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Black Women and the Activist Challenge 9 At the same time that black women sought to mobilize themselves and others to reclaim and (re)present their image, black women also under- stood that behavior modification alone was no guarantee that they would be treated as full partners, thus black women continued to engage in the practice of leadership on multiple fronts, including in their homes, in the churches to which some belonged, and in the broader community by edu- cating their biological children and other children in the community by keeping house by demonstrating excellence, resistance, and dignity dur- ing their work outside of the home and by fighting for social justice, such as in the case of testing the limits of Jim Crow laws, such as laws restrict- ing their access to areas of public accommodation.25 BLACK WOMEN FROM THE SCOTTSBORO TRAGEDY TO THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY: 1930s–1970s While winning the right to vote gave women cause for celebration, it also gave black women a cause for pause and not-so-quiet reflection. Black women understood that their access to the ballot would have restric- tions placed upon it, as had been the case for black men for decades. With ongoing assaults on black bodies and continued unequal treatment, black women appeared more engaged in issues involving their racial identity than their gender identity. However, such an interpretation fails to account for the inability of black women to see, understand, and experience American society in any other way than at the intersections of at least two ­ subordinating identities. Part of the misinterpretation about perceived shifting loyalties over time is an unwillingness to see so-called passive acts as protests on par with more active acts and the over-reliance on the speeches and primary documents of black women occupying positions of authority in organizations, many of which were overwhelmingly consid- ered middle class, thereby ignoring black women who were engaged in the struggle for social justice in more marginalized groups or as lone actors. Given the probability of encountering some form of violence—symbolic or actual—surviving from one day to another is evidence of successful resistance on the part of black women. Evidence of black women who engage in the practice of leadership was clear in the 1930s with the mothers of the Scottsboro defendants and their supporters who fought to keep their sons alive after false allegations