"Black, white, and red are related by blood and by culture and by history and by common suffering. And so what I am saying is look, let's be level with one another. Let's admit we are related and let's get on with the business of healing…"

Most Americans are familiar with Rosa Parks as the woman who provided an important spark for an unparalleled action taken by fifty thousand African-Americans in 1955-the Montgomery bus boycott. But how many of us are aware of Mary Louise Smith and Claudette Colvin, both teen-aged women who were also arrested for refusing to give up their bus seats before Rosa Parks did? That Mrs. Parks was a seasoned activist who was thinking about an NAACP workshop she was planning for the next weekend when she was arrested? Or that blacks were expected to pay their bus fare, then get off and enter the bus through the rear door? (And sometimes left in the dust as the bus rumbled off without them?)

These are just a few of the facts presented by Lynne Olson in Freedom's Daughters, published in 2001. As a comprehensive history of the role of women in the civil rights movement, this book also puts that formal movement into the context of the much larger history of women's political activism. From the abolitionist to the suffragist and ultimately to the current women's rights movements, the author shows how the involvement of women, both black and white, in political activism shaped those movements and connected them over the course of more than 130 years.

A multitude of portraits and cameos of activist women are presented: Pauli Murray, Ida Wells, Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Virginia Durr, and dozens of others are depicted as forces of organization, courage and tenacity in the repeated attempts to defeat Jim Crow and secure equal rights. As Lynne Olson shows, the inspiring work of these indefatigable women was crucial to the success of the civil rights movement. Put Freedom's Daughters on your reading list!

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