1968 - Mark Kurlansky [184]
I was difficult. I wasn’t an easy pushover. Because I could talk back a lot—not only could but did. And so that was frustrating to those who never had certain kinds of experience. And it’s a strange thing with men who were supposed to be “men about town”; if they had never known a woman who knew how to say No, and No in no uncertain terms, they didn’t know what to do sometimes. Especially if you could talk loud and had a voice like mine. You could hear me a mile away sometimes, if necessary.
In fact, Martin Luther King had a number of important issues in his own marriage completely aside from his womanizing. Coretta complained bitterly of being kept out of the movement. “I wish I was more a part of it,” she said in an interview. She envisioned a significant role for herself in the civil rights movement, and he had denied her that. This was a source of continual anger in their marriage and, according to some aides, often led to his being unable to go home at the end of a day. Dorothy Cotton, who worked closely with Martin Luther King in the SCLC, said, “Martin . . . was absolutely a male chauvinist. He believed that the wife should stay home and take care of the babies while he’d be out there in the streets. He would have a lot to learn and a lot of growing to do. I’m always asked to take the notes. I’m always asked to go fix Dr. King some coffee. I did it too.” To her it was the times. “They were sexist male preachers and grew up in a sexist world. . . . I loved Dr. King but I know that that streak was in him also.” Only after King’s death was Coretta Scott King free to emerge as an important voice for civil rights.
All of the 1960s movements—until NOW and other feminist groups became active—were run by men. Women in the SDS talked of how intimidating Tom Hayden and other male leaders were. An SDS brochure read, “The system is like a woman. You’ve got to fuck it to make it change.” Hayden in a recent interview said that part of the problem had been that “the women’s movement was dormant at the time SDS was started.” But he attributed the problem largely to his own “ignorance” and that of other leaders. Suzanne Goldberg, a leader in the Free Speech Movement and later Mario Savio’s first wife, said:
I was on the executive committee and the steering committee of the FSM. I would make a suggestion and no one would react. Thirty minutes later Mario or Jack Weinberg would make the same suggestion and everyone would react. Interesting idea. I thought maybe I’m not saying it well enough. I thought that for years. But then at the twenty-fifth anniversary of FSM, I ran into Jackie Goldberg and she said, “No, you were fine. It was classic. I used to use it in my street theater. Suzanne being ignored.”
Bettina Aptheker, another leader in the Free Speech Movement, said, “Women did most of the clerical work and fund-raising and provided food. None of this was particularly recognized as work, and I never questioned this division of labor or even saw it as an issue!”
Probably no group had a more equal distribution of labor than SNCC. SNCC work was physically arduous and always dangerous, and though it was sometimes argued that the leaders who got the media attention were all men, the work and the danger were equally divided. By 1968 SNCC’s problem was no longer attracting violence and media attention, it was surviving the violence. Once SNCC members realized, as did the Janet Rankin Brigade later, that less violence was used against them if they had women present, they wanted a strong female presence. Though they were constantly scared, beaten, arrested, intimidated, shot at, and attacked by snarling dogs—the women had to acknowledge that they were in less danger than the men, and the white women in less danger than the black women. The black men were in the most danger always. In October 1964 in the state of Mississippi, the civil rights movement suffered fifteen killings, four woundings,