A version of this story was originally published on Jan. 12, 2021.
Annie Lee Cooper stood in line on Jan. 25, 1965, to register to vote at the courthouse in Selma, Ala.
Black people had been systematically stopped from voting by White voting registrars, but Cooper, dressed in one of her finest suits, was persistent. Civil rights legend John Lewis would later describe her as “upfront, pleasant and absolutely fearless,” and Oprah Winfrey would portray her character in the movie “Selma,” capturing Cooper and her determination that would exemplify the history of Black women fighting against racism and oppression and for political power in the United States.
“I went down to register in 1963,” Cooper recalled in a 1965 interview with Jet magazine. “The next day I was fired from my job as a practical nurse at a rest home. I’ve tried to register several times, even before Dr. Martin Luther King came. They rejected me once and told me I failed the registration test. The other times, they never let me in the place.”
As Cooper, 54, waited that warm winter day in 1965, the local sheriff, James G. Clark, and his deputies arrived outside the courthouse to break up the line. Clark poked Cooper in the neck with his billy club, according to a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) account. “He came up behind me and jerked me,” Cooper recalled. “I jerked loose, pushed him back and told him not to twist my arm the way he was doing.”
Then Clark made the mistake of hitting Cooper. She spun around and landed a hard right hook, knocking the sheriff to the ground.
“He hit me. Then I lit into him,” Cooper later explained. “I guess I just got delirious or something, so I won’t deny that I hit him. I probably hit those other deputies, too.”
During her victory speech after she and Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris acknowledged the generations of women “who fought and sacrificed so much for equality and liberty and justice for all, including the Black women, who are often — too often — overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of our democracy. … I stand on their shoulders.”
Now that Biden has stepped aside and Harris has all but locked up the Democratic nomination, she’s on the verge of becoming the first Black woman to serve as a major party’s presidential candidate. Many scholars and historians agree that Harris is standing on the shoulders of unsung superwomen of racial justice.
“So many Black women have laid the groundwork for this moment,” said Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, when Harris was about to become vice president in 2021. “Because they did kick down the doors and they laid the groundwork, they were the ones who were the architects of the voting rights movement. There are lessons to be learned from what they did and how they showed up.”
Black women played critical roles in organizing, strategizing and putting their lives on the line for political freedom. Black women — even during slavery — planned resistance movements and organized for freedom.
“Each woman is like a step in a staircase that continues to go up. Each step rises,” said CeLillianne Green, a writer, lawyer and historian. “There are so many women whom we never heard of. But for them, there is no Kamala D. Harris. It’s the quiet power and dignity of Black women who you don’t know about who paved the way.”
Harris is vying for the presidency more than 170 years after abolitionist Sojourner Truth traveled the country preaching against slavery and injustice and advocating for women’s rights, even when White women in the suffrage movement resisted being connected to the anti-slavery movement.
In 1851, at the Women’s Rights Convention in Ohio, Truth took on those who had the audacity to believe that women were less than equal. “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone,” she proclaimed, “these women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right-side-up again.”
A stand for the race
Black women challenged the notion of a country that once claimed it was a democracy but counted Black people as three-fifths of a person.
Consider the courage and audacity of Ida B. Wells, born enslaved in 1862 near Holly Springs, Miss., six months before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Wells became an author, newspaper owner and anti-lynching crusader.
In 1913, Wells created a suffrage group focused on Black women in Chicago. Months later, she went to Washington to attend a parade organized by suffragists Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, who wanted the parade segregated by race. Wells had no intention of marching in the back. She stood on the sideline until the Illinois delegation approached, then stepped to the front.
“I am not taking this stand because I personally wish for recognition,” she wrote later. “I am doing it for the future benefit of my whole race.”
Mississippi challenge
In August 2020, when Biden delivered his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, he began by acknowledging Ella Baker, a phenomenal political strategist and organizer.
“Ella Baker, a giant of the civil rights movement, left us with this wisdom: Give people light and they will find a way,” Biden said.
Baker, often called a social architect of the civil rights movement, was a field secretary for the NAACP. King recruited her to help run and organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Then she helped form SNCC, which organized Freedom Rides to challenge segregated interstate transportation; Freedom Summer, a campaign to register Black people in the South to vote; and the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, which challenged the all-White Democratic Party delegation from Mississippi.
“The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use,” Baker said, “and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence.”
One example was provided by Fannie Lou Hamer, a SNCC community organizer, who co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Black-and-white footage from the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City shows her making her way through a crowd of men. She wore a print summer dress and carried a white purse on her left arm.
She spoke without notes for 13 riveting minutes about the injustices suffered by Black people. Hamer recounted being stopped by police after trying to register to vote, about being fired as a sharecropper, about 16 bullets shot into the home of friends where she slept. She described the beating she endured in a Mississippi jail after attending a voter registration workshop in South Carolina.
“All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” Hamer said. “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”
Her party was not seated. But a year later, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, outlawing voter suppression and discrimination.
Selma
The Selma-to-Montgomery march was planned in the living room of civil rights activist Amelia Boynton in 1965, after Boynton asked King to come to Selma.
On March 7, 1965, Boynton and more than 600 people began to peacefully walk from Selma to Montgomery. But on the edge of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, local police and state troopers attacked them, spraying tear gas and hitting them with billy clubs, on what became known as Bloody Sunday.
A photo of Boynton, beaten unconscious with a state trooper looming over her, was published in newspapers around the world to show the hypocrisy of American justice, according to a SNCC account.
In 1964, Boynton became the first Black woman in Alabama to run for Congress. Her campaign motto was “A voteless people is a hopeless people,” according to SNCC. “Despite being defeated, she earned eleven percent of the local vote, where only five percent of Blacks were registered.”
In 2015, Boynton died at age 104, only months after she crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge with President Barack Obama on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
Sit-in, kneel-in, lie-in
Some Black women freedom fighters have gone unrecorded by history. Some are famous, like Mary McLeod Bethune, one of the first Black women to serve as a college president. Bethune later became an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Some were unintimidated by threats of violence.
Diane Nash was a founding member of SNCC, “and few were more militant than she,” according to SNCC. “When violence stopped the first Freedom Ride in Alabama,” she was insistent rides continue.
“The students have decided that we can’t let violence overcome,” she told a movement leader, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, according to SNCC. “We are coming into Birmingham to continue the Freedom Ride.”
Another courageous Black woman was Daisy Bates, the only woman to speak on the platform during the official program at the 1963 March on Washington. “We will kneel-in, we will sit-in until we can eat in any corner in the United States,” she intoned. “We will walk until we are free, until we can walk to any school and take our children to any school in the United States. And we will sit-in and we will kneel-in and we will lie-in if necessary until every Negro in America can vote.”
On Sept. 20, 1964, the home of Aylene Quin was bombed, after Quin opened her restaurant in McComb, Miss., to SNCC workers and freedom fighters.
In an affidavit collected by SNCC, Quin wrote that in May 1964, she began receiving threatening telephone calls. Then, on a Sunday night, “while my two children were asleep in the bedroom and a pregnant babysitter was there, my home was bombed,” Quin wrote. “The bomb tore up my whole house and all the furniture. My two children, luckily, were only slightly injured.” The babysitter also survived. The bomb had been planted under the porch.
The next day, according to SNCC, Quin traveled to D.C., where she met privately with President Lyndon B. Johnson and demanded more federal protection for Black people in the South.
Seeking higher office
On Jan. 25, 1972, Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-N.Y.), the first Black woman elected to Congress, stood on a platform in a Baptist church in her district in Brooklyn. She waved to the crowd and declared her bid for the Democratic nomination for president.
“I am not the candidate for Black America, although I am Black and proud,” said Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for president on a major-party ticket. “I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and I’m equally proud of that. … I am the candidate of the people of America.”
Chisholm lost the primary to Sen. George McGovern (S.D.), who would go on to lose in a landslide to Republican Richard M. Nixon.
Nixon would face another Black woman during his impeachment hearing, when Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-Tex.) gave a speech seared into the pages of history.
Jordan became the first Black women in U.S. history “to preside over a legislative body when she was elected president pro tem of the Texas Senate in 1972,” according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. That year, she was one of two African Americans elected to Congress.
Jordan delivered the opening remarks at Nixon’s impeachment hearing. “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total,” she said. “I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”
If members of Congress could not find enough evidence for impeachment, she said, “then perhaps the 18th-century Constitution should be abandoned to a 20th-century paper shredder.”
Nixon resigned before the full House could vote to impeach him.