Obama pays tribute to female civil rights leaders

US President Barack Obama paid tribute Saturday to black women for their role in helping shape American democracy. Obama said black women did the behind-the-scenes work of strategising boycotts and organising marches while others got the credit. He said they have been part of every great movement in American history, and that every American has benefited as a result. "Women were the foot soldiers. Women strategised boycotts. Women organised marches," Obama said in a keynote address to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's annual awards dinner. "Even if they weren't allowed to run the civil rights organisations on paper, behind the scenes they were the thinkers and the doers making things happen each and every day, doing the work that no one else wanted to do." "Women made the movement happen," he said. This year's dinner honored Fred Gray, a civil rights attorney who represented Rosa Parks and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Juanita Abernathy, a civil rights activist who helped lead the historic bus boycott in her home state of Alabama in the mid-1950s, according to AP.

--Shuvo--