September 28, 2024 • 50 mins
Rosa Parks finishes out our Black History Month episodes in grand fashion. While most know her from that fateful day on the Montgomery city bus, she actually had a long life as an advocate, protestor and agent of change. Join us via this classic episode as we celebrate one of America's great history makers.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everybody, Chuck here.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
I hope you're all having some cereal or toaster pastries,
or maybe a bagel, maybe an egg sandwich, maybe some
overnight oats.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Maybe some bacon, maybe some back bacon.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Maybe it depends on where you are in the world
what kind of bacon you're eating, because we all call
it bacon, and it means a different thing wherever you
are at any rate, I hope you're enjoying some breakfast,
and you should listen to this episode while you eat breakfast.
From February twenty second, twenty eighteen. Rosa Parks Colon, agent
of change, but a great woman in American history. Welcome
(00:43):
to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's
Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. So it's
Stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
It's a podcast, clean studio version.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
I don't know, it feels a little weird in here, like, uh,
I think it's too good for us or something, you
know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yeah, just so you folks know, Jerry tests a couple
of the editor engineers here with coming in and cleaning
up the pile of spaghetti that used to flow from
the back of her workstation. Nice, not that it was
Jerry's fault. And she said, clean up my mess.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Well she clapped twice in rapid secession.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
They know what that means. Right, looks good though, it does.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
But now we actually have room to put stuff, so
we should put some stuff in here.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
I agree. It's a little bear.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
A papa's on right there, that'd be nice. I don't know. Well,
we could put a small papas on.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Most people don't realize, but this place is lousy with
Ikea lamps, I mean everywhere, and the cheapest ones like
they're one of them's on fire right now? Yeah that one?
Oh yeah, smoldering, it's smoldering. Still fire, Chuck, speaking of fire. Yes,
you want to know somebody who had some fire in
her more than most people realize. Rosa Parks, who is
(02:13):
now one of my all time heroes because before the
Rosa Parks I knew again it was like the Harriet
Tubman episode. Learned about her in school. She was a
great American respector reviewer her. Here's why she didn't give
up her seat on the bus. No, like not only
is that like just the tip of the Iceberg. It
(02:35):
wasn't until about the last five or so years. I
think about the last four years, they're like a full
picture of this woman and who she was and what
she stood for and what drove her emerged, not just
to the public in general, but to historians, even because
her personal papers were basically held up in auction for
(02:56):
years and years and years, and now now that they've
been donated for like ten years to the Library of Congress, Yeah,
we're starting to get a clear picture of her. And
she was even more worth revering than people knew before.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Yeah. I mean, I think.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
What the story isn't is Rosa Parks was just a
quiet lady who was super tired on the bus one day,
so she didn't want to get up.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
Her dogs were yapping.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Yeah, not true.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
And she even makes a point in her personal paper saying,
I was forty two years old. I was no more
tired than I was after any day at work. But
what I was tired of was being told to get
up by a white bus driver to make room for
a white passenger.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Right. That was not My dogs weren't barking.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Right, So she she I think one of the reasons
why she was kind of whittled down into this woman
who was just tired and wasn't going to give up
her seat because she shouldn't have had to in the
first place. And then she was a very meek, quiet person.
Also was another way that she was drawn. I think
(04:02):
one of the reasons why she was whittled into that
package was because she became an icon for the civil
rights movement. And one of the things that the civil
rights movement had to do, for better or worse, was
to get the establishment, both white and black, on the
side of the civil rights movement, which was a movement
(04:22):
of agitation. And if you agitated at the time, this
is the Jim Crow era that made trouble. This wasn't
like just trouble like people are going to yell at
you on Twitter. This was trouble like the cops might
arrest you for some made up infraction and then beat
and rape you on the way to the jail, and
then you would end up in the prison system. Kind
(04:44):
of trouble like. This is the kind of trouble that
a woman who refused to give up her seat on
the bus faced it at this time. So the idea
of taking a woman who was I guess palatable to
as many people as possible and saying, look at this woman,
we need to protect this woman's rights and do what's right.
(05:05):
I think that's why she got kind of whittled down
into that. But if you're looking back now, historically, there
was so much more to her than just that, and
she was certainly not meek and mild.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Yeah, I mean, distilling the story down for school books
is one thing, but like, I'm glad now that people
can get a more robust picture.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
So a lot of this comes from a website called
Great Black Heroes dot Com had a really good, lengthy article.
And then also I want to shout out a book
series called Little People, Big Dreams, And it's a kids
book series that we've been reading to my daughter. In fact,
it's kind of all she wants to read right now.
And they are on great women in history and kind
(05:48):
of brutally honest to be reading to kids. But they didn't.
It's kind of cool they weren't. They didn't whitewash anything.
It's sort of like, uh, Maya Angelo was not treated
well by white people, Like you read that to your kid,
and Rosa Parks is one. And then there's a Frieda Colo,
Coco Chanel, Amelia Earhart, Mary Currie, Aga Christi, and more.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
But but it's pretty brutal, like they draw Amelia air Hearts,
skeleton on the beach. Kind of brutal.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
You know what.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
That's the only one we haven't gotten to yet because
every night it's read Frida, Read Frida. Really, but it's
literally like Frieda Colo is lying in the street after
she gets hit by a taxi and she's bloody and
her legs don't work again after since. So, I mean,
it's pretty brutal stuff, but I don't know, it's kind
of cool, like kids can read the stuff and digest it.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
I think.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Sure it's a good way to begin them on the
path toward true stories.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
And to sharpen them to like a razor's edge at
a young.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Age, you know, look out for taxis.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Yeah, that's good. You know, that's good advice at any age.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
All right, So Rosa Parks, let's go back to where
she was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February fourth, nineteen
thirteen two. While she was born Rosa Louise McCauley to
James and Leonora McAuley, who were a carpenter and school teacher, respectively.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Right, her parents split, I guess she I don't know
how old she was. I guess she was younger than six,
but her father went to go look for work up north,
and her mom wanted to stay in the South, so
she and her mom and her brother moved in with
her mother's parents. Her grandparents and her grandfather played a
really distinct role in shaping her because she moved in
(07:33):
with them when she was, like I said, around six,
and at the time in this place Pine Level, which
is outside of Montgomery, Alabama, there was a lot of
clan violence, a lot of violence against blacks of the
hands of the Ku Klux Klan, and her grandfather was
not having it. He was actually he was the son
(07:53):
of a slave woman and a slave owner, so he
was I believe half white. He was a slave himself.
He had an owner at a young age who really
brutally mistreated him, tried to starve him for a little bit.
And her grandfather developed what she called a very intense
(08:15):
passionate hatred for white people and definitely im part of
that to his daughters and his granddaughter grandchildren. Wouldn't let
his grandchildren play with white kids, didn't let his daughters
work for white families. He was very much and it
sounds like pretty well founded against white people, and definitely
some of that rubbed off on Rose. At the very least,
(08:36):
her eyes were opened to just how unjust the system
was at the time when she was growing up.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Well, yeah, and just it wasn't even just through his eyes.
Like she went to a segregated school that she had
to walk to. White students were picked up and bussed
to the school. She went to an elementary school called
the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, cool School. It was
created by some northern white Northerners to basically try and
(09:08):
foster education in these more rural black communities in the South,
and that didn't go over well educating kids, so that
school was burned down twice.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
And then couple that with all the you.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Know, influence from her grandfather, and it's no surprise that
Rosa Parks from a very very early age was an activist.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
So and being an activist, we're talking like from age
six onward, right, So she dropped out a school, which
would have been a huge turning point. She had to
take care of her grandmother, and then I think her
mom later on because they both fell ill and she
met I think at age seventeen or eighteen, and then
(09:49):
later on, at age nineteen, married her husband, Raymond Parks,
and he encouraged her to go back and finish school
and she did. That was a huge move because she
was very much meant to be an educated person. So
the fact that she met Raymond was a huge influence
in that respect. He was also a big influence on
(10:09):
her because she said that he was the first activist,
like real activist, that she ever met. And I believe
this was even before the NAACP was in town. This
guy was like a grassroots activist and he and his
group were basically armed. Do you remember in the Black
Panthers episode where like the whole idea of arming yourself
came out of the South. This guy was, like Raymond
(10:33):
Parks was one of the real deal people who originated that,
and he and the group of activists that he he
met with would they would all come to the house
and everyone would have a gun. And apparently Rosa Parks
said sometimes there were so many guns on the table
that she didn't have any place to set the refreshments
(10:55):
during these meetings. But these meetings weren't like, you know,
how are we going to get white people back? It
was how are we going to protect like the Scottsboro
Boys from false rape accusations. He was an early pre
NAACP activist in Montgomery.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Yeah, and later on was a member of the NAACP.
We should do a show on the Scottsboro Boys at
some point. It's too much to get into here, but
the short version is a group of black men on
a train were accused of rape by two white women
who just made up this story. Basically went to trial
(11:31):
a few times and well, you know what, we'll save
the outcome, okay, because there are all kinds of outcomes
because it went to trial so many times.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
So she did finish high.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
School, and she became involved along with her husband in
the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and worked as their
secretary for fourteen years. So not only was she an activist,
but she was involved in service of these organizations.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
She worked for them like whatever you need done, I
will do.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
And anyone who's ever volunteered like knows that I guess
foot soldiers, for lack of a better term, are some
of the most important people to like in the Black
Panthers episode, when you know, the women didn't get nearly
the recognition they should have gotten for just keeping that
organization running on time.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
So, but she was more than a volunteer though. She
had some really some jobs with some real gravity. Like
she was an investigator of sexual assault of black women
by white men, which is a very dangerous thing to
do because you're going to like interview witnesses to crimes
(12:41):
that aren't being prosecuted because they're perpetrated by white people.
She was a Justice for Prisoner advocate. She did a
lot of like really important stuff. And as she was
doing this stuff as the secretary for the LOCALAACP, she
was also making contacts that would later become really important
(13:03):
in this nascent civil rights movement that largely grew out
of the Montgomery bus boycott we're going to talk about.
I had no idea how big of an event it was.
I knew it was big, but I didn't realize how
far reaching the effects of it were.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Oh yeah, And another kind of important thing happened to
her as far as integration goes, is she got a
job type job at Maxwell Air Force Base for a
little while, which because it was a federal institution, was
integrated and this was the first time that she had
first time she had worked in it, or basically been
(13:40):
in a professional integrated atmosphere. And that along with the
Highlander Folk School, which is maybe we should do a
show on that too. In nineteen fifty five, she went
to a meeting a workshop at the Highlander Folks School
and this is in the Hills of Tennessee and it
is still open today as the Highlander Research and Education Center,
not in that original building, but.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
It was just this great folks school where they prepared kids.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
For activism, workers tried to get people involved in civil rights.
And she actually got sponsored by the white couple that
she worked for to go to these meetings at mon Eagle, Tennessee.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
So that Maxwell Air Force basically mentioned. One of the
things she later said, I think they found in her
papers was a description of like because it was an
integrated base. The bus service on base was integrated as well,
So she would be riding next to a white friend
on the bus on base, and then once they would
get off of the bus on base and get onto
(14:40):
a city bus, they would have to stop their conversation
and get into the different sections, the white section and
the colored section, and that was just the reality of it.
And one thing that has really come through from her
papers is that she made a conscious decision to never
normally cannot be like, well that's just how it is. Yeah,
(15:03):
that's just life. That she would never let herself do that. Instead,
it was this is messed up. This has to be changed.
She was able to get through her day with this knowledge,
but she was never like this is normal or this
is okay.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Yeah, I mean she said it required.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
I think the quote was a lot of mental gymnastics
just to survive day to day as a black person
in America. So in other words, yeah, not accept it
and do everything I can to wrap my head around
what I can do moving forward.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Should we take a break?
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, man, all right, take a break and we'll come
back and we will start on December first, nineteen fifty five.
Very important day, all right. So it's December first, nineteen
(16:07):
fifty five. Rosa Parks is working as a seamstress at
the time at a department store. She gets off work
like she does every day, in Board's bus twenty eight
fifty seven Cleveland Avenue bus at about six o'clock and
Here's the deal with the buses at the time is
there were a certain amount of rows set aside for
white people, and then there was a sign that said,
(16:29):
you know, black people where they probably said colored people
back then can sit from here back. But that sign
could move, so as more white people get on the bus,
the bus driver gets up and moves that sign back
and says, all right, black folks, you got to get up,
get out of your seats because now the white section
is here, and just keep doing that until sensibly the
(16:50):
entire bus could be full of white people and they
just say, sorry, you all have to.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Get off, right.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Yeah, you either had to get up and move your seat.
If there were not seats left, you had to stand.
If there was no stand, you had to get off
the bus right. And then if the bus you were
getting on, if you were African American, if the white
section was already full, you had to get into the
front of the bus, pay, get off of the bus,
and get onto that back door.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
You couldn't even walk through the white section right.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
And then you know, you could take your seat in
the colored section. So there was a lot going on here.
At least half of this law was unwritten custom. Right,
The local ordinance in Montgomery, Alabama said that buses had
to be segregated. There was a white section and there
was a colored section. They put it right. All that
(17:38):
stuff about moving the sign, about getting up and like
having to leave the bus if there wasn't any standing
room for you, if more white people came on, all
of that was just customary. That was not law. That
was not the local ordinance, but it was so practiced
on a daily basis that it might as well have
been the.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Law for sure. And that's really all that matters. As
if everyone was playing ball, that's what was going to happen.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Yeah, because the courts would even prosecute as if you
had broken the law, right, if you had not actually
broken the law, but had broken this custom. So yeah,
for all intentsive purposes, it was the law.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
So the driver of that bus was one James Blake,
and Rosa had well, she had a long memory and
a previous incident with mister Blake twelve years previous, nineteen
forty three. She had paid her fare, and like you
were talking about, with the fact that they couldn't even
walk through the white section, he said, you got to
get off the bus. Go around to the back, forced her, well,
(18:38):
she had already gotten on, said no, you got to
re enter on the rear. She got out and he
was like psych closed the door and drove off with
her bus fare.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Right, Yeah, she had already paid. Yeah, that was the
nineteen forty three incident, and.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
She remembered twelve years later who James Blake was.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
I would probably not forget that bus driver. So on
this day she got on and she took her seat
in the colored section, and when she sat down again,
she was behind the sign. And I guess after a
couple of stops, and think about this, man, imagine riding
(19:14):
the bus. Let's say you have like seven stops. Think
about that pit that would be in your stomach on
a daily basis, Like, am I gonna have to get up?
I'm gonna have to be humiliated? I am I gonna
have to give up my seat to a white person?
Because even if somebody who was told that they had
to get up because a white person needed to sit there,
even if they just kind of quietly complied, that doesn't
(19:36):
get the point across how they were feeling. Right, then
anybody would be humiliated by that. And I read that
one of the reasons why buses, not just in Montgomery,
but throughout the segregated South, they were kind of flash
points because they were people were in such close quarters.
The racism was right up in your face in front
of a bunch of other people, so the humiliation was
(19:57):
even more pronounced. Right. So Rosa Park gets on the bus.
She takes her seat in the colored section, and after
a few stops, some white people got on and the driver,
James Blake, said that it was time for them to move,
that these white people needed a seat, and he was
moving the sign back at least one row.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
So at this point there's one white dude left without
a seat, so as his custom, he made four black
folks get out of their two seats on that row.
Everyone had to move back because there had to be
a whole new white row just for this one guy.
Three of the passengers got up and moved. Rosa Parks
just slid over to the window seat and sat there.
(20:43):
And he said, are you going to get up? And
she said no, I'm not. He said, well, if you
don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the
police and have you arrested. And she said, you may
do that. I know, man, I mean, just so brave.
And so the police did come, she was arrested, she
was booked, charged with disorderly conduct, and bailed out by
(21:06):
Clifford RR and Edgar Nixon, who were the local president
of the chapter of the NAACP.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
At the time. Right. So, so she's out, at least temporarily.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah, the next evening, so she spent the night in jail.
I don't I didn't run across any any statements or
any kind of evidence that she was like physically mistreated
or verbally abused by the police. But that seems to
be unusual for people who were arrested for not giving
up their seats on the bus.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
What that she was not mistreated?
Speaker 3 (21:38):
Right?
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure they didn't throw out the
welcome Matt.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
No, you know, no, but this is actually this is
noworthy here. Do you want to talk about how she
was not the first person that year, not the first
woman to have been arrested for not giving up her
seat on the bus. Yeah, sure, this is something I
didn't realize, and I think a lot of people didn't
realize this. But there were at least two other women
(22:02):
in Montgomery who were arrested that same year. One was
Claudette Colvin. She was fifteen at the time.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Yeah, wasn't she pregnant too?
Speaker 3 (22:11):
She got pregnant afterwards, Okay, but she was fifteen and
she in March was arrested for not giving up her
seat on the bus. She said at the time she
was scared to death, but she fell on one side,
so jouring her truth was holding her down, and on
the other side, Harriet Tubman was holding her down and
(22:31):
she was not about to get up. So they took
her off the bus and arrested her, and apparently she
was ridiculed and treated rather roughly. There was another woman.
Her name was Mary Louise Smith. I believe she was
eighteen at the time. She had been arrested in October
for the same thing. I didn't get the impression that
she was necessarily treated roughly, but Rosa Parks when she
(22:55):
was arrested, From what I can tell, she was treated
like the with the respect that would be afforded to
a middle class black woman at the time in Montgomery, Alabama,
which is to say, with maybe the slightest measure of respect,
which is to say, she wasn't beaten on the way
to Jail.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
There's a book, by the way called Claudette Colvin Colon
Twice Toward Justice from Phil Who's or Who's And I
think a lot of people these days are trying to
shine a little light on some of the lesser known
figures of the civil rights movement, and books are being
written and stuff like that, which is pretty awesome.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
And she was asked, Claudette Colevin was asked, why does
she think it was Rosa Parks and not her? And
she had a whole list of reasons, and all of
them are pretty legitimate. That you know, Rosa Parks was
a very again, a palatable person to a large swath
of people. And more of the point, she was also fifteen,
and the NAACP didn't think that a fifteen year old
(23:52):
was going to be the most reliable icon to kind
of project into the national forefront.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
Yeah, not to say that a lot of people have
said over the years that it was staged so because
they set Rosa Parks up, or not set her up,
but they picked her to do this because she was palatable.
They staged this whole thing to make which you know
would have been fine if that's the way you want
to kickstart the bus boycott. But from all accounts, it
was a in the moment decision. She said, I didn't
(24:22):
know that I was gonna get arrested and I was
going to sit down.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Yeah, it's just something that happened.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
And so so, on the one hand, the people who
say that no, this was staged the NUBACP, and even
before the n DOUBLEACP was around, buses had been like
a target of black activists in Montgomery in particular for decades.
I think the first bus boycott was in nineteen hundred
and it wasn't even a bus. There was a trolley line, yeah,
(24:48):
as well as boycotted. So she and having already been
the secretary of the NUBACP and an activist herself for
years by then, she must have been fully aware of
the potential outcome, which proved to be the actual outcome
from her arrest for not giving up her seat. But
the idea of saying that this was all staged it
(25:09):
does a couple of things. It's almost like a casually
racist way of just kind of diminishing it because it
does two things. One, it takes away her bravery, because
if it was, if it was staged, support the whole time.
It would have taken away a measure of fear. And
then secondly, it also makes the NAACP look kind of sneaky,
(25:32):
like there's socially engineering stuff and then pretending like that's
not the case. So I think by saying like, no,
this was staged, it really undermines the reality of the situation,
which is that this brave woman said she'd had enough.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Yeah, and you're right, she probably it probably occurred to
her the ramifications of this, but surely I bet you
anything in the moment she was just like, nope, nope,
not getting up.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
That's what I understand, that's what she's always Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
So here's what happened from there. She was arrested. Like
I said, she gets out on bail. Over that weekend,
a bunch of churches got together and they started talking
boycott on the winter trial comes around. It's a group
called the Women's Political Council, and they handed out thirty
five thousand handbills that basically said, please children, grown ups,
(26:24):
don't ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay
off the buses on Monday. Let's really try and make
a difference here. Because it was I think at the time,
black people made up seventy five percent of the passengers. Yeah,
so it could have a real impact on the finances
of the bus company.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Yeah. And it just started out as a boycott for
one day, for the Monday following Rosa Park's rest, which
was that happened on a Thursday, and they were just
going to do it for one day. But the success
of it was so surprising. I think they were hoping
for like fifty percent reduction. It turned out I saw
(27:04):
both ninety and ninety nine percent reduction in ridership by
African Americans that day.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Right, and if they make up seventy five percent, that's.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
A big loss for the city bus line, right for sure.
So it was such a success that they said, well,
let's maybe let's keep this going and see what we
can do with this. Because initially the demands of the
Montgomery bus boycott of nineteen fifty five was that one
of them was black black riders be treated with risk courtesy,
(27:33):
pretty low hanging request. Another one was that the seats
be given on a first come, first serve basis, which
was the law, and that black people sit from back
to front. White people sit from front to back. So
they were still saying like, we can keep the segregation,
but people shouldn't have to give up their seats. And
(27:56):
then the last one was they wanted black bus drivers
to be higher to drive the predominantly African American routes, right,
so that you didn't have to deal with an armed like,
oh yeah, an armed white bus driver because they were
armed and they had basically police powers to enforce segregation
on the bus. So the original boycott thing, their demands
were not extraordinarily radical. And when the boycott was a
(28:21):
success on that first Monday, they decided to extend it,
and they also decided maybe they should expand their demands
a little more.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
So while all this is going on, she was found
guilty on that Monday.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
She was fined ten.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Bucks plus court costs of four dollars for fourteen dollars total,
and said, nope, I'm going to appeal this conviction. She
challenged that basically she was what she was challenging was
segregation in general not being constitutional, right, And that ended
up being the argument that was, well, we'll get to
the court case and how it escalated. But she was
(28:56):
found guilty, and the other no notable thing that happened was.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
One Ralph David Abernethy and.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Doctor Martin Luther King, who was a young minister in
town of Dexter Avenue Baptist. He was elected president of
what was called the MIA, the Montgomery Improvement Association, which
they formed because the success of the boycott.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
So you have this new organization.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Then about a month later, month and a half, at
the end of January, Martin Luther King's home was bombed.
Everyone was unharmed in the incident, but it really ramped
up the stakes of what was going on.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
Yeah, well for sure, and they apparently the Montgomery Improvement
Association is credited with making the boycott successful. And the
way that they made it successful was through a carpool
they set up. They bought a bunch of station wagons
and put them in the name of some of the
black churches in town. And these station wagons would be
(30:00):
basically recreate the bus routes. They drove predetermined routes and
they were giving like twenty thousand people a ride every day.
That's how successful this was. And they put such a
crimp in the finances of the city bus line that
(30:20):
a couple of things happened. One they had to layoff workers,
close down lines, raise their fares like it really hurt
the city bus lines. And then secondly, the city and
I believe maybe even the state sued the Montgomery Improvement
Association for this boycott, which was apparently illegal under a
(30:41):
nineteen twenty one Alabama law.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Yeah, they sued against the car service, specifically saying that
the bus company had an exclusive franchise, right, and they
did get an injunction in November of nineteen fifty six.
But all of this comes out of the fact that
in like thirty something years earlier, in nineteen twenty one,
Alabama passed an anti boycott Act which basically said that
(31:07):
it's illegal for you to not ride the bus in
this case.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
In that case, sure or at least organize people and
get them to not ride the bus. Yeah, it was
something like it was a misdemeanor to organize against somebody
carrying out lawful business or whatever. So they were getting
them on two things, that boycott and then infringing on
the bus lines franchise in that city, right.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Right, So what do you do if you are suing
or sorry, if you're if you have an anti boycott act,
I mean, you can't arrest everyone. So they go after
I think eighty nine Martin Luther King Junior and eighty
nine other other members of the MIA and obviously because
they're the most how many of them twenty four more ministers,
(31:54):
they're the most prominent members. And he has find five
hundred bucks and spent a couple of weeks in jail.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
They said, he's very proud of his crime. Should be yeah, sure.
So now Martin Luther King as appealing. So you've got
a few things going on here. You've got Rosa Parks
who has been convicted and now is appealing her ten
dollars plus four dollars in court costs fine for breaking
(32:21):
the city ordinance even though she didn't. You've got Martin
Luther King now who is appealing his five hundred dollars
fine for the boycott and the infringing on the bus
lines franchise. And then you have something else. You have
a class action suit called Browder versus Gail and was
(32:42):
named after oh what's her name, the woman who's the
lead plaintiff in the case. Her name is Aurelia S. Browder.
And the Gail in the case was the Montgomery The
Montgomery mayor I think William Gail and we'll talk about that. Well,
let's take a break and we'll talk about this case,
(33:03):
and we'll come back to the drumbeat of the court system.
Story end of kick In.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
All right, So appeals run slow anyway, but in the South,
if it's a if it's a case like this, it's
going to go super slow because the hope from the
white establishment is, you know, maybe enough time I'll go
by time, I'll go buy and these people just sort
of get in line and forget about it, get tired
of this boycott and everything.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
We'll just go back to normal.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
Yeah, which is kind of a gamble because this boycott
was not showing any signs of cracking. So they were
basically making that bet on the back of the city
bus line and on the jobs of the drivers who
were being laid off because ridership was down so.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Low one days, three hundred and eighty one days right
for the boycott.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
So, like I said, this court the drumbeat of the
court system was starting to grow a little bit louder.
And you had three big cases Martin Luther King's case,
Rosa Parks case, and you had Browder versus Gail and
ber versus Gail represented four women originally five, but four
women who had been convicted of breaking the law for
(34:36):
not giving up their seat on the bus in Montgomery.
One of them was claut At Colvin, another one was
Mary Louise Smith, I believe, and then Aurelia Browder and then.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Lastly was Susie McDonald.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Susie McDonald, right. So these four women got together, ensued
the mayor, the bus line, a few bus drivers, the
city Public Works Commission, just a big group of people,
and they were suing to all three of those cases
were suing the question the constitutionality and the legality of
(35:13):
segregation in general, but specifically on the bus lines. And
there was a talk at first by Freddie Gray, who
was the lead lawyer in the broader Egail, of including
Rosa Parks. But he very very wisely kept her separate
from that case because he said he wanted the courts
(35:34):
to just consider one thing, not whether Rosa Parks was
guilty or not, but whether the segregation on the Montgomery
buses was legal and constitutional. So he kept those separate
very very smartly.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Yeah. I think he knew that he could get this
to the Supreme Court this way. It was a test case,
and that was his ultimate goal because it was a
state statute though in the state Constitution of Alabama. It
was of course first brought before District Court, three judges
in US District Court on June fifth, nineteen fifty six.
They ruled two to one that segregation was unconstitutional. Of course,
(36:12):
they cited Brown Versusportive Education as president, and it eventually
wound its way to the Supreme Court in nineteen fifty
six on December seventeenth.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Actually that was pretty quick.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Yeah, considering Yeah, and they rejected all appeals and voted
nine to nothing, nine to zero that it was unconstitutional.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
Yep, nine to nothing, which is I mean, that's really
saying something unanimous Supreme Court decision regarding segregation.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Yeah, in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
Yeah, so that was a that was huge. I think
doctor King was in court that day when he was
told by a reporter about that decision, the Supreme Court decision,
and even after he said, we're keeping up the boycott
because well, when they implement this d sgregation on the
(37:00):
buses will stop the boycott. And after the Supreme Court
ruling came through, the city of Montgomery saw pretty clearly
that there wasn't any way to keep this up any longer.
And I believe within three days the buses were desegregated.
And on the first day that they were desegregated, Rosa
Parks took her seat on a bus in the front row,
I believe.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Yeah, they hired black bus drivers.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
And this is after, by the way, three hundred and
eighty one days of a total sales loss of sixty
five percent.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
So yeah, And on the other side, Ralph David Abernethy's
home was bombed. Martin Luther King's home was bombed. People
were in jail, people were in court. It was a
big struggle down in Montgomery.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
So on December twenty first, doctor King and his white friend,
Reverend Glynn Smiley sat together on the front row with
Ralph David Abernethy Street here in Atlanta. Yea name for him,
Edie Dixon and Fred Gray, the attorney that saw that case.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Right. So that was a huge thing that did a
number of things. It made Rosa Parks and icon. It
projected Martin Luther King into the national spotlight. That was
basically where he first found national fame and basically was like, well,
this guy's the leader of the civil rights movement now,
and it also was a huge domino in the idea
(38:23):
of desegregation in general, not just on buses, not just
in Montgomery, but the concept it followed in the wake
of plus e v. Ferguson which it was just one
of those court cases that said separate facilities is inherently racist,
because the only reason you would have separate facilities is
(38:44):
because you think one group is superior over the other
and they shouldn't have to consort or mix. That's inherently unconstitutional.
And this was one of those dominoes that fell in
that chain that led to desegregation across the Jim Crow
South And and like a laser, this particular case and
(39:04):
the changes it brought were focused right onto Rosa Parks,
her act, her courage, what she did.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Yeah, and this was this was within our parents' lifetime.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
I know, I was wondering. I was like, why am
I so much more jazzed about this than Harriet Tubman.
I love Harriet Tubsman Tubman's story. Yeah, but I remember
when I was researching, I wasn't new these jazz and
I realized, like, I can relate to this woman so
much better. Just because this is pretty pretty recent, you know.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Well, yeah, and just the notion that where we are
as a country now racially, this was not that long ago.
So for the people in the camp of saying just
get over things, African Americans, just get over things, it's
like this was not hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
This was very recently. These like my peers parents had
(39:59):
to live through this.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
Well, one thing Rosa Parks is now known for what
they didn't realize before is, you know, her act in
like the civil rights movement that grew out of over
like the next ten years, fifteen years. There's this idea
that around nineteen seventy there was a button put on
that and it was like, you guys were successful. Wait
(40:20):
to go, we can stop doing this now. Rosa Parks
was like, no, no, it's not done. This hasn't changed.
Up until she died in two thousand and five, she
was like, this struggle is still continuing.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
People didn't realize that about her until this collection was opened.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Yeah, this all came.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
There was significant cost to her family, to her her husband.
Her and her husband both suffered through stomach ulcers because
of this. They lost their jobs. Eventually they left Alabama
said and let's go to Virginia. And Virginia wasn't a
whole lot better. They said, all right, let's go to Detroit.
(41:00):
Kept going north, and then finally, after not having a
job for a long time, she was hired as secretary
for John Conyers, a brand new, brand newly elected black
congressman who she would work for for twenty three years.
And mister Conyers, you know, he was the one who
stepped down last year after sexual assault allegations after serving many,
(41:23):
many years in Congress, and was a civil rights icon.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
So it's kind of a.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Very sad ending to that story, but Rosa worked for him.
In seventy seven, her husband, James died of cancer, her
brother died of cancer three months later, her mom died
two years after that. But I get the sense that
after that, it really it really kind of freed her
to really go back to work and devote herself once
(41:49):
again to the cause, because after those family members passed away,
she established the Rosa Parks Scholarship Foundation in the Rosa
and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development and wrote two memoirs. Yeah,
she was busy, she was, and then very sadly, I know.
I remember this in nineteen ninety four when she was
(42:11):
home invaded and robbed.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Yeah, hit over the.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
Head by a guy named Joseph Skipper.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
Yeah, man, that was just like, I mean, for kidding.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
Me with that for fifty eight bucks.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Of all the houses to accidentally break into. Yeah, what
do you think you knew it was Rosa Parks.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
I don't know. I don't know, but he I've.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
Seen nothing to indicate that that was true.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
He knew that that he would go down as the
man who robbed and beat Rosa Parks. Oh well yeah,
so yeah, I don't I don't think he was she
was targeted because she was Rosa Parks or anything like that.
I think she's just a little old lady. The impression
I have is it doesn't matter if she was Rosa
Parks or not. Sure, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah,
(42:58):
so she That was ninety four, and then like right afterward,
there was a huge national outcry and she moved into
a very secure high rise in Detroit, where she lived
until she died in two thousand and five. I believe
she died in that.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Apartment ninety two years young, and she had a slew
of honors, unprecedented honors in this country. She was transported
her body to Washington, d C. And she laid an
honor under the rotunda the US capital. First woman, yep
to get that honor, the second African American and the
(43:34):
first non government American ever to have this honor.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
Yep. I mean that is a high honor.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
When she died, every flag on public land in the
United States and around the world was flown at half mast,
which is pretty pretty great too.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
George W. Bush made sure that happened. And then here's
just some of her lifetime achievement awards. INAACP gave her
what's called the Sping Garden Medal in nineteen seventy nine,
their highest honor. She's in the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame,
Martin Luther King Junior Award nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3 (44:12):
You could have just stopped at the Michigan Hall of.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Fame, Michigan Women's Hall of Fame, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
In nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Congressional Michigan Women's Hall of Fame.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
Congressional Gold Medal. No, now we're in a contest.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Time magazine named her was one of the twenty most
influential and iconic figures of the twentieth century.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
It's a big one, okay.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
And then yeah, he mentioned George W.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Bush ordered half mass flags in two thousand and five.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
So again there was this idea that she was just
a tired, little old lady who was quietly brave and
didn't give up her seat, and she was kind of
meek and quiet. And in twenty fourteen, her personal collection,
the Rosa Parks Collection, was sold to the Howard Buffett Foundation,
Warren Buffett's son. They bought it for a song at
(45:04):
like four and a half million dollars, and it's something
like I think sixty five hundred documents and twenty five
hundred photographs, and it is her personal papers, like notes
for speeches, notes for her books, I believe, correspondence, and
it paints this picture that no one had of her before,
which was no like this lady was an activist. They
(45:26):
went through her whole life. She was an activist who
wanted to talk about and agitate for the rights of
black Americans and how messed up the situation was that
they lived in and that she wouldn't normalize this, she
would learn to deal with it. As much as she
needed to while she was working to change it. And
(45:49):
it was just a surprise to a lot of people
when they cracked open these papers and found that picture
of her.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:56):
I also want to shout out article how history got
the Roads of Park story wrong. And this was written
by the same person who wrote the award winning book
The Rebellious Life of Missus Rosa Parks. Her name is
Jeane Theo Harris. Theohis it's all one word. Yeah, I
(46:16):
know it sounds like it should be hyphenated.
Speaker 3 (46:18):
It's really easy to say, but how do you say it?
Speaker 1 (46:21):
I have no idea, I know.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
But she's professor Professor of Polysi at Brooklyn College of
c U n Y.
Speaker 3 (46:28):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
Man, great lady, yep.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
So if you want to know more about Rosa Parks,
go out on the internet. Educate yourself.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
I don't seen that movie. Have you seen that? No?
The about the bus boycott?
Speaker 3 (46:43):
No, I mean it was a significant event. I had
no idea. Okay, well, I think I said go search
stuff in there somewhere. So that means it's time for
listener maw.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
I'm gonna call this oh all right, hey, guys, let
me start off by saying enjoyed the podcast very much fine.
Aside from being interesting and entertaining, it very much helps
my time in the car.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
We get that a lot sure commute helps people would
go insane if it weren't for us.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Several episodes ago, I believe Chuck mentioned that you love
tiny things.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
I do.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
Josh likes things that are grossly oversized. That giant pocket
watch over.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
There, Yeah it's kind of a pain.
Speaker 3 (47:27):
I'm wearing it.
Speaker 2 (47:29):
He mentioned loving tiny things, there are something extraordinarily satisfying
about them. I agree. I love tiny things. Would be
remiss if I did not bring bring you to the
Museum of Jurassic Technology.
Speaker 3 (47:41):
I love that place.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
I know I've been there too. It's in Los Angeles.
There are not one, but two fantastic exhibits of tiny things.
I have the needle in micro mosaics. I don't think
I saw those, did you?
Speaker 3 (47:54):
The tiny thing I remember was like the dioramas of
the trailers. I have the needle. I remember that. Oh yeah, yeah,
I don't remember the micro mosaics.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Though I haven't been in many years. Though, yeah, I
have the needle features delightful.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Whimsical miniature sculpture is actually small enough to fit into
the eye of a needle.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
Oh, there you go. That's a little too small for me.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
Okay, so you like so you like?
Speaker 1 (48:16):
I like the tiny Tabasco bottles that you get in there.
Speaker 3 (48:19):
You like to feel like you're a giant, not like
a god.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
Yeah, gotcha, exactly. I just want to be taller.
Speaker 2 (48:25):
The micro mosaics exhibit also requires a magnifying glass to enjoy.
However beautiful, this exhibit has a slightly creepy.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
Aspect to it.
Speaker 2 (48:32):
The tiny mosaic pieces are in fact bits of butterfly wings.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
Yeah, that's not too creepy. Oh, I mean they kill
the butterflies?
Speaker 3 (48:42):
Depends. Yeah, how'd they come across those wings? Where do
they rogue kill?
Speaker 2 (48:45):
If so, that's fine, Yeah, what a job, go out
and just try and find dead butterflies.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
All in all, these exhibits of a wonderful field of
magic Realism. Museum also features a lovely rooftop garden as
well of a meditative tea room to enjoy complimentary cup
of tea.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
Interesting. That is all guys, cheers from Sandra Williams.
Speaker 3 (49:06):
Thanks a lot for the shout out, Sandra. That is
indeed a great place if you're ever in Los Angeles,
everybody go check out the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Just
going with your mind open and thank us later.
Speaker 1 (49:17):
Yeah, get out of Ripley's Believe it or.
Speaker 3 (49:19):
Not, We'll go both.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
You know, sure I said get out of Ripley's Believe
it or not?
Speaker 3 (49:26):
Okay? Yeah, But I mean Jack Palance, man, how do
you pass that guy?
Speaker 1 (49:30):
I don't get it.
Speaker 3 (49:31):
Remember he was the host of the TV show.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
Or Not.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
Yeah, my brother worked with him on City Slickers too,
and there was one story where, you know, he's kind
of old at the time, where Scott as the ad
is to walk him. Second ad is to walk the
talent to the set from their trailer, and that was
through the desert, the rocky desert, and Scott was like,
you know, look out for that wrong, mister Palence or
something like that. And one day he was just like,
(49:58):
I don't need you to tell me how to walk,
Scott like shrank down. Of course I can't remember if
that's exactly.
Speaker 3 (50:05):
What you said, but but I'll bet I'll bet Jack
Palance felt so bad for yelling at Scott, of all people,
I doubt it.
Speaker 2 (50:12):
You know, it's Scott and he didn't delight in Scott
like everyone else does.
Speaker 3 (50:16):
Jackal Yeah, Well, if you want to tell us how
great you think Scott is, you can send us all
an email, including Jerry. It's a stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks
dot com has always joined us at our home on
the web, Stuff Youshould Know dot Com.
Speaker 1 (50:32):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, everybody, Chuck here.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
I hope you're all having some cereal or toaster pastries,
or maybe a bagel, maybe an egg sandwich, maybe some
overnight oats.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Maybe some bacon, maybe some back bacon.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Maybe it depends on where you are in the world
what kind of bacon you're eating, because we all call
it bacon, and it means a different thing wherever you
are at any rate, I hope you're enjoying some breakfast,
and you should listen to this episode while you eat breakfast.
From February twenty second, twenty eighteen. Rosa Parks Colon, agent
of change, but a great woman in American history. Welcome
(00:43):
to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's
Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. So it's
Stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
It's a podcast, clean studio version.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
I don't know, it feels a little weird in here, like, uh,
I think it's too good for us or something, you
know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yeah, just so you folks know, Jerry tests a couple
of the editor engineers here with coming in and cleaning
up the pile of spaghetti that used to flow from
the back of her workstation. Nice, not that it was
Jerry's fault. And she said, clean up my mess.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Well she clapped twice in rapid secession.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
They know what that means. Right, looks good though, it does.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
But now we actually have room to put stuff, so
we should put some stuff in here.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
I agree. It's a little bear.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
A papa's on right there, that'd be nice. I don't know. Well,
we could put a small papas on.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Most people don't realize, but this place is lousy with
Ikea lamps, I mean everywhere, and the cheapest ones like
they're one of them's on fire right now? Yeah that one?
Oh yeah, smoldering, it's smoldering. Still fire, Chuck, speaking of fire. Yes,
you want to know somebody who had some fire in
her more than most people realize. Rosa Parks, who is
(02:13):
now one of my all time heroes because before the
Rosa Parks I knew again it was like the Harriet
Tubman episode. Learned about her in school. She was a
great American respector reviewer her. Here's why she didn't give
up her seat on the bus. No, like not only
is that like just the tip of the Iceberg. It
(02:35):
wasn't until about the last five or so years. I
think about the last four years, they're like a full
picture of this woman and who she was and what
she stood for and what drove her emerged, not just
to the public in general, but to historians, even because
her personal papers were basically held up in auction for
(02:56):
years and years and years, and now now that they've
been donated for like ten years to the Library of Congress, Yeah,
we're starting to get a clear picture of her. And
she was even more worth revering than people knew before.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Yeah. I mean, I think.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
What the story isn't is Rosa Parks was just a
quiet lady who was super tired on the bus one day,
so she didn't want to get up.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
Her dogs were yapping.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Yeah, not true.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
And she even makes a point in her personal paper saying,
I was forty two years old. I was no more
tired than I was after any day at work. But
what I was tired of was being told to get
up by a white bus driver to make room for
a white passenger.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Right. That was not My dogs weren't barking.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Right, So she she I think one of the reasons
why she was kind of whittled down into this woman
who was just tired and wasn't going to give up
her seat because she shouldn't have had to in the
first place. And then she was a very meek, quiet person.
Also was another way that she was drawn. I think
(04:02):
one of the reasons why she was whittled into that
package was because she became an icon for the civil
rights movement. And one of the things that the civil
rights movement had to do, for better or worse, was
to get the establishment, both white and black, on the
side of the civil rights movement, which was a movement
(04:22):
of agitation. And if you agitated at the time, this
is the Jim Crow era that made trouble. This wasn't
like just trouble like people are going to yell at
you on Twitter. This was trouble like the cops might
arrest you for some made up infraction and then beat
and rape you on the way to the jail, and
then you would end up in the prison system. Kind
(04:44):
of trouble like. This is the kind of trouble that
a woman who refused to give up her seat on
the bus faced it at this time. So the idea
of taking a woman who was I guess palatable to
as many people as possible and saying, look at this woman,
we need to protect this woman's rights and do what's right.
(05:05):
I think that's why she got kind of whittled down
into that. But if you're looking back now, historically, there
was so much more to her than just that, and
she was certainly not meek and mild.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Yeah, I mean, distilling the story down for school books
is one thing, but like, I'm glad now that people
can get a more robust picture.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
So a lot of this comes from a website called
Great Black Heroes dot Com had a really good, lengthy article.
And then also I want to shout out a book
series called Little People, Big Dreams, And it's a kids
book series that we've been reading to my daughter. In fact,
it's kind of all she wants to read right now.
And they are on great women in history and kind
(05:48):
of brutally honest to be reading to kids. But they didn't.
It's kind of cool they weren't. They didn't whitewash anything.
It's sort of like, uh, Maya Angelo was not treated
well by white people, Like you read that to your kid,
and Rosa Parks is one. And then there's a Frieda Colo,
Coco Chanel, Amelia Earhart, Mary Currie, Aga Christi, and more.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
But but it's pretty brutal, like they draw Amelia air Hearts,
skeleton on the beach. Kind of brutal.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
You know what.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
That's the only one we haven't gotten to yet because
every night it's read Frida, Read Frida. Really, but it's
literally like Frieda Colo is lying in the street after
she gets hit by a taxi and she's bloody and
her legs don't work again after since. So, I mean,
it's pretty brutal stuff, but I don't know, it's kind
of cool, like kids can read the stuff and digest it.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
I think.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Sure it's a good way to begin them on the
path toward true stories.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
And to sharpen them to like a razor's edge at
a young.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Age, you know, look out for taxis.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Yeah, that's good. You know, that's good advice at any age.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
All right, So Rosa Parks, let's go back to where
she was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February fourth, nineteen
thirteen two. While she was born Rosa Louise McCauley to
James and Leonora McAuley, who were a carpenter and school teacher, respectively.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Right, her parents split, I guess she I don't know
how old she was. I guess she was younger than six,
but her father went to go look for work up north,
and her mom wanted to stay in the South, so
she and her mom and her brother moved in with
her mother's parents. Her grandparents and her grandfather played a
really distinct role in shaping her because she moved in
(07:33):
with them when she was, like I said, around six,
and at the time in this place Pine Level, which
is outside of Montgomery, Alabama, there was a lot of
clan violence, a lot of violence against blacks of the
hands of the Ku Klux Klan, and her grandfather was
not having it. He was actually he was the son
(07:53):
of a slave woman and a slave owner, so he
was I believe half white. He was a slave himself.
He had an owner at a young age who really
brutally mistreated him, tried to starve him for a little bit.
And her grandfather developed what she called a very intense
(08:15):
passionate hatred for white people and definitely im part of
that to his daughters and his granddaughter grandchildren. Wouldn't let
his grandchildren play with white kids, didn't let his daughters
work for white families. He was very much and it
sounds like pretty well founded against white people, and definitely
some of that rubbed off on Rose. At the very least,
(08:36):
her eyes were opened to just how unjust the system
was at the time when she was growing up.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Well, yeah, and just it wasn't even just through his eyes.
Like she went to a segregated school that she had
to walk to. White students were picked up and bussed
to the school. She went to an elementary school called
the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, cool School. It was
created by some northern white Northerners to basically try and
(09:08):
foster education in these more rural black communities in the South,
and that didn't go over well educating kids, so that
school was burned down twice.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
And then couple that with all the you.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Know, influence from her grandfather, and it's no surprise that
Rosa Parks from a very very early age was an activist.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
So and being an activist, we're talking like from age
six onward, right, So she dropped out a school, which
would have been a huge turning point. She had to
take care of her grandmother, and then I think her
mom later on because they both fell ill and she
met I think at age seventeen or eighteen, and then
(09:49):
later on, at age nineteen, married her husband, Raymond Parks,
and he encouraged her to go back and finish school
and she did. That was a huge move because she
was very much meant to be an educated person. So
the fact that she met Raymond was a huge influence
in that respect. He was also a big influence on
(10:09):
her because she said that he was the first activist,
like real activist, that she ever met. And I believe
this was even before the NAACP was in town. This
guy was like a grassroots activist and he and his
group were basically armed. Do you remember in the Black
Panthers episode where like the whole idea of arming yourself
came out of the South. This guy was, like Raymond
(10:33):
Parks was one of the real deal people who originated that,
and he and the group of activists that he he
met with would they would all come to the house
and everyone would have a gun. And apparently Rosa Parks
said sometimes there were so many guns on the table
that she didn't have any place to set the refreshments
(10:55):
during these meetings. But these meetings weren't like, you know,
how are we going to get white people back? It
was how are we going to protect like the Scottsboro
Boys from false rape accusations. He was an early pre
NAACP activist in Montgomery.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Yeah, and later on was a member of the NAACP.
We should do a show on the Scottsboro Boys at
some point. It's too much to get into here, but
the short version is a group of black men on
a train were accused of rape by two white women
who just made up this story. Basically went to trial
(11:31):
a few times and well, you know what, we'll save
the outcome, okay, because there are all kinds of outcomes
because it went to trial so many times.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
So she did finish high.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
School, and she became involved along with her husband in
the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and worked as their
secretary for fourteen years. So not only was she an activist,
but she was involved in service of these organizations.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
She worked for them like whatever you need done, I
will do.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
And anyone who's ever volunteered like knows that I guess
foot soldiers, for lack of a better term, are some
of the most important people to like in the Black
Panthers episode, when you know, the women didn't get nearly
the recognition they should have gotten for just keeping that
organization running on time.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
So, but she was more than a volunteer though. She
had some really some jobs with some real gravity. Like
she was an investigator of sexual assault of black women
by white men, which is a very dangerous thing to
do because you're going to like interview witnesses to crimes
(12:41):
that aren't being prosecuted because they're perpetrated by white people.
She was a Justice for Prisoner advocate. She did a
lot of like really important stuff. And as she was
doing this stuff as the secretary for the LOCALAACP, she
was also making contacts that would later become really important
(13:03):
in this nascent civil rights movement that largely grew out
of the Montgomery bus boycott we're going to talk about.
I had no idea how big of an event it was.
I knew it was big, but I didn't realize how
far reaching the effects of it were.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Oh yeah, And another kind of important thing happened to
her as far as integration goes, is she got a
job type job at Maxwell Air Force Base for a
little while, which because it was a federal institution, was
integrated and this was the first time that she had
first time she had worked in it, or basically been
(13:40):
in a professional integrated atmosphere. And that along with the
Highlander Folk School, which is maybe we should do a
show on that too. In nineteen fifty five, she went
to a meeting a workshop at the Highlander Folks School
and this is in the Hills of Tennessee and it
is still open today as the Highlander Research and Education Center,
not in that original building, but.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
It was just this great folks school where they prepared kids.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
For activism, workers tried to get people involved in civil rights.
And she actually got sponsored by the white couple that
she worked for to go to these meetings at mon Eagle, Tennessee.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
So that Maxwell Air Force basically mentioned. One of the
things she later said, I think they found in her
papers was a description of like because it was an
integrated base. The bus service on base was integrated as well,
So she would be riding next to a white friend
on the bus on base, and then once they would
get off of the bus on base and get onto
(14:40):
a city bus, they would have to stop their conversation
and get into the different sections, the white section and
the colored section, and that was just the reality of it.
And one thing that has really come through from her
papers is that she made a conscious decision to never
normally cannot be like, well that's just how it is. Yeah,
(15:03):
that's just life. That she would never let herself do that. Instead,
it was this is messed up. This has to be changed.
She was able to get through her day with this knowledge,
but she was never like this is normal or this
is okay.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Yeah, I mean she said it required.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
I think the quote was a lot of mental gymnastics
just to survive day to day as a black person
in America. So in other words, yeah, not accept it
and do everything I can to wrap my head around
what I can do moving forward.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Should we take a break?
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, man, all right, take a break and we'll come
back and we will start on December first, nineteen fifty five.
Very important day, all right. So it's December first, nineteen
(16:07):
fifty five. Rosa Parks is working as a seamstress at
the time at a department store. She gets off work
like she does every day, in Board's bus twenty eight
fifty seven Cleveland Avenue bus at about six o'clock and
Here's the deal with the buses at the time is
there were a certain amount of rows set aside for
white people, and then there was a sign that said,
(16:29):
you know, black people where they probably said colored people
back then can sit from here back. But that sign
could move, so as more white people get on the bus,
the bus driver gets up and moves that sign back
and says, all right, black folks, you got to get up,
get out of your seats because now the white section
is here, and just keep doing that until sensibly the
(16:50):
entire bus could be full of white people and they
just say, sorry, you all have to.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Get off, right.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Yeah, you either had to get up and move your seat.
If there were not seats left, you had to stand.
If there was no stand, you had to get off
the bus right. And then if the bus you were
getting on, if you were African American, if the white
section was already full, you had to get into the
front of the bus, pay, get off of the bus,
and get onto that back door.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
You couldn't even walk through the white section right.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
And then you know, you could take your seat in
the colored section. So there was a lot going on here.
At least half of this law was unwritten custom. Right,
The local ordinance in Montgomery, Alabama said that buses had
to be segregated. There was a white section and there
was a colored section. They put it right. All that
(17:38):
stuff about moving the sign, about getting up and like
having to leave the bus if there wasn't any standing
room for you, if more white people came on, all
of that was just customary. That was not law. That
was not the local ordinance, but it was so practiced
on a daily basis that it might as well have
been the.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Law for sure. And that's really all that matters. As
if everyone was playing ball, that's what was going to happen.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Yeah, because the courts would even prosecute as if you
had broken the law, right, if you had not actually
broken the law, but had broken this custom. So yeah,
for all intentsive purposes, it was the law.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
So the driver of that bus was one James Blake,
and Rosa had well, she had a long memory and
a previous incident with mister Blake twelve years previous, nineteen
forty three. She had paid her fare, and like you
were talking about, with the fact that they couldn't even
walk through the white section, he said, you got to
get off the bus. Go around to the back, forced her, well,
(18:38):
she had already gotten on, said no, you got to
re enter on the rear. She got out and he
was like psych closed the door and drove off with
her bus fare.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Right, Yeah, she had already paid. Yeah, that was the
nineteen forty three incident, and.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
She remembered twelve years later who James Blake was.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
I would probably not forget that bus driver. So on
this day she got on and she took her seat
in the colored section, and when she sat down again,
she was behind the sign. And I guess after a
couple of stops, and think about this, man, imagine riding
(19:14):
the bus. Let's say you have like seven stops. Think
about that pit that would be in your stomach on
a daily basis, Like, am I gonna have to get up?
I'm gonna have to be humiliated? I am I gonna
have to give up my seat to a white person?
Because even if somebody who was told that they had
to get up because a white person needed to sit there,
even if they just kind of quietly complied, that doesn't
(19:36):
get the point across how they were feeling. Right, then
anybody would be humiliated by that. And I read that
one of the reasons why buses, not just in Montgomery,
but throughout the segregated South, they were kind of flash
points because they were people were in such close quarters.
The racism was right up in your face in front
of a bunch of other people, so the humiliation was
(19:57):
even more pronounced. Right. So Rosa Park gets on the bus.
She takes her seat in the colored section, and after
a few stops, some white people got on and the driver,
James Blake, said that it was time for them to move,
that these white people needed a seat, and he was
moving the sign back at least one row.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
So at this point there's one white dude left without
a seat, so as his custom, he made four black
folks get out of their two seats on that row.
Everyone had to move back because there had to be
a whole new white row just for this one guy.
Three of the passengers got up and moved. Rosa Parks
just slid over to the window seat and sat there.
(20:43):
And he said, are you going to get up? And
she said no, I'm not. He said, well, if you
don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the
police and have you arrested. And she said, you may
do that. I know, man, I mean, just so brave.
And so the police did come, she was arrested, she
was booked, charged with disorderly conduct, and bailed out by
(21:06):
Clifford RR and Edgar Nixon, who were the local president
of the chapter of the NAACP.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
At the time. Right. So, so she's out, at least temporarily.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah, the next evening, so she spent the night in jail.
I don't I didn't run across any any statements or
any kind of evidence that she was like physically mistreated
or verbally abused by the police. But that seems to
be unusual for people who were arrested for not giving
up their seats on the bus.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
What that she was not mistreated?
Speaker 3 (21:38):
Right?
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure they didn't throw out the
welcome Matt.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
No, you know, no, but this is actually this is
noworthy here. Do you want to talk about how she
was not the first person that year, not the first
woman to have been arrested for not giving up her
seat on the bus. Yeah, sure, this is something I
didn't realize, and I think a lot of people didn't
realize this. But there were at least two other women
(22:02):
in Montgomery who were arrested that same year. One was
Claudette Colvin. She was fifteen at the time.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Yeah, wasn't she pregnant too?
Speaker 3 (22:11):
She got pregnant afterwards, Okay, but she was fifteen and
she in March was arrested for not giving up her
seat on the bus. She said at the time she
was scared to death, but she fell on one side,
so jouring her truth was holding her down, and on
the other side, Harriet Tubman was holding her down and
(22:31):
she was not about to get up. So they took
her off the bus and arrested her, and apparently she
was ridiculed and treated rather roughly. There was another woman.
Her name was Mary Louise Smith. I believe she was
eighteen at the time. She had been arrested in October
for the same thing. I didn't get the impression that
she was necessarily treated roughly, but Rosa Parks when she
(22:55):
was arrested, From what I can tell, she was treated
like the with the respect that would be afforded to
a middle class black woman at the time in Montgomery, Alabama,
which is to say, with maybe the slightest measure of respect,
which is to say, she wasn't beaten on the way
to Jail.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
There's a book, by the way called Claudette Colvin Colon
Twice Toward Justice from Phil Who's or Who's And I
think a lot of people these days are trying to
shine a little light on some of the lesser known
figures of the civil rights movement, and books are being
written and stuff like that, which is pretty awesome.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
And she was asked, Claudette Colevin was asked, why does
she think it was Rosa Parks and not her? And
she had a whole list of reasons, and all of
them are pretty legitimate. That you know, Rosa Parks was
a very again, a palatable person to a large swath
of people. And more of the point, she was also fifteen,
and the NAACP didn't think that a fifteen year old
(23:52):
was going to be the most reliable icon to kind
of project into the national forefront.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
Yeah, not to say that a lot of people have
said over the years that it was staged so because
they set Rosa Parks up, or not set her up,
but they picked her to do this because she was palatable.
They staged this whole thing to make which you know
would have been fine if that's the way you want
to kickstart the bus boycott. But from all accounts, it
was a in the moment decision. She said, I didn't
(24:22):
know that I was gonna get arrested and I was
going to sit down.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Yeah, it's just something that happened.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
And so so, on the one hand, the people who
say that no, this was staged the NUBACP, and even
before the n DOUBLEACP was around, buses had been like
a target of black activists in Montgomery in particular for decades.
I think the first bus boycott was in nineteen hundred
and it wasn't even a bus. There was a trolley line, yeah,
(24:48):
as well as boycotted. So she and having already been
the secretary of the NUBACP and an activist herself for
years by then, she must have been fully aware of
the potential outcome, which proved to be the actual outcome
from her arrest for not giving up her seat. But
the idea of saying that this was all staged it
(25:09):
does a couple of things. It's almost like a casually
racist way of just kind of diminishing it because it
does two things. One, it takes away her bravery, because
if it was, if it was staged, support the whole time.
It would have taken away a measure of fear. And
then secondly, it also makes the NAACP look kind of sneaky,
(25:32):
like there's socially engineering stuff and then pretending like that's
not the case. So I think by saying like, no,
this was staged, it really undermines the reality of the situation,
which is that this brave woman said she'd had enough.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Yeah, and you're right, she probably it probably occurred to
her the ramifications of this, but surely I bet you
anything in the moment she was just like, nope, nope,
not getting up.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
That's what I understand, that's what she's always Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
So here's what happened from there. She was arrested. Like
I said, she gets out on bail. Over that weekend,
a bunch of churches got together and they started talking
boycott on the winter trial comes around. It's a group
called the Women's Political Council, and they handed out thirty
five thousand handbills that basically said, please children, grown ups,
(26:24):
don't ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay
off the buses on Monday. Let's really try and make
a difference here. Because it was I think at the time,
black people made up seventy five percent of the passengers. Yeah,
so it could have a real impact on the finances
of the bus company.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Yeah. And it just started out as a boycott for
one day, for the Monday following Rosa Park's rest, which
was that happened on a Thursday, and they were just
going to do it for one day. But the success
of it was so surprising. I think they were hoping
for like fifty percent reduction. It turned out I saw
(27:04):
both ninety and ninety nine percent reduction in ridership by
African Americans that day.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Right, and if they make up seventy five percent, that's.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
A big loss for the city bus line, right for sure.
So it was such a success that they said, well,
let's maybe let's keep this going and see what we
can do with this. Because initially the demands of the
Montgomery bus boycott of nineteen fifty five was that one
of them was black black riders be treated with risk courtesy,
(27:33):
pretty low hanging request. Another one was that the seats
be given on a first come, first serve basis, which
was the law, and that black people sit from back
to front. White people sit from front to back. So
they were still saying like, we can keep the segregation,
but people shouldn't have to give up their seats. And
(27:56):
then the last one was they wanted black bus drivers
to be higher to drive the predominantly African American routes, right,
so that you didn't have to deal with an armed like,
oh yeah, an armed white bus driver because they were
armed and they had basically police powers to enforce segregation
on the bus. So the original boycott thing, their demands
were not extraordinarily radical. And when the boycott was a
(28:21):
success on that first Monday, they decided to extend it,
and they also decided maybe they should expand their demands
a little more.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
So while all this is going on, she was found
guilty on that Monday.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
She was fined ten.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Bucks plus court costs of four dollars for fourteen dollars total,
and said, nope, I'm going to appeal this conviction. She
challenged that basically she was what she was challenging was
segregation in general not being constitutional, right, And that ended
up being the argument that was, well, we'll get to
the court case and how it escalated. But she was
(28:56):
found guilty, and the other no notable thing that happened was.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
One Ralph David Abernethy and.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Doctor Martin Luther King, who was a young minister in
town of Dexter Avenue Baptist. He was elected president of
what was called the MIA, the Montgomery Improvement Association, which
they formed because the success of the boycott.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
So you have this new organization.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Then about a month later, month and a half, at
the end of January, Martin Luther King's home was bombed.
Everyone was unharmed in the incident, but it really ramped
up the stakes of what was going on.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
Yeah, well for sure, and they apparently the Montgomery Improvement
Association is credited with making the boycott successful. And the
way that they made it successful was through a carpool
they set up. They bought a bunch of station wagons
and put them in the name of some of the
black churches in town. And these station wagons would be
(30:00):
basically recreate the bus routes. They drove predetermined routes and
they were giving like twenty thousand people a ride every day.
That's how successful this was. And they put such a
crimp in the finances of the city bus line that
(30:20):
a couple of things happened. One they had to layoff workers,
close down lines, raise their fares like it really hurt
the city bus lines. And then secondly, the city and
I believe maybe even the state sued the Montgomery Improvement
Association for this boycott, which was apparently illegal under a
(30:41):
nineteen twenty one Alabama law.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Yeah, they sued against the car service, specifically saying that
the bus company had an exclusive franchise, right, and they
did get an injunction in November of nineteen fifty six.
But all of this comes out of the fact that
in like thirty something years earlier, in nineteen twenty one,
Alabama passed an anti boycott Act which basically said that
(31:07):
it's illegal for you to not ride the bus in
this case.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
In that case, sure or at least organize people and
get them to not ride the bus. Yeah, it was
something like it was a misdemeanor to organize against somebody
carrying out lawful business or whatever. So they were getting
them on two things, that boycott and then infringing on
the bus lines franchise in that city, right.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Right, So what do you do if you are suing
or sorry, if you're if you have an anti boycott act,
I mean, you can't arrest everyone. So they go after
I think eighty nine Martin Luther King Junior and eighty
nine other other members of the MIA and obviously because
they're the most how many of them twenty four more ministers,
(31:54):
they're the most prominent members. And he has find five
hundred bucks and spent a couple of weeks in jail.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
They said, he's very proud of his crime. Should be yeah, sure.
So now Martin Luther King as appealing. So you've got
a few things going on here. You've got Rosa Parks
who has been convicted and now is appealing her ten
dollars plus four dollars in court costs fine for breaking
(32:21):
the city ordinance even though she didn't. You've got Martin
Luther King now who is appealing his five hundred dollars
fine for the boycott and the infringing on the bus
lines franchise. And then you have something else. You have
a class action suit called Browder versus Gail and was
(32:42):
named after oh what's her name, the woman who's the
lead plaintiff in the case. Her name is Aurelia S. Browder.
And the Gail in the case was the Montgomery The
Montgomery mayor I think William Gail and we'll talk about that. Well,
let's take a break and we'll talk about this case,
(33:03):
and we'll come back to the drumbeat of the court system.
Story end of kick In.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
All right, So appeals run slow anyway, but in the South,
if it's a if it's a case like this, it's
going to go super slow because the hope from the
white establishment is, you know, maybe enough time I'll go
by time, I'll go buy and these people just sort
of get in line and forget about it, get tired
of this boycott and everything.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
We'll just go back to normal.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
Yeah, which is kind of a gamble because this boycott
was not showing any signs of cracking. So they were
basically making that bet on the back of the city
bus line and on the jobs of the drivers who
were being laid off because ridership was down so.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Low one days, three hundred and eighty one days right
for the boycott.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
So, like I said, this court the drumbeat of the
court system was starting to grow a little bit louder.
And you had three big cases Martin Luther King's case,
Rosa Parks case, and you had Browder versus Gail and
ber versus Gail represented four women originally five, but four
women who had been convicted of breaking the law for
(34:36):
not giving up their seat on the bus in Montgomery.
One of them was claut At Colvin, another one was
Mary Louise Smith, I believe, and then Aurelia Browder and then.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Lastly was Susie McDonald.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Susie McDonald, right. So these four women got together, ensued
the mayor, the bus line, a few bus drivers, the
city Public Works Commission, just a big group of people,
and they were suing to all three of those cases
were suing the question the constitutionality and the legality of
(35:13):
segregation in general, but specifically on the bus lines. And
there was a talk at first by Freddie Gray, who
was the lead lawyer in the broader Egail, of including
Rosa Parks. But he very very wisely kept her separate
from that case because he said he wanted the courts
(35:34):
to just consider one thing, not whether Rosa Parks was
guilty or not, but whether the segregation on the Montgomery
buses was legal and constitutional. So he kept those separate
very very smartly.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Yeah. I think he knew that he could get this
to the Supreme Court this way. It was a test case,
and that was his ultimate goal because it was a
state statute though in the state Constitution of Alabama. It
was of course first brought before District Court, three judges
in US District Court on June fifth, nineteen fifty six.
They ruled two to one that segregation was unconstitutional. Of course,
(36:12):
they cited Brown Versusportive Education as president, and it eventually
wound its way to the Supreme Court in nineteen fifty
six on December seventeenth.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Actually that was pretty quick.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Yeah, considering Yeah, and they rejected all appeals and voted
nine to nothing, nine to zero that it was unconstitutional.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
Yep, nine to nothing, which is I mean, that's really
saying something unanimous Supreme Court decision regarding segregation.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Yeah, in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
Yeah, so that was a that was huge. I think
doctor King was in court that day when he was
told by a reporter about that decision, the Supreme Court decision,
and even after he said, we're keeping up the boycott
because well, when they implement this d sgregation on the
(37:00):
buses will stop the boycott. And after the Supreme Court
ruling came through, the city of Montgomery saw pretty clearly
that there wasn't any way to keep this up any longer.
And I believe within three days the buses were desegregated.
And on the first day that they were desegregated, Rosa
Parks took her seat on a bus in the front row,
I believe.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Yeah, they hired black bus drivers.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
And this is after, by the way, three hundred and
eighty one days of a total sales loss of sixty
five percent.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
So yeah, And on the other side, Ralph David Abernethy's
home was bombed. Martin Luther King's home was bombed. People
were in jail, people were in court. It was a
big struggle down in Montgomery.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
So on December twenty first, doctor King and his white friend,
Reverend Glynn Smiley sat together on the front row with
Ralph David Abernethy Street here in Atlanta. Yea name for him,
Edie Dixon and Fred Gray, the attorney that saw that case.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Right. So that was a huge thing that did a
number of things. It made Rosa Parks and icon. It
projected Martin Luther King into the national spotlight. That was
basically where he first found national fame and basically was like, well,
this guy's the leader of the civil rights movement now,
and it also was a huge domino in the idea
(38:23):
of desegregation in general, not just on buses, not just
in Montgomery, but the concept it followed in the wake
of plus e v. Ferguson which it was just one
of those court cases that said separate facilities is inherently racist,
because the only reason you would have separate facilities is
(38:44):
because you think one group is superior over the other
and they shouldn't have to consort or mix. That's inherently unconstitutional.
And this was one of those dominoes that fell in
that chain that led to desegregation across the Jim Crow
South And and like a laser, this particular case and
(39:04):
the changes it brought were focused right onto Rosa Parks,
her act, her courage, what she did.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Yeah, and this was this was within our parents' lifetime.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
I know, I was wondering. I was like, why am
I so much more jazzed about this than Harriet Tubman.
I love Harriet Tubsman Tubman's story. Yeah, but I remember
when I was researching, I wasn't new these jazz and
I realized, like, I can relate to this woman so
much better. Just because this is pretty pretty recent, you know.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Well, yeah, and just the notion that where we are
as a country now racially, this was not that long ago.
So for the people in the camp of saying just
get over things, African Americans, just get over things, it's
like this was not hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
This was very recently. These like my peers parents had
(39:59):
to live through this.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
Well, one thing Rosa Parks is now known for what
they didn't realize before is, you know, her act in
like the civil rights movement that grew out of over
like the next ten years, fifteen years. There's this idea
that around nineteen seventy there was a button put on
that and it was like, you guys were successful. Wait
(40:20):
to go, we can stop doing this now. Rosa Parks
was like, no, no, it's not done. This hasn't changed.
Up until she died in two thousand and five, she
was like, this struggle is still continuing.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
People didn't realize that about her until this collection was opened.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Yeah, this all came.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
There was significant cost to her family, to her her husband.
Her and her husband both suffered through stomach ulcers because
of this. They lost their jobs. Eventually they left Alabama
said and let's go to Virginia. And Virginia wasn't a
whole lot better. They said, all right, let's go to Detroit.
(41:00):
Kept going north, and then finally, after not having a
job for a long time, she was hired as secretary
for John Conyers, a brand new, brand newly elected black
congressman who she would work for for twenty three years.
And mister Conyers, you know, he was the one who
stepped down last year after sexual assault allegations after serving many,
(41:23):
many years in Congress, and was a civil rights icon.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
So it's kind of a.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Very sad ending to that story, but Rosa worked for him.
In seventy seven, her husband, James died of cancer, her
brother died of cancer three months later, her mom died
two years after that. But I get the sense that
after that, it really it really kind of freed her
to really go back to work and devote herself once
(41:49):
again to the cause, because after those family members passed away,
she established the Rosa Parks Scholarship Foundation in the Rosa
and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development and wrote two memoirs. Yeah,
she was busy, she was, and then very sadly, I know.
I remember this in nineteen ninety four when she was
(42:11):
home invaded and robbed.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Yeah, hit over the.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
Head by a guy named Joseph Skipper.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
Yeah, man, that was just like, I mean, for kidding.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
Me with that for fifty eight bucks.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Of all the houses to accidentally break into. Yeah, what
do you think you knew it was Rosa Parks.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
I don't know. I don't know, but he I've.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
Seen nothing to indicate that that was true.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
He knew that that he would go down as the
man who robbed and beat Rosa Parks. Oh well yeah,
so yeah, I don't I don't think he was she
was targeted because she was Rosa Parks or anything like that.
I think she's just a little old lady. The impression
I have is it doesn't matter if she was Rosa
Parks or not. Sure, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah,
(42:58):
so she That was ninety four, and then like right afterward,
there was a huge national outcry and she moved into
a very secure high rise in Detroit, where she lived
until she died in two thousand and five. I believe
she died in that.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Apartment ninety two years young, and she had a slew
of honors, unprecedented honors in this country. She was transported
her body to Washington, d C. And she laid an
honor under the rotunda the US capital. First woman, yep
to get that honor, the second African American and the
(43:34):
first non government American ever to have this honor.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
Yep. I mean that is a high honor.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
When she died, every flag on public land in the
United States and around the world was flown at half mast,
which is pretty pretty great too.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
George W. Bush made sure that happened. And then here's
just some of her lifetime achievement awards. INAACP gave her
what's called the Sping Garden Medal in nineteen seventy nine,
their highest honor. She's in the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame,
Martin Luther King Junior Award nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3 (44:12):
You could have just stopped at the Michigan Hall of.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Fame, Michigan Women's Hall of Fame, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
In nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Congressional Michigan Women's Hall of Fame.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
Congressional Gold Medal. No, now we're in a contest.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Time magazine named her was one of the twenty most
influential and iconic figures of the twentieth century.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
It's a big one, okay.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
And then yeah, he mentioned George W.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Bush ordered half mass flags in two thousand and five.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
So again there was this idea that she was just
a tired, little old lady who was quietly brave and
didn't give up her seat, and she was kind of
meek and quiet. And in twenty fourteen, her personal collection,
the Rosa Parks Collection, was sold to the Howard Buffett Foundation,
Warren Buffett's son. They bought it for a song at
(45:04):
like four and a half million dollars, and it's something
like I think sixty five hundred documents and twenty five
hundred photographs, and it is her personal papers, like notes
for speeches, notes for her books, I believe, correspondence, and
it paints this picture that no one had of her before,
which was no like this lady was an activist. They
(45:26):
went through her whole life. She was an activist who
wanted to talk about and agitate for the rights of
black Americans and how messed up the situation was that
they lived in and that she wouldn't normalize this, she
would learn to deal with it. As much as she
needed to while she was working to change it. And
(45:49):
it was just a surprise to a lot of people
when they cracked open these papers and found that picture
of her.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:56):
I also want to shout out article how history got
the Roads of Park story wrong. And this was written
by the same person who wrote the award winning book
The Rebellious Life of Missus Rosa Parks. Her name is
Jeane Theo Harris. Theohis it's all one word. Yeah, I
(46:16):
know it sounds like it should be hyphenated.
Speaker 3 (46:18):
It's really easy to say, but how do you say it?
Speaker 1 (46:21):
I have no idea, I know.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
But she's professor Professor of Polysi at Brooklyn College of
c U n Y.
Speaker 3 (46:28):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
Man, great lady, yep.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
So if you want to know more about Rosa Parks,
go out on the internet. Educate yourself.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
I don't seen that movie. Have you seen that? No?
The about the bus boycott?
Speaker 3 (46:43):
No, I mean it was a significant event. I had
no idea. Okay, well, I think I said go search
stuff in there somewhere. So that means it's time for
listener maw.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
I'm gonna call this oh all right, hey, guys, let
me start off by saying enjoyed the podcast very much fine.
Aside from being interesting and entertaining, it very much helps
my time in the car.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
We get that a lot sure commute helps people would
go insane if it weren't for us.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Several episodes ago, I believe Chuck mentioned that you love
tiny things.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
I do.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
Josh likes things that are grossly oversized. That giant pocket
watch over.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
There, Yeah it's kind of a pain.
Speaker 3 (47:27):
I'm wearing it.
Speaker 2 (47:29):
He mentioned loving tiny things, there are something extraordinarily satisfying
about them. I agree. I love tiny things. Would be
remiss if I did not bring bring you to the
Museum of Jurassic Technology.
Speaker 3 (47:41):
I love that place.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
I know I've been there too. It's in Los Angeles.
There are not one, but two fantastic exhibits of tiny things.
I have the needle in micro mosaics. I don't think
I saw those, did you?
Speaker 3 (47:54):
The tiny thing I remember was like the dioramas of
the trailers. I have the needle. I remember that. Oh yeah, yeah,
I don't remember the micro mosaics.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Though I haven't been in many years. Though, yeah, I
have the needle features delightful.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Whimsical miniature sculpture is actually small enough to fit into
the eye of a needle.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
Oh, there you go. That's a little too small for me.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
Okay, so you like so you like?
Speaker 1 (48:16):
I like the tiny Tabasco bottles that you get in there.
Speaker 3 (48:19):
You like to feel like you're a giant, not like
a god.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
Yeah, gotcha, exactly. I just want to be taller.
Speaker 2 (48:25):
The micro mosaics exhibit also requires a magnifying glass to enjoy.
However beautiful, this exhibit has a slightly creepy.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
Aspect to it.
Speaker 2 (48:32):
The tiny mosaic pieces are in fact bits of butterfly wings.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
Yeah, that's not too creepy. Oh, I mean they kill
the butterflies?
Speaker 3 (48:42):
Depends. Yeah, how'd they come across those wings? Where do
they rogue kill?
Speaker 2 (48:45):
If so, that's fine, Yeah, what a job, go out
and just try and find dead butterflies.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
All in all, these exhibits of a wonderful field of
magic Realism. Museum also features a lovely rooftop garden as
well of a meditative tea room to enjoy complimentary cup
of tea.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
Interesting. That is all guys, cheers from Sandra Williams.
Speaker 3 (49:06):
Thanks a lot for the shout out, Sandra. That is
indeed a great place if you're ever in Los Angeles,
everybody go check out the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Just
going with your mind open and thank us later.
Speaker 1 (49:17):
Yeah, get out of Ripley's Believe it or.
Speaker 3 (49:19):
Not, We'll go both.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
You know, sure I said get out of Ripley's Believe
it or not?
Speaker 3 (49:26):
Okay? Yeah, But I mean Jack Palance, man, how do
you pass that guy?
Speaker 1 (49:30):
I don't get it.
Speaker 3 (49:31):
Remember he was the host of the TV show.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
Or Not.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
Yeah, my brother worked with him on City Slickers too,
and there was one story where, you know, he's kind
of old at the time, where Scott as the ad
is to walk him. Second ad is to walk the
talent to the set from their trailer, and that was
through the desert, the rocky desert, and Scott was like,
you know, look out for that wrong, mister Palence or
something like that. And one day he was just like,
(49:58):
I don't need you to tell me how to walk,
Scott like shrank down. Of course I can't remember if
that's exactly.
Speaker 3 (50:05):
What you said, but but I'll bet I'll bet Jack
Palance felt so bad for yelling at Scott, of all people,
I doubt it.
Speaker 2 (50:12):
You know, it's Scott and he didn't delight in Scott
like everyone else does.
Speaker 3 (50:16):
Jackal Yeah, Well, if you want to tell us how
great you think Scott is, you can send us all
an email, including Jerry. It's a stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks
dot com has always joined us at our home on
the web, Stuff Youshould Know dot Com.
Speaker 1 (50:32):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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