Throughout the post–World War II decades of the 1950s and the early 1960s, African American women leaders like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and Fannie Lou Hamer called attention to racism and poverty in the American South. As they pointed out on numerous occasions, the vast majority of blacks living in the South worked as sharecroppers and day-laborers on land owned by whites since Reconstruction. In their eyes, the grueling experience was compounded by the lack of economic opportunity, decrepit living conditions, segregated educational facilities, and ever-present reality of white violence. Working with various organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), they drew upon the courage, energy, and youthful enthusiasm of local people, movement activists, and school-age children. They outwardly challenged existing racial discrimination while inwardly contesting the male chauvinism that manifested in their organizations. By the mid-1960s, a new generation of black women stepped forward, bringing an untapped reservoir of leadership and a unique brand of strategy and tactics to the freedom struggle.

As the freedom struggle intensified in 1967, the urban North opened a new phase in civil rights activism. Led by Beulah Sanders from New York, Johnnie Tillmon from Los Angeles, and Etta Horn from Washington, DC, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) was formed to secure more government-sponsored support for childcare and greater access to the job market. At the grassroots level, they simultaneously launched pro-family initiatives in New York, Chicago, Oakland, and Des Moines, as well as in other cities. For most of the leaders of these groups and their membership, the campaign was both personal and immediate. In the impoverished Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, Tillmon, a mother of six, led a local group of women and organized a number of families who received Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Growing up in a poor sharecropping household in Arkansas, Tillmon witnessed the impacts of grinding poverty firsthand. Tillmon and others demanded increased welfare benefits and jobs. They called for an end to the government’s intrusion into women’s lives. In doing so, Tillmon and others challenged the federal bureaucracy’s attitudes regarding black female dependency and husband-absent households in the mid-1960s. In 1967, the NWRO staged a Mother’s March in Washington, DC, during which scores of organizers assembled to criticize the government’s stringent welfare work requirements and the sex discriminatory aspects of the workforce. By 1969, the impact of the NWRO could be felt in several ways. There was a demonstrable increase in welfare benefits for poor women. The number of families receiving AFDC support tripled from 1,127,000 in 1966 to well over 3,000,000 in 1974. Numerous NWRO leaders appeared at hearings held by Congress where they reminded lawmakers that the sanctity of motherhood and a family’s earning power were very much intertwined in the lives of working black women.

In important ways, the social movement for welfare rights and the Black Power Movement were prelude to a new assertiveness among black women. This gave rise to more radical politics throughout the Midwest and West. In Des Moines, Iowa, frustrations over poor housing, unequal education, recreation discrimination, and run-ins with the police gave rise to organizing strategies waged by Mary Rhem and other young city residents. By 1967, their efforts to organize blacks in the community around welfare rights resulted in the creation of the Des Moines Chapter of the Black Panther Party. Around the same time, Kathleen Cleaver, Elaine Brown, Ericka Huggins, and numerous black women activists who lived in North and West Oakland, California, spearheaded a series of community organizing efforts. These aimed at combating poverty, housing discrimination, urban renewal policies, and police brutality. Between 1967 and 1974, Black Panther Party advocates provided free breakfast programs, medical clinics, and clothing drives for city residents who lived in their neighborhoods.

Black women–led protests also extended to the sphere of education. In 1968, black New York parents and their school-aged children staged numerous boycotts and demonstrations in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district, demanding that their children receive equal education in the city. Faced with disparity in resources, overcrowded schools, inadequate curricula, the lack of accountability and access, and discriminatory hiring, black parents demanded greater control over the community schools and increased opportunity for black students and teachers in the city. The Education Committee of the NAACP Boston Branch, led by Ruth Batson and spearheaded by Ellen Jackson, Betty Johnson, Melnea Cass, and Muriel and Otto Snowden, joined with activists and parents affiliated with the North Dorchester-Roxbury Parent Association. Together, they waged a battle to gain equal opportunity for their children and black teachers in the city’s public school system. Between 1963 and 1974, thousands of local activists staged numerous marches and boycotts throughout Roxbury against the de facto segregation in the district. In the late 1960s, other black parent–led organizations such as the Metropolitan Council for Education Opportunity (METCO) launched their own response to the situation. They began busing public-school-age students from the city to predominantly white suburbs to be educated. And still other groups of parents started independent schools, like the New School and the Highland Park Free School, to educate their children. On their own behalf, black students created a Black Student Union in 1971 to register their outrage over the racial segregation in the schools. Holding demonstrations throughout the city high schools, the students demanded that the city recruit black teachers and guidance counselors, form a commission to study racial patterns in the city schools, end the harassment of black students, and grant amnesty to striking students. While these demands bore few results, they paved the way for the Tallulah Morgan v. James W. Hennigan lawsuit filed by the NAACP in 1972. In 1974, the actions taken by Boston’s black leadership produced favorable results when the federal judge, W. Arthur Garrity, issued a court order calling for its city schools to begin desegregation.

For many black women leaders, the struggle for equality amidst depressed wages and rapidly rising unemployment rates in the North also resulted in new ideas about political empowerment. In 1972, Civil Rights struggle, Black Power politics, and black feminist strategies beyond the South converged with powerful force with the campaign of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm for the presidency of the United States. Chisholm’s presidential bid was historic as she was the first African American in US history to campaign for the Democratic Party nomination for the nation’s highest office.