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 US. As a result, lynchings spread, and the victims would often be “castrated or sexually tortured” while whites watched in glee as a reminder of the crimes committed and the necessity and effectiveness of vigilante justice. Olsen goes further however, in highlighting the work of Ida Wells and others who attempted to show that black sexual violence was rarely the actual cause of a lynching. More often, black men committed egregious crimes such as opening competitive grocery stores. It is descriptions like these passages in which Olsen is most effective, taking a known and uncomfortable topic and turning our common understandings on their heads.

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.