'Jane Crow' and the March on Washington
(lengthy, very informative and important article)
‘Jane Crow’ and the March on Washington
1/30/2018 by Jeanne Theoharis
It’s time we move women out of the background of civil rights history and into the center.
A young woman at the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. (U.S. National Archives / Creative Commons)
Much of the national memorialization of the civil rights movement maintains a “great man” version of history. Women regularly appear in tributes to the movement, but a clear sense of their leadership, lives and organizing efforts is often missing. One key example of that marginalization took place at the 1963 March on Washington. The crucial roles Black women played and the ways they were sidelined at the march have received limited mention in the ways the march has been memorialized. Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, John Lewis—these names rang out in 50th-anniversary celebrations for their significant roles in the march.
In August 2013, the White House announced a posthumous award for Bayard Rustin, largely for his key role in organizing the March on Washington. But where were the women? What about Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the only woman on the march committee, who was largely responsible for the significant presence of white Christians at the march?
Raised in Minnesota and a graduate of Hamline University, Hedgeman worked for the YWCA and then the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. In 1954, she became the first Black woman to hold a cabinet position in New York City government, before taking a job with the National Council of Churches. That role led to her inclusion on the march organizing committee, the only woman on it. With King and Randolph initially planning two separate events, Hedgeman arranged the meeting where the two civil rights leaders sat down and patched their differences and agreed to press forward with a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. As coordinator for special events for the Commission on Religion and Race, Hedgeman played a determining role in getting large numbers of white Christians to the march. Indeed, as Hedgeman’s biographer Jennifer Scanlon notes, the interracialism of the march wasn’t happenstance—Hedgeman organized to make the sizeable presence of white Protestants a reality. This was not a given; white Christian support of civil rights had been limited up to this point and needed to be shamed, cultivated and brought out. Part of Hedgeman’s organizing genius was the way she managed to bring many white Christian leaders and laypeople into the civil rights struggle. The March on Washington would be the first mass civil rights event with a large percentage of whites (estimated at 25 percent of the marchers). Hedgeman also facilitated many of the day’s logistics, including Operation Sandwich, in which she commanded a massive volunteer effort to produce 80,000 box lunches for marchers.
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But this history of women’s leadership and marginalization is largely absent from many movement memorials. John Lewis was repeatedly described as the only living speaker during the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations—even though Gloria Richardson was alive and well in New York City. The public memorialization of the march, in many ways, has repeated the marginalization of women of 50 years ago, with little mention of Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Dorothy Height, Pauli Murray and Gloria Richardson—despite the important roles Black women played in the march’s organization and their attempts to challenge their marginalization at the event.
Leadership, vision, marginalization, contention and challenge all characterized the experiences of women in the movement. Rethinking the Black freedom struggle thus requires interrogating a narrative of the movement that casts women in supporting roles. There was sexism, but women played crucial leadership, organizational and intellectual roles in the struggle, and challenged sexism at the time. Recognizing this means jettisoning the tendency to cast the fight for gender justice as occurring largely outside of the Black freedom struggle, rather than as interwoven in it. And it demands moving women out of the background of civil rights history and into the center.
Excerpted from A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History by Jeanne Theoharis (Beacon Press, 2018).
https://msmagazine.com/2018/01/30/jane-crow-march-washington/