Every so often, a historian will teach us a little more about the cast of thousands who co-created the 20th Century US Civil Rights Movement, those who preceded charismatic figures like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Kwame Ture in the work, and whose stories surface far less often.
In a new collection of essays, interviews, and speeches, former professor and lifelong abolitionist Angela Y. Davis speaks to the teams that are always just off-stage when we rather focus the spotlights of headlines or memorials on single and supposedly singular individuals. Mandela’s work in South Africa is a great example. So is Martin Luther King, Jr., in the mid 1950s and 1960s:
Dominant representations of the Black freedom movement are a discrete series of historical moments largely produced by the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. And somehow, although Martin Luther Jr. himself began to emerge to prominence as a consequence of that boycott, he is seen as always already the orator and leader of the civil rights movement.
Even though numbers of books, both scholarly and popular, have been written on the role of women in the 1955 boycott, Dr. King, who was actually invited to be a spokesperson for a movement when he was entirely unknown—the movement had already formed—Dr. King remains the dominant figure…
As a matter of fact during the 1950s, some 90 percent of all Black women were domestic workers. And given the fact that the majority of people who rode buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 were Black domestic workers, why is it so difficult to imagine and acknowledge what must have been, among these Black women domestic workers, this amazing collective imagination of a future world without racial and gender and economic oppression?
Even though we may not know the names of all of those women who refused to ride the bus from poor Black communities to affluent white communities in Montgomery, Alabama, it seems that we should at least acknowledge their collective accomplishment.” —Angela Y. Davis, October 25, 2013
Yes, we should. Work worth doing always involves more than one person, and usually more than a plucky handful. When we tell the stories of our movements, we need to acknowledge the teams with whom we move from mere imagination to collective progress.