Post by Mitch on Oct 25, 2005 20:16:40 GMT
It was on 1st December 1955 that a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, called ROSA L. PARKS, refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus after he had boarded after her. This action, and her refusal to give up her seat took place in the context of segregation in the deep south and with buses that upto this point had been segregated. As a black American woman she was expected to troop to the back of a bus to a 'black only' segregated area, and if the bus was full to give up her seat to any white person that boarded.
This brave action by Rosa L. Parks, (who struggled to find work in Alabama after this action, and faced a jail sentence and a large fine that a seamstress' weekly wage would struggle to pay), was the spark that ignited a boycott of all Montgomery buses by Black residents in Montgomery, Alabama. This combined with being knackered after a hard days work, and a bubbling anger surfacing in resistance and years of working within the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) culminated in a seemingly spur of the moment action by Rosa Parks to say NO, she would not give up her seat.
Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, home of the renowned Tuskegee Institute. When I visited Tuskegee briefly in the early 1990s I could have blinked and missed it, the town was so small and in the heart of rural Alabama - life looked as if it was pretty tough there in the early 1990s, let alone during the 1920/30s, the time of Rosa Park's childhood, growing up as she did on a small farm with her brother, mother, and grandparents.
Rosa Parks, looking back, spoke of her childhood fears of hearing the Ku Klux Klan ride at night, listening to lynchings, and being afraid the house would burn down.
She attended a school for African-American children, an old one room shack serving as a schoolhouse, which was only open five months a year. Rosa Parks, as well as helping on the family farm went on up to the sixth grade, and in 1924, age 11, she was sent to Montgomery to continue her studies. But five years later, she had to leave school in order to care for her sick grandmother, and then her mother.
In 1932 she married the barber and civil rights activist Raymond Parks, and with a combination of Raymond's support and dogged determinism Rosa Parks finally graduated from high school in 1934. They then both went on together to work for the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which campaigned long and hard for black civil rights, and particularly during the 1930s/40s against lynchings.
During the 1930s and upto 1955 Rosa Parks worked as a seamstress for a pittance wage, and when she refused to give up her seat on the Montgomery bus on 1st December 1955 she was returning home from a long, hard days work in the factory.
There was a history of fight then in Rosa Park's life before this spark of action. She had been working within the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) for many years before this event, and she had the weight of that organisation behind her - this was an intelligent direct act of resistance, albeit spur of the moment, but it gets you like that when you've been thinking about how to act - and an opportunity sometimes comes along. There had been other similar acts of defiance by black Americans on buses before Rosa Parks took a stand, and she would have known about those actions through the NAACP.
In 1943 she was appointed secretary of the NAACP's Montgomery branch and later its youth leader. She spent much of her life inspiring young people to act and help them reach their potential.
From 1965 - 1988 she worked as a receptionist and office assistant for John Conyers, an African-American congressman, and part of her job involved helping homeless people get housing.
From 1987 until her death today on 25th October 2005, aged 92, she established and worked with the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, which was set up with the intention to motivate and direct youth to achieve their highest potential.
This below is an extract from an interview with Rosa L. Parks in 'My Soul is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered', by Howell Rains (1977), quoted in the superb Civil Rights Reader, 'Eyes on the Prize', Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from The Black Freedom Struggle 1954-1990', (1991), published by Penguin Books.
Eyes on the Prize was also a renowned documentary on the Civil Rights Movement.
Just to add something ... an anarchist once asked me why I am interested in the Women's Suffrage Movement of the late 19th century/early 20th century, and I've thought about this quite a lot. They couldn't understand because they thought that I was just interested in the fight for the 'vote', which of course is a rather dubious subject to anarchists. (I did not vote in the last election, and no doubt neither Rosa Parks or Selina Cooper would have approved of that, but I bet they would have listened to why I decided not to).
What interests me, and inspires me in the suffrage, as well as here in the Black Civil Rights Movement, is the ACTION by working class women like Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks took action as well with the tripple whammy of prejudice (as Audre Lorde tells us in 'Sister Outsider', - she was working class, she was female and she was black.
In the suffrage it was never just the 'vote' for working class women, the fight went on for them after the 'vote' was gained, because there was the persecution of their class to fight. Working class women like Selina Cooper just saw 'getting the vote' as one small step - the work continued afterwards.
So with Rosa Parks, it was a life's work of action.
So it was for Rosa Parks, whose work continued until her death to raise the consciousness and confidence of young people to act. An end to 'legal' segregation was not the end of the fight for Rosa Parks - oh no.
During a day when the headlines in the UK are full of George Galloway, I celebrate the life of Rosa Parks, a woman who inspires others to act, who took great personal risk through direct action, but had the intelligence and the mindset to do this with the weight and momentum of a swell of black working class resistance and anger behind her. It was a selfless act that Rosa Parks undertook on 1st December 1955.
Galloway I'm afraid is a one man band, working from an opportunist foundation that will pull away when the beast comes in for the kill. The contrast has struck me today.
Here is Rosa Parks in her own words,
"I had left my work at the men's alteration shop, a tailor shop in the Montgomery Fair department store, and as I left work, I crossed the street to a drugstore to pick up a few items instead of trying to go directly to the bus stop. And when I had finished this, I came across the street and looked for a Cleveland Avenue bus that apparently had some seats on it. At that time it was a little hard to get a seat on the bus. But when I did get to the entrance of the bus, I got in line with a number of other people who were getting on the same bus.
As I got up on the bus and walked to the seat I saw there was only one vacancy that was just back of where it was considered the white section. So this was the seat that I took, next to the aisle, and a man was sitting next to me. Across the aisle there were two women, and there were a few seats at this point in the very front of the bus that was called the white section. I went on to one stop and I didn't particularly notice who was getting on the bus, didn't particularly notice the other people getting on. And on the third stop there were some people getting on, and at this point all of the front seats were taken. Now in the beginning, at the very first stop I had got on the bus, the back of the bus was filled up with people standing in the aisle and I don't know hy this one vacancy that I took was left, because there were quite a few people already standing toward the back of the bus. The third stop is when all the front seats were taken, and this one man was standing and when the driver looked around and saw he was standing, he asked the four of us, the man in the seat with me and the two women across the aisle, to let him have those front seats.
At his first request, didn't any of us move. Then he spoke again and said, 'You'd better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats'. At this point, of course, the passenger who would have taken the seat hadn't said anything. In fact, he never did speak to my knowledge. When the three people, the man who was in the seat with me and the two women, stood up and moved into the aisle, I remained where I was. When the driver saw that I was still sitting there, he asked if I was going to stand up. I told him, no I wasn't. He said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have you arrested'. I told him to go on and have me arrested.
He got off the bus and came back shortly. A few minutes later, two policemen got on the bus, and they approached me and asked if the driver had asked me to stand up, and I said yes, and they wanted to know why I didn't. I told them I didn't think I should have to stand up ... They placed me under arrest then and had me to get in the police car, and I was taken to jail and booked on suspicion, I believe. .... They had to determine whether or not the driver wanted to press charges or sear out a warrant, which he did. Then they took me to jail and I was placed in a cell. In a little while I was tekn from the cell, and my picture was made and fingerprints taken. I went back to the cell then, and a few minutes later I was called back again, and when this happened I found out that Mr. E.D. Nixon and Attorney and Mrs. Clifford Durr had come to make bond for me".
This brave action by Rosa L. Parks, (who struggled to find work in Alabama after this action, and faced a jail sentence and a large fine that a seamstress' weekly wage would struggle to pay), was the spark that ignited a boycott of all Montgomery buses by Black residents in Montgomery, Alabama. This combined with being knackered after a hard days work, and a bubbling anger surfacing in resistance and years of working within the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) culminated in a seemingly spur of the moment action by Rosa Parks to say NO, she would not give up her seat.
Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, home of the renowned Tuskegee Institute. When I visited Tuskegee briefly in the early 1990s I could have blinked and missed it, the town was so small and in the heart of rural Alabama - life looked as if it was pretty tough there in the early 1990s, let alone during the 1920/30s, the time of Rosa Park's childhood, growing up as she did on a small farm with her brother, mother, and grandparents.
Rosa Parks, looking back, spoke of her childhood fears of hearing the Ku Klux Klan ride at night, listening to lynchings, and being afraid the house would burn down.
She attended a school for African-American children, an old one room shack serving as a schoolhouse, which was only open five months a year. Rosa Parks, as well as helping on the family farm went on up to the sixth grade, and in 1924, age 11, she was sent to Montgomery to continue her studies. But five years later, she had to leave school in order to care for her sick grandmother, and then her mother.
In 1932 she married the barber and civil rights activist Raymond Parks, and with a combination of Raymond's support and dogged determinism Rosa Parks finally graduated from high school in 1934. They then both went on together to work for the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which campaigned long and hard for black civil rights, and particularly during the 1930s/40s against lynchings.
During the 1930s and upto 1955 Rosa Parks worked as a seamstress for a pittance wage, and when she refused to give up her seat on the Montgomery bus on 1st December 1955 she was returning home from a long, hard days work in the factory.
There was a history of fight then in Rosa Park's life before this spark of action. She had been working within the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) for many years before this event, and she had the weight of that organisation behind her - this was an intelligent direct act of resistance, albeit spur of the moment, but it gets you like that when you've been thinking about how to act - and an opportunity sometimes comes along. There had been other similar acts of defiance by black Americans on buses before Rosa Parks took a stand, and she would have known about those actions through the NAACP.
In 1943 she was appointed secretary of the NAACP's Montgomery branch and later its youth leader. She spent much of her life inspiring young people to act and help them reach their potential.
From 1965 - 1988 she worked as a receptionist and office assistant for John Conyers, an African-American congressman, and part of her job involved helping homeless people get housing.
From 1987 until her death today on 25th October 2005, aged 92, she established and worked with the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, which was set up with the intention to motivate and direct youth to achieve their highest potential.
This below is an extract from an interview with Rosa L. Parks in 'My Soul is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered', by Howell Rains (1977), quoted in the superb Civil Rights Reader, 'Eyes on the Prize', Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from The Black Freedom Struggle 1954-1990', (1991), published by Penguin Books.
Eyes on the Prize was also a renowned documentary on the Civil Rights Movement.
Just to add something ... an anarchist once asked me why I am interested in the Women's Suffrage Movement of the late 19th century/early 20th century, and I've thought about this quite a lot. They couldn't understand because they thought that I was just interested in the fight for the 'vote', which of course is a rather dubious subject to anarchists. (I did not vote in the last election, and no doubt neither Rosa Parks or Selina Cooper would have approved of that, but I bet they would have listened to why I decided not to).
What interests me, and inspires me in the suffrage, as well as here in the Black Civil Rights Movement, is the ACTION by working class women like Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks took action as well with the tripple whammy of prejudice (as Audre Lorde tells us in 'Sister Outsider', - she was working class, she was female and she was black.
In the suffrage it was never just the 'vote' for working class women, the fight went on for them after the 'vote' was gained, because there was the persecution of their class to fight. Working class women like Selina Cooper just saw 'getting the vote' as one small step - the work continued afterwards.
So with Rosa Parks, it was a life's work of action.
So it was for Rosa Parks, whose work continued until her death to raise the consciousness and confidence of young people to act. An end to 'legal' segregation was not the end of the fight for Rosa Parks - oh no.
During a day when the headlines in the UK are full of George Galloway, I celebrate the life of Rosa Parks, a woman who inspires others to act, who took great personal risk through direct action, but had the intelligence and the mindset to do this with the weight and momentum of a swell of black working class resistance and anger behind her. It was a selfless act that Rosa Parks undertook on 1st December 1955.
Galloway I'm afraid is a one man band, working from an opportunist foundation that will pull away when the beast comes in for the kill. The contrast has struck me today.
Here is Rosa Parks in her own words,
"I had left my work at the men's alteration shop, a tailor shop in the Montgomery Fair department store, and as I left work, I crossed the street to a drugstore to pick up a few items instead of trying to go directly to the bus stop. And when I had finished this, I came across the street and looked for a Cleveland Avenue bus that apparently had some seats on it. At that time it was a little hard to get a seat on the bus. But when I did get to the entrance of the bus, I got in line with a number of other people who were getting on the same bus.
As I got up on the bus and walked to the seat I saw there was only one vacancy that was just back of where it was considered the white section. So this was the seat that I took, next to the aisle, and a man was sitting next to me. Across the aisle there were two women, and there were a few seats at this point in the very front of the bus that was called the white section. I went on to one stop and I didn't particularly notice who was getting on the bus, didn't particularly notice the other people getting on. And on the third stop there were some people getting on, and at this point all of the front seats were taken. Now in the beginning, at the very first stop I had got on the bus, the back of the bus was filled up with people standing in the aisle and I don't know hy this one vacancy that I took was left, because there were quite a few people already standing toward the back of the bus. The third stop is when all the front seats were taken, and this one man was standing and when the driver looked around and saw he was standing, he asked the four of us, the man in the seat with me and the two women across the aisle, to let him have those front seats.
At his first request, didn't any of us move. Then he spoke again and said, 'You'd better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats'. At this point, of course, the passenger who would have taken the seat hadn't said anything. In fact, he never did speak to my knowledge. When the three people, the man who was in the seat with me and the two women, stood up and moved into the aisle, I remained where I was. When the driver saw that I was still sitting there, he asked if I was going to stand up. I told him, no I wasn't. He said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have you arrested'. I told him to go on and have me arrested.
He got off the bus and came back shortly. A few minutes later, two policemen got on the bus, and they approached me and asked if the driver had asked me to stand up, and I said yes, and they wanted to know why I didn't. I told them I didn't think I should have to stand up ... They placed me under arrest then and had me to get in the police car, and I was taken to jail and booked on suspicion, I believe. .... They had to determine whether or not the driver wanted to press charges or sear out a warrant, which he did. Then they took me to jail and I was placed in a cell. In a little while I was tekn from the cell, and my picture was made and fingerprints taken. I went back to the cell then, and a few minutes later I was called back again, and when this happened I found out that Mr. E.D. Nixon and Attorney and Mrs. Clifford Durr had come to make bond for me".
