African American women move to forefront in fight for racial equality
Black Lives Matter movement helped spur new era of leadership
Bree Newsome snatched down a Confederate flag at the South Carolina Statehouse. Lesha Evans calmly faced down officers in riot gear at a Baton Rouge march.
Widely published photographs of these and other black women offer some of the most arresting images to emerge from the protest movement of recent years. The photos have come to symbolize the effort by today’s African-American women to take a place at the forefront of the fight against racial bias in law enforcement, the workplace and politics.
“We as feminists of color … have been involved in building these movements over the decades, but we have never been acknowledged as leaders,” said Barbara Smith, co-founder of the Combahee River Collective, an early black feminist group.
Unlike many of their predecessors from previous decades, this generation of black women is “demanding that they be respected. They can assert that publicly and have impact and visibility, because of all the movement work that has come before,” Smith said.
Newsome scaled a flagpole in 2015 to tear down the Confederate banner in the aftermath of the attack at a Charleston church, where a white supremacist shot nine worshippers to death during a Bible study. Evans acted last summer after the police killings of two black men — Philando Castile in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge. Images of both women become powerful emblems of protest and unrest.
Historically, black women have been no strangers to the quest for social change. Sojourner Truth was a leading abolitionist. Ida B. Wells led a crusade against lynching during the early 20th century. Fannie Lou Hamer demanded voting rights in the 1960s. Black women founded the Black Lives Matter movement.
But they have often been overshadowed — during the suffragette movement by white women who relegated them to the rear during marches and put their own rights first, and by the black men lionized during the civil rights movement.
“You can find that overshadowing throughout all these movements until very recently,” said Jelani Cobb, a historian and journalism professor at Columbia University. “These movements that were trying to achieve democracy were not always functioning democratically.”
A new era of black, female leadership emerged in 2014 with the Black Lives Matter Movement, Cobb said.
“At any given point, the majority of the voices you heard would be female, which is very atypical of the way things have traditionally operated,” he said. “It can almost be taken as a given that women have a right to be in leadership. That’s crucial, because it’s been a stumbling block for decades.”
A longstanding attraction to a male leadership model often drowned out women’s voices.
“Black women were really made to feel guilty during the civil rights era,” said Deborah Gray White, a historian at Rutgers University. “That was a function of American racism and sexism. Now black women are going back to their foremothers and realizing they can and do represent the race.”
Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, called black women “the curators of the social justice movement” and the canaries in the coal mine for all American minorities.
“What happens to black women is soon to happen to everybody,” Garza said. “The conditions of black women can tell us a lot about where this country is headed.”