Black women drove bus boycotts while male preachers became public figureheads

Evidence

But the civil rights movement kept coming. W. E. B. Du Bois was stunned watching the unfolding Montgomery Bus Boycott during the 1956 election year. It was not the boycott’s initial mobilizer, Alabama State College professor Jo Ann Robinson, nor the boycott’s drivers, those walking Black female domestics, who surprised him. Any serious history student of Black activism knew that Black women were regularly driving forces. Du Bois was stunned by the twenty-seven-year-old figurehead of the boycott. A Baptist preacher as a radical activist? Du Bois had never thought his eighty-eight-year-old eyes would see a preacher like Martin Luther King Jr. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 933

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the interplay of race and gender racism discussed throughout the book; the erasure of women organizers fits Kendi’s pattern of who gets credited.