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THE FIRST MEETING OF FEMINIST PROTEST in the 1960S was called to order by Dorothy Height, the president of the 800,000-member National Council of Negro Women (ncnw), in Washington, DC, on August 29, 1963. It was the day after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (mow).1 "We could hardly believe that after all we were doing in the Civil Rights Movement," Height recalls, "the women came to feel that they were getting a kind of runaround" as they sought and were denied fair representation in the march because of their sex.2 "I was determined," she said in her 2003 memoir, "to bring wise women together to learn and gather strength from the experience."3 As "women talked freely of their concern about women's participation," Height observed, "we began to realize that if we did not . . . demand our rights, we were not going to get them. The women became much more aware and much more aggressive in facing up to sexism in our dealings with the male leadership in the movement."4 "That moment," Height recalled, "was vital to awakening the women's movement."5
Black women's fight for representation in the mow appears narrowly framed in scholarly literature as a specific and isolated reaction to the sexism of male mow planners. I argue, however, that the campaign of feminist protest meetings surrounding the mow-and the political lessons that emerged-was a starting point in the chronology of the rebirth years of feminist upheaval in the 1960s. Why? Because the lessons of that campaign provided the crucial conceptual model of an "naacp for women" that would be consciously and purposely adopted by the newly forming National Organization for Women (now). Together with Height, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the only woman on the mow planning committee, and longtime co-conspirator Pauli Murray, who spearheaded the mow protests, were critical actors in now's formation and brought the model to Now's more well-known white organizers. This model, and the Black women who developed it, opened the trajectory that led to now's establishment in 1966, the first feminist organization of the decade.
Black scholar activist Bernice Johnson Reagon called the Civil Rights Movement the "borning" struggle of its time.6 By the early 1960s, the impact of this phase of civil rights...