THE LADIES BEFORE ROSA
A PHOTOGRAPH OF JANIE JAMES IN SUNDAY’S STYLE SECTION HAD THE WRONG CREDIT; IT WAS TAKEN BY MARK MILLER. (PUBLISHED 04/14/98)
By Paul Hendrickson buy canada goose jacket By Paul Hendrickson April 12, 1998
One way to get there is on the No. 6 Lexington Avenue train. You take it to 177th Street in the Bronx canada goose outlet store locations and then uk canada goose it’s only a short walk. You find an apartment building. You press a buzzer marked “C. Colvin 11 H.” Upstairs lives a 58 year old woman who works nights at a nursing home. Upstairs, pondering how destinies work out, lives one of the women before Rosa.
As in Canada Goose Parka Rosa Parks.
A long time ago, in a Deep South apartheid canada goose clearance place called Montgomery, Rosa Parks refused canada goose coats on sale to surrender her seat on the bus to a white rider and the civil rights movement in America was born. But before that, before Rosa, on another racist Montgomery municipal bus, this woman, too, summoned something large insider her and said no, she would not move. Only, when canada goose uk black friday she said it, the world wasn’t ready to hear. Not quite.
History is always up to its own turns and ironies and devices. Her name is Claudette Colvin. Her no was on March 2, 1955. They took her off the Highland Gardens bus late that afternoon kicking and screaming. They charged her with assault Canada Goose sale and battery as well as transgressing city and state segregation laws. It was nine months almost to the day, nearly to the spot before Rosa Parks’s no and subsequent arrest, which had a much different quality and tone about it, although the humiliation was the same.
You see, while one was a highly emotional 15 year old 11th grader about whom there were unsavory stories and who lived in a house that didn’t have an indoor toilet, the other, “Mrs. Parks” as so much of black Montgomery respectfully thought of her was a small, modest, ascetic looking, wholly untainted 42 year old seamstress Canada Goose Coats On Sale and civic canada goose uk shop activist and youth leader: a perfect and righteous symbol for igniting not just a year long boycott but an entire movement. Not that anybody in Alabama or anywhere else understood it so clairvoyantly at the time. That understanding would come later.
“Why do you push us around?” Mrs. Parks asked them quietly that evening. “I do not know,” said one of the arresting officers, “but the law is the law, and you are under arrest.”
Eldridge Cleaver later wrote that when a woman, who earned $23 a week, summoned no, in the gathering dark of a homebound suppertime bus, on Dec. 1, 1955, a gear in the machinery shifted. Martin Luther King Jr. once said it was the instant in eternity when she got “anchored to her seat by the accumulated indignities of days gone by, and by the boundless aspirations of generations yet unborn.”
And yet, what about other noes, earlier noes, prior anchorings, some of which go back into previous decades? Don’t they, too, represent a swimming against unfathomable tides?
“I haven’t talked about it very much,” Claudette Colvin says. “It’s pulling out of me now.” By “it,” she must canada goose store be referring not only to what happened to her in downtown Montgomery on a day when the world didn’t heed, but to the rest of her life as well, which has been hard.
A visitor isn’t five minutes inside Canada Goose Outlet her door when she’ll say, with traces of soft Southern cadences: ” What do we have to do to make God love us?’ I always grew up with that. I always used to go around thinking that. God loved the white people better. He must’ve. That’s why he made them white.’ ”
And toward cheap Canada Goose the end, after she’s talked for almost four hours, she’ll say, no pity in it: Canada Goose Online “They didn’t want me because I didn’t represent the middle class…. They didn’t want me involved because of where I lived and what my parents’ background was.”
Let us now praise unfamous women. Let us write of those unattended by history. canada goose black friday sale Let us try to honor names in the shadows. Because what may surprise you here is how many stirring and anticipatory and conditioning moments to Rosa Parks there were. Think of them as precursing lives, solitary voices in the bigoted Alabama wilderness of almost half a century ago, and beyond. Before Their Time
You could fall in love with the names themselves. They seem to offer their own hidden lyric beauty. Aurelia Browder. Viola White. Geneva Johnson. Katie Wingfield. Susie McDonald. Epsie Worthy. Mary Louise Smith Ware. Is this all? It cheap canada goose uk can’t possibly be all. But these are some of the ones whose names are tucked in the margins, in the back notes, in the fine print. You compile a list, gleaning it from books and doctoral dissertations and old newspaper clippings. But the truth is, it’s impossible to say with any accuracy just how many women and it was women more than men went obscurely and heroically ahead of Rosa Parks’s heroism in terms of standing up to racial injustice on Montgomery public bus transportation in the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s and ’50s. Even civil rights scholars, some canada goose of whom have given much of their scholarship over to studying the altering event mankind knows as the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, can’t begin to tell us the whole cruel number.
In a highly valuable but not well known 1987 book titled “The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It,” a now deceased Montgomery political activist and English professor, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, wrote: “Intermittently, twenty to twenty five thousand black people in Montgomery rode city buses, and I would estimate that up until the boycott of December 5, 1955, about 3 out of 5 had suffered some unhappy experience on the public transit lines.”
Rosa Parks said no to a driver named James F. Blake uk canada goose outlet on Thursday the 1st; on the following Monday, the “Walking City” started walking, and didn’t stop until Dec. Supreme Court desegregation order on Montgomery city commissioners. The next morning, for the first time in more than a year, the black citizenry returned canada goose coats to municipal buses and sat anywhere they damn well pleased, front or back.
Incidentally, why canada goose clearance sale was it women, more than men, who decided to say no? For one thing, they rode the buses more than their husbands. They depended on public transit to get across the city to their work as domestics in the rich white neighborhoods. Often, the men walked to their menial labor, or hitched rides with one another. But another reason is that some of the key organizing figures were middle class Montgomery women, connected to all black Alabama State College. They were emboldened by that bond and by their education. Then, too, there was the linkage of the churches, which gave strength.
And maybe there’s a more fundamental reason. Let Johnnie R. Carr explain.
She’s 87. She’s been a canada goose uk outlet Montgomery civil rights worker since the late ’30s. She’s still president of a legendary black political grass roots organizing committee called the Montgomery Improvement Association. (The MIA’s first leader, elected at the outset of the boycott, was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or “Mike” King, as people knew him back then, when he was relatively new to town and pastoring Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.)
Carr: “If black men came out, they would have been crucified. The women had more freedom, so to speak. And maybe the women had a little more courage, too. There is something in courage that women are just endowed with.”
To know the real depth of what was endured by women on buses, you’d have to start going through every Montgomery phone book or city directory, year by year, then dialing numbers, hoping to luck onto a descendant or other relative. Or, better, start walking door Canada Goose online to door through the old black neighborhoods with piles of census registers. Because a lot of the heroes in this story never could afford phones anyway. Names of Distinction
If there were justice, the world would know a lot buy canada goose jacket cheap about Aurelia Eliscerea Shines Browder. She loved to put up fruits and vegetables. She lived at 1012 Highland Ave. She used to pluck ripe switches from the back yard to give the dickens to her kids when they needed it. She was a buxom woman who not only birthed 21 children of her own (including five sets of twins, two sets of triplets), but who somehow found the will and the means to finish high school in her thirties and then earn a degree with honors from Alabama State. Her children still have that degree, with their mom’s name in gold lettering on the canadian goose jacket blue leather bound cover. The yellow tassel is pressed flat, like a tea rose in a Bible.
And yet who knows the name? It graces a seminal legal and historic document: the federal lawsuit, filed in early 1956, after the boycott was in full and successful swing, charging discriminatory treatment by bus drivers and challenging the constitutionality of city and state bus segregation. Aurelia Browder seamstress, midwife, teacher, widow, Canada Goose Jackets mother was the lead plaintiff in the suit. Originally there were five Montgomery women willing to lend their names to the document; hers was at the top. The case is called Browder v. Gayle. “Tacky” Gayle was the mayor of Montgomery; even his friends called him Tacky.) The filing became the legal basis upon which the boycott was ultimately https://www.officialcanadagoosesoutlet.ca victorious in the courts.
Browder’s recorded humiliation on a city bus there must have been more than one was borne on April 29, 1955. That was seven months before Rosa Parks. It was on the Day Street bus, after she’d gotten a transfer from the Oak Park bus in front of Price’s drugstore. There are court transcripts still around in which she tells her story and in which the fancy white lawyers for the city are seen trying to pick her apart on the stand and to trick her into canada goose factory sale saying things she doesn’t believe. But she is having none of it. She is backing them right off, with sentences that may not parse so well but are goose bumping to read.
She tells the court: “I had stopped riding because I wanted better treatment. I knew if I would cooperate with my color I would finally get it.”
A cross examiner tries to get her to say it is all Martin Luther King Jr.’s fault he is the one stirring it up, rousing the local rabble.