Here's Where It Gets Interesting - 155. Momentum: The Ripples Made by Ordinary People, Part 10

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

Today in our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon begins with a woman who is surely familiar to anyone who has received a crash course on the Civil Rights movement in America: Rosa Parks. While Rosa Parks earned her position in history, this story does not begin with a tired woman who simply needed to rest her feet on a bus in Birmingham, Alabama. Before Rosa Parks, there was Lucille Times. And before there was Lucille Times, there was Claudette Colvin. Before Rosa Parks, there was Aurelia Browder, and Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith. The Civil Rights Movement would be nowhere without the extraordinary and prolonged courage and efforts of women. In the words of Rosa Parks, “We must live our lives as a model for others.” Following the Supreme Court ruling of Brown vs. the Board of Education, some leaders of the Civil Rights Movement believed this was their moment. A boycott of Montgomery, Alabama buses had been discussed for months, but leaders were afraid that the wrong person would stall their efforts if they became the face of the movement. This was one of several reasons why Rosa Parks was chosen for this role. But how did a bus boycott shape Civil Rights? And what does the arrest of another household name – Martin Luther King Jr. – have to do with this? Next time, Sharon will speak more on how M.L.K. Jr. played a prominent role in this surge of momentum. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to the 10th installment of our special series called Momentum, which is about ordinary Americans and the struggle for freedom during the Civil Rights era. Just a small content warning, this story does discuss some historically accurate topics that might be hard to hear about. And if you have small children, you may want to listen with your headphones. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. If you ask any school child studying civil rights, they will bring up Rosa Parks. She's often heralded as the mother of the civil rights movement, and in many ways that credit is deserved. But the popular narrative of Rosa Parks being a tired seamstress who just wanted to rest her feet on that bus in Birmingham, Alabama, the notion that the only thing keeping her from moving seats in December of 1955 was exhaustion? None of that is true.

And Rosa wasn't the first woman to refuse to move, to refuse to obey the authority of bus drivers. Before there was Rosa Parks, there was Lucille Times. And before there was Lucille Times, there was Claudette Colvin. Before Rosa Parks, there was Aurelia Browder and Susie MacDonald and Mary Louise Smith. Rosa Parks was undoubtedly important, but she wasn't the first. Nine months before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to get up and stand in the back of a busy Montgomery, Alabama bus.

When the bus driver yelled at her to give up her seat to white passengers who had boarded, she said, History kept me stuck to my seat. I felt the hand of Harriet Tubman pushing down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth pushing down on the other. In 1955, Birmingham, Alabama, bus drivers had police power. That power was often wielded in racist and violent ways. Claudette was handcuffed and put in the back of a police car. She said the police made lewd comments about her body. And when a police officer insisted on riding in the backseat with her, she said she was afraid that she would be sexually assaulted. Claudette aspired to be the President of the United States one day. But instead, she was charged and convicted of three crimes.

Disturbing the peace, violating segregation laws, and assaulting police officers. Colvin said she never assaulted any police officers, but she became a ward of the state and was sentenced to home confinement after her conviction. She said she was ostracized by the NAACP and other civil rights leaders in Montgomery because she was viewed as tainted, a convicted criminal. Months later, she said they would come crawling back. Lucille Times was a proud cafe owner and had recently acquired a new white Buick car. In 1955, she was driving to the dry cleaners when a white bus driver tried to run her off the road. And when he was unsuccessful, he tried twice more. Eventually, Lucille pulled off the road and got out of her car and the bus driver got out of the bus and he yelled expletives and racial slurs at her. She yelled back at him and they got into a physical altercation. Lucille bit the bus driver's

arm and then she felt a blow to her neck. She looked up and saw a police officer's metal flashlight. The police officer told her that she was lucky she was a woman or her head would be jelly. Lucille was not known for being mild-mannered. People who knew her personally described her as being an iron fist inside of a velvet glove. And this altercation with the bus driver didn't intimidate her, it emboldened her. She wrote letters to newspapers who refused to print her pleas for change in the Montgomery bus system. She described the incident to everyone who would listen, including making three phone calls to the bus department manager who never called her back. She began advocating for a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. But other civil rights leaders said it wasn't the right time, and she

wasn't the right person. Lucille Times decided to take matters into her own hands. Instead of waiting for other people to tell her the time was right or to approve of her face as the face of the movement they wanted to create, Lucille began driving around Montgomery in her white Buick, particularly during rush hour. And when she would see black people waiting for a bus, she would pull over and offer them rides, sometimes pulling over immediately in front of a stopped bus. She wanted the drivers to see that she was taking their business. Rides with Lucille were free, but Lucille and her husband Charlie started a tip jar at their cafe where they accepted donations to pay for gas. Lucille and Charlie Times later organized a phone line at their cafe where people could call to arrange for rides. In 2017, Lucille gave an interview and said, You've got to fight. You don't get nothing for free. I've been a fighter all my days.

Her nephew said of her that she was loaded for bear. She would not back down for anything and she was always full steam ahead. Aurelia Browder was a widow caring for six children. She was a nurse midwife, a seamstress, and she taught lessons to make ends meet. She tutored people who were trying to pass literacy tests to be able to vote. She too was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus almost eight months before Rosa Parks. Susie McDonald was in her 70s when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Susie was white passing, but she made a point of correcting people who assumed she was white. She and her husband owned

a farm that they were likely only able to acquire because the people selling the property believed the couple was white. Also before Rosa Parks was 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith. Smith was arrested six weeks before Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat. The year was 1955, and Brown v. The Board of Education was decided by the Supreme Court in 1954. And they issued their opinion in Brown v. The Board of Education, too, earlier that year. Some leaders of the civil rights movement believed this was their moment. This was the chance to build momentum. A boycott of Montgomery, Alabama buses had been discussed for months. But leaders were afraid that the wrong person, someone whose background was questionable in some way,

would stall their efforts if they became the face of the movement, which is one of the reasons Rosa Parks was chosen. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends, and together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve!

It is my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there.

Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. NAACP meetings. She attended trainings. Rosa was middle class. She had a pleasant demeanor. She wasn't viewed by other people as overly abrasive. She was the right candidate. And she did rise to the moment. She had the courage to purposely be arrested and to forever have her name attached to something that could and did endanger her safety. But she wasn't the first, and she did it work alone. On December 1st, 1955, a seemingly mild-mannered seamstress named Rosa Louise Macaulay-Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man. She was arrested and was famously photographed after being taken to the police station. She said, people always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that wasn't true.

I was not tired physically or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. No, the only tired I was was tired of giving in. Joanne Robinson was the youngest of 12 children and she became a teacher. She eventually earned a master's degree and had a job teaching at Alabama State. She was a member of the Women's Political Council, which was a political activism group for Black women. Joanne Robinson was also highly influential in the civil rights movement, but she did it in such a way that she drew little attention to herself. She feared that she would lose her job at Alabama State, and consequently

few people have heard of her. She was so influential that Martin Luther King Jr. mentioned her by name in his memoir. He said, apparently indefatigable, she perhaps more than any other person was involved in every level of protest. The night Rosa Parks was arrested, Joanne stayed up all night at Alabama State mimeographing 35,000 leaflets. If you're not familiar with a mimeograph machine, it is a precursor to a copy machine, and you make copies by rotating a handle. So to make 35,000 leaflets meant she couldn't just press a button and come back later when copies were done. She literally had to stay up all night rotating a handle. She sent messages to students to come pick up the leaflets in the morning and begin passing them out. And the leaflets said,

this is for Monday, December 5th, 1955. Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. Negroes have rights too. And if we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. Next time, it may be you or your daughter or mother. you or your daughter or mother. After staying up all night, Joanne drove more leaflets all over the city to spread the word far and wide. And by the end of the day, Friday, December 2nd, nearly the entire Black community of Montgomery had agreed to a plan. The plan was cemented by Black religious leaders from the pulpit on Sunday, that the next day, Monday, December 5th, as many Black people as were able would not take the bus.

They would instead walk, ride bikes, call in sick, and organize carpools. African Americans made up 70% of bus ridership, so this was going to dramatically impact the bottom line of the bus company. The community agreed to reconvene Monday evening after a one-day boycott to see how it went and if they should continue. More than 50,000 people participated. Their absence was noticeable. When Rosa Parks stepped on that bus on Thursday, December 1st, she recognized the driver. He was the driver who, years before, had stolen her money. money. Bus drivers could, if they wanted to, require black patrons to enter the front doors of the bus, deposit their fare, walk back off of the bus, and enter through the back doors to take their seat. This driver took her fare, told her to board via the back doors, but then closed the doors and drove away without allowing her to board, taking her money and leaving her without a ride. Rosa didn't forget. And the driver? His name was James F. Blake. He was also the same driver

who tried to run Lucille Times off the road. Years later in the 1980s, the Washington Post tracked James F. Blake down and went to his house. He told the reporter that he was just doing his job when he had Rosa arrested, and I was hoping for a redemption story. I was hoping to hear that he was sorry, that he realized that he was wrong. But very quickly after his conversation with the Washington Post reporter began, he started using the N-word. And here's something else that history books have failed to mention about Rosa Louise McCauley Parks. She was a rape investigator. And further, the Montgomery bus boycott was about far more than integrating buses. It was about far more than voting rights.

In fact, one of the major catalysts for the modern civil rights movement was women. In particular, it was violence against black women at the hands of white men. A woman named Recy Taylor was one of the catalysts for the modern civil rights movement. Recy was a married mother walking home from a church event when a car of seven white men pulled over and forced her into their vehicle. They drove off into the woods and six of them raped her. One of them didn't participate in the rape because he said that he knew her. They then dropped Reese off blindfolded on the side of the highway, and her husband and the sheriff were out looking for her. She told them what happened. This was in a small town in Alabama called Abbeville.

There was only one car that matched the description of the vehicle of her kidnappers. The sheriff knew who it belonged to. The day after the rape, Recy Taylor's house was firebombed. Two all-white grand juries refused to charge any of the six men with a crime. The NAACP sent their best investigator, Rosa Parks. She went to Abbeville to get to the bottom of things, and this led to two months of protests. If you think about modern-day protests,

we often think about them taking a couple of hours, like we're going to have a protest this afternoon from two to 4. These protests lasted months. You would be mistaken if you believed that Black women did not speak up. You'd be mistaken if you thought that Black women did not risk their personal safety to try and get justice. You'd be mistaken if you thought these facts were never going to see the

light of day again. What's done in darkness will always come to light. Seeds of resistance, seeds of momentum were planted not just in the hearts of men and women all over the South, they were planted in the hearts of their children and their relatives. In 2011, the Alabama legislature formally apologized for never prosecuting anyone for Recy Taylor's rape. A few years later, Gertrude Perkins was walking home from the bus stop when she was abducted by two white police officers. They forced her into the back of a squad car and raped her at gunpoint. She went immediately to her minister who carefully wrote down her story and contacted authorities. Neither of the officers were ever prosecuted because doing so would, quote, violate their constitutional rights, Gertrude was told. Again, enter Rosa Parks.

She helped organize more months of protests demanding accountability for the officers. The seeds that were planted by Recy Taylor and nurtured by Rosa Parks and watered by Gertrude Perkins were now fields of resistance and momentum. So no, Rosa was not just a tired seamstress who did not want to give up her seat after a long day of work one day in December 1955. Rosa was one of many, one of thousands of Black women and men who organized and resisted and planned and did not give up. The one-day bus boycott was so successful that the leaders agreed to make it last longer. And within a few days, they had organized the MIA, the Montgomery Improvement Association, with Martin Luther King Jr. playing a prominent role. Schedules of ride shares were created. Organizers asked cab

drivers to charge Black residents the same fare as the bus, which was 10 cents, and cab drivers agreed. Within a few days, the city of Montgomery passed an ordinance saying that cab drivers had to charge no less than 45 cents, and any driver who didn't comply would be fined. The MIA held meetings with city leaders, and the city refused their demands. So the boycott continued. Because 70% of the city's bus riders were Black, the city urgently doubled fares to try to make up for the lost revenue and to try to keep the bus system open. People participating in ride-sharing were constantly harassed and ticketed, trying to dissuade them from continuing. And Black people with cars like Martin Luther King were arrested. Some were jailed based

on the assumption that they were all involved in the boycott and that it violated city rules. The boycott was just getting started. And at the end of January of 1956, Martin Luther King Jr.'s home was bombed. He wasn't home at the time, and fortunately the rest of his family wasn't injured. And as the calendar flipped to February 1956, attorney Fred Gray had been hard at work on a federal lawsuit. Fred Gray filed a lawsuit contesting Montgomery's policies of racial segregation on buses. And the plaintiffs in his lawsuit? Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Mary Louise Smith, and Susie McDonald. Claudette was now 16 and pregnant with the baby of a much older man. She felt like civil rights leaders had abandoned her, but they came back when they needed additional plaintiffs for their case.

Because she was pregnant, they didn't want the fact that she wasn't married to be a factor in the lawsuit, so she was never the face of the case, even though she was a party to it. They decided that Susie McDonald was too elderly. They decided that Mary Louise Smith's father was an alcoholic, so she remained party to the lawsuit, but she wasn't the face of it. They didn't want character assassination to get in the way of their case. That left 37-year-old Aurelia Browder. A widowed mother of six was exactly who they needed, someone who worked three jobs to be there for her kids and relied on the bus to do so. Another woman, Janetta Reese, was originally party to Fred Gray's lawsuit, but dropped out

after one day because of the number of death threats she received. The case Browder v. Gale is an often overlooked civil rights case. William Gale was the mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, and Browder refers to Aurelia Browder. As federal lawsuits often do, the case took months to get a resolution. And in the meantime, 11,000 white people showed up at a rally in support of bus segregation. They wanted to keep the buses segregated. A grand jury indicted 89 of the organizers of the bus boycott with crimes. After the 89 people were charged with crimes, only one ended up being prosecuted, Martin Luther King. We'll talk more about his prosecution in the next episode, but in June of 1956, the Montgomery bus boycott was still going on. Take a moment to think about how willing you would be to commit to doing something that was a significant inconvenience to you for many months.

Most people fail at New Year's resolutions within a couple of days, a couple of weeks. New Year's resolutions within a couple of days, a couple of weeks. Refusing to take the bus, boycotting the bus was a major commitment. Finally, the court came back. The federal court said that bus segregation violated the Constitution and the city of Montgomery immediately appealed. and the city of Montgomery immediately appealed. Eventually, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. And in November of 1956, the Supreme Court released their opinion. Segregation of Montgomery's buses was unconstitutional. The headline of the Alabama Journal read, bus segregation is knocked out. Birmingham Mayor William Gale, whose nickname was Tacky, that was actually his nickname, refused to do anything about it. He made no moves to desegregate the buses.

buses. And so in December of 1956, federal marshals handed Mayor Gale a notice. Desegregate now. On December 28th, 1956, the bus boycott ended. After nearly 13 months of refusing to ride the bus, black riders returned. After the prolonged, significant, and collective effort, the concerted desire to create change, ordinary Americans were successful. Their plan had worked. Except snipers began firing on integrated buses. On the day they were fully integrated, a woman who was eight months pregnant was shot in both of her legs. Four churches and the homes of two ministers were firebombed. All of them had openly supported the integration of buses. Reverend Ralph Abernathy, whose church and home were both firebombed, announced, despite the wreckage and the broken windows, we will gather as usual at our church and offer special prayers for those who would desecrate the house of God.

Two white KKK members were indicted for the bombings. They confessed to doing it. An all-white jury acquitted them anyway. The boycott was over, but the civil rights movement was just getting started. Rosa Parks had to move away because of death threats and the fact that she couldn't find work. In 2019, Montgomery unveiled a new statue of Rosa, along with markers for Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie MacDonald, and Mary Louise Smith. Women who, along with Joanne Robinson and Lucille Times, Recy Taylor, Gertrude Perkins, and thousands of others sat down so that we can stand up. Lucille Times lived to be 100. She died from COVID in 2021. Also in 2021, Claudette Colvin, the 15-year-old who refused to give up her seat, asked to have her criminal record expunged. Her request was granted in December of 2021. She said, I want them to know that their grandmother stood up for something against the

injustice in America. The laws will change and a lot of people, not only myself, paid the price and made sacrifices. We're not where we're supposed to be, but don't take the freedom that we do have for granted. On May 8th of 2022, attorney Fred Gray received an honorary law degree from the University of Alabama. law degree from the University of Alabama. He is in his 90s and is still practicing law. The civil rights movement would be nowhere without the extraordinary, prolonged courage and efforts of women. In the words of Rosa Parks, we must live our lives as a model for others. Join me next time when we begin our discussion of J. Edgar Hoover's vendetta against Martin Luther King. Not only did he hate him, he blackmailed him. I'll see you soon.

Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.