3 Women Civil Rights Activists Who Changed History

Through reading, discussion, and small group activities, students learn about three relatively unknown women in the civil rights movement: Diane Nash, Virginia Durr, and Claudette Colvin.    

Objectives:

Students will

  • Share knowledge about women in the civil rights movement
  • Study the work of three relatively unknown women in the civil rights movement
  • Learn about the trajectory of social change

Skills:

  • Research
  • Critical thinking


Materials needed:

  • Today's agenda on chart paper or on the board
  • Chart paper (or space on the board) for writing
  • Copies of the short biographies below (or download this pdf
  • Individual chart paper for small groups, plus markers


Agenda

  • Gathering (10 min.)
  • Agenda Review (1 min.)
  • Small group reading & poster-making (15 min.)
  • Poster reports and discussion (10 min.)
  • Closing (4 min.)

Gathering: 
What do we know?
 

In a go-round, ask students to say one thing they know about the civil rights movement. Ask what civil rights are. Write down the answers, making sure that the right to vote, right to a fair trial, freedom of speech, and equal protection under the law are included.

Accept all responses and chart them in a few words each on chart paper.

Explain the following, making sure to provide information that addresses any factual errors in what students have shared.

  • When we talk about the civil rights movement today, we are usually talking about the movement to gain the true right to vote, an end to racial segregation, and equal protection under the law for people who are not considered white in our society.
  • A few years after slaves were freed (emancipation), the U.S. Constitution was amended  or changed to give males the right to vote. (Women did not gain the right to vote until almost 50 years later.) However, almost everywhere in the South and in many other places, there were many laws and regulations to keep African Americans from voting. Many immigrants from certain countries, such as China and other parts of Asia, were specifically not allowed to become citizens or to marry white people, either. The civil rights movement of the 1960s helped change laws that targeted Asian people as well as black people.
  • The civil rights movement was mainly led by young people. Many of the activists were students in high schools and colleges. They were only a few years older or the same age as the students in the room.
     

 

Check agenda and objectives

Review the agenda and check off the first item.
 



Small group posters and discussion
 

In a go-round, ask students to share one name they associate with the civil rights movement. Write down their responses and then review them with students. It's possible that Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, and Fannie Lou Hamer will be listed, but there are probably more men than women on the list.

Tell the students that there were many, many more women, both black and white, who were involved in the civil rights movement. Their names are not always in the history books.  Many times, they were taking care of children or working to earn money when the men lost their jobs because of their activities. They were also at the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and the demonstrations, but they were not always the ones who got their pictures in the paper.

Today we are going to find out about three women in the civil rights movement whose names are known, but who are not written about a lot.

Divide the class into three groups and give each group copies of one of the biographical sketches below (or in this pdf ), a sheet of chart paper, and markers. Give the groups 10 or 15 minutes to do the following:

  • read their biography together by going around in a circle with each person reading a sentence
  • write down any questions they have
  • make a poster describing the most important points they want their classmates to know

Then, reconvene the class and ask each group to present their poster and report to the class. Allow about 10 minutes for the reports, and for questions, if there is time.

After students have reported and discussed each person, ask students to think about how each person's actions in the civil rights movement helped other people. The victories of the civil rights movement did not come from one brave person but from many brave people.

Ask students to turn to a neighbor and give an example from what we learned today or what they already know about how one person's action builds on another person's action. Each student should talk for about a minute.

Ask for volunteers to share examples.


Follow up activities

  •  If students have questions for which there are simple, direct answers, provide those answers to the class.
  •  If other questions require further study, ask for volunteers to look into them and give poster reports back.
  •  Encourage students to do research on other women in the civil rights movement.

Closing

Ask for several students to tell how the work of civil rights activists has made their lives better today.
 



SYNOPSES OF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES  

(Download the pdf or see below.)

Diane Nash: In the photos of the civil rights movement, she is next to Martin Luther King and other more well-known leaders, but she was also in the meetings where civil rights activists planned strategy. Her courage inspired not only thousands of people, but her own family, which became active because of her work.

Virginia Durr: This white child of the Old South was almost kicked out of college in the North because she refused to sit next to a black classmate. She soon learned more about injustice against blacks and became an activist. Her husband, a lawyer, is mentioned more often than Virginia in the history books, but she was there from the beginning of the struggle.

Claudette Colvin  If we know her name, we know her as the teenager who preceded Rosa Parks in refusing to give her seat on the bus to a white person. But we probably don't know that she was part of the lawsuit that made bus segregation illegal.

Resources

http://www.aarp.org/politics-society/history/info-2014/female-civil-rights-leaders.html
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/civilrights/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/19/march-on-washington-women/2648011/

 


 

Diane Nash
Biographical Sketch

Before she started school at Fisk University in Nashville, Diane Nash had never seen a sign that said "Colored" or "Whites Only." She grew up in Chicago, where her parents tried to shelter her from racism. At Fisk, she decided she wanted to fight against racism. Soon, she heard about people who were learning nonviolent ways to resist racism. She signed up for training in nonviolence and started to study what Mohandas Gandhi had done in India.

The first campaign she was involved with was to integrate the lunch counters in stores in downtown Nashville. Black shoppers could buy food at the counter, but they had to take it outside to eat it. The lunch counter sit-ins started in Nashville and spread throughout the South. Nash and many other students were arrested. As soon as they were arrested, others would take their place at the counter. After over 150 students were arrested and negotiations with the Mayor, the protesters eventually won their demand, and downtown lunch counters began serving Black customers for the first time.

Nash helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and dropped out of school to be in charge of its direct action arm. A historian who later wrote about her said she was "...bright, focused, utterly fearless, with an unerring instinct for the correct tactical move."

Next, in 1961, Nash helped lead Freedom Rides. The Freedom Riders were interracial groups who rode interstate buses across the South as a way of challenging segregation on the buses. The Freedom Riders were beaten up when the buses rolled into town. The leaders of the campaign wanted to call off the rides because they were sure somebody would get killed. Nash refused. "We know someone will be killed, but we cannot let violence overcome nonviolence,"  she said. She and other Freedom Riders made out their wills and were prepared to die. They were not killed, but some of the people who were beaten never recovered from the effects.

Nash married a fellow civil rights activist, James Bevel, and was pregnant with their first child when she was arrested for her Freedom Ride work and sent to jail. She could have paid bail and gotten out, but, she said, "I believe that if I go to jail now, it may help hasten that day when my child and all children will be free — not only on the day of their birth but for all their lives."

President John Kennedy appointed Nash to work on the national committee that promoted passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  But at the same time, Nash knew that it was very important to put pressure on politicians to make such progress possible. She worked with Martin Luther King to plan the voting rights march in Selma, Alabama, and to get publicity for the cause.

After being a leader in the civil rights movement, Nash became active in protests against the war in Vietnam. Many years later, when someone asked what the best piece of advice was that she'd ever gotten, she said, "When I have a decision to make, I always make the choice that will make me proud of and will make me respect the person I see in the mirror."

ImageDiane Nash (front row, center) and other activists march to the Nashville City Hall on April 19, 1960, to confront the mayor over segregation and violence against protesters. Credit: Copyright New York Times/Archive 

 

Resources

There are a number of powerful videos and video segments that explore Nash's life. They include:

http://www.makers.com/diane-nash (video interview with Nash)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/story/04_nonviolence.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/people/diane-nash
 


 

Virginia Durr
Biographical Sketch

 

Virginia Foster Durr saw a lot of change in her life. She was born in 1903 and died in 1999. She came a long way from the beliefs and prejudices of her early life. Raised in the South, the daughter of a well-known minister, Durr thought that her life would be similar to those of other privileged white women. But her life changed because of something that happened when she went to school at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

At the school, students were expected to eat dinner with different people. When she saw that she was supposed to sit next to a Black student, she refused.  The dean of the school told her that she had to eat with the student or she would have to leave the school.  She wrote later that she stayed up all night thinking about her choice, then decided to stay at school and sit with the other student.

That decision changed her life, because she started to rethink all the things she had been taught about race. Later, after Durr became well known and wrote about how she had changed, some developmental psychologists called what she went through a "Virginia Durr moment." That is the moment when you make a choice that advances your moral development. You  reflect, you change your beliefs, you move forward morally.

Durr married a white lawyer from Montgomery, Alabama, named Clifford Durr. They had five children. She and Clifford moved to Washington, D.C. to work for President Franklin Roosevelt. They became involved in civil rights work. Virginia began to work on getting voting rights for Black people. Many states had poll taxes that people had to pay before they could register to vote. The taxes were a way to keep poor people and African Americans from voting. Usually, the law was written so that if you had an ancestor who had voted in 1867, then you didn't have to pay the tax.

Virginia Durr and her husband were active in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They had to send their two youngest children away to school because of all the threats against their family. The Durrs helped bail Rosa Parks out of jail after Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus. Durr had employed Parks as a seamstress and had helped her get a scholarship to a school that trained activists. When Virginia died, Rosa Parks said that Virginia Durr's "upbringing of privilege did not prohibit her from wanting equality for all people. She was a lady and a scholar, and I will miss her."

 

Resources

http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1574

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Durr_Moment

Social Activism and Civil Rights, by Virginia Durr
Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr
Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years
 


Claudette Colvin
Biographical Sketch

 

Claudette Colvin was 15 years old when she walked onto the stage of history not once but twice. She was arrested for not giving up her seat to a white person on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The officers kicked and handcuffed her.

Colvin was active in the NAACP youth group. Rosa Parks was a mentor to the group.

The NAACP had been looking for a test case to oppose segregation on the city buses. The lawyers thought that Colvin's case would be it the right case (see our brief classroom activity on this).  But when Colvin became pregnant to a married man a few months after her arrest, they worried that the deeply religious black community might not be sympathetic to her.

Nine months later, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, and the bus boycott began. Lawyers for the NAACP knew that they had to get the courts to declare segregation on city buses illegal. Even if the boycott worked, there would be no legal way to make another bus company stop segregating. The lawyers knew it would take a long time for the Parks case to go through the state court system. They needed a federal case.

They took another look at Colvin's case. They found four other women who had also been arrested for refusing to give up their seats on the buses. All the women and their families knew that they would be in danger once their names became public.

The NAACP realized that those cases could be filed as a class action in a U.S. district court, and a decision could be made faster.  They asked Colvin and another teenager, Mary Louise Smith, to be part of the lawsuit along with three other women.

The case is called  Browder v. Gayle. Aurelia Browder was what is called the lead plaintiff in the case, and W. A. Gayle was the mayor of Montgomery. One of the women dropped out of the case because of threats from whites.

It took almost a year, but the U.S. Supreme Court decided that segregation on the buses was illegal.  A brave teenager was partly responsible for this historic win.

 

Resources
 

Please see this short Teachable Instant activity on Colvin. 

http://www.tolerance.org/article/browder-v-gayle-women-rosa-parks
http://www.philliphoose.com/books/claudette-colvin-twice-towards-justice/
http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/performance-%E2%80%9Crage-not-1-day-thing-untaught-history-montgomery-bus-boycott%E2%80%9D  (one-woman play about women involved in the boycott, including Colvin)