opportunities for African Americans and examine how Prudence Crandall challenged the prevailing attitude toward educating African Americans in New England prior to the Civil War.

Mabel Keaton Staupers was an advocate for African American nurses and health in the Black community. She worked to integrate nursing during World War II. Learn about her example and different ways of making change in our society.

African American women played a critical role in the Space Race and rose to new heights as mathematicians, computer programmers, team project leads, and engineers at NASA. This article features properties in the National Register of Historic Places that are related to their stories.