Bruh I learned all of this and more in my civil rights history class last semester. My professor actually got her doctorate in black women in the black power movement. Even though two black men from California started the radical group as we know it, black women did most of the work and kept the group afloat. By the 80s it was largely female led. Also, elderidge cleaver wrote an essay after getting out of prison where he recanted everything he said in soul on ice and this was largely due to the fact that women were running the bpp and told him he couldn’t join if he was to co tibie to perpetuate this rape nonsense.
Also also claudette Colvin wasn’t the only one who was forgotten during the Montgomery bus boycott. Do y'all know who Jo Ann Robinson is? Home girl was the backbone to the whole movement tbh. Yeah rosa (a trained activist btw) was the igniting flame and yes in her documents and Jo Ann’s Claudette was credited as the inspiration, but jo Ann really kept the movement running. She organized car pools for all the black folks in Montgomery. Y'all the Montgomery bus boycott lasted for a year! People still had to get to work and shit. Jo Ann was on it! Plus she had a whole committee that was pushing for regulation changes and the end of segregation in busing. And hell, Montgomery buses were damn near reliant on black commuters so they eventually had to give.
Plus my all time fave is the homie Ella baker. Home girl ensured the founding of sncc when fuckboy Mlk tried to make them the youth chapter of the sclc. SNCC is the group that made sit ins a popular form of protest during the early civil rights movement. They founding students had their first sit in in 1960. Ella baker was like these students need their own separate movement and the sclc ain’t it. Plus she was a true proponent of self determination which was clear in everything that sncc did.
Basically what I’m trying to say is black women been the backbone of society and they still are.
