#GAReads | Black women's roles in the civil rights movement have been understated — but that's changing

“In March 1955, …15-year-old [Claudette Colvin] was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a White person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.”

“Black women's roles in the civil rights movement have been understated — but that's changing”:

In August 1963, hundreds of thousands of people descended on the nation's capital for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, something of a precursor to the 1968 Poor People's Campaign.

The march featured a star-studded lineup of speakers, including John Lewis, who at the time was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and King, who delivered his powerful (though now seasonally diluted) "I Have a Dream" speech.

Excluded from the official program? Women such as Gloria Richardson, who in the early '60s was a leader in the demonstrations in Cambridge, Maryland, over equal access to education and public accommodations. At 98, Richardson is still a champion of civil rights: "Even today, until everyone is on the same plane, then the fight continues," she said in December.

Read Brandon Tensley and Skylar Mitchell’s full article at CNN Politics here…