Freedom’s
Daughters: Heroines
Finally Celebrated
Matt Buckles
AHTC Memphis Book Review
April 2010
Despite the countless egalitarian
gains for many people, American society remains dominated by the white, male,
middle class. Today’s America shows a
much subtler favoritism than the era of inquiry of Lynne Olsen’s Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of
the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970, however, despite the claims of
some of a post-racial society, white, male, middle class still holds much of
the power and influence in America. The
fact that Olsen’s heroines have indeed been “unsung” proves that our cultural
memory of even minority groups tends to de-emphasize women. Americans know Martin Luther King, Malcolm X,
and W.E.B. DuBois, but far too many of the scores of women unearthed in Freedom’s Daughters have been all but
ignored in the popular understanding of the history of the Civil Rights
Movement. To accomplish her goal of
singing the praises of the unsung heroines of the movement, Olsen eloquently
melds the varied stories of nearly sixty women into a coherent narrative of the
damning effects of gender in the fight for racial equality throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Given the widely known efforts of
prominent men in the Civil Rights Movement, a novice student of history might
assume that women only assumed a cursory role in the movement. If we were to merely trust historical memory
on the subject, after Rosa Parks’s famous bus incident, it was men like Martin
Luther King, Jr. who took over the Birmingham Bus Boycott and brunt of the
Civil Rights Movement. In reality, while
men like King became the face of the boycott and the movement, it was women who
bore the brunt of the actual work. Such
a boycott would have never been successful without the work of women to
organize meetings, organize carpools, welfare services, and day-to-day
operations. Indeed, King said of Jo Ann
Robinson, “More than any other person, she was active on every level of the
protest” (124). In response, Olsen asks
the obvious rhetorical question, “Why then did Robinson fade into almost total
obscurity? Why did she and the other women organizers remain so quietly in the
background, ceding center stage to King and the other male leaders” (124)? As she points out, women had much more to
lose; the jobs of women in the movement were far more dependent on whites. They also were forced to follow the social
norms of the time, however, being followers to the leadership of men. Women’s groups had championed the fight for
equal rights for African Americans for a century, but once men entered the
movement on a large scale, they slipped right into the spotlight role. For
women, “nothing was more important than the cause,” so they allowed the
spotlight to shine on the men.
While Freedom’s Daughters reveals these hidden stories of women behind
the scenes better than any other source, most people are generally aware of the
work that was done and that women were involved. These chapters were engaging and offered
excellent depth to the context to the Civil Rights Movement in the post-WWII
years. It is the book’s description of
sex that reads as truly shocking. The
shock value is doubled by the fact that the horrific details are largely
unknown or greatly simplified in our common understanding. Black women were stereotyped as “sexual
wantons” that led white men away from their wives (35). Of course, in reality, white men had
virtually unrestricted access to their slaves.
Even in the post-emancipation South, rape remained rampant, and white
men faced little danger of repudiation.
Indeed, many African American women escaped to the North as part of the
First Great Migration to escape sexual exploitation specifically.
While black women had to concern
themselves with the ever-present possibility of rape, black men feared
lynchings. Lynchings have long been
known to be a result of accusations of sexual violence by black men against
white women, however Olsen shows this view accurate but misleading and
incomplete. First, as slaves, African
American men were not placed into the sexual predator stereotype that plagued
them after emancipation. Since blacks
were property, white men had no reason to feel threatened and would certainly
not want to kill an investment. After
the Civil War, “blacks weren’t property anymore, [and] whites no longer had a
financial incentive to keep them alive and healthy, nor…the legal power to keep
blacks in line” (38). The sexual threat
from the beginning was financial since interracial children could inherit
property as citizens – and therefore take property from established white
power. The stereotype of the black male
with the voracious sexual appetite for white women became accepted as fact in
reputable media outlets across the
Her stories of the myriad of women
and their unique stories manage to break these misconceptions frequently, and
somehow do meld into a coherent narrative.
The reader certainly grows attached to certain figures, and then she
moves to another woman and back again.
With so many figures, it would seem certain that the reader would be
unable to keep track. In reality,
however, the book is a fairly easy read that connects women who never met
through their common aspirations, efforts, triumphs, and struggles. For this reason, excerpts from the book could
actually be valuable for use in a high school classroom. The reading level is rather high for a
typical high school class, but short sections on individual women can be easily
excerpted. A small group study of a
certain woman fighting “behind the scenes” for the rights of African Americans
jigsawed with other groups reading other sections of the book would couple
extremely well with other lessons and topics within a Civil Rights Movement
unit or African American history class.
Its usefulness in a high school
class is a result of the nature of the book.
It is well researched, but has few major groundbreaking revelations that
other historians have not already discovered.
However, Olsen’s breadth in her study of women in the Civil Rights
Movement is unmatched. The book is not a
study of Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, or Jo Ann Robinson in particular, but rather
a connection between the women and their work within a broader context of civil
rights for African Americans and a prelude to the fight for civil rights of
women. Indeed, for Olsen, “women’s work”
certainly does not hold a negative connotation as the work of each of these
women is arguably the most essential in the trenches of the Movement.