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February 2 - February 3, 2019
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. —Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I swear to the Lord I still can’t see Why Democracy means Everybody but me. —Langston Hughes
CLAUDETTE COLVIN: I was about four years old the first time I ever saw what happened when you acted up to whites.
backhand slap across my face.
“Don’t you know you’re not supposed to touch them?”
Alabama during the 1940s and 1950s, Jim Crow controlled your life from womb to tomb.
Together, the whole system of racial segregation was known as “Jim Crow.”
Jim Crow’s job was not only to separate the races but to keep blacks poor.
WHO WAS JIM CROW? Between the 1830s and the 1950s, minstrel shows starred white performers who smeared burnt cork on their faces and ridiculed African-American life. Thomas “Daddy” Rice is credited with popularizing minstrel shows with the song “Jump Jim Crow,” which, he said, he’d heard from a black singer. After the sheet music sold widely, Jim Crow became a standard character in minstrel shows and then evolved into a term to represent the whole system of laws and customs that segregated black and white Americans.
But everything about riding a bus was humiliating for black passengers. All riders entered through the front door and dropped their dimes in the fare box near the driver. But, unless the entire white section was empty, blacks alone had to get back off the bus and reenter through the rear door. Sometimes the driver pulled away while black passengers were still standing outside.
On Monday, May 17, 1954, in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools.
them to try to make it happen. One such student was fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin, whose school had been studying black history
Around 3:30 on March 2, 1955, this slim, bespectacled high school junior boarded
settled back for a five-block ride that not only would change the course of her life but would spark the most important social movement in U.S. history.
Back then, while World War II was going on, whenever one of our hens would lay a bad egg we’d mark it with an “H”—for Hitler.
My Sunday school teacher said we had been cursed by one of Noah’s sons. I didn’t buy that at all. To me, God loved everyone. Why would He curse just us?
I told my pastor, Reverend H. H. Johnson, “I don’t want to serve a God that would have a cursed race.” He seemed proud of me for saying that.
Our school was a one-room white wooden building
One teacher taught all six elementary grades,
We could shop in white stores—they’d take our money all right—but they wouldn’t let us try anything on.
When Delphine and I needed shoes, my mom would trace the shape of our feet on a brown paper bag and we’d carry the outline to the store because we weren’t allowed to try the shoes on.
“Radical” simply means “grasping things at the root.” —Angela Davis
For some reason we seemed to hate ourselves. We students put down our hair texture and skin color all the time. Can you imagine getting up in the morning every day and looking in the mirror and saying to yourself, “I have bad hair”? Or “I’m black and nobody likes me”?
Miss Nesbitt had her face buried in an open book.
“Ahhhh . . . there’s no smell as good as the smell of a new book.”
The children involved in the landmark civil rights lawsuit Brown v. Board of Education, which challenged segregation in public schools, in Topeka, Kansas, 1953:
Linda Brown was a third-grade student who lived in Topeka, Kansas. She had to walk five long blocks to her school every day, even though she lived much closer to a school for whites only. Linda’s father sued the city government to let her go to the all-white school. The case was combined with several similar cases around the country, and it was argued all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, under the title Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled 9–0 that segregated schools did not give black students an equal chance for a good education. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote on behalf of the nine justices: “We conclude, unanimously, that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
I admired Harriet Tubman more than anyone else I read about—her courage, the pistol she wore, the fact that she never lost a passenger on the Underground Railroad.
That was the whole point of the segregation rules—it was all symbolic—blacks had to be behind whites.
she didn’t bawl me out, she just asked, “Are you all right, Claudette?”
Everyone prays for freedom. We’ve all been praying and praying. But you’re different—you want your answer the next morning. And I think you just brought the revolution to Montgomery.”
The world is a severe schoolmaster. —Phillis Wheatley, the first published African-American poet (1753?–1784)
But Mary Louise Smith, the second teenager with the nerve to face down Jim Crow on a city bus, was, like Claudette, branded “unfit” to serve as the public face of a mass bus protest.
Education may have been the way up, but transportation was the way out.
ON DECEMBER 2, 1955, tens of thousands of black Montgomery residents studied an unsigned leaflet bearing a brief typewritten message. It began: “Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the Claudette Colbert [sic] case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped.”
The “other Negro woman” arrested was Rosa Parks.
Claudette had lit the fuse to a powder keg of protest, but her rebellion had caught black Montgomery by surprise. Now, nine months later, Rosa Parks was embraced by a community ready for action. Claudette had given them the time to prepare. As Fred Gray later said, “I don’t mean to take anything away from Mrs. Parks, but Claudette gave all of us the moral courage to do what we did.”
CLAUDETTE: The first few months I hoped and prayed and pretended it wasn’t true, but it was.
It had only happened once with this man, and I was so uninformed that I wasn’t even sure that what we had done could get me pregnant.
When I heard on the news that it was Rosa Parks, I had several feelings: I was glad an adult had finally stood up to the system, but I felt left out. I was thinking, Hey, I did that months ago and everybody dropped me.
Dr. King delivered lines for which he would be remembered. “And we are determined here in Montgomery,” he said, his voice rising in intensity, “to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
“Standing beside love is always justice,” he continued. “Not only are we using the tools of persuasion—but we’ve got to use the tools of coercion.”
King, Jr., who urged boycotters to refrain from violence and seek charity toward whites in their hearts, inspired crowds with stirring speeches that often included ideas and philosophies from distant times and places. He talked about the power of love to change the world.
One MIA driver told the story of having come upon an elderly woman hobbling along the road. “Jump in, grandmother,” he said to her, pushing open the door. She waved him on. “I’m not walking for myself,” she said. “I’m walking for my children and my grandchildren.”
In 1896, in a famous court case known as Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state of Louisiana could racially segregate its buses, streetcars, and trains without violating the U.S. Constitution as long as the separate sections of compartments were “equal.” Separate but equal became the legal basis for segregation throughout the South. But the idea that the schools, parks, hotels, restaurants, and sections of buses and trains were “equal” was a sham.
The lawyers ruled out Rosa Parks. Her case was still being appealed, and they wanted the new federal lawsuit to be independent of any existing criminal case. Besides, Mrs. Parks had been arrested for disturbing the peace, not for breaking the segregation law.
Claudette Colvin had been on Fred Gray’s short list from the moment he conceived the suit.
It took real courage to be a plaintiff in that suit. It wasn’t easy. And Claudette was the youngest.”
My mother had always said, “If you can even talk to a white person without lowering your eyes you’re really doing something.”
