NSCC Library: Anti-Racism Resources : Women in the Civil Rights Struggle

Journal Articles from the NSCC Databases

Leaping into the Fire: Women in the United States Race Riots
The Fall 2007 issue of the journal Studies in the Literary Imagination was dedicated to essay's on the role of women in the race riots of the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries.
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Link will open a list of articles published in the themed issue.

E-Books from the NSCC Library

Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle by Rebecca Tuuri
Call Number: NSCC E-Book
Publication Date: 2018
When women were denied a major speaking role at the 1963 March on Washington, Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), organized her own women's conference for the very next day. Defying the march's male organizers, Height helped harness the womanpower waiting in the wings. Height's careful tactics and quiet determination come to the fore in this first history of the NCNW, the largest black women's organization in the United States at the height of the civil rights, Black Power, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by the Women in SNCC by Faith S. Holsaert (Editor); Martha Prescod Norman Noonan (General Editor); Judy Richardson (Editor); Betty Garman Robinson (General Editor); Jean Smith Young (General Editor); Dorothy M. Zellner (Editor)
Call Number: NSCC E-Book
Publication Date: 2010
In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women--northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina--share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. The testimonies gathered here present a sweeping personal history of SNCC: early sit-ins, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides; the 1963 March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the movements in Alabama and Maryland; and Black Power and antiwar activism.

Streaming Documentaries

From the early days of the Civil Rights movement, African American women have worked and served in numerous and influential leadership roles. What are their experiences and what changes have taken place in their opportunities, expectations, responsibilities, and obstacles? A panel discusses their personal journeys and the advice they would offer to young women in the struggle for equality. Presented by the US National Archives and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Million Woman March: Sisterhood Alive and Well
This video documents the Million Woman March in Philadelphia on October 25, 1997, when black women from all over America gathered to demonstrate their concerns for Black America and to express their sense of unity as a movement that can play an influential role in American society.
Profiled: The Mother's of Murdered Black and Latino Youth
This documentary knits the stories of mothers of black and Latin youth murdered by the NYPD into a powerful indictment of racial profiling and police brutality, and places them within a historical context of the roots of racism in the U.S.
Ranging from the routine harassment of minority students in an affluent Brooklyn community to the killings and protests in Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri, PROFILED bears witness to the racist violence that remains an everyday reality for black and Latin people in this country.