While the story of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s is well known by all Americans, the decades preceding it remain a mystery to many. And while Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and a few other notable men are revered as heroes, the women who fought back against Jim Crow are often left out of the narrative, leaving entire generations of Black and white Southern heroines unsung. Decades before boycotts and marches, these women built grassroots networks, organized groups with memberships in the millions, and strategized how to take down the legal structures of white supremacy. Artists, activists, lawyers, and teachers, these women laid the foundation for the period we are taught about in textbooks.

From Mary McLeod Bethune, Mary Church Terrell, Jesse Ames Daniels, and Pauli Murray to Ida B. Wells, Septima Clark, Audley Moore, and Lillian Smith, women were some of the leading architects of direct action in the post-World War II period. Intentionally working together across racial and class lines, these activists helped create and sustain organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the pacifist Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and made important inroads for labor and economic improvements in the region.

As I learned very well in writing my biography of Lillian Smith–one of these overlooked women–by broadening our understanding of the post-Depression era South, the true beginnings of the long civil rights movement are laid bare. This chapter of American history reminds us that the quest for justice is a lengthy and often agonizing process—but incremental progress over time can truly change the world. And women have played an important role for decades.

Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship. Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice

Patricia Bell-Scott’s 2016 double-biography examines the long and, at times, tumultuous twenty-five year friendship between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and writer-scholar-activist Pauli Murray. Using letters, diaries, and journals, Bell-Scott shows how their intellectual partnership blossomed. Roosevelt’s patrician upbringing, as well as ties to her husband’s career, led to certain frictions between the two, with Murray consistently urging the First Lady to act on behalf of Black Americans and other oppressed peoples. From labor struggles and lynching to desegregation, Murray served as the ethical voice of reason, directing Roosevelt to use her immensely powerful position on behalf of righteous causes. The Firebrand and the First Lady demonstrates that the early civil rights movement was built on a foundation of deep, complicated, long-term relationships which traversed the boundaries of both race and class.

Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching

Originally published in 1979, Revolt Against Chivalry challenged everything historians thought about upper and upper-middle class white Southern women during the Jim Crow era. Connecting suffrage to the early civil rights movement, Dowd Hall demonstrates how a sizable network of churchgoing white women revolted against the white patriarchy and helped put an end to lynching in the South. Led by the white Texas businesswoman Jesse Daniel Ames and initially based in Atlanta, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) had four million members by the early 1940s. Ames was able to expand so rapidly by using organizations that were already established: Methodist and Baptist church groups. Dowd Hall shows how the ASWPL destroyed the notion of white Southern chivalry, as the women flatly denied that lynchings were because of the rapes of white women. Declaring that they did not need white men to preserve their honor and virtue, stripping lynch mobs of all possible morality. These women pressured local judges and sheriffs, and would actively show up to courthouses, protecting potential lynching victims with thier own bodies.

John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South