Forgotten Americans

Diane Nash, as Erik Loomis explains.

Sadly, the centrality of women to the civil rights movement has only become faintly visible to most Americans with the deaths of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King in the past year. Even now, however, popular historical memory has little room to accomodate young organizers like Nash — who chafed against moderate leaders of the SCLC and other established civil rights organizations — or the thousands of anonymous working class black women who sustained the Montgomery Bus boycott for a year longer than any of its leadership initially expected. Erik’s post reminds us of how disorienting — in all the best senses of the term — the civil rights movement actually was.