Rosa Parks Writes About Her Arrest

"I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment I couldn't take it anymore." 

(Rosa Parks)

Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus to a white person in 1955, helped spark the Civil Rights Movement.  While her name was forever etched on the history books, Parks paid a high price for her stance.  

Writing on a piece of Montgomery Department Store stationery, Parks explained:  

"I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment I couldn't take it anymore." When I asked the policeman why we had to be pushed around, he said he didn't know.  'The law is the law.  You are under arrest.'  I didn't resist." (http://www.vox.com/2015/2/4/7977373/rosa-parks-collection-documents)

The following year saw the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a successful tool to integrate public transportation in the city.  Parks lodged a protest against her arrest.  She was very much in the public eye.  Near the end of 1956, the seamstress was let go from her job at the Montgomery Department Store.  Her husband, who had been forbidden to discuss her case at work, was also let go from his position.  Old Jim Crow wasn't going to give up without a fight.

As Parks explained in her letter:

"little children are so conditioned early to learn their place in this segregated pattern as they take their first toddling steps and are weaned from their mother's breast."

In early 1957, Parks jumped through another hoop and secured her right to vote, at a time when few blacks had that right in the Deep South.  But the economic situation looked bleak in Alabama and Rosa and her husband Raymond moved to Detroit, Michigan by the early 1960's.  Rosa found work as a receptionist for a U. S. Congressman.  

For more information, read http://alinefromlinda.blogspot.ca/2011/12/on-rosas-ride.html.

*First published in 2015.

On Rosa’s ride to work and back

Down Cleveland Ave in fifty-five.

White bus driver Blake gave her flack,

But Rosa Parks would not move back.

Sewing suits from nine until five,

She did what she could to survive.

As more whites boarded, four blacks stalled.

Blake warned:  “Move back or I won’t drive!”

At six o’clock, Blake placed the call.

Police came and she took the fall.

Her only crime was being black.

She had paid her fare, after all.

Rosa’s bus ride launched the attack

On racist laws that hurt each black.

White bus driver Blake gave her flack,

But Rosa Parks would not move back.

Linda Jonasson
(August 28, 2008.)

Photo of Montgomery, Alabama bus at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan courtesy http://farm4.static.flickr.com.

Photo of Rosa Parks on Dec. 1, 1955 courtesy http://thegospelcoalition.org.

*First published in 2011.

The Warmth of Other Suns

Why did 100 years elapse between the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the American Civil Rights Act in 1964?  Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson’s book, The Warmth of Other Suns, sheds much light on this question.  Although black slaves were freed during the Civil War, it took another century for attitudes in the Deep South to change.  After a brief respite for blacks during Reconstruction, they were subjected to a more subtle form of slavery with the adoption of the Jim Crow laws.  “Separate, but equal” became the motto:  blacks ate in different restaurants, drank from different water fountains, borrowed books from different libraries, lived in different neighbourhoods, attended different schools, rode in separate railway cars, sat in a separate section of busses and earned different (lower) wages.

Although blacks were no longer “owned” by whites, they still had to answer to them in the South, sometimes paying with their life:  lynchings were a dangerously common occurrence for decades.  Whites dictated the wages blacks received as they performed the back-breaking work of cotton picking on the large plantations.  Any attempt to organize to demand higher wages was met with hostility by the sharecroppers.  Any attempt to speak out against Jim Crow laws was met with resistance:  one newspaper writer was locked up in an insane asylum; a man who belonged to the NAACP had a bomb go off under his bed on Christmas Day.  Any attempt to “mix” with white society, even a young black boy speaking to a white girl, could result in dire consequences:  one boy was tortured mercilessly. 

Blacks finally sought refuge in the North and West of the United States:  it was called The Great Migration and would last from 1917 until 1970.  Refugees purchased train tickets and, with a box full of chicken and sweet potatoes for the journey, said goodbye to their loved ones at railroad stations across the south, making their way to destinations like Washington D.C., New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, etc.  In the later decades, some left by car, travelling across the Arizona desert to the ‘promised land” of California, settling in cities like San Diego, Oakland and Los Angeles. 

Those blacks who feared repercussions left in sneakier ways.  One man was stuffed in a box in the fetal position, put on a train and turned upside down, a position he held for 26 hours as he headed north to Washington DC where he was met at the station by a member of the NAACP.  The black newspaper reporter who was deemed insane and locked away in an asylum, managed to escape, with the help of Northerners, and was hustled away in a car, joined by a caravan of other cars; once the motorcade crossed the state line, the reporter found his way to a railroad station and purchased a ticket to freedom in the North. 

While the North and the West provided freedoms for blacks that they did not have in the South, it was not always the promised land that they had hoped for.  One farmer from Florida, who moved to New York City and became a railroad porter, remembers changing the cars at Washington D.C., as the train changed from an integrated to a segregated one.  Another central figure in the book leaves Mississippi for California, attempting to find a hotel in the desert, only to see VACANCY signs be turned off the second he arrived and requested a room.  One black couple moved to Chicago where they tried to get into the neighbourhood of Cicero, only to have their new apartment ransacked, and to see a riot ensue.  Cicero, a neighbourhood that had made room for immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, sadly had no room for black migrants.  One black boy accidentally crossed the invisible colour line in the water at a Lake Michigan beach and was drowned by whites.

While blacks in the Southern towns risked lynchings, black migrants to the Northern cities faced the vices of the streets like drugs, prostitution, etc.  Children of migrants sometimes succumbed to these temptations.  Furthermore, the South held two centuries of history for many black families, roots that were lost once they moved to the North.  Some blacks chose not to dwell on their pasts, hoping to make a new history for their children, but in essence leaving them rootless.  

Even so, many blacks found work in the Northern factories at wages they never could have earned in the South.  Many migrants were able to send their children to integrated elementary and high schools and even to Ivy League Universities where they trained for professions that they would likely not have learned in the South.  Some migrants saw their children win sports scholarships to colleges and later find jobs in the NBA or the NFL.  One young runner named JC, the son of a migrant, went on to win a gold medal at the Berlin Olympics in 1936; we know him as Jesse Owens.

The Great Migration is a fascinating topic to explore.  Isabel Wilkerson’s book is packed full of American History.  What a great read!

Image courtesy http://nationalpostarts.files.wordpress.com/.

*First published in 2012.

Martin Luther King Sr.: A Sixth Grade Education and a Pair of Shoes

Martin Luther King Sr. left Stockbridge, Georgia with nothing but a sixth grade education and a pair of shoes.  Within a decade, he would head up the Ebenezer Street Baptist Church.  By 1964, his son would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Baptized Michael King, he was one of ten children raised in rural Georgia.  Life was not easy for the young Michael who witnessed a lynching as well as his drunken father beating his mother.  Early on, he realized the importance of hard work and an education.

Michael followed his sister to Atlanta where he worked odd jobs and started preaching as a lay preacher.  At Ebenezer Baptist Church, he met Rev. Williams who encouraged him to "overcome his educational limitations".  He started courting the minister's daughter, Alberta, who encouraged him to enrol in Bryant Prep School followed by a two year stint at Dillard University.

The couple married and three children followed in quick succession.  All the while, Michael pursued his Bachelor of Theology degree which he received shortly thereafter.  In 1931, Rev. Williams passed away and Michael was appointed the new senior pastor at Ebenezer Street Baptish Church.  Three years later, Michael attended the World Baptist Alliance in Berlin.  There, he learned about Martin Luther and his work with the Protestant Reformation, inspiring him to change his name to Martin Luther King, and his son's name to Martin Luther King Jr.

Returning home from Germany, King Sr. realized that Jim Crow still reigned in the South.  Visiting a shoe shop with his son, he was asked to change seats with a white person.  Explained Martin Luther King Jr.:  "This was the first time I had seen my dad so furious.  That experience revealed to me at a very early age that my dad had not adjusted to the system, and he played a great part in shaping my conscience.  I still remember walking down the street as he muttered:  'I don't care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it.'"

King Sr. was true to his word.  After a vicious attack on blacks in the Atlanta bus system in the 1920's, King Sr. refused to ride the buses anymore.  Later, he headed up the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP where he continued to champion the cause of education, securing equal pay for black teachers.  In the 1960s, King Sr. continued to buck the system, riding the whites only elevator to the top floor of the city hall where he pushed for black voting rights.

King Sr. travelled to Oslo in 1964 to see his son, Martin Luther King Jr., receive the Nobel Peace Prize.  "As M. L. stood receiving the Nobel Prize, and the tears just streamed down my face, I gave thanks that out of that tiny Georgia town, I'd been spared to see this and so much else." (http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_king_martin_luther_michael_sr_1897_1984/)

Martin Luther King Sr., at right, and his son, Martin Luther King Jr. at left courtesy http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/2-martin-luther-king-picture-preacher-picture-660x433.jpg.

Rosa Parks Writes About Her Arrest

"I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment I couldn't take it anymore." 

(Rosa Parks)

Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus to a white person in 1955, helped spark the Civil Rights Movement.  While her name was forever etched on the history books, Parks paid a high price for her stance.  

Writing on a piece of Montgomery Department Store stationery, Parks explained:  

"I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment I couldn't take it anymore." When I asked the policeman why we had to be pushed around, he said he didn't know.  'The law is the law.  You are under arrest.'  I didn't resist." (http://www.vox.com/2015/2/4/7977373/rosa-parks-collection-documents)

The following year saw the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a successful tool to integrate public transportation in the city.  Parks lodged a protest against her arrest.  She was very much in the public eye.  Near the end of 1956, the seamstress was let go from her job at the Montgomery Department Store.  Her husband, who had been forbidden to discuss her case at work, was also let go from his position.  Old Jim Crow wasn't going to give up without a fight.

As Parks explained in her letter:

"little children are so conditioned early to learn their place in this segregated pattern as they take their first toddling steps and are weaned from their mother's breast."

In early 1957, Parks jumped through another hoop and secured her right to vote, at a time when few blacks had that right in the Deep South.  But the economic situation looked bleak in Alabama and Rosa and her husband Raymond moved to Detroit, Michigan by the early 1960's.  Rosa found work as a receptionist for a U. S. Congressman.  

For more information, read http://alinefromlinda.blogspot.ca/2011/12/on-rosas-ride.html.

Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow"

"There was but one place where a black boy who knows no trade can get a job.  And that's where the houses and faces are white, where the trees, lawns and hedges are green.  My first job was an optical company in Jackson, Mississippi.  The morning I applied I stood straight and neat before the boss, answering his questions with straight yessirs and nosirs.  I was very careful to pronounce my sirs distinctly, in order that he might know that I was polite, that I knew where I was, and that I knew he was a white man.  I wanted that job badly." (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/white/anthology/wright.html)

Richard Wright grew up in in Mississippi, "where nothing green ever grew in [his yard]".  In the 1910's, he remembers an early lesson his Mom taught him about Jim Crow laws when she tanned his backside for getting into a battle with the white boys from the other side of the tracks, even though he came home with a three inch gash behind his ear.

Wright talks about losing his first factory job because he called his boss Pease instead of Mr. Pease. He talks what was accepted conversation and what was taboo for a black man; how he had to respond constantly with "yes sir" or "no sir" to a white man; how, when he entered an elevator full of whites, he had to remove his hat, even if he had a handful of packages.

Wright remembers frantically pedalling home one night from a delivery to a white home, and being stopped and questions by a police officer, just for being in a white neighbourhood after dark.  He remembers not being allowed to meet the gaze of the white guests at the hotel where he worked.

He learned how to "lie, cheat and steal" to eat and live once he moved to Memphis, Tennessee.  It was in Memphis that he met a Roman Catholic white man sympathetic to his cause.  Wright wanted to borrow books from the local library, but blacks were denied the simple right to a library card. Wright's co-worker lent him his card.  Wright would write a note that said:  "Please let this nigger boy have the following books."  He signed the note with his co-worker's signature.  So as not to alert the librarian that the books were actually for Wright, "[He] would stand at the desk, hat in hand, looking as unbookish as possible."  For more on Richard Wright, read "The Freedom of a Library Card" at http://alinefromlinda.blogspot.ca/2011/06/freedom-of-library-card.html.

Wright later moved to Chicago where he penned the famous novels Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945).  He finished his years writing in France, far away from the tentacles of Jim Crow.

Richard Wright received pennies from men in a Mississippi saloon courtesy http://www.blackpast.org/aah/wright-richard-1908-1960.