The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation

Content Warning: This section discusses racism, racial violence, and sexism.

Black women’s contributions to the Black freedom struggle are often obscured and disregarded by historical discourse. As with all women, Black women’s significance has traditionally been overlooked, and this is exacerbated by the intersectionality of race and gender discrimination. Black women had key roles as organizers, grassroots activists, demonstrators, and leaders in the 1960s civil rights movement, continuing a long legacy of political action through the 20th century. Their contributions to the struggle for social justice and equality remain pivotal, especially as they highlighted the effects of intersectional oppression due to gender, race, and class, addressing racism and sexism as common denominators of social injustice. Black women’s grassroots activism defined the course of the civil rights movement and promoted humanity and liberation for Black people and all oppressed social groups.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Black women formed their own activist organizations to battle racism within the feminist movement and sexism within the civil rights movement. As Jim Crow legislation was established in the South, organizations like the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs incorporated small, local activist groups that addressed racial violence, equal civil rights, and lynching. In 1909, African American activists of both sexes founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which battled white supremacist violence and addressed segregation in education. The emergence of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s continued this legacy of activism.

Rosa Parks is one of the best-known Black women figures of the civil rights movement. She was already a grassroots activist when she helped spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott that galvanized the Southern civil rights struggle. She has often been characterized as the “mother” of the movement. The boycott was the first direct-action demonstration in the South, and it established Martin Luther King Jr. as the leading voice and spokesperson of the movement. During the boycott, many Black women played key roles as organizers of the protests, galvanizing church communities and their own families. As the movement gained momentum, Black women expanded the conversation of the liberation struggle to encompass feminist politics and the class struggle. Although historically the narrative of the civil rights movement has been built around male leaders, Black women’s agency had a profound impact on the future of their communities, supporting education, self-determination, and economic empowerment. Women activists like Daisy Bates had a crucial role in public school desegregation as she pushed the full implementation of integration laws through the legal system. The achievements of the civil rights movement include the 1964 Civil Rights Act—which banned discrimination based on race, gender, and ethnicity—and the 1965 Voting Rights Act—which abolished African Americans’ exclusion from the vote. Black women were essential to this progress.

Black women’s roles as coordinators, community organizers, demonstrators, and theorists were essential to the advancement of the civil rights movement. Black women navigated issues of race and gender and battled discrimination in the broader social order as well as within the civil rights movement. Despite facing the continual erasure of their significance and contributions to the freedom struggle, Black women’s activism and leadership transformed society, allowing new possibilities for future generations. Acknowledging the pivotal agency and roles of Black women expands today’s understanding of American history and racial progress and helps to rectify the injustice of erasure.