By Gail Collins
Daisy Bates had to march with the wives. When the US observes the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock school desegregation there will undoubtedly be a great deal said about Bates, who was head of a NAACP chapter. She helped recruit nine black teenagers and escorted them through irate mobs of white adults and into their first classes. As a result, she and her husband, Lucius, lost their business. She was jailed, threatened and the Ku Klux Klan burned an 8-foot cross on her lawn.

Bates was invited, of course, to the famous March on Washington in 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Rosa Parks was invited, too, and Pauli Murray, the lawyer and feminist who had staged the first sit-in at a Washington restaurant during World War II.

“Not a single woman was invited to make one of the major speeches or be part of the delegation of leaders who went to the White House. The omission was deliberate,” Murray said later.

Dorothy Height, the head of the National Council of Negro Women, and others begged that at least one woman be included among the speakers. They nominated Diane Nash, the student leader who had been perhaps the one person most responsible for the success of the Freedom Riders in the South. In the end A Philip Randolph delivered a “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom” while the female civil rights legends sat on the stage.
The Declaration of Independence is the US’ noblest piece of prose even though Thomas Jefferson kept slaves. King and the other male leaders and martyrs of the civil rights movement are always going to be a beacon in the centre of the US history. But they generally believed women’s place was in the home, and most were privately looking forward to the moment when they would all go back there.

King’s first triumph as the public face of the Montgomery bus boycott was possible because a group of middle-class black women led by a college teacher, Jo Ann Robinson, had organised it. They had been preparing for the opportunity so long that when Parks went to jail, they had 35,000 fliers ready the next morning, to deliver to black households through their children at school. Yet now they have practically vanished from the US history.

You do not have to dismiss the men to believe that Ella Baker was the greatest organiser the civil rights movement ever knew. When she was passed over for the directorate of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which she helped found and ran as acting director, she attributed the rejection to the fact that “I was female, I was old. I didn’t have a PhD”. Then she went right on organising, guiding the black college students into forming the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Baker also got it — the moment of recognition that all the previous movements for American social justice had not quite grasped. She said, “we are not fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone, but for the freedom of the human spirit, a larger freedom that encompasses all mankind”. The reports from Jena this week makes you wonder where women like Bates and Baker and Robinson would be if they were alive today. Wherever it was, it would be at the front of the parade.