Free My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem

he did begin the “I have a dream” litany from memory, with the crowd calling out to him after each image—
Tell it!
What would be most remembered had been least planned.
    I hoped Mrs. Greene heard a woman speak up—and make all the difference.
    —
    F IFTY YEARS LATER I stood again with thousands who gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to celebrate the anniversary of that first march—and this time there were women’s voices. Bernice King, who had been an infant at home when her father gave that first speech, spoke about the absence of women in 1963. There was also Oprah Winfrey, who had been a nine-year-old girl in Mississippi when Dr. King spoke, and Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of John F. Kennedy, the president who the marchers had hoped would disobey his political advisers, leave the White House, and just appear—but he never did. Finally, there was President Barack Obama, twice elected president of the United States, a possibility even Dr. King hadn’t dreamed of.
    This was huge progress, yet nothing can make up for truths untold. As Dr. King once said, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.” If Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer and others had been heard fifty years ago—if women had been half the speakers in 1963—we might have heard that the civil rights movement was partly a protest against the ritualistic rape and terrorizing of black women by white men. 4 We might have known that Rosa Parks had been assigned by the NAACP to investigate the gang rape of a black woman by white men—who had left her for dead near a Montgomery bus stop—before that famous boycott. We might have known sooner that the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself—or will use military violence against another country—is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence against females. It normalizes all other violence. 5 Mrs. Greene knew that. She also knew it was all about keeping women from controlling their own bodies. It has been part of the history of this country ever since Columbus captured Native women as sex slaves for his crew, and expressed surprise when they fought back. 6
    I knew Mrs. Greene couldn’t possibly be alive to see women speaking a half-century later, but I hoped her daughter was watching. Back then, she had been impatient with her mother’s complaints, but I bet now she would be proud.
    After these fiftieth anniversary speeches, I found myself standing with a group of young African American women, some wearing Smith College T-shirts. Yolanda King, Martin and Coretta King’s daughter, had gone there, and these women knew I had, too. We took photos with our cell phones. I told them that my class of 1956 included not one African American student—or Negro girl, as everyone then would have said—and when I asked a man in the Smith admissions office why, he said, “We have to be very careful about educating Negro girls because there aren’t enough educated Negro men to go around.”
    The young women laughed at this sexist/racist double whammy—and hugged me with sympathy, as if I had been the wronged one—and in a way, they were partly right. White people should have sued for being culturally deprived in a white ghetto. When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.
    These young women were not looking to Washington, as Malcolm X might have feared, nor were they waiting to be asked to speak. They were complete unto themselves, as in the line from one of Alice Walker’s poems in
Revolutionary Petunias:
Blooming Gloriously
    For its Self
    Malcolm X would have been proud of them, too. I knew the oldest of his six daughters, Attallah Shabazz, an elegant and experienced version of those self-possessed young women. She was a writer, speaker, activist, and, by then, a grandmother herself. Getting to know her had been a gift of the road.
    When we talked again, she told me something I’d never heard or read. Malcolm X had