Grassroots Impacts on the Civil Rights Movement: Christian Women Leaders’ Contributions to the Paradigm Shift in the Tactics of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Its Affiliates
This dissertation examines the historical factors that built grassroots movements during the civil rights era of the United States. These movements were produced by Christian women leaders, and they influenced a crucial transition in the leadership of the civil rights movement. Through their training and mobilizing tactics, women civil rights leaders utilized grassroots leadership to help major civil rights organizations, such as SCLC, SNCC, CORE, COFO, and the NAACP, work closely with local black people in the South who struggled with their underprivileged circumstances. This project investigates the key role of the grassroots leadership of Christian women leaders, which led civil rights leaders to learn how to train and work together with local black people to desegregate voter registration and which drove their voting rights movement to succeed in achieving the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The nationwide successes of the Birmingham Campaign, the Freedom Summer Project, the St. Augustine Movement, and the Selma to Montgomery marches were essentially based on the Citizenship School, and Christian women leaders trained the major civil rights activists of these movements. This dissertation identifies the contributions of the women leaders’ Citizenship School as key to these successes during the civil rights movement.
civil rights movement; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Highlander Folk School; Septima Clark; Coretta Scott King;Ella Baker; Rosa Parks, History of Christianity
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