By Bonnie Washuk,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – A pioneer in African-American women’s history brought four lesser-known civil rights activists to life Monday at Bates College’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. observance.

The four were brave “racewomen” whose work should be known, said Sharon Harley, who chairs the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Maryland.

The term “racewoman” or “raceman” was given to people who had pride and made sacrifices for their race, Harley said.

She named Billie Holiday, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Gloria St. Clair Richardson and Louise Thompson Patterson as four who are often overlooked as civil rights leaders.

Billie Holiday, best known as an entertainer, traveled the South in the 1930s singing with white bands. Because she was black, Holiday was not allowed to use indoor bathrooms, stay in hotels or eat in restaurants.

Holiday “concluded it was better to relieve herself outside than to suffer the degradation of being called the n’ word,” Harley said.

But Holiday delivered a powerful anti-lynching message in her song “Strange Fruit.”

After she sang, “Southern trees bear strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root, black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,” Holiday refused an encore, no matter how much the audience begged.

Chicago native Louise Thompson Patterson graduated from college in 1923 to find there were no jobs for black women with economics degrees. She worked in service jobs and taught school before getting involved in the World Conference Against Racism.

Patterson also defended workers’ rights with the International Workers Order. In the South she was jailed for un-American acts, and wrote “Southern Terror” about the jail conditions. Her fiery speeches drew large crowds to Chicago and New York.

Like Martin Luther King Jr., Nannie Helen Burroughs was an activist in the black Baptist church. Burroughs was educated in a prestigious Washington, D.C., school, but after graduating, was denied a teaching job “because she was a washer woman’s daughter, because she was a darker skinned woman in a skin-color-conscious Washington society,” Harley said. She left Washington only to return in 1909 as the founder of her own school for girls.

Gloria St. Clair Richardson was a militant civil rights figure in Cambridge, Md., in the 1960s. Richardson grew up in a political, elite family. Her grandfather and father served in local government.

Her youth was a mix of joy and guilt because all around her blacks suffered in poverty. After graduating from college Richardson returned to Maryland and led a civil rights group. The group organized public protests, pickets and sit-ins in movie theaters and bowling allies, opposing segregation.

The only protests she missed from 1962-64 was when she was in jail, Harley said. After one protest turned violent, Richardson was warned, “no more public demonstrations” by officials as high as President John Kennedy’s administration. “She was back at it the next day,” Harley said.

Harley researches, writes and lectures to encourage people to find out more about “unknown people” committed to racial and economic justice. When several of the above women died, thousands attended the funerals.

“But we don’t know anything about them,” Harley said.

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