That’s very interesting. Based on the Section 11 quote above, which merely authorized bus drivers to request a passenger move (while requiring passengers obey such a “request”), I was presuming the bus company could’ve ended the boycott by simply ordering its drivers to stop making “requests” under Section 11. But Section 10 required the bus company to require its drivers enforce segregation.
I have a good memory for slights, but 12 years seems like a long time to expect someone to remember a nasty bus driver.
What the hell is “middle class” skin texture? Does teen-aged acne make you unreliable??!?
What I do not understand is how it was not obvious to everyone that this regulation violated the equal protection clause. I mean, you could argue (and I think one or more of the supremes did argue) that anti-miscegenation statutes restricted whites just as much as blacks, but you cannot in this case.
It’s obvious now. It was obvious to some people then. But the legal interpretation of the equal protection clause from the mid-1890s (Plessy v. Ferguson) to mid-1950s (Brown v. Bd. of Education) was that “separate but equal” was sufficient.
Notice that the ordinance is written theoretically neutrally: it doesn’t say that black people have to move, but that people of each race have to move if they’re in the wrong section. Of course, in practice no white person in early-1950s Birmingham was going to sit in the back of the bus and thus have to move for a black person.
As I recall, the NAACP’s big legal battle before they sought to outright overturn Plessy was to attack the obviously not equal accommodations in the South and at least get “separate but equal” with teeth. They had some success in the federal courts in education (public schools, public colleges & universities) cases and IIRC that’s why they tried to overturn Plessy in a school case.
And “separate but equal” covered a lot of things back then: separate water fountains and restrooms for whites and “coloreds;” blacks being restricted to different areas in theaters and stadiums; even segregated government-sponsored public housing complexes and hospitals.
But it was not equal. The driver could require the blacks to move back, but I never heard he could require whites to move forward. It was, unless I have misunderstood, always to the disadvantage of the blacks. Of course, in actual fact, black schools were never funded equally to white schools and they didn’t get equal busing, etc.
Why do they have to repeal the existing ones when they could simply leave them on the books in their unenforceable state? This happens all the time when laws are struck down, either out of expediency (it being a lot of work to pass and publish a new version of the rules) or defiance (if whatever executive or legislative body made the rules in the first place wants to ineffectually thumb its nose at the judiciary).
She had been personally boycotting that driver for years. She would regularly wait for the next bus if he was driving the first one that came. On Dec. 1, 1955, she forgot to check before she boarded, but hus face was still fresh in her mind.
Lighter.
Color ≠ texture. My guess was less weatherbeaten than from work in the fields, smoother from a lifetime of work indoors. Either that or a conflation of skin color and hair texture. Middle class implying affluent enough to get hair straightened.
What was that quote about the poor in France? “The law in its infinite wisdom forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under the bridges.” A law can sound general and be targeted.
Just because a law was written to say X does not mean it was enforced that way, or there would be no civil rights movement necessary after 1865. Until the late 1950’s, the courts all the way up were less inclined to honor the spirit of equality.
Claudette Colvin’s skin wasn’t weatherbeaten. She was in high school. She used “middle-Class skin texture” was a euphemism for “lighter.”
There were a lot of reasons that they didn’t use Claudette Colvin as the “face” of the bus boycott, but one of them was that Mrs. Parks did have a look and demeanor that would be more appealing to the overall white community, both Northern and Southern.
For what it’s worth, I happen to be preparing a presentation on why exactly Rosa Parks made the decision to keep her seat on that particular day. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I’m up to my ears in Rosa Parks at the moment.
Her decision was spontaneous in the sense that it was not pre-planned, nor had she been specifically selected to do it. As mentioned above, however, the NAACP et al had been looking for a “spark” to start the bus boycott for some time already. IMHO, a combination of factors came together to make her WANT to do it that day, and given that she knew she was exactly the type of person they were looking for, she decided to go for it.
I have read an account claiming she had been pre-selected, but this claim is not well-supported by other material. She wasn’t a plant. She was somebody who found herslf as the right person in the right place at the right time, and she bravely stepped up and did what needed to be done.
A likely factor in her decision hasn’t been mentioned yet - Emmett Till. He was lynched in August, 1955. His murderers were acquitted in September. Less-known is that prosecutors went after the perpetrators again in November, this time trying to get them for kidnapping, at least. The grand jury rejected that. MLK announced the outcome on the Sunday prior to Mrs. Parks’ protest. There has also been another recent lynching in Montgomery. I think it’s safe to say that Emmett Till was on her mind and played into her decision.