In fact, she is one of the great leaders of all time. This is clear instantly to anyone who reads her story, told calmly and clearly,absent any self-aggrandizement or ego. Her role was that of countless women organizers such as Rosa Parks in Birmingham and Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi, almost the only female leaders' names we have from that Movement, and the barely-known student leader Anne Moody (whose moving autobiography, "Coming of Age in Mississippi" is another powerful document of that time) who actually risked their lives every day to do the monumentally hard,thankless,daily organizing work that persuaded Black people one by one throughout the South to risk their livelihoods, their housing and credit for basic food supplies at the local white landowner's grocery store, and their very lives, to come to a meeting, or register to vote, or take any first step to be involved in overthrowing America's apartheid regime, known as "Jim Crow" in areas where to join the NAACP meant being lynched. She matter-of-factly shows it to be a role largely unrewarded, unnoticed by the mass media, and never credited at all. Moreover, she had to fight every day, every week, every month, not to be thrown out of regular SCLC meetings by Dr. Ralph Abernathy, who resented her leadership status apparently for no other reason than that she was a woman, and enormously effective. Dr. King, in defending her place at the meeting, clearly knew he would have no crowds to march in front of at all were it not for women like Septima Clark.