Overview:
The Civil Rights Movement was powered by the daily labor, quiet decisions, and acts of care of ordinary people, especially women, whose work was often dismissed as secondary. The movement's sustainability was built on labor deemed ordinary, care dismissed as secondary, and courage that didn't always fit the narrative. Women's work, such as cooking and providing shelter, was essential to the movement's infrastructure and logistics. These women understood that people could not keep showing up unless someone was making sure they were fed, rested, and held together. To honor them is to finally tell the truth about the movement.
When we tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement, we tend to remember it through moments: the march, the microphone, the photograph frozen in time. But movements,not sustained by moments alone, are powered by people, daily labor, quiet decisions, and acts of care that rarely make headlines.
Much of that work was done by women, and much of the toil and outcomes were dismissed as ordinary. To tell the truth about how the movement endured, we have to listen for the voices history often lowered.
Reclaiming Coretta Scott King’s Legacy
Even among the women we do remember, their leadership is often misframed. Coretta Scott King is frequently introduced as a wife or widow, rather than as an organizer, strategist, and global thinker. Long before she became a national figure following her husband’s leadership and later assassination, she was already engaged in political work — connecting civil rights to peace, labor rights, women’s equality, and international struggles against apartheid and war.
After 1968, she refused the expectation of quiet grief. Instead, she expanded the movement’s vision, ensuring that nonviolence and justice were not memorialized ideas but living commitments. Her work reminds us that movements don’t end when charismatic leaders are gone.They require people willing to carry them forward.
Claudette Colvin and Selective Visibility
But visibility has always been selective. Nine months before Rosa Parks’ arrest, a 15-year-old girl named Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. She did so not because she was trained or prepared, but because she knew the law was wrong and knew she was right.
Young Colvin’s arrest came with trauma, fear, and lasting consequences. And yet, movement leaders decided she was not the face they wanted—too young, too poor, later deemed too complicated. Still, her courage mattered. Colvin became one of the plaintiffs in the federal case that ultimately dismantled bus segregation. Her story forces us to reckon with a hard truth: bravery has never guaranteed recognition, especially for Black girls whose lives do not conform to respectability.
Joy and Faith as Strategy: Mahalia Jackson’s Role
What sustained people through those exclusions, arrests, and long nights was not resolve alone. It was also joy, faith, and collective grounding. Mahalia Jackson’s voice provided that sustenance. In churches and mass meetings, her gospel singing did more than inspire — it steadied people’s nerves and reminded them why the struggle mattered. Music was not incidental to the movement; it was strategy. When fear crept in, song pulled people back into themselves and into each other. Jackson gave sound to a hope that words alone could not always carry.
The Truth About “Women’s Work”
That same sustaining work showed up in kitchens across the South, where “women’s work” quietly became movement infrastructure. Georgia Gilmore, a cook and midwife in Montgomery, understood that resistance required resources. Through a collective known as the “Club from Nowhere,” she and other Black women sold fried chicken, pork chops, and peach cobbler to raise money for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Their cooking funded carpools, fed families, and helped sustain a 382-day campaign that challenged segregation at its core. What might have been dismissed as domestic labor was, in reality, logistics — freedom financed one plate at a time.
Selma’s Homes as Headquarters
In Selma, that same logic turned homes into headquarters. Amelia Boynton Robinson opened her house as a space for organizing, planning, and refuge, while Marie Foster worked tirelessly to support voter registration efforts and sustain marchers through citizenship classes, meals, and care. Shoebox lunches, spare bedrooms, and open doors became as essential as protest signs. These women understood that people could not keep showing up unless someone was making sure they were fed, rested, and held together.
Taken together, these stories remind us that the civil rights movement was not only built on speeches and laws. It was built on labor deemed ordinary, care dismissed as secondary, and courage that didn’t always fit the narrative. Freedom was organized in living rooms, sung into crowded churches, cooked into survival, and carried forward by women whose work made everything else possible. To honor them is not to add footnotes to history—it is to finally tell it honestly.
This story was originally published on Word In Black on February 19th, 2026