The Women of Operation Breadbasket: A Lost Chapter in the Chicago Civil Rights Movement.

This study provides the first scholarly examination of the Women of Operation Breadbasket (WOB), founded in 1967 by Rev. Willie T. Barrow as the direct-action women's unit of Operation Breadbasket-Chicago (OB-C), the economic justice arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the North. It situates the WOB within the broader genealogy of Black women's activism in Chicago and highlights its central role in advancing economic justice, particularly through leadership in OB-C's "Don't Buy at A&P" boycott campaign against discriminatory hiring and business practices. Employing womanist sociological theory and qualitative case study methods, the research recovers the WOB's contributions to the civil rights movement, emphasizing Black women's agency in shaping community institutions despite operating within male-dominated organizational structures. The study calls for further research on the WOB's organizational dynamics and its intersection with religious activism, underscoring the importance of including Black women's organizations in civil rights historiography to enrich understanding of Black freedom struggles.