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

by Sharon McMahon

Closing the schools only further deepened the racial and socioeconomic divide, as the overwhelming majority of white students were able to obtain other schooling. They could go to private school, drive to suburban schools, or stay with relatives elsewhere. The number of Black students who were able to obtain some kind of education was about half that of white students.

Toward the end of the school year, the Little Rock school board purged dozens of teachers from their midst who were deemed too sympathetic to the NAACP.

After the case became part of the Brown v. Board of Education cohort that made its way to the Supreme Court, Virginia senator Harry Byrd said it was “the most serious blow that has yet been struck against the rights of the states in a matter vitally affecting their authority and welfare…. In Virginia now we are facing a crisis of the first magnitude.”[17] To be clear, the “crisis” Byrd believed they were facing was that white and Black children might be ordered to share schools.

Senator Byrd and other southern members of Congress signed on to “The Southern Manifesto,” which said, in part: “This unwarranted exercise of power by the Court…is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through ninety years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.” It went on to say, “We commend the motives of those States which have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means.”[20]

Prince Edward County closed its public schools for five years. The school closures lasted until the 1960s, when Attorney General Robert Kennedy got involved. “We may observe with much sadness and irony that, outside of Africa, south of the Sahara, where education is still a difficult challenge, the only places on earth known not to provide free public education are Communist China, North Vietnam, Sarawak, Singapore, British Honduras—and Prince Edward County, Virginia,” he said.[22] In 1963, Prince Edward County schools had still not integrated, nine years after Brown v. Board of Education.

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. The NAACP sent their best investigator, a woman named Rosa Parks. She went to Abbeville to get to the bottom of things, which led to two months of protests.[1]

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.

Jo Ann Robinson (no known relation to Bernice) had a job teaching at Alabama State. She was a member of the Women’s Political Council, which was a political activism group for Black women. She was so important and integral to the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King mentioned her by name in his memoir. 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]

One of the organizers who helped leaflet Montgomery was Claudette Colvin’s favorite teacher, Geraldine Nesbitt. The leaflets read, “This is for Monday December 5th, 1955…. Another negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. Negroes have rights too…. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. Next time it may be you or your daughter or mother.”[9]

Schedules of ride shares were created. Organizers asked cab drivers to charge Black residents the same fare as the bus, which was ten cents. Cab drivers agreed. Montgomery city officials couldn’t just let people exit the system of white supremacy and create a new societal structure. So they passed an ordinance saying that cab drivers had to charge no less than forty-five cents, and any driver who didn’t comply would be fined.[10] The MIA held meetings with city leaders, and the city refused their demands. So the boycott continued. Because 70 percent of the city’s bus riders were Black, the city urgently doubled fares to make up for the lost revenue.[11]

But the boycott was just getting started, and at the end of January 1956, Martin Luther King Jr.’s home was firebombed. He wasn’t home, and fortunately, the rest of his family wasn’t injured.[12] Jo Ann Robinson’s car had acid poured all over it. Her front window shattered when a huge rock was thrown through it. Both of these acts of vandalism were carried out by police officers in uniform in broad daylight.[13] But still, she refused to quit.

Now Claudette had yet another reason to be a pariah: people assumed her baby’s father was a white man.

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 city tried to argue that segregation was necessary to maintain law and order. Without it, there would be violence, they said.

Meanwhile, the bus boycott continued. Take a moment to think about how willing you would be to commit to doing something that was a significant inconvenience to you for many months. Most people fail at New Year’s resolutions within a couple of weeks. The Montgomery bus boycott was a massive push against the forces of resistance that wanted, more than anything else, for things to stay the same. It required the daily choice by tens of thousands of people to take part in something bigger than themselves for a cause greater than themselves.

On December 20, 1956, the bus boycott officially ended. After nearly thirteen months of refusing to ride the bus, Black riders returned. After their prolonged, significant, and collective effort, along with a concerted desire to create change, the small and mighty ordinary Americans had done it.

Except: snipers began firing on integrated buses. Right after Christmas, a woman who was eight months pregnant was shot in both of her legs. Violence broke out around the city, and the bus system was shut down for several weeks. Four churches and the homes of two ministers were firebombed. All of them had openly supported the integration of buses. 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] Two white KKK members were indicted for the bombings. They confessed. And color me unsurprised: the all-white jury acquitted them anyway.[21] The boycott was over, but the civil rights movement was just getting started.

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.

In 2019, the Highlander Research and Education Center, the facility that held all of Highlander’s records, burned down. Nearby were symbols of white nationalism.

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.

I’d want you to know that often, the small are truly the mighty. That their stories may be eclipsed by a dominant sun, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t ours to discover,

I’d want you to know that great Americans aren’t only people who existed long ago, their faces captured on a frame of black-and-white film. Great Americans live. Whatever year you are reading this in, know that you are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, people who see you and depend on your efforts. Our ancestors made a way in the wilderness for us, descendants they didn’t even know, but whose existence was assured.

I—and the small and mighty people in this book—want you to know that being a great American isn’t dependent on fame or fortune. It doesn’t require your name to be recorded in the annals of history or to appear on a ballot.

I’d want you to know that the American experiment is full of ill-equipped people, people with the “wrong” faces and the “wrong” life circumstances, who just went for it. They just tried something no one had done before. They were willing to let other people watch them fail. They just did the next right thing.