Fetching Dr. King's Coffee

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.

  • aisha

    There was scandal in my office when a male asked a female to make him some popcorn.

  • I’ve heard stories about this similar treatment of women leaders in the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 70s. It’s weird, because the issues those women had with middle class white women’s brand of feminism are still coming up these days in the blogosphere.

  • kate

    I don’t understand it either, but the fact is that we are a splintered group/movement/whatever. It would make sense for social justice advocates to help one another’s work, be it anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-gender-discrimination, etc. It would make sense for environmentalists to care about social justice and about animal welfare (and for those movements to care about the environment). For whatever reason, though, it has never actually been the case. People are too busy doing their own thing, working on their own little corner, to see the bigger picture, which is too bad, because until we see the bigger picture and make the most of our common stregnths and goals, we won’t get very far.

  • Geod

    I wouldn’t get too upset at it. While we can look back on it from here and critique attitudes or motivations in light of current sensibilities, it isn’t exactly fair to the actors we’re critiquing. While equal treatment of women is a valid issue that’s come a long way since then, the more pressing issue of the time was the violence and subhumanization of all people of color, no matter their gender. As a crude analogy, when your leg is openly bleeding from a large gash a headache is not the greatest of your worries.

  • wolfgrrl

    Geod, I don’t agree with your rationalization at all. How can you not think that putting women into a lesser position because of their gender is treating them as subhuman? How can someone fight for rights and equality in one category and not strive to practice it in all other aspects of their life? What kind of excused hypocrisy is that? Sexism is entrenched in all aspects of our society just as racism is. You can’t just fight for one and assume another will be taken care of in the future. And if you use “current sensibilities” as rationalization of their treatment of women, then you might as well excuse racism too–because it was just an accepted part of the status quo in those days right?