African American Women's Role In The Civil Rights Movement

Even after slavery ended in the United States, African Americans still felt like they were deprived of their rights. To gain the rights that they knew belonged to them, they started the Civil Rights Movement which Angela Davis says can also be called a “human rights movement.” It was a struggle by African Americans in the mid-1950s to late 1960s to achieve civil rights equal to those of whites including the right to vote, the right of equal access to public facilities, and the right to be free of racial discrimination. Many courageous people that took part in the civil rights movement including colored and white men and women. Several of them were beaten and killed for this cause. African American women’s role in the Civil Rights Movement can …show more content…
Some of the rights that African Americans were fighting for was the segregation law on public buses which did not permit black people to sit on “the white only” section, and if African Americans were found sitting in a white only section on the bus, they would be asked to move and if they refused to, they would be arrested and put in jail. Jo Ann Robinson was perhaps the one individual most instrumental in planning and publicizing the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. Rebecca Woodham suggests that Jo Ann Robinson, after being mistreated on a bus when she got yelled at by the bus driver for sitting in a white only section, is when she was awakened to the realities of segregation in the South. Thus, she decided to help resolve the conditions of African Americans. She decided that something had to be done, and met with attorney Fred Gray who also wanted to help resolve the bus segregation law in Montgomery. In 1950 Jo Ann Robinson became president of the Women’s Political Council and encouraged more women to join and fight against the bus segregation laws. Jo Ann and the other women part of the Women’s Political Council wanted better treatment from the bus drivers, to let black people board the bus, pay, and walk to their seats by the front, for the busses to stop more frequently in black neighborhoods and have more space on the bus for blacks. Robinson came up with the idea of a bus boycott which would affect the economy. So, when Rosa Parks was arrested, Joann and a couple of others thought it would be a great opportunity for the bus boycott which Jo Ann envisioned. She wrote a flyer calling all African Americans to participate in the bus boycott. She and two of her students mimeographed thousands of flyers calling for a one- day bus boycott on Monday, December 5,