Dorothy Height was born in Richmond, Virginia on March 24th, 1912 and died on April 20, 2010 at the age of 98 (Williams, 2013). The racism she witnessed and personally went through as a child encouraged her to become who she grew up to be (Height, 2003). She said “I am the product of many whose lives have touched mine, from the famous, distinguished, and powerful to the little known and the poor” (Height, 2003, p. 467). Dorothy Height was an advocate for women’s rights and civil rights because she heard many cases about African American women being violated, abused, and raped in jails and in public (McGuire, 2010). Height had a dual agenda to end racism and sexism which led her to earn 20 honorary degrees and more than 50 awards in her later life (Crewe, 2013). Dorothy Height was not in the media’s public eye during the Civil Rights Movement but later on she became known.
Dorothy Irene Height was born in Richmond, Virginia on March 24th, 1912 and raised in Pennsylvania. Dorothy’s mother did not make it to many of her school events, which only fueled her to excel in school (White, 1999). She won a $1000 scholarship from Daughter Elk because of her participation in the national oratorical contest on the U.S Constitution and she was the valedictorian of her high school class. Dorothy wanted to go to Barnard in New York but they rejected her because they had already admitted their quota of black students, which happened to be two. She ended up going to New York University where she joined a sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, and became the head of the sorority. She then earned two degrees, a bachelors in education and a masters in psychology within six years (White, 1999). After college, she began her job as a social worker that she receiv...
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...ald Regan honored Dorothy with the Citizens Medal Award for distinguished services. In the same year she received the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Freedom Medal from the Roosevelt Institute. President Bill Clinton presented Height the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award and she was inducted to the “National Women’s Hall of Fame.” President George W. Bush presented her the Congressional Gold Medal on her 92nd birthday (National Council of Negro Women, 2013). In 1994, she receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom recognized all of the efforts she had put in towards the movement (Height, 2003). Due all the awards, Dorothy Height is the last female activist icon of the Civil Rights Movement and started to become a memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Present Obama called Dorothy "the godmother of the civil rights movement and a hero to so many Americans” (Stewart, 2010).
Thesis: McGuire argues that the Civil Rights movement was not led just by the strong male leaders presented to society such as Martin Luther King Jr., but is "also rooted in African-American women 's long struggle against sexual violence (xx)." McGuire argues for the "retelling and reinterpreting (xx)" of the Civil Rights movement because of the resistance of the women presented in her text.
The history of The Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States is a fascinating account of a group of human beings, forcibly taken from their homeland, brought to a strange new continent, and forced to endure countless inhuman atrocities. Forced into a life of involuntary servitude to white slave owners, African Americans were to face an uphill battle for many years to come. Who would face that battle? To say the fight for black civil rights "was a grassroots movement of ordinary people who accomplished extraordinary things" would be an understatement. Countless people made it their life's work to see the progression of civil rights in America. People like W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, A Phillip Randolph, Eleanor Roosevelt, and many others contributed to the fight although it would take ordinary people as well to lead the way in the fight for civil rights. This paper will focus on two people whose intelligence and bravery influenced future generations of civil rights organizers and crusaders. Ida B.Wells and Mary Mcleod Bethune were two African American women whose tenacity and influence would define the term "ordinary to extraordinary".
Glenda Gilmore’s book Gender & Jim Crow shows a different point of view from a majority of history of the south and proves many convictions that are not often stated. Her stance from the African American point of view shows how harsh relations were at this time, as well as how hard they tried for equity in society. Gilmore’s portrayal of the Progressive Era is very straightforward and precise, by placing educated African American women at the center of Southern political history, instead of merely in the background.
Malcolm X stated that the most disrespected, unprotected and neglected person in America is the black woman. Black women have long suffered from racism in American history and also from sexism in the broader aspect of American society and even within the black community; black women are victims of intersection between anti-blackness and misogyny sometimes denoted to as "misogynoir". Often when the civil rights movement is being retold, the black woman is forgotten or reduced to a lesser role within the movement and represented as absent in the struggle, McGuire 's At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power does not make this same mistake.
Anne Moody’s memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, is an influential insight into the existence of a young girl growing up in the South during the Civil-Rights Movement. Moody’s book records her coming of age as a woman, and possibly more significantly, it chronicles her coming of age as a politically active Negro woman. She is faced with countless problems dealing with the racism and threat of the South as a poor African American female. Her childhood and early years in school set up groundwork for her racial consciousness. Moody assembled that foundation as she went to college and scatter the seeds of political activism. During her later years in college, Moody became active in numerous organizations devoted to creating changes to the civil rights of her people. These actions ultimately led to her disillusionment with the success of the movement, despite her constant action. These factors have contributed in shaping her attitude towards race and her skepticism about fundamental change in society.
After World War II, “ A wind is rising, a wind of determination by the have-nots of the world to share the benefit of the freedom and prosperity” which had been kept “exclusively from them” (Takaki, p.p. 383), and people of color in United States, especially the black people, who had been degraded and unfairly treated for centuries, had realized that they did as hard as whites did for the winning of the war, so they should receive the same treatments as whites had. Civil rights movement emerged, with thousands of activists who were willing to scarify everything for Black peoples’ civil rights, such as Rosa Parks, who refused to give her seat to a white man in a segregated bus and
Deborah Gray White was one of the first persons to vigorously attempt to examine the abounding trials and tribulations that the slave women in the south were faced with. Mrs. White used her background skills acquired from participating in the Board of Governors Professor of History and Professor of Women 's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University to research the abundance of stories that she could gather insight from. It was during her studies that she pulled her title from the famous Ain’t I A Woman speech given by Sojourner Truth. In order to accurately report the discriminations that these women endured, White had to research whether the “stories” she was writing about were true or not.
Anne Moody had thought about joining the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but she never did until she found out one of her roommates at Tougaloo college was the secretary. Her roommate asked, “why don’t you become a member” (248), so Anne did. Once she went to a meeting, she became actively involved. She was always participating in various freedom marches, would go out into the community to get black people to register to vote. She always seemed to be working on getting support from the black community, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. Son after she joined the NAACP, she met a girl that was the secretary to the ...
Barbara Morrison, an educated woman who grew up in a nuclear family home, their home included “[her] parents and children living in one household” (Moore& Asay, 2013). They lived in Roland Park in Baltimore Maryland. Living the “Average” lifestyle in her parents’ home she felt as if she were an outsider. Morrison decided to go to Western Maryland and pursue her collegiate education. She could not take the racism that went on in 1970 and decided to uproot her life for the better. Worcester, Massachusetts is where Morrison’s life would further take its course, she finally felt at home in this city. Morrison met her closest friend Jill who would also be an important benefactor in Barbra’s life; the first thing that she explained to Morrison was “The vast majority of people on welfare were white and lived in rural areas, not inner cities” (Morrison,2011).Morrison did not understand this until she was faced with the reality of poverty. In order to survive she needed to bring in resources, which are “anything identified to meet an existing or future need” (Moore& Asay, 2013).In Morrison’s case ...
The civil rights movement was a popular historical movement that worked to allow African Americans to have equal rights and privileges as U.S. citizens. The movement can be defined as a struggle against racial segregation and discrimination that began in the 1950s. Although the origins of the civil rights movement go back to the 1800s, the movement peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. African American men and women, along with whites, organized and led the movement from local to national levels. Many actions of the civil rights movement were concentrated through legal means such as negotiations, appeals, and nonviolent protests. When we think of leaders or icons of the movement we usually think of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Even though Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. are important figures, their participation in the movement was minimal compared to other unknown or forgotten figures. Howell Raines’s, My Soul Is Rested, contains recollections of voices from followers of the civil rights movement. These voices include students, lawyers, news reporters, and civil right activists. Although the followers of the movement were lesser known, the impact they made shaped the society we live in today.
Angela Yvonne Davis’ interest in social justice began during her youth when she was exposed firsthand to the hateful and violent consequences of racism. She was born on ...
Smith, J, & Phelps, S (1992). Notable Black American Women, (1st Ed). Detroit, MI: Gale
In the weekly readings for week five we see two readings that talk about the connections between women’s suffrage and black women’s identities. In Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s Discontented Black Feminists: Prelude and Postscript to the Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, we see the ways that black women’s identities were marginalized either through their sex or by their race. These identities were oppressed through social groups, laws, and voting rights. Discontented Black Feminists talks about the journey black feminists took to combat the sexism as well as the racism such as forming independent social clubs, sororities, in addition to appealing to the government through courts and petitions. These women formed an independent branch of feminism in which began to prioritize not one identity over another, but to look at each identity as a whole. This paved the way for future feminists to introduce the concept of intersectionality.
Evelyn Boyd was born on May 1,1924 in the city of Washington D.C to the parents, William Boyd and Julia Boyd. Once she started her school career in the junior high, she graduated being the salutatorian of her class. Once she graduated from junior high school and entering high school, from then she was one out of five valedictorians from Dunbar High School. Being a young African-American woman in the 1940s, there were not a lot of African-Americans in college, so she decided to take that step and entered college. The school she attended was Smith College in Northampton, MA, fall of 1941. While ending her college years, she graduated summa cum laude in 1945 in Mathematics. After graduating undergraduate, she went to graduate school at Yale University wh...