I heard the most disturbing thing on the Tavis Smiley show a couple of weekends ago, during one of the many memorializations on the the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death. Dorothy Cotton, the educational director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and its highest-ranking woman, said during meetings the men, including Dr. King, would ask her to make coffee or take minutes. Cotton said another man, “who was more enlightened than [she] was,” convinced the others during those moments that it was more important for their educational director be at the table and take part in the discussions.
Cotton goes on to explain that she and the other women were, at the time, honored to serve these men and, most heart-breakingly, didn’t realize the critical role the women were themselves playing. The educational arm of the movement was supplying its foot soldiers, she said. That was Cotton’s bag, and it was a critical component.
Rosa Parks, another, more famous woman who served the movement, is also often portrayed as a sympathetic seamstress whose tired feet helped the movement stumble into action, rather than a community organizer who had been working with the movement for years. Though some of that may have been tactical, Rosa Parks could not have been painted a leader for reasons both internal and external to the movement.
Cotton’s story wasn’t the first time I realized the sexism within the movement, but it disappointed me nonetheless. Why should all of this matter half a century after the fact? After all, second-wave feminism hadn’t really started. Should we expect the men of the movement to necessarily be more enlightened than everyone else? I guess I think so. It’s a scary thing to realize and to say, but I am disappointed that the people who died to fight inequality in a movement as transcendental as the Civil Rights movement didn’t see the inequities in their own offices.
Perhaps more importantly, we still see these two issues, race and gender, as separate. We see it most starkly in the current Democratic presidential nominating contest, to the extent that it’s still really a contest, and the commentary on it. It’s as if sexism and racism don’t work in tandem, and one cancels out the other. They intertwine and interplay. I was naively hoping that there was a time when people knew that.
Most tellingly, perhaps, is that Cotton does not have her own Wikipedia page.