Summary

This chapter is about the role of women in the civil rights movement and how their contributions have been memorialized. Theoharis writes that a clear sense of their leadership, lives, and organizing efforts is often missing and that women like Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King are presented inaccurately, as limited versions of their full selves. These gendered and two-dimensional presentations suggest that there is a correct or acceptable way to be a woman activist that fits into patriarchal ideas of women as passive, meek, and in supporting rather than leadership roles.

Theoharis then writes about Coretta Scott King's life of activism, which was significant both before her marriage and after her husband's death. Scott King herself lamented how she was always presented in a supporting role rather than an important activist in her own...