The best books on women in the civil rights movement

Ella Baker (1903-1986) was one of the most important organizers and intellectuals behind the Black freedom movements that transformed the United States in the last half of the 20th century. She is often best remembered for convening the 1960 conference of young sit-in activists that led to the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and then mentoring them as they continued their work across the South. Like Septima Clark, Baker embraced a philosophy of spreading leadership throughout a community and emphasized ordinary people’s capability to assume those responsibilities. Ransby’s magnificent biography supplies readers with an intimate portrait of the world that made Baker, the difficulties she encountered as a woman, and her pronounced influence in both the civil rights movement and American history.

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) rose from obscurity as a sharecropper and plantation time-keeper to become a key player in the Mississippi movement. After joining the Student Non-Violent Committee in 1962, she helped with voter registration; arrested a year later, Hamer endured a horrible beating in a jail in Winona that left her with permanent injuries. In 1964, she helped organize Freedom Summer and co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the seating of the state’s all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention that fall. Seeking to empower her rural African American neighbors, and drawing on long-standing traditions of self-determination, Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in 1969. Lee’s biography of this one incredible activist underscores the everyday racial and sexual violence—including forced sterilization—that accompanied life as a Black woman in the segregated South. It also demonstrates how they overcame it.

Using sexual violence—specifically white men’s rape of Black women—as its lens, McGuire’s work profoundly reorients our understanding of what motivated civil rights activists at the grassroots, especially women. The early chapters consider both the radical activism of Rosa Parks prior to 1955 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that emerged in the wake of her arrest. McGuire also examines how the 1959 rape of a young co-ed at Florida A&M University spurred student activism on campus and beyond. The last chapter covers the 1975 trial and exoneration of Joan Little, a poor Black woman from North Carolina accused of killing her white jailer as he attempted to sexually assault her. This book is a must-read for anyone who seeks deeper insight into the civil rights era.   

Sanders offers a most compelling portrait of how working-class Black women harnessed civil rights activism to education and the War on Poverty. In 1965, the Child Development Group of Mississippi became one of the earliest Head Start programs in the nation. Sanders focuses on how activists deployed it to enhance educational opportunities for Black children and to secure economic independence from white employers for Black women. She also tracks how the state’s white supremacist political leaders and those in Washington D.C. undermined this successful program. In so doing, Sanders demonstrates the precariousness of civil rights victories, especially when activists sought economic justice that required fundamentally remaking the structure of U.S. society.  

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) represented the youthful vanguard of the civil rights movement, those high school and college students who dared to envision a different future and risked their lives daily to make it a reality. In this powerful collection of edited oral histories, fifty-two female SNCC veterans reflect on their experiences. Readers gain a sense of what it felt like to participate in the movement across many distinct locations as well as their perspectives on its most iconic moments and the internal debates among movement activists and organizations. Overall, these testimonies enrich our awareness of women’s civil rights engagement and the subsequent impact it had on their lives.