Sarah Mae Flemming and the Forgotten Women of Civil Rights
Who were the women who fought the decisive battle against racial segregation in the American South?
In the racially segregated American South of the 1950s a Black woman sits in the section of a bus reserved for white passengers. Physically and verbally abused by the driver, she is forced off the vehicle. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) takes up her case, filing a suit that claims her constitutional rights have been violated. Her cause strengthens the determination of Black activists to abolish segregation not only on buses but in all areas of public life.
This story will sound familiar, yet the woman was not Rosa Parks but Sarah Mae Flemming, the city not Montgomery, but Columbia, South Carolina. Her name rarely appears in histories of the civil rights struggle, but her story is important in showing how the momentous action taken by Parks in 1955 was not a spontaneous decision but pertained to a broader political offensive by Black female activists.