Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I a Woman?. When I first encountered it, it struck me that while she was speaking about her being black trumping her being a woman, it applies to any woman who isn’t viewed as “a lady” (in fact, to anybody who isn’t viewed as “deserving of respect”).
I have to call out this now common attempt to rewrite history. Rosa Parks was active in the civil rights movement and took an action that she new would get her arrested.
The act was not “staged:” the white man who told her to get out of her seat was not part of a plan, he was a white bigot. The bus driver who called a cop over was not part of a plan, he was a white bigot. The cop who arrested her wasn’t part of a plan, he was a white bigot.
There is this effort to somehow undermine Parks courage and dignity because she was an active civil rights advocate. She bravely took an action that she knew would result in her ending up in a southern jail.
:rolleyes:
Calm down. I am just asking a question. Not undermining anyones dignity. Lots of actions in the Rights era and during the Civil Right and anti colonial era were staged. Did not make the law and custom any less oppressive or the actions less courageous or unimportant.
Sure you weren’t.
I know the OP was asking about segregation in the USA, but that wasn’t the only place it happened.
I grew up in Freetown, Sierra Leone; a city originally created by the British as a place to drop the slaves they freed from newly illegal slave ships. It was then a British colony and the administration was headed by a governor appointed from Britain.
As far as I am aware, there were no actual laws that segregated black and white; but there were plenty of places where that was the accepted rule. As children, my sister and I swam on a white-only beach (there were a couple of [black] soldiers at the main entrance to turn any black people away). The British had imported some ex London double decker busses (the only ones in Africa I believe) and although white people would rarely use them, my sister and I were obliged to sit upstairs at the front. At some point while we were there (in the 1940s) that rule was rescinded and we could sit downstairs.
No. Not that it makes any difference, and certainly the NAACP and other groups engaged in civil disobedience specifically to create test cases, but Parks’ refusal was organic. Parks’ case was not a good test case anyway because she was arrested and charged under state criminal law.
The NAACP wanted to go directly to federal court, which they could only do by finding a plaintiff who had been discriminated against and filing a civil case seeking an injunction on her behalf.
Per my family, in Montgomery Alabama there were black owned restaurants that served white customers- one was a downtown coffee shop and the other what would now be called a “soul food” place, both of which had outdoor dining, which might have made a difference. (We’re not talking fancy places at all- very working class.) I don’t know if
1- Black restaurant owners didn’t have a choice about allowing white customers
2- They did have a choice, but these just did so because it made financial sense to do so
3- It was illegal but just not enforced when whites wanted to go to a restaurant that had good and cheap cooking
My father, who was far from a liberal by today’s standards and not prone to embellishment in his anecdotes, used to eat breakfast at the place downtown and swore he talked history a couple of times with Martin Luther King, Jr., whose church was nearby. Per my father, MLK died with my father owing him for a cup of coffee from a day when he realized he didn’t have any money in his wallet. (The Bus Boycott began soon after and all civility between the races stopped.)
White owned businesses did not allow blacks, period, but employed them as cooks and janitorial and other staff. Never seek consistency in southern logic or law, not that there’s a lot outside the south.
Not a business but a religion that was way ahead of the curve: Jehovah’s Witnesses. They had interracial congregations in the south in the 20th century- that’s almost unheard of- still is in some places. Some of my own great aunts and great uncles were actually arrested for protesting the arrest of a black congregant for distributing JW literature on the courthouse grounds. (The lawsuits filed over this arrest ultimately went to the SCotUS.) I don’t romanticize JWs- some of their views and beliefs are loopy as hell (one of my cousins attempted to make his wife miscarry because the world was supposed to end before the child would be to the age of accountancy and he didn’t want to get attached to a kid whose soul wouldn’t come to “New Earth”, and when that child [who wasn’t miscarried] gave birth 20+ years later to a baby who needed a blood transfusion my father [who became mainstream Protestant[ had to wake up a judge in the middle of the night to issue a court order because the family was refusing to allow it). BUT, appropriate sayings about blind squirrels and stopped clocks and whores and old buildings and all- they deserve props for their racial egalitarianism (at least in church).
Whodathunk a pro wrestler would do his bit for desegregation?: The Pro Wrestler Who Body-Slammed Jim Crow - Foundation for Economic Education
Thank you for that link. I’m a wrestling fan and had never heard of Sputnik Monroe. Good site, too!
A little known sidenote - black owned businesses like hotels and restaurants could also refuse to serve whites.
Could you provide a cite on this? Or a reference to what state this was and the relevant law?
“I heard it somewhere one time, or possibly made it up.”
Or “I know it in my head,” my young niece used to stubbornly say.
I think you’re mixing up “staged”, which connotes something unreal or faked, with “planned”. Planning to commit civil disobedience in such a way as to call public attention to it is not the same as “staging” a pretend act of disobedience in which your fellow actors pretend to arrest you. None of the consequences of Parks’s refusal to move to the back of the bus were “staged”.
That said, as other posters have noted, there’s no evidence that Parks’s non-compliance with bus policy was even planned, in the sense of being determined by some civil rights organization instead of Parks herself individually. Of course, it’s very likely that Parks had been thinking about doing such a thing for a while before she actually did it; but that doesn’t constitute organizational “planning”.
Speaking of Rosa Parks, were there any publicised occasions when a black person was forced to give up their seat and then offered a seat by a white person?
Claudette Colvin actually was arrested months before the Rosa Parks incident for basically doing the same thing. However, Montgomery’s black leaders hesitated to publicize her case as Colvin was young and kind of a “loose cannon”. Rosa, on the other hand, was older and seemed to be a better example for the courts to look at.
Neither case was “staged”.
Can I provide a link? No.
Just some information from people back in the day.
Not that I’ve ever heard of or read about, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened now and then.
One of Lee Harvey Oswald’s few redeeming features (he was a wife-beater and a mooch long before Dallas) was that he opposed segregation, and always made it a point to sit in the backs of New Orleans buses when he lived there.
Fine. I say flatly that I don’t believe this is true. Surely it would be much talked about if it happened.