Black women are a force in Alabama
State has produced influential activists
The Washington Post
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 blackwomen for helping Mr. Jones win in a traditionally Republican state.
Ninety-eight percent of black women who voted went for Mr. Jones, while most white women — including those with college degrees — supported Mr. Moore, who had been accused of sexual misconduct with teenage girls decades ago.
In the aftermath of the victory for Mr. Jones, the hashtag #BlackWomen began trending on Twitter:
@KaniJJackson wrote The effort to get “62 years ago a Black African-Americans to the Woman in Alabama refused polls on Tuesday reto give up her bus seat to a minded Ms. Brooks, direct racist. Yesterdaydirector of the Southern #BlackWomen in Alabama Poverty Law Center Civil refused to give a Senate seat Rights Memorial in Montgomery, to a pedophile.” of the work done
Long before Tuesday’s by Amelia Boynton Robinson. special election, black She was a civil rights women have been a force in activist in Alabama who Alabama. led voting drives and bec
Trailblazers from the a m e the first black state have included everyone woman in the state to run from Mae Jemison, the for Congress in 1964. first African-American Boynton Robinson was severely woman to fly on the space beaten by police during shuttle, to Condoleezza Rice, the “Bloody Sunday” who became the first black protest on the Edmund Pettus woman to serve as U.S. Secretary Bridge, in Selma, Ala., in of State. 1965. She was played by actress
Alabama has produced Lorraine Toussaint in some of the country’s most the film “Selma,” directed by renowned female civil rights Ava DuVernay. leaders. “Amelia Boynton was the
“Black women, what we woman who brought Doctor did in the Doug Jones campaign, King to Selma,” Ms. Brooks follows in a proud tradition,” said. “She organized black said Lecia Brooks, folks to go to the courthouse director of the Southern in Selma and demand to be Poverty Law Center Civil registered to vote. The whole Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Selma story is owed to Amelia Ala. Boynton.” In 1934, Ms. Boynton had become one of the few African-American women registered to vote in Selma.
In 2015, she accompanied former 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, Ms. 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.
In a brief biographical sketch, Ms. Parks wrote: “I wanted to see him kill a KuKluxer. He declared that the first to invade our home would surely die.”
Black Power movement activist Angela Yvonne Davis grew up in Birmingham. When she was 5, white segregationists firebombed her neighbors’ home.
“Bombing soon became such a constant that this section of Birmingham gained the nickname ‘Dynamite Hill,’ “according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama.
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. Protest 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, Ms. 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. “Mrs. King spearheaded the massive educational and lobbying campaign to establish Dr. King’s birthday as a national holiday,” according to the King Center. “In 1983, an act of Congress instituted the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission, which she chaired for its duration.”