By Sikivu Hutchinson
On January 13th, civil rights activist Claudette Colvin passed away at the age of 86. During much of her life, Colvin was virtually unsung for the courageous act of civil disobedience she committed at 15 years-old on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955, months before the arrest of Rosa Parks. Colvin’s arrest and jailing for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger laid the foundation for the 1956 Browder vs. Gayle Supreme Court decision, which ended Jim Crow segregation on public buses in Montgomery. As an educator who has taught about Colvin for years, I mourn her and consider her extraordinary teenaged example as a prelude to the conditions that ushered a young Dr. Martin Luther King into history.
While white conservatives have long attempted to hijack King’s message of so-called “colorblind” pacifism to undermine his fight against American apartheid and white supremacist state violence, his blistering critiques of racial capitalism, U.S militarism and global aggression resonate deeply in this Orwellian climate of historical erasure. In 1966, King said, “There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America should move toward a democratic socialism.” As the nation’s poor and working class brace for the onslaught of the gutting of Medicaid, white nationalist-supremacist vilification of socialism and wealth redistribution buttress Trumpian kleptocracy. It is no accident that the Trump regime’s efforts to “disappear” African American history, women’s history, LGBTQ+ history and identity, Indigenous history and any other historical record that contradicts the narrative of American exceptionalism and white superiority is undergirded by the federal government’s massive theft of Black and BIPOC generational wealth.
In 2025, Black women suffered the greatest employment losses and layoffs amongst all demographic groups in the U.S. Black women were especially vulnerable because of their employment in federal and state jobs that were eliminated by the Trump regime. In addition, Black women workers were disproportionately affected by GOP cuts to and attacks on DEI in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. These attacks have had a direct impact on Black generational wealth and wellbeing, as many Black women are primary breadwinners for their families. In addition, attacks on abortion care and reproductive health care have had a chilling effect on the upward mobility of Black and BIPOC women and gender expansive people. Thus, when it comes to overall household wealth, Black women only have a penny to the dollar of white families. And the crowning irony of the GOP’s virulent opposition to affirmative action is that white women are the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action hiring policies and practices. White families have essentially profited off of racial and gender justice reforms that were meant to redress disparities experienced by people of color.
Trumpian revisionism of this fact is rampant in renewed efforts to paint white men as victims of civil rights legislation. Yet erasure of any kind is insidious. Which is why It is important to stress that King stood on the shoulders of forerunners such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Maria Stewart, Ella Baker, Colvin and scores of other less heralded nineteenth and early twentieth century Black women freedom fighters. These women were habitually overshadowed in the “accepted” patriarchal civil rights leadership that King also endorsed. Indeed, Colvin braved sexual harassment and racist terrorism after she was arrested and jailed in 1955, and was revictimized by the colorism and classism of Montgomery’s Black community, who deemed Rosa Parks a more acceptable model for the subsequent Montgomery bus boycott campaign. In her article, “The Legacy of MLK and the Erasure of Black Women,” Cierra Graham writes, “Dr. King can be heralded as an influential civil rights leader, and we can also talk about how the exclusive focus on his legacy continues to uphold systems of patriarchy. Additionally, we can also acknowledge him as a pusher for racial justice, while recognizing his inherent patriarchal practices.” For example, according to historian Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker was sidelined and marginalized in King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference leadership’s structure because it was “not ready to welcome her into the organization on an equal footing… it would be too far afield from the gender relations they were used to in the church.” The sexist, patriarchal structure of traditional civil rights leadership also informed King’s alleged adulterous treatment of women in his private life.
As Dr. Graham and many other commentators have noted, amplifying the contradictions of King’s life and legacy doesn’t besmirch his towering contributions, but merely sharpens focus on the historical nuances of his path. This is especially true when considering the revolutionary promise of King’s final act of economic justice organizing. The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign for living wage jobs, education and health care sought to actualize democratic socialism. As Dr. Cornel West noted in The Radical King, “The litmus test for realizing King’s dream was neither a Black face in the White House nor a Black presence on Wall Street. Rather, the fulfillment of his dream was for all poor and working class people to live lives of decency and dignity.” In a time of predatory neoliberalism and the mass rollback of civil and human rights protections forged by multitudes of unsung heroes, MLK Day reminds us, yet again, of Audre Lorde’s warning that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
Sikivu Hutchinson is the founder of the Women’s Leadership Project and Black Skeptics Los Angeles and the author of Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist and Heretical and the novel White Nights, Black Paradise on Black women, Peoples Temple and the Jonestown massacre.
