The sisters in the struggle

WASHINGTON —In churches throughout America, small and large, urban or rural, they're known as "Sisters." As in Sister King. As in Sister Lowery. As in Sister Baskin.

They're the women who gave so much to the civil-rights movement over the years. Women who set the tables — because the kids had to eat — when husbands were traveling through the pine woods to register voters. Women who closed the living-room curtains and fretted into the night about bomb throwers.

Coretta Scott King, who died Tuesday, was one of many who had toiled and sacrificed through the years, standing beside men who were better known.

"From time to time we'd call each other," recalled Evelyn Lowery — not as famous as her husband, Joseph Lowery, a King family confidant for many years — talking about those civil-rights widows and wives.

Through much of the '50s the Lowerys lived in Mobile, Ala., where he was the pastor at Warren Street United Methodist Church. The women she knew, like herself, were wives and cooks, baby-sitters and guardians.

"It was quite a role to play," Evelyn Lowery says. "You have to realize the men didn't have resources, like administrative assistants and the such that people have today. We had to do that." She adds: "And we also marched."

Lowery believes history has yet to catch up with the women of the movement. "I'm trying to do some writing now," she says. "For instance — and I've never told this story — there was a priest at this college in Mobile, a white priest. He was sympathetic to the movement. He'd send students to Klan meetings to find out what the Klan was up to. And he'd come tell me, 'Mrs. Lowery, you have to move to the back of the house. They're planning to bomb your house tonight.' "

Lowery is founder of SCLC/Women's Organizational Movement for Equality, Now. She leads an annual heritage tour of civil-rights sites. And yet, she says, "they still refer to me as 'the wife of' instead of seeing you in light of your own leadership role."

Of course there were names from the movement that plowed their way into the headlines and history. But many remain unchronicled.

Gwen Patton, a youth leader of the Montgomery (Ala.) Improvement Association in the early 1960s who was later elected student-body president at Tuskegee Institute, says much of the written history has improperly diminished women's roles in the civil-rights movement. "Coretta was a strong woman in her own right. It was Coretta's activism in Boston — as well as her good looks, no doubt — that first caught the eye of Dr. King," Patton says. When Inez Baskin, one of the few black women working as journalists in the Deep South in the '50s and '60s, looked around while out on some of those assignments, she couldn't help but notice the wily ways in which women made contributions to the movement.

"There was a class-caste system at work here in the South," Baskin recalled Tuesday, "between blacks, even. Those on the upper level could seem not to care about those on the lower level of society. With the movement, black women experienced a camaraderie that was not there before. Teachers walked and talked with others who didn't teach. They said, in a sense: 'I am not above you. We are sisters under the skin.' "

In Montgomery she worked out of a little office a few blocks from the home of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther and Mrs. King.

"You must remember also," she goes on, "that black women had to sometimes sit on their men. To keep them from going and protesting because they would have been killed."

Baskin says there was nothing like the mass meetings held throughout the South. "Sometimes you'd see a 3-to-1 ratio, women to men. It was such a spiritual thing. The music was just hands and feet. These were mothers. So picture a mother who had lived in terror all her life. A mother who cooks the meals in her house — and yet, that night, for no good reason other than the color of their skin, her son or husband is killed. Picture that. Black women have been through so much."

It was last March when thousands gathered in Selma, Ala., to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Sister Coretta was there. So was Sister Amelia.

In 1965, Amelia Boynton Robinson was beaten and bloodied on the Edmund Pettus bridge with other marchers. She had cooked a meal for her husband that day. Last year she returned to the site to be honored for her part in the famous protest. "I felt so humble," she said Tuesday. "You know, we've got to live before we die."

Robinson, 94, marcher and widow, will rise tomorrow morning and go to work. She's a youth counselor in Tuskegee. Still working for the movement.