Former civil rights leader James Bevel was supposed to be remembered as a hero. But now, I say that title ought to go to his daughter.

That’s because she decided that it was less important to protect her father’s legacy as one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s lieutenants and more important to expose him as a perpetrator of sexual abuse.

It’s the kind of abuse that far too many black women feel compelled to suffer in silence. They do this because they’ve been taught to put their pain aside for the sake of protecting black men from another kind of pain; the kind of pain that comes from racists who use their weaknesses to further devalue them.

But silence was no longer working for Bevel’s daughter. She spilled her story to a jury.

And the jury heard her.

Last Friday in Loudoun County, Va., Bevel, now 71, was found guilty of having sex with his daughter, who now goes by the name of Aaralyn Mills, in the 1990s. She was 14 or 15 years old then and living with Bevel in a Leesburg townhouse.

The evidence that sealed Bevel’s fate, it seems, was a taped telephone conversation in which Mills, who is now 29, asked him why he had asked her to douche after a sexual encounter. He told her that he had no interest in getting her pregnant.

And to think that Bevel’s defense -- which is typical for incest perpetrators -- was that much of what he did, including rubbing his daughter’s chest, was part of his teachings on sex and marriage.

If he truly believes that a douche can prevent pregnancy, then it’s clear the only title he deserves is pervert, not teacher.

But let me get back to Mills.

Apparently, it took her around 11 years or so to file the incest charge against her father. According to the Washington Post, she testified that during a family reunion in 2004, several of Bevel’s daughters talked about having similar sexual encounters with him. They tried an intervention to get him to ‘fess up and get therapy, but he said no. Said he had done nothing wrong, and that he was only “teaching them.”

So Mills went to the police. And for that, I call her a hero.

I say she’s a hero because when she decided to press charges, she wasn’t just going up against her father. She was going up against a minister and a hero of the civil rights struggle -- and against a cultural mindset that, in ways both blatant and tacit, expects for black women to shelter black men at the cost of their own suffering.

This mindset, fueled by the idea of black men being an endangered species, puts black women in a position in which they are not only expected to bear the pain of sexual abuse, but the guilt of how they’ll hurt the race if they speak out.

This guilt-fed silence seems to be borne out in some studies.

Dr. Gail Wyatt of UCLA, for example, did a study of black women in which 40 percent of them reported instances of coerced or forced sexual contact as children and as teenagers. And it’s pretty well known that rape and sexual abuse is one of the most underreported crimes by black women.

It’s not hard to see why that’s the case. The chilling effects are everywhere.

Back in 1991, for example, when beauty contestant Desiree Washington was raped by then-heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, a number of black Baptist ministers worked overtime in the hairsplitting department. They harshly criticized her for going to his hotel room in the wee hours of the morning -- a move that wasn’t smart, but one that certainly didn’t excuse Tyson’s crossover into criminality. Washington was even offered $1 million to drop the charges.

And when black women aren’t being vilified for standing up to rape and sexual abuse by family members, or by black men with whom the black public is infatuated, many wind up being marginalized.

A recent example is the 35-year-old Haitian woman who was raped and sodomized, and forced to perform oral sex on her 12-year-old son, by a group of black youths in the Palm Beach, Florida public housing complex known as Dunbar Village.

You’d think the local NAACP would be passing out fliers emphasizing the need to protect women like her from violence. Instead, they passed out fliers describing her accused assailants as “endangered,” and “treasured,” and about to be victimized by a cruel justice system.

The woman is now all but invisible.

So, up against that cultural backdrop, I have to say that I’m glad to see that Mills, who said Bevel’s abuse drove her to alcoholism, decided to pursue those charges. He wouldn’t get help. So she decided to get justice.

I hope that, in the end, more sisters rail against the cultural to do what Mills did -- and decide that silence is no balm for the pain of sexual abuse.