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Rebellious Women in the Black Freedom Struggle

From Montgomery, Alabama, to the United Nations, women activists promoted the black freedom struggle in the mid-twentieth century, and scholarly biographies of their impact have been emerging since around 2000.1 Two recent biographies of Rosa Parks and Eslanda Robeson break new ground in deepening our understanding of gender and the “long history” and international scope of the Civil Rights Movement. While it will come as no shock that Eslanda Robeson, activist journalist and anthropologist, was a radical like her husband, Paul Robeson, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks may surprise some readers. Both women had associations with the Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., black nationalism, the peace movement, and the left wing of the union movement. Their biographers, Barbara Ransby and Jeanne Theoharis, are both noted civil rights historians who have argued for the “long civil rights movement” and have placed women at the center, rather than the margins of their analysis. The result is a rich, gendered view of the long civil rights movement and an examination of the way we view black women activists in our culture. Some of the most important analysis in Theoharis’ The Rebellious Life, is her examination of Rosa Parks as a symbol and her critique of that symbolism. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., who often remains frozen in time giving the “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, Rosa Parks has been frozen standing on a bus in Montgomery in 1955, refusing to give up her seat. As Theoharis points out, Parks has often been portrayed as a quiet seamstress who was tired that day: an “accidental heroine” who acted as an individual and showed the world the flaw of racism in American democracy, so it could be corrected. Her own rebelliousness in confronting racism through