Claudette Colvin: How Black women and girls have been excluded from civil rights history

Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton: Near-mythological men frequently took center stage in the mid-century Black freedom struggle. Today, they endure as the “great men” of civil rights history. Meanwhile, others, including women and young people, were rendered relatively invisible, despite their sizable contributions.

Still, she was keenly aware that the fault lines of gender went through the party.

“Women ran the party, and the men thought they (the men) did,” Huggins says in the 1997 documentary, “Comrade Sister: Voices of Women in the Black Panther Party.”

The present-day battle for racial justice is more decentralized. In particular, its constituent groups, such as the Black Lives Matter Global Network, don’t gravitate around men who’ve reached superstar status.

Free of such larger-than-life leadership and its attendant hierarchies, groups can avoid some of the strains of the past and, even more importantly, elevate often neglected issues and perspectives.

Looking for a certain sort of leader

To understand the evolution of Black freedom movements, rewind to the middle of the 20th century.

In August 1963, hundreds of thousands of people descended on the nation’s capital for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, something of a precursor to the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign.

Beverly Guy-Sheftall, a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta and the founding director of the school’s Women’s Research and Resource Center, was quick to identify why women were shut out of speaking at the event.

For sure, women such as Height successfully organized within groups including the National Council of Negro Women. But they rarely received the same level of acknowledgment as their male counterparts.

The gender politics of the March on Washington is just one example of how masculinist authority often replicated within parts of the Black freedom struggle, relegating women to the shadows of their own movement.

Another example: the gender dynamics within the Black Panther Party. The group certainly contained elements of revolutionary feminism, including in how it both armed and elevated women.

Yet movement leaders never turned Colvin into the public face of the cause.

“(The image of Parks) would be more acceptable to the White community than a dark-complexioned teenager,” Colvin told CNN’s Phillip. “And they (movement leaders) figured they could control Mrs. Parks.”

Rather, in looking more closely at the era, it’s possible to recover its complexity. It’s possible to learn something from a pivotal time and chip away at the prevailing narrative that only a particular kind of man is a leader, while everyone else is a foot soldier.

Reimagining leadership

Racial justice organizers today seem to have learned from earlier forms of Black politics.

Consider the Black Lives Matter Global Network, the seeds of which were planted by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi in 2013 following George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

BLM meaningfully departs from many of its predecessors in at least two key ways. For one thing, BLM has queer, Black feminist roots. Two of its co-creators, Garza and Cullors, identify as queer, and the group has always highlighted the usually overlooked prejudices beleaguering Black women and Black LGBTQ Americans.

BLM distinguishes itself in another way, too: in how it views leadership.

The organization is decentralized, with autonomous chapters all over the country. No one is the face of BLM; no one is at risk of being freighted with allegory. This structure, which has been successful despite early criticism, is by design.

In other words, BLM illuminates a different model of organizing. This model not only staves off top-heavy, male-centered leadership in the group. It also ensures BLM’s survival.

When King, Malcolm and Newton were killed, “so in large part were the movements they led,” Garza writes, referring to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party, respectively. “The struggle continued, but those specific movements, without their most recognizable leaders, were never the same.”

BLM might be the most prominent group in the contemporary Black freedom movement. But it isn’t the only one.

Created in 2018 to sustain the attention that the March for Our Lives demonstration trained on gun violence prevention, 50 Miles More has since reoriented itself around racial and social justice in a broader sense. Notably, the group’s name alludes to the 54-mile voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.

“We realized that many of the Black youth involved in the organization were being ignored. So we shifted our focus,” 50 Miles More executive director Tatiana Washington told CNN. “We’re a Black youth-led organization that focuses on liberation through Black feminism.”

And while the structure of 50 Miles More isn’t expressly decentralized, it’s clear that the organization has the animating ambition of distributing power among its members — of opening itself up to the contributions of those often kicked to the sidelines.

“We believe that to get liberation, the most marginalized voices should be at the forefront — that means Black trans women, Black nonbinary folks, Black working class people,” Washington said.

Of course, newer groups aren’t without their challenges. In her book, Garza notes that, in a decentralized network, it can be tricky to react promptly to issues because of the commitment to reaching a wider consensus before making a decision. And as the origins of 50 Miles More demonstrate, racial hierarchies can hover just out of frame.

Even so, BLM and 50 Miles More (among other groups) are vital and refreshing in their embrace of the same joyous tension: honoring previous iterations of Black struggle, while also moving them forward.

“I think that there’s a shift happening,” Washington said. “More and more, it seems like people want to engage in organizing differently. We still have a long way to go. But we’re getting there.”

Or as Colvin described the distance between movements past and present, “A lot of young children say, ‘Oh, I don’t see any changes.’ I say, ‘But you have to be old enough to know the before picture in order to see the after picture.’ “