In 1944, the black press had dubbed activist Anna Arnold Hedgeman the “young feminist” in Civil Rights leader A. Philip Randolph’s circle, but nearly twenty years later, in 1963, she had made little progress in convincing him of her right, and other women’s right, to exercise full leadership in the black freedom movement. Why, she wondered, were men so obstinate? Why did women pose such a threat? “Suffice it to say that the male would be better advised to spend less time mourning the loss of his superiority and more time working in partnership with women,” she wrote.

For years, Anna Hedgeman had been thinking and talking about the discrimination women faced, delivering lectures and keynote addresses with titles like “Why Women Walk Two Steps behind Their Men,” “The Role of the Negro Woman,” “Women and the New America,” and “Equal-Unequal.” She had depended on her network of professional women in government, labor, and religious and civil rights organizations to help her surmount the obstacles she faced trying to realize her personal and professional goals, and knew how much women had accomplished on behalf of civil rights despite being denied significant leadership roles. She was not naive enough to think it would be easy to get men to open the march leadership to women, but she was determined to see it happen.

Hedgeman and her African American female friends and associates had for years been trying to make people think about what Mary Church Terrell called the “double handicap of race and sex.” In so many circumstances—pregnancy and childrearing, inferior employment opportunities segregated by sex as well as race, the exigencies of aging in difficult economic circumstances—black women’s experiences differed from black men’s experiences. Nevertheless, African American women had formed the backbone of civil rights and church work for much of the twentieth century; as Hedgeman saw it, they had fully earned a voice in national decision-making.

To Anna Arnold Hedgeman and Dorothy Height, the head of the National Council of Negro Women, gender-based slights were petty and routine, but the march was too important an event not to push for at least one woman as speaker. Height believed that Hedgeman, the “doyenne of American Negro women,” as Pauli Murray called her, should speak, but the men refused. They provided a variety of excuses: the list of speakers was already too long; it would be too difficult to select one woman; if they did choose one, others would be jealous. It never occurred to them that they could have included more than one woman, and the idea that women alone suffered from jealousy would be laughable to the women watching the male leaders jockey for status and recognition.

The back and forth continued, but the men remained unmoved. Women were featured as singers, recruited as marchers, and relied on as organizers, but they were not granted a speaking voice. A week before the march, Hedgeman again pointed out during a planning meeting that not a single woman was listed as a speaker on the program. A compromise was proposed: A. Philip Randolph would say a few words about African American women’s contributions to the struggle, then invite a group of women to stand and take a bow. Hedgeman listened with a deepening sense of frustration. Clearly, male civil rights leaders, including those who had counted on Hedgeman’s skills and hard work over many decades, had great difficulty moving beyond their belief that women were second-class citizens. Historians have too often followed their lead, finding it remarkably easy to leave African American women out of the civil rights histories they helped shape. And historical treatments of the second wave of feminism in the United States continue to give short shrift to these early moves by African American women toward gender equality.