Sunday, September 30, 2018

Civil Rights Events
Little Rock Nine
Elizabeth and Hazel



Who doesn’t know that face?
It’s the face of a white girl—she was only 15 years old, but everyone always thinks her older than that, and judges her accordingly—shouting at an equally familiar, iconic figure: a sole black school girl dressed immaculately in white, her mournful and frightened eyes hidden behind sunglasses, clutching her books and walking stoically away from Little Rock Central High School on Sept. 4, 1957—the date when, in many ways, desegregation first hit the South where it hurt.
It’s all in that white girl’s face, or so it has always appeared. In those raging eyes and clenched teeth is the hatred and contempt for an entire race, and the fury of a civilization fighting tenaciously to preserve its age-old, bigoted way of life. You know what the white girl’s saying, but you can’t print it all: commands to get out and go home —“home” being the place from which her forebears had been dragged in chains centuries earlier. That what that white girl was actually doing that day was more grabbing attention for herself than making any statement of deep conviction doesn’t really matter. Of anyone with that face, you simply assume the worst. You also assume she is beyond redemption, especially if, symbolically, she is more useful as is than further understood or evolved.
The black girl is Elizabeth Eckford of the Little Rock Nine. Moments earlier, she’d tried to enter Central High School, only to be repeatedly rebuffed by soldiers from the Arkansas National Guard placed there by Gov. Orval Faubus. A mob baying at her heels, Elizabeth is making her way, fearfully but determinately, toward what she hoped would be the relative safety of the bus stop a block away.
The face belongs to Hazel Bryan. Hazel, the daughter of a disabled war veteran, was largely apolitical, even on matters of race; while sharing the prejudices of her parents, she cared far more about dancing and dating. Being in that crowd that morning, making a ruckus, out-shouting all of her friends, was a way of getting noticed, and far more exciting than going into class. She’d thought nothing would come of what she’d done, and nothing ever would have had she not been captured in mid-epithet by Will Counts, a young photographer for the Arkansas Democrat (Margolick, “Lives” 1-2)
About Hazel Bryan, Vice Principal for Girls Elizabeth Huckaby recalled: she was "rather pleased with herself"—so much so that two days later, she was in front of Central again, telling reporters that no way would she attend an integrated Central High School. "Whites should have rights, too!" she barked at a television camera, as [her friends] Mary Ann and Sammie Dean looked on with approval. "Nigras aren't the only ones that have a right!" At first, Mrs. Huckaby couldn't place the screaming white girl in the picture, but she later remembered her from the previous winter: Hazel had played hooky to be with her boyfriend, and had failed some courses. The school notified her parents; her father said he did not want to beat her, but sometimes couldn't help himself. Hazel subsequently swallowed some poison, and was briefly hospitalized; Mrs. Huckaby sent a teacher to check on her. The story even made the papers.
Now Hazel was in them again, far more prominently, and the irate vice principal hauled her into her office. Hatred destroyed haters, the older woman said. Hazel only shrugged; "breath wasted," Mrs. Huckaby later wrote. And she was right: the following Monday, Hazel was at Central again, telling newsmen that had God really wanted whites and blacks to be together, "he would have made us all the same color." "The boys and girls pictured in the newspapers are hardly typical and certainly not our leading students," Mrs. Huckaby wrote her brother in New York. "The girl (with mouth open) behind the Negro girl is a badly disorganized child, with violence accepted in the home, and with a poor emotional history." Hazel's parents promptly pulled her out of Central and put her in a rural high school closer to her home. America had seen its last of Hazel Bryan for the next 40 years—except, that is, for the picture, which popped up whenever Little Rock in the 1950s, or the civil-rights movement or race hatred, was recalled (Margolick, “Lens” 6-7).
If anyone in the picture, which reverberated throughout the world that day and in history books ever since, should feel aggrieved, it’s of course Elizabeth Eckford. What Counts had captured both symbolized and anticipated the ordeals that Elizabeth, a girl of unusual sensitivity and intelligence, would face in her lifetime. First came the hellish year she and other black students endured inside Central, and then decades in which the trauma from that experience, plus prejudice, poverty, family tragedy, and her own demons kept her from realizing her extraordinary potential.
With enormous courage and resiliency, Elizabeth ultimately made a life for herself and has largely come to peace with her past. Paradoxically, it’s been Hazel, who has led a life of far greater financial and familial security, who now feels wounded and angry. Someone who once embodied racial intolerance feels victimized by another form of prejudice, in which good deeds go unappreciated, forgiveness cannot possibly be won, and public statements of contrition breed only resentment and ridicule.
Concerned over her sudden notoriety, only days after the infamous photograph appeared, Hazel’s parents transferred her from Central to a rural high school closer to home. She never spent a day in school with the Little Rock Nine and played no part in the horrors to which administrators, either lax or actually sympathetic to a small group of segregationist troublemakers, allowed them to be subjected. And she left her new school at 17, got married, and began a family.
But Hazel Bryan Massery was curious, and reflective. Tuning in her primitive Philco with the rabbit ears her father had bought her, she heard the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and saw those black protesters getting hot coffee and ketchup poured on their heads at segregated lunch counters or being routed by fire hoses and German shepherds. Such scenes brought home to her the reality of racial hatred, and of her own small but conspicuous contribution to it. One day, she realized, her children would learn that that snarling girl in their history books was their mother. She realized she had an account to settle.
Sometime in 1962 or 1963—no cameras recorded the scene, and she didn’t mark anything down—Hazel, sitting in the trailer in rural Little Rock in which she and her family now lived, picked up the Little Rock directory, and looked under “Eckford.” Then, without telling her husband or pastor or anyone else, she dialed the number. Between sobs, she told Elizabeth that she was that girl, and how sorry she was. Elizabeth was gracious. The conversation lasted a minute, if that. In the South, in the ’60s, how much more did a white girl and a black girl have to say to one another (Margolick, “Lives” 3-7)?
Works cited:
Margolick, David.  “The Many Lives of Hazel Bryan.”  Slate, October 11, 2011.  Web.  < http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2011/10/elizabeth_and_hazel_what_happened_to_the_two_girls_in_the_most_f.html.>
Margolick, David.  “Through a Lens, Darkly.  Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007.  Web.  <https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/09/littlerock200709.>



Sunday, September 23, 2018

Civil Rights Events
The Little Rock Nine
First Day
In its Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, issued May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation of America’s public schools was unconstitutional.
Until the court’s decision, many states across the nation had mandatory segregation laws, requiring African-American and white children to attend separate schools. Resistance to the ruling was so widespread that the court issued a second decision in 1955, known as Brown II, ordering school districts to integrate “with all deliberate speed.”
In response to the Brown decisions and pressure from the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Little Rock, Arkansas, school board adopted a plan for gradual integration of its schools.
The first institutions to integrate would be the high schools, beginning in September 1957. Among these was Little Rock Central High School, which opened in 1927 and was originally called Little Rock Senior High School.
Two pro-segregation groups formed to oppose the plan: the Capital Citizens Council and the Mother’s League of Central High School.
Despite the virulent opposition, nine students registered to be the first African Americans to attend Central High School. Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls had been recruited by Daisy Gaston Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP and co-publisher of the Arkansas State Press, an influential African-American newspaper.
Daisy Bates and others from the Arkansas NAACP carefully vetted the group of students and determined they all possessed the strength and determination to face the resistance they would encounter. In the weeks prior to the start of the new school year, the students participated in intensive counseling sessions guiding them on what to expect once classes began and how to respond to anticipated hostile situations (Little 1-2).
Years later in an interview Melba Pattillo said: Really, there were 116 students, and then it sort of whittled down to nine by people being frightened and people being threatened because by this time, the White Citizens' Council had nominated a committee of white people to go door to door, contact you through your doctor, contact you through whomever to get to you to tell you, oh, now, you know, you don't want to integrate. But eventually, to qualify - in the beginning, to qualify, you had to have good grades, and you had to have a record of not fighting, not talking back, a record of being a good student behavior-wise and academically (Davies 1).
The group soon became famous as the Little Rock Nine.
On September 2, 1957, Governor Orval Faubus announced that he would call in the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the African-American students’ entry to Central High, claiming this action was for the students’ own protection. In a televised address, Faubus insisted that violence and bloodshed might break out if black students were allowed to enter the school.
The Mother’s League held a sunrise service at the school on September 3 as a protest against integration. But that afternoon, federal judge Richard Davies issued a ruling that desegregation would continue as planned the next day.
The Little Rock Nine arrived for the first day of school at Central High on September 4, 1957. Eight arrived together, driven by Bates.
Elizabeth Eckford’s family, however, did not have a telephone, and Bates could not reach her to let her know of the carpool plans. Therefore, Eckford arrived alone (Little 1-2)
Interviewed years later, Ernest Green divulged the following.  
Daisy [Bates] called us all up and told us that we were going to go to school as a group … and to arrange to meet at her house and there were a number of ministers … that … I was not aware of [that] … had been involved in trying to lay a groundwork to have …  the integration of the schools reasonably accepted … by the people … in the city. So that morning, eight of us gathered at … Daisy's house, Elizabeth wasn't there. And …  we went by car to Central, to the corner of 14th Street and Park. Uh… it was about eight o'clock that morning. And we made an attempt to go though the troops and …  were denied  access to the front of the school. And … we went home after that. Elizabeth had missed the call … she didn't have a phone I think. And that morning she was at the other end, two blocks down 16th, where there was nobody, no supporters at least, none of the ministers, none of the people that …had helped us … provide transportation up to the school and that she was down there facing the mob by herself. None of us knew that until we got home after school.
We just made a cursory kind of attempt to, to enter school that morning. Elizabeth ... attempted to go through the guards and had the mobs behind her.  So that was the first day… at Central (Eyes 1-2)  
The Arkansas National Guard, under orders of Governor Faubus, prevented any of the Little Rock Nine from entering the doors of Central High. One of the most enduring images from this day is a photograph of Eckford, alone with a notebook in her hand, stoically approaching the school as a crowd of hostile and screaming white students and adults surround her.
Eckford later recalled that one of the women spat on her. The image was printed and broadcast widely, bringing the Little Rock controversy to national and international attention (Little 1-2).
Elizabeth Eckford
As southern states went 50 years ago, Arkansas was racially open-minded. Its governor in 1957, Orval Faubus, had been elected three years earlier as a moderate. Little Rock (population 100,000 at the time) was considered one of the most progressive cities in the region. Five days after the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 ruling ordering school integration, the local school board pledged to comply. But beneath the city's tolerant façade, Jim Crow was alive and well. 
For all its professed good intentions, the school board moved tentatively and begrudgingly, taking three years to enroll only a token number of blacks in one school: Little Rock Central High School, the most prestigious in the state. Administrators looked for black students strong enough to survive the ordeal but placid enough not to make trouble. The superintendent told Elizabeth she'd have to be like Jackie Robinson, turning the other cheek, never talking or fighting back. Improbably—mistakenly, really—sensitive, brooding Elizabeth somehow made the cut. And even more improbably, her worrywart mother agreed to let her go. There'd be only eight others, in a student population of roughly 2,000.
Among Little Rock's black community, the Eckfords were known for their intelligence and seriousness. They thought of themselves as special—as "something on a stick," Elizabeth's mother once said. The patriarch was Elizabeth's grandfather Oscar Eckford Sr., a large and formidable man—his wife, and even some white people, used "Mr." when addressing him—who ran a small grocery store. From him, Elizabeth always understood she would go to college, even though it was never clear how they'd pay. Elizabeth's father, Oscar Jr., worked nights at the train station and weekends cleaning white peoples' houses; her mother, Birdie, did the laundry at the Arkansas School for the Blind and Deaf Negro, five blocks from the modest home the Eckfords bought in 1949 and moved into on Elizabeth's eighth birthday, later that year. Birdie Eckford's job allowed her to look out for her badly handicapped son, one of her six children, who went to school there. Elizabeth's grandfather was the only man she knew who spoke to white people without fear, but her mother had her Uncle Tom ways. "I have never had trouble with white people," she once said. "I always gave in, if necessary." The Eckfords had no phone but did have a television, the better to keep the children in Birdie's sights. "The Queen of No," Elizabeth still calls her mother, 15 years after her death.
A 10th grader at the segregated Horace Mann High School in the spring of 1957, Elizabeth read habitually and got good grades. She especially loved history. She was essentially a loner, prone to sitting and daydreaming on the big rock in her backyard for hours at a time, thinking that wherever she was, she didn't quite belong. No one had yet diagnosed her as depressed, but there was a history of the condition in her family.
Inspired by the example of Thurgood Marshall, who'd just argued the Brown case before the Supreme Court, she wanted to become a lawyer. She preferred Central not out of some burning desire to mix with whites, but because it offered courses that Horace Mann didn't. While underfunded, Little Rock's black schools had a distinguished tradition, teaching black pride before the term existed and black history before there were any texts. So whatever benefits Central conferred on its first black students would come at a cost: the loss of friends, community, and teachers who cared, as well as the chance to participate in extracurricular activities, since the school board, fearing white outrage over racial mixing, had barred the nine black students from them.
… the director of the Arkansas chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., Daisy Bates, instructed the black parents to bring their children to her home the following morning. From there, the students, accompanied by a few ministers—white and black—would proceed to Central as a group. But the Eckfords didn't have a phone, so Bates never notified them.
Elizabeth left the house and, four blocks away, boarded the bus heading downtown.
Fifteen minutes later, at the corner of 12th and Park Avenue, two blocks from Central, she hopped off. She'd often walked by Central—it was on the way to her grandfather's store—and instantly she sensed something was awry: more parked cars than usual, the murmur of a crowd. Then the jeeps and half-tracks came into view, along with the soldiers ringing the school. She saw some white children pass quietly through the line, a sign that everything was al right. But the first two soldiers she approached rebuffed her. A mob of several hundred protesters that had gathered across the street quickly caught sight of her. "They're coming!" someone shouted. "The niggers are coming!" Elizabeth walked down the street a bit, then approached a different group of soldiers. This time they closed ranks and crossed rifles. "Don't let her in!" someone shouted.
Elizabeth's knees started to shake. She walked toward Central's main entrance and tried a third time; again, the soldiers blocked her way, but this time told her to cross the street. Now the crowd fell in behind her, shouting: "Lynch her! Lynch her!" "No nigger bitch is going to get in our school! Get out of here!" "Go back to where you came from!" Looking for a friendly face, she turned to an old woman, who spat on her. Before long, some 250 whites were at her heels. She knew she couldn't go back the way she'd come. But if she could only get to the bus stop a block ahead, she thought, she would be safe. She wanted to run, but thought she might fall down. Recording it all was 26-year-old Will Counts of the Arkansas Democrat. He felt sorry for Elizabeth, but he had a job to do; he just hoped he had enough film. "Lynch her!" someone shouted. "Send that nigger back to the jungle!"
One white girl in the throng stood out: she was "screaming, just hysterical," as Benjamin Fine of The New York Times later put it. It was Hazel Bryan. Unlike many in the crowd, rednecks from the sticks, Hazel was a student at Central—like Elizabeth, about to begin her junior year. Her father was a disabled vet; her mother made light bulbs for Westinghouse. Hazel's dress was fashionable and a bit too tight, as if to show off her figure. Her good looks brought her lots of boys and a certain license, and she'd always been a bit of a performer. Her racial attitudes mirrored her parents': her father would not let black clerks wait on him, for instance, and when banks started hiring black tellers, he found himself another line.
Marching alongside Hazel, chanting "Two, four, six, eight—we don't want to integrate!" were two friends, Mary Ann Burleson and Sammie Dean Parker. Sammie Dean, immediately to Hazel's right in the picture and wearing a dark dress, was one of the ringleaders of the segregationist students; Mary Ann, the girl carrying the purse at the far left, was largely along for the ride. Each of them was having herself a grand old time. But to Hazel—her friends called her "Kitty"—this was serious business, and her mood, and look, were dark. An alien federal government was foisting blacks into her secure, comfortable schoolgirl world, and she was outraged. While Mary Ann stared ahead amiably and Sammie Dean Parker turned momentarily toward her father, thereby protecting herself from ignominy and posterity, Hazel, her eyes narrowed, her brow furrowed, her teeth clenched as if about to bite, shrieked: "Go home, nigger! Go back to Africa!" Click. Will Counts had his picture.
"This little girl, this tender little thing, walking with this whole mob baying at her like a pack of wolves" was how Benjamin Fine later described the scene. Once she reached the bus stop, Elizabeth sat herself down at the edge of the empty bench, as if not wanting to take up too much space. "Drag her over to this tree!" someone shouted. A small group of reporters—Jerry Dhonau and Ray Moseley of the Arkansas Gazette, Paul Welch of Life—formed an informal protective cordon around her; it was all that they, as professionals, felt they could do. But Fine sat himself next to Elizabeth and, at a time and place in which whites simply didn't do such things, put his arm around her, then lifted her chin. "Don't let them see you cry," he said. The move inflamed the crowd, made Fine a target for the rest of his stay in Little Rock, and probably hastened his departure from the paper. Years later, he was asked if he'd stepped beyond his assigned role. "A reporter has to be a human being," he replied.
By now, the other eight black students had been rebuffed en masse, and dispersed. One of them, Terrence Roberts, spotted Elizabeth, and offered to walk her home. But he would have accompanied her only part of the way, and she worried what could happen once he'd left her. Daisy Bates's husband also offered assistance, pulling back his jacket to show Elizabeth the gun he was wearing beneath his belt. But her mother would never have approved of her going off with a strange man. Then a white woman named Grace Lorch, wife of a professor at the local black college, tried to help, taking Elizabeth with her to the drugstore across the street to call for a cab. When they reached it, the owner locked the door in their faces. After 35 minutes the bus finally came and, through a barrage of abuse, the two boarded. (The Lorches were old radicals—Grace's husband, Lee, had lost his job at City College in New York for agitating to integrate Stuyvesant Town, the massive housing complex on New York's East Side—and one Arkansas official later charged that Grace's "Communist masters" had directed her to protect Elizabeth that day.) As for Elizabeth, she hadn't wanted Grace Lorch's help—her admonishments to the crowd (she told them that one day they'd all be ashamed of themselves) had only riled it up more—and she was relieved when, after a brief time, Lorch got off the bus.
There are times, as Elizabeth puts it, when you just know you need your mama. She went directly to the basement of her mother's school, where the laundry was located. Elizabeth found her looking out the window; simply from her posture, she could tell she'd been praying. When her mother turned, she could see she'd been crying too. Elizabeth wanted to say she was all right, but neither of them could speak. Instead, they embraced, then headed home. Meantime, Elizabeth's father had gone looking for her, carrying a .45-caliber revolver along with the only three bullets he could find.
… the Nine gathered at the Bates home. It was the first time Elizabeth had ever met Daisy Bates. Segregationists, reporters, and Faubus were to accuse her of sending Elizabeth into the mob deliberately, to garner sympathetic publicity. Now Elizabeth let her have it, too. "Why did you forget me?" she asked, with what Bates, who died in 1999, later called "cold hatred in her eyes." To this day, Elizabeth believes that Bates, now lionized by everyone (a major street near Central High School has been named for her), saw the black students as little more than foot soldiers in a cause, and left them woefully unprepared for their ordeal (Margolick 1-3).
Works cited:
Davies, Dave, interviewer.  “'They Didn't Want Me There': Remembering The Terror Of School Integration.”  NPR: Fresh Air, January 15, 2018.  Web.  <https://www.npr.org/2018/01/15/577371750/they-didn-t-want-me-there-remembering-the-terror-of-school-integration.>
“Eyes on the Prize Interview of Earnest Green. “  Washington University Digital Gateway Texts, August 26, 1979.  Web.  < <http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb/gre0015.0329.043ernestgreen.html.>
Margolick, David.  “Through a Lens, Darkly.  Vanity Fair.  September 24, 2007.  Web.  <https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/09/littlerock200709.>


Sunday, September 16, 2018

Civil Rights Events
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Victory
 
On December 5 approximately 40,000 African-American bus riders—the majority of the city’s bus riders—boycotted city transportation.  The Montgomery Improvement Association [MIA] had hoped for a 50 percent support rate among African Americans. To their surprise and delight, 99 percent of the city's African Americans refused to ride the buses. People walked to work or rode their bikes, and carpools were established to help the elderly.  The demands that the MIA had announced were simple: Black passengers should be treated with courtesy. Seating should be allotted on a first-come-first-serve basis, with white passengers sitting from front to back and black passengers sitting from back to front. And African American drivers should drive routes that primarily serviced African Americans (King 1-3).
 
At a mass meeting that evening, MIA leaders decided to continue the boycott. Thousands walked or found other means of travel for work, school and shopping, and a system of carpools was created.  The city’s African-American taxi drivers charged only 10 cents for African-American riders – the same price they paid to ride the bus.  Drivers and passengers were often ticketed or arrested, and many boycott supporters were threatened with the loss of their jobs and harassed by local government officials (Rosa 1).
 
Montgomery officials stopped at nothing in attempting to sabotage the boycott. King and Abernathy were arrested. Violence began during the action and continued after its conclusion. ... The bus company suffered thousands of dollars in lost revenue.  … The Montgomery bus boycott triggered a firestorm in the South. Across the region, blacks resisted "moving to the back of the bus." Similar actions flared up in other cities (King 3).
 
Earlier in the year the Federal Interstate Commerce Commission had banned segregation on interstate trains and buses. On February 1, 1956, the MIA filed suit in the U.S. District Court challenging the constitutionality of bus segregation in Montgomery.  The suit -- Browder v. Gayle -- named four Black women including Claudette Colvin but not Rosa Parks as the plaintiffs.
 
Later that month, over 100 protestors, including Dr. King, were arrested for “hindering” a bus (Rosa 1-2).
 
On June 5, 1956, a Montgomery federal court ruled that any law requiring racially segregated seating on buses violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That amendment, adopted in 1868 following the U.S. Civil War, guarantees all citizens—regardless of race—equal rights and equal protection under state and federal laws.
 
The city appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court’s decision on December 20, 1956. Montgomery’s buses were integrated on December 21, 1956, and the boycott ended. It had lasted 381 days.
 
Integration, however, met with significant resistance and even violence. While the buses themselves were integrated, Montgomery maintained segregated bus stops. Snipers began firing into buses, and one shooter shattered both legs of a pregnant African-American passenger.
 
In January 1957, four black churches and the homes of prominent black leaders were bombed; a bomb at King’s house was defused. On January 30, 1957, the Montgomery police arrested seven bombers; all were members of the Ku Klux Klan … The arrests largely brought an end to the busing-related violence.
 
The Montgomery Bus Boycott victory is viewed by many today as a feel-good story.  Indeed the boycott was significant on several fronts. First, it is widely regarded as the earliest mass protest on behalf of civil rights in the United States, setting the stage for additional large-scale actions outside the court system to bring about fair treatment for African Americans.
 
Second, in his leadership of the MIA, Martin Luther King emerged as a prominent national leader of the civil rights movement while also solidifying his commitment to nonviolent resistance. King’s approach remained a hallmark of the civil rights movement throughout the 1960s.
 
Shortly after the boycott’s end, he helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a highly influential civil rights organization that worked to end segregation throughout the South. The SCLC was instrumental in the civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, and the March on Washington in August of that same year, during which King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
 
The boycott also brought national and international attention to the civil rights struggles occurring in the United States, as more than 100 reporters visited Montgomery during the boycott to profile the effort and its leaders (Montgomery 3-6).
 
Participants in the boycott paid a substantial economic and psychological price.  Rosa Parks was red-baited and received death threats and hate mail for years in Montgomery and in Detroit for her movement work. Though the righteousness of her actions may seem self-evident today, at the time, those who challenged segregation — like those who challenge racial injustice today — were often treated as unstable, unruly and potentially dangerous by many white people and some black people. Her writings show how she struggled with feeling isolated and crazy, before and even during the boycott. In one piece of writing, she explained how she felt “completely alone and desolate as if I was descending in a black and bottomless chasm.”
 
Despite the boycott’s successful end, the Parks family still faced death threats and could not find steady work. In August 1957, they left Montgomery for Detroit, where her brother and cousins lived — “the promised land that wasn’t,” as she called it. There, in Detroit, she remained active in various movements for racial, social, criminal and global justice in the decades to come. Mountains of fliers, programs, letters, mailings, meeting agendas and conference programs document the span of her political activism there — though very few writings have survived in her personal papers from these later years.
 
The few that remain tell us that her radicalism never weakened. “Freedom fighters never retire,” she noted in a testimonial for a fellow activist. As she had for decades, Parks drew sustenance from the militancy and spirit of young people, working in and alongside the growing Black Power movement. Understanding the impact that years of activism with limited results can have on a person, she continued calling for rapid and radical change. In a 1973 letter posted at the Afro-American Museum in Detroit, she noted the impact that years of white violence and intransigence had on the younger generation:
 
The attempt to solve our racial problems nonviolently was discredited in the eyes of many by the hard core segregationists who met peaceful demonstrations with countless acts of violence and bloodshed. …
 
 Writing this after what many mark as the successful end of the modern civil rights movement, Parks clearly believed that the struggle was not over. In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, she continued to press for change in the criminal justice system, in school and housing inequality, in jobs and welfare policy and in foreign policy. She worked in U.S. Rep. John Conyers’s office and spoke out against Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court, dismayed by his poor record on civil rights. Sometime in the 1990s, an older Parks doodled on a paper bag (preserved in the collection): “The Struggle Continues…. The Struggle Continues…. The Struggle Continues” (Theoharis 3-4).
 
 
Works cited:
 
“King, Abernathy, Boycott, and the SCLC.”  U.S. History Online Textbook.  Web.  <http://www.ushistory.org/us/54b.asp.>
 
Montgomery Bus Boycott.”  History.  Web.  <https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/montgomery-bus-boycott.>
 
“Rosa Parks and The Montgomery Bus Boycott.”  Wesleyan University.  Web.  < http://www.wesleyan.edu/mlk/posters/rosaparks.html.>
 
Theoharis, Jeanne.  “How history got the Rosa Parks story wrong.”  The Washington Post.  December 1, 2015.  Web.  <https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/01/how-history-got-the-rosa-parks-story-wrong/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.db17cb4465a5.>


Sunday, September 9, 2018

Civil Rights Events
Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Boycott Begins
 
Arrested December 1, 1955, for violating the Montgomery city ordinance that required black riders of city busses to give up their seats to whites when the section of seats reserved for whites was full, Rosa Parks was fined $10, plus $4 in court fees.  She immediately called E. D. Nixon, who, assisted by activist lawyers Clifford and Virginia Durr, had her released on bail. 
 
Clifford Durr wanted to get the case dismissed, but E.D. Nixon saw the opportunity to use Mrs. Parks’ case as an ideal middle class, respectable plaintiff to challenge segregation. Raymond Parks didn’t agree. After much debate, she and Raymond made the difficult, courageous choice knowing they’d probably lose everything as a result (Schmitz 7).
 
Mrs. Parks was “a faithful member of St. Paul AME Church in Montgomery.  She taught Sunday school during the 9:30 morning hour and helped prepare the Lord’s Supper during the 10:30 hour. 
 
According to James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, what set Parks apart was that she had an almost “biblical quality.” “There was,” he recalled, “a strange religious glow about Rosa — a kind of humming Christian light” (Taylor 1).
 
Rosa and Raymond, however, were not middle class blacks.  We have this myth that she's middle-class. They're not middle class. They're living in the Cleveland Courts projects when she makes her bus stand. Their income is cut in half. … She loses her job; her husband loses his job. They never find steady work in Montgomery ever again.  In fact, it takes 11 years for the Parks to post an annual income equal to what they're making in 1955. They will move to Detroit in 1957 because things are so tough in Montgomery (NPR 2).
 
Questioned about Mrs. Parks’s selection  to be the public face in the black citizens’ challenge to the city ordinance,  Claudette Colvin said that  the NAACP and all the other black organizations felt Parks would be a good icon because "she was an adult. They didn't think teenagers would be reliable."
 
She also says Parks had the right hair and the right look.
 
"Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle class," says Colvin. "She fit that profile."
 
After Colvin's arrest, she found herself shunned by parts of her community. She experienced various difficulties and became pregnant. Civil rights leaders felt she was an inappropriate symbol for a test case (Adler 1).
 
Released from jail, Mrs. Parks called Fred Gray, who she had had lunch with that day, and asked him to represent her. Mr. Gray called Jo Ann Robinson, a leader of The Women’s Political Council, a group of African American women who had been calling for a bus boycott. Ms. Robinson called E.D. Nixon, and they agreed to call a bus boycott for Monday, the day of Mrs. Parks’ arraignment. Along with another staff member and two students, she [Robinson] used the mimeograph machine overnight at Alabama State College to print more than 15,000 fliers. Can you imagine doing that many fliers today, let alone on 1955 technology? This was especially risky since the university was funded by the segregationist state legislature. The Women’s Political Council members met her at dawn and fanned the community with the fliers Friday morning (Schmitz 8).  The fliers read: “Don’t ride the bus to work, town, to school, or any place Monday, December 5. . . . Come to a mass meeting, Monday at 7:00 P.M. at the Holt Street Baptist Church for further instruction” (Montgomery 1).
 
At 6 AM, E.D. Nixon phoned Rev. Ralph Abernathy of First Baptist Church and suggested pulling the pastors together that night for a meeting. Rev. Abernathy suggested that he call the newest pastor in town Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church because he had no set alliances, enemies, and had little to lose if things didn’t work out. Dr. King was reluctant at first, but eventually agreed with prodding from Rev. Abernathy. About 50 pastors met Friday night with Mrs. Parks and Ms. Robinson. They agreed to support the boycott from their pulpits on Sunday and announce a mass meeting for Monday night.
 
On Saturday, Mrs. Parks went to Alabama State College where she was conducting a leadership training for the NAACP. She was discouraged when only 5 students attended. She was no longer discouraged on Monday, when she and other leaders marveled at the empty buses and the streets filled with African American citizens walking to school and work. The boycott was on.
 
Leaders gathered Monday afternoon before the mass meeting to plan an organization to sustain the boycott effort, The Montgomery Improvement Association. Rufus Lewis was a business man and rival of E.D. Nixon’s. He did not want Nixon to lead the new organization, so he nominated his pastor, Dr. King, to lead it, arguing that he was a neutral choice (and hoping he could pull strings from behind). That is how Dr. King was drafted into movement leadership. That night, 15,000 people attended a mass meeting and new 26 year old MIA President Dr. King’s prophetic oratory inspired them to commit to the boycott (Schmitz 9-10).
 
“There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” King explained … “There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time” (Taylor 2).
 
Mrs. Parks never spoke or was consulted on strategy. Sexism and a desire to make her sound more sympathetic converted the experienced activist into a “tired seamstress” (Schmitz 10).
 
 
Works cited:
 
Adler, Margot.  “Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin.”  NPR.  March 15, 2009.  Web.  < https://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719889/before-rosa-parks-there-was-claudette-colvin.>
 
 
“No Meekness Here: Meet Rosa Parks, 'Lifelong Freedom Fighter'.”  NPR Books.  Web.  < https://www.npr.org/2015/11/29/457627426/understanding-rosa-parks-as-a-life-long-freedom-fighter.>
 
Schmitz, Paul.  “How Change Happens: The Real Story of Mrs. Rosa Parks & The Montgomery Bus Boycott.”  HUFFPOST.  Web.  <https://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-schmitz/how-change-happens-the-re_b_6237544.html.>
 
Taylor, Justin.  “5 Myths about Rosa Parks, the woman who had almost a ‘biblical quality’.”  The Washington Post.  December 1, 2015.  Web.  <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/12/01/5-myths-about-rosa-parks-the-woman-who-had-almost-a-biblical-quality/?utm_term=.9b89a31dae83.>
 


Sunday, September 2, 2018

Civil Rights Events
Montgomery Bus Boycott 
Rosa Parks
 
There had been numerous instances of Blacks refusing to obey the segregation laws on public transportation [in Montgomery, Alabama] throughout the 1940s. The Women’s Political Council (WPC) was formed in 1949, after Jo Ann Gibson was made to leave an almost empty bus for refusing to move to the back . By 1955, the WPC had members in every school, and in federal, state and local jobs, and according to Gibson, its President, “we knew that in a matter of hours, we could corral the whole city”. The WPC had met with the mayor of Montgomery in May of 1954, and followed it up in writing, asking for changes to the bus segregation practices and informing him that if conditions on the busses did not change, citizens would stage a boycott. She stated that with three-fourths of the riders being African American, the busses would not be able to function without their patronage. When conditions did not change, the WPC waited for the right event to serve as the catalyst for the boycott. Three opportunities arose in 1955 when, at different times, a woman was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white person (Rosa 1).
 
You have read about Claudette Colvin’s experience March 2, 1955.
 
On October 21, 1955, 18 year-old Mary Louise Smith, another member of Rosa Parks’s Youth Council, refused to move to the back of the bus and was arrested. Like Claudette Colvin, she, too, was considered by the WPC too poor and too young to be presented as a responsible, mature, sympathetic victim.
 
Then came Rosa Parks.  Before we read an account of her experience, we need to know the following:
 
Though Parks later wrote an autobiography, her notes from decades earlier give a more personal sense of her thoughts. In numerous accounts, she highlighted the difficulty of navigating a segregated society and the immense pressure put on black people not to dissent. She wrote that it took a “major mental acrobatic feat” to survive as a black person in the United States. Highlighting that it was “not easy to remain rational and normal mentally in such a setting,” she refused to normalize the ability to function under American racism.
 
For her, the frustration began in childhood, when even her beloved grandmother worried about her “talking biggety to white folks.” She recounts how her grandmother grew angry when a young Rosa recounted picking up a brick to challenge a white bully. Rosa told her grandmother: “I would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated and not be allowed to say ‘I don’t like it.’ ”
 
Parks viewed the power of speaking back in the face of racism and oppression as fundamental — and saw that denying that right was key to the functioning of white power. Parks’s “determination never to accept it, even if it must be endured,” led her to “search for a way of working for freedom and first class citizenship.”
 
Parks carried that determination into adulthood, though she made clear the impossible mental state it required. She lyrically described the difficulty of being a rebel, the ways black children were “conditioned early to learn their places,” and the toll it took on her personally: “There is just so much hurt, disappointment and oppression one can take…. The line between reason and madness grows thinner.”
 
In the longest piece of the collection, an 11-page document describing a near-rape incident, Parks decisively uses the power of speaking back. When the document became public in 2011, there was controversy around its release and questions about whether it was a work of fiction. But it does not appear that Parks wrote fiction, and details of the story correspond to Parks’s life. Like the narrator of the story, Parks was doing domestic work during the Scottsboro trial, during her late teens in 1931. It’s written in the first person, though the narrator is unnamed.
 
In the account, a young Rosa is threatened with assault by a white neighbor of her employer, who was let into the house by a black worker, “Sam.” The heavy-set white man she aptly called “Mr. Charlie” (a term black people of the era used for white people and their arbitrary power) gets a drink, puts his hand on her waist, and attempts to make a move on her.
 
Furious and terrified, she resolved to resist: “I was ready and willing to die, but give any consent, never, never, never.” When Mr. Charlie said he’d gotten permission from Sam to be with her, she replied that Sam didn’t own her, that she hated the both of them, and that nothing Mr. Charlie could do would get her consent. “If he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body,” Parks wrote, “he was welcome but he would have to kill me first.”
 
 
After years of activism, Parks had reached her breaking point on the bus that December evening: “I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn’t take it any more.” Her writings reveal the burden that this decade of political activism — which, with a small cadre of other Montgomery NAACP members, had produced little change — had been on her spirit. Describing the “dark closet of my mind,” she wrote about the loneliness of being a rebel: “I am nothing. I belong nowhere.”
 
Repeatedly in her writings, Parks underscored the difficulties in mobilizing in the years before her bus protest: “People blamed [the] NAACP for not winning cases when they did not support it and give strength enough.” She found it demoralizing, if understandable, that in the decade before the boycott, “the masses seemed not to put forth too much effort to struggle against the status quo,” noting how those who challenged the racial order like she did were labeled “radicals, sore heads, agitators, trouble makers” (Theoharris 2-4).
 
The account.
 
Shortly after 5 p.m., on a cool Alabama evening 60 years ago Tuesday, a 42-year-old woman clocked out from her job as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair Department Store. Rosa Parks walked westward along Montgomery Street to Court Square to board the Cleveland Avenue bus to make the five-mile, 15-minute trek back to her apartment at Cleveland Courts to cook supper for her husband, Raymond.
 
Encountering a standing-room-only bus and having been on her feet all day operating a huge steam press, Parks decided to cross the street and do some Christmas shopping at Lee’s Cut Rate Drug while waiting for a less crowded bus. Around 6 p.m., as she boarded bus number 2857 at the corner of Montgomery and Moulton streets, Parks was about to change the course of the 20th century.
 
Montgomery municipal buses each had 36 seats. The first 10 were reserved for whites only. The last 10 seats were theoretically reserved for blacks. The middle 16 seats were first-come-first-serve, with the bus driver retaining the authority to rearrange seats so that whites could be given priority.
 
Parks was sitting in an aisle seat on the front row of this middle section. To her left, across the aisle, were two black women. To her right, in the window seat, was a black man.
 
A few minutes later, when the bus reached the third stop in front of the Empire Theater, several white passengers boarded, and driver James E. Blake (1912–2002) noticed a white man standing near the front. He called out for the four black passengers in Parks’s row to move to the back, where they would have to stand, as all of the seats were now taken.
 
They did not respond. Blake got out of his seat and instructed the four to move, saying, “Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.” Three of the black passengers reluctantly proceeded to go and stand in the back of the bus. Parks, however, refused to get up, sliding from the aisle seat to the window seat, which would have allowed for the white passenger to sit in any of the three seats in her row.
 
The bus driver asked: “Are you going to stand up?” Parks looked him in the eye and responded with a quiet but resolute, “No.” She explained that she had gotten on board first, that she paid the same fare and that she wasn’t sitting in the white section.
 
She didn’t think it was fair that she had to stand for someone else to sit who arrived after her and that she was not violating the city ordinance. (She didn’t complain how nonchivalrous it was that a supposed gentleman would make a woman stand so he could sit, or how irrational it was that he wouldn’t even want to sit in the same row with her.)
 
“Well,” Blake responded, “I’m going to have you arrested.” Parks gave him the permission he did not request: “You may do that.”
 
Blake called his supervisor, who advised him that after warning the passenger he had to exercise his power and put Parks off the bus. He then radioed the police, who sent officers F.B. Day and D.W. Mixon.
 
As they boarded the bus while several passengers exited through the rear, the officers debriefed Blake and then peacefully arrested Parks. “Why do you all push us around?” she asked the tired beat cops. Officer Day responded, “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.” They drove her in their squad car to the city jail, booked her and held her in a dank and musty cell.
 
Parks’s boss and friend, NAACP president E.D. Nixon, bailed her out that evening. …
 
If Rosa Parks had been paying attention, she never would have gotten on the bus driven by the tall, blond, 43-year-old Blake. He had a reputation for spitting his tobacco juice, using derogatory language toward blacks (and black women in particular) and making black passengers pay their fare in the front of the bus but reenter in the rear, only to pull away before they could get back on.
 
A dozen years earlier — in November 1943 — Blake had tried to make Parks exit and reenter his bus through the crowded rear entrance after she had already boarded his bus in the front. Parks refused, so Blake grabbed her sleeve to push her off the bus. She intentionally dropped her purse and sat down in the white section to retrieve it. As she looked at Blake, she warned him: “I will get off…. You better not hit me.”
 
For the next 12 years, Parks intentionally avoided riding on Blake’s bus, walking whenever she could, despite her chronic bursitis. But on Dec. 1, 1955, she absentmindedly boarded without noting that she was once again entering a bus driven by Blake. It proved to be a serendipitous mistake.
 
Parks sought to set the record straight: “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I was at the end of a working day…. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” She later said she couldn’t have lived with herself if she had given in and stood up (Taylor, 2-5).
 
 
Works cited:
 
“Rosa Parks and The Montgomery Bus Boycott.”  Wesleyan University.  Web.  < http://www.wesleyan.edu/mlk/posters/rosaparks.html.>
 
Taylor, Justin.  “5 Myths about Rosa Parks, the woman who had almost a ‘biblical quality’.”  The Washington Post.  December 1, 2015.  Web.  <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/12/01/5-myths-about-rosa-parks-the-woman-who-had-almost-a-biblical-quality/?utm_term=.9b89a31dae83.>
 
Theoharis, Jeanne.  “How history got the Rosa Parks story wrong.”  The Washington Post.  December 1, 2015.  Web.  <https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/01/how-history-got-the-rosa-parks-story-wrong/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.db17cb4465a5.>