Black women became force even before Moore

When Democrat Doug Jones upset Republican Roy Moore on Tuesday night in Alabama’s special election for a U.S. Senate seat, Twitter exploded with tributes to black women for helping Jones win in a traditionally Republican state.

Ninety-eight percent of black women who voted went for Jones, while most white women -- including those with college degrees — supported Moore, who’d been accused of sexual misconduct with teenage girls decades ago.

In the aftermath of the victory for Jones, the hashtag #Blackwomen began trending on Twitter:

@Kanijjackson wrote “62 years ago a Black Woman in Alabama refused to give up her bus seat to a racist. Yesterday #Blackwomen in Alabama refused to give a Senate seat to a pedophile.”

Long before Tuesday’s special election, black women have been a force in Alabama. Trailblazers from the state have included everyone from Mae Jemison, the first African-american woman to fly on the space shuttle, to Condoleezza Rice, who became the first black woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State.

Alabama has produced some of the country’s most renowned female civil rights leaders.

“Black women, what we did in the Doug Jones campaign, follows in a proud tradition,” said Lecia Brooks, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala.

The effort to get Africanamericans to the polls on Tuesday reminded Brooks, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, of the work done by Amelia Boynton Robinson. She was a civil rights activist in Alabama who led voting drives and became the first black woman in the state to run for Congress in 1964.

Boynton Robinson was severely beaten by police during the “Bloody Sunday” protest on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Ala., in 1965. She was played by actress Lorraine Toussaint in the film “Selma,” directed by Ava Duvernay.

“Amelia Boynton was the woman who brought Doctor King to Selma,” Brooks said. “She organized black folks to go to the courthouse in Selma and demand to be registered to vote. The whole Selma story is owed to Amelia Boynton.” In 1934, Boynton had become one of the few African-american women registered to vote in Selma.

In 2015, she accompanied President Barack Obama across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma march. She died that same year at 104.

Rosa Parks helped spark the civil rights movement when she was arrested in Montgomery on Dec. 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. A decade earlier, she led a national campaign against sexual assaults on black women.

In her personal papers, loaned to the Library of Congress, after she died at the age of 92 on Oct. 24, 2004, Parks described growing up in rural Alabama. As a child, she often stayed awake at night with her grandfather, Sylvester Edwards, who used a shotgun to guard against Ku Klux Klan members who roamed at night, terrorizing black communities.

Black Power movement activist Angela Yvonne Davis grew up in Birmingham. When she was 5, white segregationists firebombed her neighbors’ home.

In 1970, she was accused of kidnapping, murder and conspiracy in California, after a shootout at the Marin County Courthouse.

“For 14 months she was held without bail,” according to a 1980 Washington Post article. Protests marches were staged around the world, with people demanding “Free Angela.”

She was eventually released on a $102,000 bond and acquitted at trial. In 1980, Davis ran for vice president on the Communist Party, U.S.A., ticket.

Coretta Scott King marched beside her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., during the civil rights movement and endured the threats and abuse that came with demanding an end to segregation and racism.

After her husband’s assassination in 1968, Coretta Scott King continued working for equal rights and nonviolent social change.