When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

by Gail Collins

  The Women’s Political Council, a quiet organization of Montgomery’s middle-class black teachers and social workers, had struggled with hostile poll workers and arcane literacy tests to register to vote themselves and then to help others register. But the bus service had been their particular target. The council head, Jo Ann Robinson, never forgot the day her long-anticipated vacation was ruined by the driver who shrieked at her until she ran, weeping, into the street. The council leaders had met with city officials over and over to complain about the service. “True, we succeeded only in annoying [them], but this was better than nothing,” said one of the members. When word of Parks’s action spread around Montgomery, the women were ready. The next day they wrote a leaflet calling for a bus boycott, and that midnight they were at Alabama State University, where Robinson taught, cutting a mimeograph stencil and running off 35,000 copies. The following morning, Rosa Parks recalled, Robinson “and some of her students loaded the handbills into her car, and she drove to all the local black elementary and junior high and high schools to drop them off so the students could take them home to their parents.”

  The women were not only far better organized than the male ministers who were the public face of the black community but more radical. While the ministers pressed the bus company for a more orderly system of dividing the seats between the races and more courteous drivers, the women wanted total integration. The women were also more fearless. The ministers were wary of being too far out in front in so controversial an enterprise. That was why they had tapped Dr. King, a newcomer, to take the lead, and why they originally wanted to call a mass meeting without letting the white community know that they were the ones doing the calling. (E. D. Nixon of the NAACP said he warned the ministers that if they didn’t assume public leadership, he would let the black community know it was because “you all are too scared to stand on your feet and be counted.”) Later, when Parks’s lawyer was looking for a handful of volunteer plaintiffs to file a suit against the bus segregation in federal court, not a single minister volunteered to step forward. In the end, the plaintiffs were four women: Aurelia Browder, a seamstress, a widow, and mother of six; Susie McDonald, who was in her seventies; and two teenagers who had refused to give up their seats on the bus before Parks but who had been passed over by the NAACP as not quite right to carry their cause.

  Parks herself was far from the simple, weary seamstress her backers tried to depict. She was one of the most active NAACP members in Montgomery. Like the women who organized the boycott, she had actually been preparing for this moment for years. But at the community meeting when the black citizens of Montgomery came together, inspired by her defiance to challenge segregation, the newly energized ministers monopolized the podium and told her she wouldn’t be required to speak. “You have said enough,” they assured her.

  “OTHER NEGROES WILL HAVE THE CAREER I DREAMED OF.”

  When Marian Anderson was interviewed by Ladies’ Home Journal in 1960, she was asked how it felt to have “accomplished everything you set out to do.” Anderson—who had just endured a cab ride with a driver who had thought she was a maid and urged her to do well by the “boss lady”—mildly pointed out that she had actually wanted to be an opera singer. Although she did become the first black performer ever invited to sing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the invitation came when she was 58 and well past her prime. “Other Negroes will have the career I dreamed of,” she told the interviewer.

  By 1960 the Supreme Court had ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional and had struck down segregation in interstate transportation. (Looking for their perfect plaintiff in that case, the Virginia NAACP lawyers had found Irene Morgan, a married 27-year-old defense worker who was ill and on her way to see a doctor when she was arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat.) But on the ground in the South, very little had changed. The buses and trains were still segregated, and black students still went to separate, inferior schools. Joyce Ladner, who grew up in Mississippi, attended an all-black high school with no lab equipment in its science classes and was barred from using the city library her family paid taxes to support. “I felt the Hattiesburg public library held all the knowledge I wanted,” she recalled. “But my school library consisted of one bookshelf.” Blacks were still relegated to the balconies in theaters. Swimming pools and amusement parks were off-limits to black children. (Lucy Murray of Washington, DC, never forgot going on an expedition with a white friend’s family to Glen Echo Park in Maryland, where the children piled onto the merry-go-round. “All of a sudden, this state trooper came over and told me to get off.”) Restaurants, restrooms, and all other public accommodations were strictly segregated. When Marian Anderson arrived in a Southern town to sing, she was often escorted quickly and surreptitiously to a hotel room that had been reserved by special arrangement for the black guest who was too famous to reject.

  If Anderson believed young black people would have a different life from hers, the young people intended that as well. Students from Southern black colleges had been holding classes in nonviolence and civil disobedience, and they began to claim what was being withheld from them. That meant sitting in at white-only lunch counters, picketing white-only restaurants, and allowing themselves to be dragged off to jail in defiance of unjust laws. The demonstrations spread quickly from Greensboro, North Carolina, to Nashville, Atlanta, and other cities, drawing in the best of the postwar generation of black youth. Many of them were children from poor families whose parents had placed all their hopes on their smart, striving sons and daughters. To join the protest movement was to risk the one clear path to a better future. Gwendolyn Robinson, a scholarship student at Spelman College in Atlanta, vowed to stay clear of the demonstrations: “I certainly had no intention of getting involved. I had my priorities straight. This was an opportunity of a lifetime for me; I certainly wasn’t going to blow it.” Despite her resolve, she was soon on the picket lines and then in jail. Worst of all, Robinson was forced to call her grandmother, who had raised her. “She said I had disgraced the family, reminding me that I was the first person in our family to ever be arrested. She sounded so sad, so pained. Her voice was all low and husky.”

  Spelman was the most prestigious college for black women in the country. A young Marian Wright arrived in 1956, wary of “its reputation as a tea-pouring very strict school designed to turn black girls into refined ladies and teachers.” Its rigor was based, at least in part, on the widely held conviction that if black men had to be at least twice as good as whites to succeed, then black women had to be twice as respectable. Students had a nine o’clock curfew. The dress code required them to wear nylon stockings at all times—pants, of course, were banned. After Spelman dances ended, the students had fifteen minutes to get back to their dorms. Alice Walker lasted two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence to get away from “a school that I considered opposed to change, to freedom, and to understanding that by the time most girls enter college they are already women and should be treated as women.” (Spelman was hardly alone in keeping its black coeds under a tight rein. Joyce Ladner, who started at Mississippi’s Jackson State in 1960, lived in a dorm where the housemother “was more strict than our parents had been…. We had to be in by six o’clock in the evening or at dark…. We had to go to vespers every Sunday, and she stood at the door and checked to see if we had hats and gloves on.”)

  The women who joined the civil rights protests of the early ’60s were almost all the product of parents and teachers who believed that respectable black girls needed to be constrained, disciplined, perfect ladies. They had been raised to regard jail as the ultimate disgrace, something that happened to the other kind of black women—the ones who were living out all the worst white stereotypes. And they had not been encouraged to take the lead any more than white middle-class girls of the era were. When Diane Nash was nominated to chair the committee coordinating protests by students at the various black colleges in Nashville, she was so unnerved that she
said she could not take the job because she had her period. She got the post anyway, and not long after, Nash led the students in a critical confrontation with Mayor Ben West that would become the high point of the Nashville movement. She skillfully drew West into declaring his general opposition to discrimination and bias, and then quickly asked whether that included the symbolic lunch counters. Cornered, the mayor had to agree it did, and by the end of the meeting on the city’s courthouse steps, West and the students were embracing one another, and the local paper was preparing its headline: “Integrate Counters—Mayor.”

  “IF YOU WERE GOING TO JAIL, YOU DRESSED UP.”

  Making the transition from ladylike student to jailbird was made easier by the fact that the early civil rights protests had all the decorum of a Spelman tea party. “If you were going to jail, you dressed up,” recalled Lenora Taitt-Magubane. “Nobody could ever see there were some ragamuffins who don’t deserve a hamburger at Woolworth’s.” Later, when the first Freedom Riders were preparing to challenge segregation on interstate transit with a trip that would leave them beaten, jailed, and nearly incinerated in a blazing bus, the organizers dictated that the men would wear coats and ties, and the women, dresses and high heels. “When I went to jail, I had on a skirt and a blouse, and probably a jacket,” said Taitt-Magubane. “When you went on a march, you were fittingly dressed.” As television cameras began to follow the students’ progress, the American public couldn’t help but see the contrast between the rowdy mob of white racists shrieking epithets and the well-clad black students, reading their textbooks while they sat silent and erect on the lunch-counter stools—seats that were fine for the time it took to eat a sandwich but that felt extremely uncomfortable after three or four hours. The Richmond News Leader, an outspoken opponent of integration, admitted to “a tinge of wry regret” at the scene. “Here were the colored students, in coats, white shirts, ties, and one of them was reading Goethe and one was taking notes from a biology text. And here, on the sidewalk outside, was a gang of white boys come to heckle, a ragtail rabble, slack-jawed, black-jacketed, grinning fit to kill…. Eheu! It gives one pause.”

  Taitt-Magubane, who was then Lenora Taitt, got into the protests in 1960 via a musical. “I was in the drama club. My professor Howard Zinn said, ‘Lenora, would you like to see My Fair Lady?’ I said I would love to.” Zinn, who was white, was arranging to take a mixed-race group of students into Atlanta’s segregated downtown theater. When they sat down in the white section, the theater manager first threatened to cancel the production. “We said that would be very sad,” said Taitt-Magubane. “And we didn’t move.” He then called the mayor, who pragmatically suggested the lights be dimmed as quickly as possible. (“We enjoyed that play,” Taitt-Magubane recalled.) When the lights went back on, her group discovered all the nearby seats had been vacated. “So we wouldn’t contaminate them, I guess,” she added, laughing. Outside the theater, the press and photographers were waiting. “And the next day it was a front page story.”

  There was, throughout the movement, always a question about the role of black women: were they comrades in the struggle or helpless dependents to be protected? (“If anyone gets whupped out here today, it ain’t gonna be our women,” a student demonstrator assured reporters later in Alabama.) When the Freedom Rides began, organizers were reluctant to allow black women to be put in what was going to be obvious peril and in the end limited the female contingent to three—two of them white. But the black women had no intention of staying out of the action. “A guy might be protective of you on the march—say, ‘You okay?’ or whatever. But I could get beaten just like he could,” said Joyce Ladner. When the Nashville students went off to the first big sit-in that was likely to result in mass arrests, James Bevel, one of the leaders, urged Diane Nash to avoid going to jail so she could coordinate from the outside. Nash thought the other students might wonder if she was a coward. If someone was not going to be arrested, she responded sensibly, it should be Bevel, who already had a reputation for fearlessness. And off to jail she went.

  Angry whites didn’t much differentiate between the sexes once a protest began. In February 1961 Lana Taylor, a college sophomore, was sitting in at an Atlanta restaurant when an employee walked up behind her, grabbed her by the shoulders, and said, “Get the hell out of here, nigger.” But Taylor stayed put. “Lana was not going,” said Jane Stembridge, a white civil rights worker. “She put her hands under the counter and held…. I looked down at that moment at her hands… brown, strained… every muscle holding…. All of a sudden he let go and left…. He knew he could not move that girl—ever.” At another demonstration, a waitress threw a Coke bottle that just missed hitting 18-year-old Ruby Doris Smith.

  Smith was another Spelman student, although a young man who knew her at the time described her as “not the quintessential Spelman woman…. She was not the ladylike kind.” Her relatively poor family had scrimped to give their daughters extras, and Ruby had piano lessons and a debut at a ball in Atlanta sponsored by Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority. She was in many ways a typical teenager, worried about her figure, interested in clothes. Once, when a group of students were nervously preparing to leave for a protest that would inevitably lead to jail, Ruby Doris suddenly announced a delay: “My hair is not right,” she declared. “And I’m rolling it and I’m not leaving until it’s curled.” But her determination soon set her apart. In the summer of 1960, when most of the Atlanta college students had gone home, she helped organize picketing of a local grocery, often simply marching in front of the store alone, carrying her sign. She also took part in a series of “kneel-ins” at white churches. Stunned when she was barred admission to pray at one congregation, she “pulled up a chair in the lobby and joined in the singing and the worship services, which I enjoyed immensely.”

  “SOMEONE WILL RISE. SOMEONE WILL EMERGE.”

  Ella Baker was well into middle age when the students started raising hell. She had gone to Shaw University, a proper Baptist school in Raleigh, at a time when the regulations made Spelman of 1960 look like a Woodstock reunion. Her most daring rebellion involved a petition that girls be permitted to wear silk stockings on campus. (Part of the uniform of the proper young African-American lady a generation later, silk stockings were regarded as a sign of vanity, and perhaps exhibitionism, in Baker’s college days.) The petition was denied, and the girls were required to spend extra time in chapel until they repented of their folly. It was typical of Baker that she did not actually care what she wore herself. She just wanted the students to stand up for themselves, and if stockings were their priority, that was fine.

  One thing that marked young Ella as different was that she absolutely refused to consider a career in teaching. Every black woman was expected to give back to the community, and if you were middle class with an intellectual bent, you did it by teaching school until you married and turned your attention to good works in the church and proper women’s clubs. It broke her mother’s heart, but after college Ella left home and embarked on a career as a community organizer—a job that involved traveling by herself in an era when women were still expected to have a male protector when they were away from home. Baker joined a long and distinguished line of peripatetic American heroines. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, she seemed most at home on a train, with an overnight bag and a stack of work. Even when she married, she never nested, and even when she took on the responsibility of raising her young niece, she never stayed home. “I had to move fast to keep up with her,” her niece Jackie recalled. “I would sit in the back of meetings and do my homework many a night.”

  In 1941 Baker was hired as an organizer for the NAACP, and two things quickly became clear. The first was that she was brilliant at the job. The chairman of the Virginia NAACP had protested when he heard a woman would be sent to organize the annual membership drive. But afterward, he described Baker’s visit as “one of the most important and wonderful things that has ever happened in Richmond.” Unlike the many male organizers who behaved li
ke visiting superstars, Baker had what the Richmond leaders called a “wonderful and outstanding quality of mixing with any group of people.”

  Her second defining characteristic was a dislike of top-down leadership. “She had an interest in the power of people,” said Lenora Taitt-Magubane. “She never gave answers. Miss Ella would ask questions: What about this? Have you thought about so and so? And then let you fight it out…. She felt leaders were not appointed but they rose up. Someone will rise. Someone will emerge.” It was an attitude Baker shared with some of the other older women in the movement, such as Septima Clark, a venerable educator and mentor to Rosa Parks who once sent Martin Luther King a letter urging him “not to lead all the marches himself but instead to develop leaders who could lead their own marches.” (It was not a successful intervention. “Dr. King read that letter before the staff. It just tickled them; they just laughed,” Clark said.)

  Baker became one of the founders and acting director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was meant to keep alive the spirit of the Montgomery bus boycott. But the SCLC was defined by Martin Luther King’s charismatic leadership, and since Baker did not believe in charismatic leaders, she and King never hit it off. She was not offered the permanent directorship. Wyatt Tee Walker, the minister who got the job, said Baker was not even really considered: “It just went against the grain of the kind of person she was.” Ella had a similar, although blunter, take. “After all, who was I?” she said. “I was female. I was old. I didn’t have a PhD.” On another occasion, she attributed the lack of connection between her and the male leaders to the fact that she “wasn’t a fashion plate” at a time when black men—like white men—tended to judge all women by their aesthetic value. (Septima Clark once referred to the wives of early civil rights leaders as “just like chandeliers: shining lights, sitting up, saying nothing.”) While Baker was a handsome woman, her appearance was the last thing people talked about when they met her. “Miss Ella was, I guess, she was about five feet tall, but she seemed to me like she was twenty feet,” said Lenora Taitt-Magubane. “With her pillbox hat—always looking very crisp.”