I read this piece in a Times article and felt some kind of way. I was surprised that the men who are revered for the work they did to fight for civil rights for Black American people (I thought ALL people), treated the women of this same movement as if they were assistants and not the HWICs (I feel like I can't say HBICs lol), and though, not all were this way, I feel like not enough weren't that way - not enough men said (at the time that it would have most mattered) that these women deserved the spotlight. 

​

It did remind me that it was a different time socially and the women's movement did "pop off" as another bi-product of this movement, but Ethan Allen reminded us in the 3rd episode of SIWYB, that people with power do not want to give up that power easily. 

​

This is what I read...

​

Daisy Bates was head of the Little Rock N.A.A.C.P. chapter. She helped recruit nine black teenagers and escorted them through irate mobs of white adults and into their first classes. As a result, she and her husband, Lucius, lost their business. She was jailed, threatened and the Ku Klux Klan burned an 8-foot cross on her lawn.

​

Bates was invited, of course, to the famous March on Washington in 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Rosa Parks was invited, too, and Pauli Murray, the lawyer and feminist who had staged the first sit-in at a Washington restaurant during World War II.

​

When they got there, they were all assigned to walk with the wives of the male civil rights leaders, far away from the cameras. “Not a single woman was invited to make one of the major speeches or be part of the delegation of leaders who went to the White House. The omission was deliberate,” Murray said later. - The Women Behind the Men - Gail Collins

​

​

READ ABOUT THE WIVES OF CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS HERE & SELF-EXPLORE!

​