Explains how Robinson and the Women's Political Caucus started the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1954

Explains how Robinson and the Women's Political Caucus started the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1954

Explains how Robinson and the Women's Political Caucus started the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1954

Over the past two decades, historians have successfully disputed the notion that American women remained wholly outside the realm of politics until the early twentieth century. Still, a consensus has prevailed that, unlike their Northern counterparts, women of the antebellum South were largely excluded from public life. With this book, Elizabeth Varon effectively challenges such historical assumptions. Using a wide array of sources, she demonstrates that throughout the antebellum period, white Southern women of the slaveholding class were important actors in the public drama of politics. Through their voluntary associations, legislative petitions, presence at political meetings and rallies, and published appeals, Virginia's elite white women lent their support to such controversial reform enterprises as the temperance movement and the American Colonization Society, to the electoral campaigns of the Whig and Democratic Parties, to the literary defense of slavery, and to the causes of Unionism and secession. Against the backdrop of increasing sectional tension, Varon argues, these women struggled to fulfill a paradoxical mandate: to act both as partisans who boldly expressed their political views and as mediators who infused public life with the "feminine" virtues of compassion and harmony.

The success of the civil rights movement demanded extraordinary courage of ordinary people. During her short life, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson became one of the most important leaders in the black struggle for equality. By age 24, Robinson's intelligence, brashness, and bravery had elevated her to a top leadership role in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Cynthia Griggs Fleming's beautifully written biography of this incredible woman demonstrates that Robinson's activism wasn't limited to racial equality--she was an equally eloquent and powerful voice for women's rights. Fleming provides new insights into the success, failures, peculiar contradictions, and unique stresses of Robinson's life. This book will appeal to all readers interested in African American and women's history.

"A superb oral history." —The Washington Post Book World "So touching, so exhilarating...no book for a long time has left me so moved or so happy." —The New York Times Book Review The almost unfathomable courage and the undying faith that propelled the Civil Rights Movement are brilliantly captured in these moving personal recollections. Here are the voices of leaders and followers, of ordinary people who became extraordinary in the face of turmoil and violence. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956 to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, these are the people who fought the epic battle: Rosa Parks, Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams, Fannie Lou Hamer, and others, both black and white, who participated in sit-ins, Freedom Rides, voter drives, and campaigns for school and university integration. Here, too, are voices from the “Down-Home Resistance” that supported George Wallace, Bull Connor, and the “traditions” of the Old South—voices that conjure up the frightening terrain on which the battle was fought. My Soul Is Rested is a powerful document of social and political history, as well as a magnificent tribute to those who made history happen.