Focusing on the unsung and virtually "invisible" Black women important to the civil rights movement, Sisters in Struggle rethinks, challenges and broadens traditional concepts of leadership, derived from male leadership models. Based on eight years of research, oral narratives, life histories and extensive personal interviews conducted with over 100 movement activists of the 1960s, Bernice McNair Barnett provides a timely analysis of race, gender and class in social movement leadership. Excluded from patricentric civil rights scholarship and Eurocentric feminist scholarship, Black women were seldom recognized as leaders, yet they often were the ones who initiated protest, formulated strategies and tactics and mobilized other resources necessary for successful protest. Their multidimensional leadership roles and personal-political struggles reveal common themes in Black women's diverse life histories and activism during the civil rights movements.
