Women in the Movement
Though often overshadowed by men in the public spotlight, women were crucial to the black freedom movement. Here, protesting at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, are (left to right) Fannie Lou Hamer, Eleanor Holmes, and Ella Baker. The men are (left to right) Emory Harris, Stokely Carmichael, and Sam Block. Hamer had been a sharecropper before she became a leader under Baker’s tutelage, and Holmes was a Yale University-trained lawyer who went on to become the first female chair of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. © 1976 George Ballis/Take Stock/The Image Works.