…that wanted Rosa Parks seat?
Is he alive today?
Any info on him, what the papers of the day had to say, etc would be appreciated.
The bus driver was apparently a James Blake who sounds like something of a prick (as one would expect). No idea about the passanger.
Oddly enought, at the time of the incident it was Rosa Parks who was defending the “color line.” She was sitting in the front row of the colored section. The white section was full.
I’m not sure what you mean. It’s not as though she was objecting to a white person sitting in the colored section. She was told to move to the back of the bus to make room for a white person, and she refused.
I don’t think “defending the ‘color line’” is how I’d put it either, but what saoirse wrote is right. Parks was already sitting in the colored section, but black passengers in the first few rows of that section were supposed to give those seats if any white people asked.
And presumably stand the rest of the way so the white passenger could sit down. The story at the time was that she was tired from working all day and did not want to stand so that a white guy could sit.
Our local news show a clip of her denying that. She said the only thing she was tired of was having her rights stolen.
She had already been required to move once, and she was simply done. It was as much her right to sit comfortably as anyone, white or black.
This pretty much agrees with what the Wikkipedia article implied. The story, according to the article, that she was tired from working was made up after the fact, one supposes, to make her more sympathetic.
I’d think it was for the opposite effect - to downplay any nobility in her actions as just the actions of someone who couldn’t be bothered. Not that that’s how I view Rosa Parks, of course, just how I view that argument.
I disagree; it brings home the fact that enforced prejudice impacts simple people’s everday lives; that people only want to live and work like everyone else. Not everything has to be a Noble Principle; the “tired from work” story greatly humanized the struggle. Not every white person at the time could sympathize with the Political Principles involved; but everyone knows what it’s like to be tired.
Rosa Parks was a secretary for the local chapter of the NAACP, which was looking for a test case for the segregated seating rules on the Montgomery buses. They had already considered and passed over at least one case (as I remember, a young man who had things in his background that would have made him a less-than-sympathetic defendant). When Ms. Parks was ordered to give up her seat to a white man, she decided on the spot to make herself the test case.
She may have been tired from work, but she knew and cared about the larger issue.
Don’t you just hate it when you post something like this and they come along yelling, “cite.” I’d never do that, no way. It always sounds like they don’t believe you, or something.
But, wow cool. Where’d you find that out. I’d like to read more about this new angle on Ms Parks.
It’s hardly a new angle-it’s been fairly well known for years. I’m sure it’s mentioned in some of the articles that are out about her now.
Personally, I think it makes her even cooler. Purposely deciding to stick it to the man.
Rosa Parks was not “a secretary” for the NAACP, but became the Secretary (chapter officer) of the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter in 1943.
http://womensissues.about.com/cs/famouswomen/p/p_rosaparks.htm
Her husband Raymond was a NAACP activist, and they both worked in behalf of causes such as the Scottsboro boys in the 1930s.
I believe the white passenger’s name is lost to history. At most his name would have been taken down as a potential witness at Rosa Parks’ trial, but my understanding is that the trial was a pretty perfunctory affair–she wanted to be convicted, after all, to establish a viable test case for striking down the civic segregation law. (Although, as it turned out, the case which did so was Browder v. Gayle which did not involve Mrs. Parks.) It’s just as well, I suppose, that the passenger concerned didn’t brag about his role after the fact.
Slate magazine reran this article yesterday, mentioning not a young man, but two teenage girls who had been arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up their seats for white passengers… and saying that poverty, pregnancy, and family alcoholism were the reasons that the activists didn’t go to bat for them as strongly as for Rosa.
It comes from the Penguin Lives biography of Rosa Parks , which I read a few years ago.
BTW, the prior case which I mentioned in my previous post was not a young man, but a young woman. Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama on March 2, 1955. She was arrested, and although the NAACP did use her arrest in a civil rights lawsuit, they decided not to make her a national symbol for the cause of desegregation. The main reason was that she was, at the age of 15, unmarried and pregnant. There were also rumors that she had used profanity when she was arrested, something that she still denies. The NAACP wanted someone who was squeaky clean, and Rosa Parks fit the bill.
Claudette Colvin didn’t go away, though. She was one of the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit that brought an end to this form of discrimination.
I vaguely recall from reading some Howard Zinn (lefty historian who was an activist in the civil rights era) on the subject that Ms. Parks (or at least her office) had decided she’d make a great test case before she set foot on the bus that day. In other words the event was a bit more planned than the mythology around it has made it out to be. One can set out ahead of time to get arrested as a test case and still be tired after a day of work, and it seems likely to me both were true.
Unfortunately I don’t remember which Zinn book or piece I read this in.
Could the white man have been a plant as well and essentially ‘disappeared’ after the process was started?
Well, he didn’t disappear. He reappeared on a grassy knoll in 1963 and killed Kennedy. Then he was the director for filming of the fake moon landing.
Anything could have happened, though I doubt it.