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.
On 22 June 1954 Sarah Mae Flemming, aged 20, boarded a crowded bus to the Columbia suburb where she worked as a maid. Forced at first to stand, Flemming found a seat vacated by a departing white passenger. The driver later claimed she had sat in front of two white women. When he demanded she move, Flemming found the rear exit blocked by commuters, so headed to the front exit instead. The furious driver reacted to this breach of racial etiquette by striking her in the stomach.
With the support of South Carolina NAACP Secretary Modjeska Simkins, Flemming filed suit for $25,000 plus punitive damages. The case was complicated and protracted. A district court twice dismissed the case on the grounds that the driver had performed his legal duty to enforce segregation. It was overruled on both occasions by appeals judges, who ruled that following the recent school desegregation decision by the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ could no longer be ‘regarded as a correct statement of the law’. The bus company tried but failed to have the Supreme Court hear the case.
Civil rights activists believed the Flemming case could be the decisive breakthrough against bus segregation. Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier proclaimed ‘separate but equal’ was ‘as dead as a dodo’. The outcome was less decisive. Flemming lost her case to a jury consisting entirely of white men. But the appeals court’s assertion that segregation was unconstitutional served as a precedent in the Browder v. Gayle case that, in 1956, ruled in favour of the Montgomery bus boycott.
This overlooked episode emphasises the incremental role of Black female activism in the fight for racial equality, not only in terms of Flemming’s braving the hostility of the white political, judicial and media establishment but also the support she received from Simkins. This was also clear in Montgomery, where the Women’s Political Council led by Jo Ann Robinson had long campaigned for reform and looked for a suitable case to test bus company practices. One candidate was 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, arrested nine months before Rosa Parks, but activists believed her youth and pregnancy would expose her to harsh recrimination. She was nonetheless one of the four Black female plaintiffs in the Browder case.
When Flemming, Parks and other women of the modern civil rights era fought back, they were continuing a longstanding tradition of Black female resistance. African American women were at the heart of Black activism in the post-Civil War South. Their activism – which often focused on economic rights and community building – evolved over the following century to include more direct confrontations with segregation such as Flemming’s. In that sense, the story of Rosa Parks’ refusal to stand up – traditionally told as the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott, and thus the spark for the civil rights movement – should be seen as a story of the culmination of a generations-old tradition of African American female activism.
The contribution of Black women to the civil rights movement remains underappreciated, despite the best efforts of historians over recent decades. In dominating the public-facing leadership roles, it is the words and actions of male activists that echo loudest. Women, meanwhile, were often excluded from decision-making and restricted to community-facing roles away from the media spotlight: raising funds, recruiting support and maintaining communication links with movement leaders. As a result, this vital grassroots work, which sustained the movement on a day-to-day basis, is comparatively less well understood and celebrated.
Even when female activists have been incorporated into the history of the African American freedom struggle, we are often given only a limited sense of who they were and what they did. Rosa Parks – perhaps the most famous female civil rights activist of the 20th century – is popularly understood almost exclusively in terms of her refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in December 1955. In reality, her life was marked by a long-standing commitment to the fight for racial justice. She had joined the Montgomery NAACP and became its secretary as early as 1943, 12 years before her arrest, and was still, as she neared her 80th birthday in the early 1990s, working with a non-profit social work and youth development institute in Detroit.
Upon her death in 2005, Congress moved to have her body lie in state at the Capitol Rotunda, making Parks only the second private citizen and first African American woman to be honoured in that way. Although Parks is one of the few women to have been immortalised in civil rights history, the story of Sarah Mae Flemming, and of others, shows us that, as remarkable as Parks was, she was not an outlier.
Tom Adam Davies is Senior Lecturer in American History and Clive Webb is Professor of Modern American History at the University of Sussex.
