ABSTRACT

The modern Civil Rights Movement can be said to have begun in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, when a woman—Rosa Parks—refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. Throughout the next decade, as protesters defied segregation throughout the South, women participated every step of the way. In fact, one of the final events in the movement's most vibrant 10 years as a biracial campaign for integration was the murder of a woman, Viola Liuzzo, just after the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965.