I've had various inspirations over the years for websites. One of them was to track people who had never gotten the credit they deserved for some important contribution to history, especially if more credit was given to someone else. 

So instead of a whole website, I'll just list them here as I find out about them:

Claudette Colvin died last week. Her refusal in 1955 to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala., came months before it was overshadowed by a similar act of resistance in the same city by Rosa Parks. But local civil rights leaders decided not to make Ms. Colvin their symbol of discrimination. She was, she later said, too dark-skinned and too poor to win the crucial support of Montgomery’s Black middle class. 

And...

We all know the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. While the poetry and prose were all his, the “I have a dream” motif actually came from Black activist and minister Prathia Hall.

Hall delivered a prayer during a service commemorating the Mount Olive Baptist Church, destroyed by the KKK. She spoke directly to God about justice and equality, saying over and over, “I have a dream.” King, in attendance, didn’t hide his inspiration. He told Hall outright he wanted to iterate on her metaphor.

As Sen. Raphael Warnock says in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s excellent history, “The Black Church”: “People need to know that before it was Martin’s dream, it was Prathia’s prayer.”

Rather than diminish King’s accomplishment, to me, this underscores how the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t made by giants alone. It was built instead with countless people’s gifts, intelligence, ideas, labor, acts of resistance, works of art, words, deeds, sacrifices and, yes, prayers.

And bonus addition:

The woman who didn't get full credit for the discovery of the DNA double helix with Crick and Watson was Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose crucial "Photo 51" provided the key evidence for their model, but her contributions were minimized during her lifetime, and she wasn't eligible for the Nobel Prize awarded in 1962 because she had passed away in 1958. Her work, shared without her explicit consent, was foundational, leading to her being called the "dark lady of DNA" and a symbol of sexism in science. 

 

So heck, just out of curiosity, I just googled "people who didn't get the credit they deserved" and there was a whole list. So maybe this will be my last post on the topic, but...probably not.