When director Ava DuVernay decided to helm the Martin Luther King, Jr. biopic Selma, she noticed something missing from the script.

"When I first came on board the project, the women were not there at all," she told Melissa Harris-Perry in an MSNBC interview.

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In order to be more accurate, DuVernay fleshed it out with the important women who bolstered the movement — the women who helped shape important world events, but get lost in the narrow, unforgiving filter of time.

Everyone knows the boldfaced icons of the civil rights movement: MLK, Jr. and Malcolm X. However, there are so many names deserving of praise.

While some women loom large in the canon — Coretta Scott King and Rosa Parks among them — there are many whose voices and actions were just as powerful.