Black Women Reds and Black Women on the Liberal Left

Rosa Parks being fingerprinted on Feb. 22, 1956, as one of the people indicted as leaders of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. She was one of 73 people rounded up by deputies that day after a grand jury charged 113 African Americans for organizing the boycott. This was a few months after her arrest on Dec. 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated municipal bus in Montgomery, Ala. Photo courtesy of The Commons As we left February, which was African American History Month—traditionally referred to as Black History Month—we had Women’s History Month in March. Each month’s purpose is to highlight and celebrate the achievements of each group against the odds of racism, sexism, class exploitation and the remnants of caste ideology of hierarchy and privilege. What seems peculiar is an emphasis on Martin Luther King during Black History Month and not on the women workers and organizers of civil rights change such as Jo Ann Robinson, Daisy Bates, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash, Rosa Parks and many others. The fact is that King cut his political teeth during the Montgomery Boycott in 1955, as Parks cut her political teeth in 1933...