The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History

by Sharon McMahon

Barbara rallied the students to go on strike with her until they got what they wanted, which was a new school building. The students decided to contact the NAACP for help with their efforts. The NAACP later said that the students were so intent and they handled themselves so well that they would help if the students’ parents were also on board. But, the organization told them, the strike couldn’t be just about better facilities. It needed to be about equality and integration. A month later, the NAACP filed a lawsuit.[16]

School closures didn’t just affect school-age children, they affected the entire family. Some parents had to enroll their children in the state welfare system so they could be placed with foster families in other parts of the state to be able to attend school. Some children lived with teachers like Virginia Randolph. Several women began grassroots learning centers in homes and churches. They wouldn’t make them full-fledged schools, because they feared that if they created private schools, it would impact their lawsuit.

The civil rights movement was about far more than integrating buses. It was about far more than voting rights. It was about far more than Jim Crow laws. It was also about violence against Black women at the hands of white men.

When Recy staggered into her house, bruised and broken, she told her husband and the sheriff what had happened to her. The sheriff knew immediately who was to blame, as there was only one vehicle in the tiny town of Abbeville, Alabama, that matched the description. The day after the rape, Recy Taylor’s house was firebombed. How dare she report us, the rapists thought. She needs to shut up. Two all-white grand juries refused to charge any of the six men with a crime.

You’d be mistaken if you believe that Black women did not speak up. You’d be mistaken if you thought that Black women did not risk their personal safety to work for justice. You’d be mistaken if you thought these facts were never going to see the light of day again, swept under the rug of today’s moral panic, the moral panic of learning about the real, true, beautiful, infuriating, horrific, meaningful history of the United States and calling it by some other boogeyman name like Critical Race Theory (it’s not) or labeling it a divisive concept (it’s only divisive if lies and cover-ups benefit you in some way).

What is done in darkness must come to light. Seeds of resistance, seeds of momentum, were planted not just in the hearts of men and women all over the South, they were planted in the hearts of their children and their relatives.

“No,” Rosa said. “I got on first and paid the same fare, and it isn’t right for me to have to stand so someone else who got on later could sit down.” “I’m going to have you arrested,” Blake seethed. “You may do that,” she told him.[4] Everything Rosa had done and seen had led to this moment. It wasn’t that she was tired from Christmas shopping or a long day at work. It was decades of organizing, of investigating rapes, of baking cookies to sell for someone’s legal defense. It was witnessing violence against people she knew and loved, it was a lifetime of feeling threatened and humiliated. Nothing had been wasted. Not one moment, not one sacrifice. Everything she lived through was now being used.

He said, “Apparently indefatigable, she, perhaps more than any other person, was involved in every level of protest.”[5] Every level of protest. And few people even know her name.

Jo Ann attended Claudette Colvin’s trial, and when Rosa Parks was arrested, Jo Ann stayed up all night using the mimeograph machines at Alabama State to make thirty-five thousands leaflets.[8]

The following day, Monday, December 5, 1955, as many Black Montgomerians as were able would not take the bus. They would instead walk, ride bikes, call in sick, and organize carpools. They agreed to reconvene Monday evening after a one-day boycott to see how it went and if they should continue. Between thirty and fifty thousand Black residents said “enough is enough,” and refused to step foot on the bus that day.

But still, she refused to quit.

At a ball game, Claudette Colvin had met a man who she estimated to be at least ten years older than her. He took an interest in her, encouraged her passion for civil rights and societal change, and for once, made her feel like she wasn’t being stupid or difficult for caring about things like the Constitution. And then this man took advantage of her. Claudette had no idea what was going on, because she had received absolutely no education on the topic, at home or in school. So when she wound up pregnant, she wasn’t even sure what had made it happen. This man, whom Claudette has always refused to name, was married, so there was no hope of him marrying her to care for their child.

“If God is for you, the devil can’t do you any harm,” and Claudette clung to that promise.[14]

As she recounted how she had been kicked and objectified by the police, the sound of muffled sniffs and the labored breathing of crying filled the courtroom. On cross-examination, the city’s attorney tried to trap Claudette into saying that she had been swindled by the silver-tongued Martin Luther King, who put her up to all of this. But Claudette was too smart for him. “Why did you stop riding the buses?” the attorney asked, hoping she would talk about how the Montgomery Improvement Association had told them to. She stared him in the eye and confidently said, “Because we were treated wrong, dirty, and nasty.”[16]

The three-judge panel came back: segregation on Montgomery buses was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. One of the judges later said, “The boycott case was a simple case of legal and human rights being denied.”[18]

Reverend Ralph Abernathy, whose church and home were both firebombed, announced: “Despite the wreckage and the broken windows, we will gather as usual at our church, and offer special prayers for those who would desecrate the house of God.”[20]

Earl Warren was “conscience stricken” about what he had participated in when he ordered people like Norman Mineta’s family to leave their homes and move to incarceration camps.[23] So he spent the rest of his career trying to ensure all citizens were equal in the eyes of the law. He tried to do what was just, despite his past mistakes.

She wrote, “To me, social justice is not a matter of money, but of will, not a problem for the economist as much a task for the patriot.”[25]

never feel discouraged,” Septima said near the end of her life. “I know that each step is a stepping-stone in the right direction.”[26]

The civil rights movement would be nowhere without the courage of people with the least amount of political, social, and economic power. Those whose very lives breathed oxygen into justice and freedom, whose cumulative actions worked to unfasten the padlocks of centuries of oppression. None of them could do it all, but they all could do something. These are the small and the mighty. And we can be too.