Rosa Parks Was A Pawn
Rosa worked for the NAACP - A black civil rights organisation. The bus adventure was staged to garner public sympathy. Be careful who you're praising in her passing folks...
Out of Stanford
In The Shadow Of Rosa Parks: ‘Unsung Hero’ Of Civil Rights Movement Speaks Out
By Vanessa de la TorreJanuary 20, 2005
Claudette Colvin could easily be lost in the crowd. Her short hair is neatly curled; she wears eyeglasses and a small pair of gold hoop earrings. She dresses modestly and looks more like someone’s kindly grandmother than the woman who 50 years ago was a catalyst for one of the most famous events in civil rights history.
But that, in fact, is who Colvin is.
Nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, Colvin had done the same thing, but without any fanfare. She was only 15 at the time, and civil rights leaders had reservations about using her as the symbol of their movement. Instead, Parks, who worked for the NAACP and was inspired by Colvin’s example, became the person whom history would remember.
Now, half a century later, Colvin still vividly recalls her emotions on the day when a bus driver summoned the police to arrest her in Montgomery, Ala.
It was March 2, 1955. Colvin was a junior at Booker T. Washington High School. She hoped to practice law one day and defend people like Jeremiah Reeves, a black classmate who had been convicted of raping a white woman and sentenced to death. The case had her simmering. It was on her mind that bus ride, she explains. And she was angry that twice a day she rode the same bus and here was the driver, ordering her to stand so a white person could sit.
What happened next was impulsive, Colvin says. “I had the spirit of Sojourner Truth inside me, the spirit of Harriet Tubman, telling me, ‘Don’t get up!’” She told a policeman that she was “just as good as any white person” and wasn’t going to give up her seat.
“I was very hurt because I didn't know that white people would act like that and I was crying,” Colvin later testified in court. “And (the policeman) said, ‘I will have to take you off.’ So I didn’t move. I didn’t move at all … So he kicked me and one got on one side of me and one got the other arm and they just drug me out.”
The police said Colvin was “clawing and scratching” as they hauled her off the bus. What Colvin has admitted is screaming again and again, “It’s my constitutional right.” She had paid her bus fare.
Colvin was charged with misconduct, resisting arrest and violating city and state segregation laws. (Eventually she was convicted and sentenced to probation.)
E.D. Nixon, then a leader of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, had been waiting for a test case to challenge bus segregation and vowed to help Colvin after her father posted bail. But then came the second-guessing: Colvin’s father mowed lawns; her mother was a maid. Churchgoing people, but they lived in King Hill, the poorest section of Montgomery. The police, who took her to the city hall and then jail, also accused the teenager of spewing curse words, which Colvin denied, saying that in fact the obscenities were leveled at her (“The intimidation, the ridicule,” she often says now).
Some blacks believed she was too young, and too dark-skinned to be an effective symbol of injustice for the rest of the nation. Then, as local civil rights leaders continued to debate whether her case was worth contesting, that summer came the news that Colvin was pregnant — by a married man.
E.D. Nixon would later explain in an oral history, “I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with.” Rosa Parks, for a decade the NAACP secretary who took special interest in Colvin’s case, was “morally clean, reliable, nobody had nothing on her.”
On December 1, 1955, Parks would board a bus at the same stop as had Colvin, and go on to become the symbol Nixon had been seeking.
In contrast to Colvin, when policemen came to lead Parks away, she asked, calmly, “Why do you all push us around?”
Recently, as the country honored what would have been Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 75th birthday, televisions replayed scenes from the era of burning crosses, hooded Klansmen, “Whites Only” signs, clashes between Southern policemen and peaceful protestors, the “I Have a Dream speech,” and King’s assassination.
But second to Reverend King is the image of serene dignity: Rosa Parks, the unassuming seamstress who galvanized the movement after a long day’s work, because she refused to give her seat to a white person. The legend goes that her feet were tired. She became one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Important People of the Century.
When someone Googles Claudette Colvin, on the other hand, the first item is a dated news release about fourth graders in Milwaukee who made a six-minute film titled, “Claudette Who?”
[...]
Not to take away from the good that came of the adventure but you've all been hoodwinked by the NAACP.
Kate keeps her comments short and sweet... Outside the Beltway has a mini round-up... Stop the ACLU is being far more kind than I expected...
Out of Stanford
In The Shadow Of Rosa Parks: ‘Unsung Hero’ Of Civil Rights Movement Speaks Out
By Vanessa de la TorreJanuary 20, 2005
Claudette Colvin could easily be lost in the crowd. Her short hair is neatly curled; she wears eyeglasses and a small pair of gold hoop earrings. She dresses modestly and looks more like someone’s kindly grandmother than the woman who 50 years ago was a catalyst for one of the most famous events in civil rights history.
But that, in fact, is who Colvin is.
Nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, Colvin had done the same thing, but without any fanfare. She was only 15 at the time, and civil rights leaders had reservations about using her as the symbol of their movement. Instead, Parks, who worked for the NAACP and was inspired by Colvin’s example, became the person whom history would remember.
Now, half a century later, Colvin still vividly recalls her emotions on the day when a bus driver summoned the police to arrest her in Montgomery, Ala.
It was March 2, 1955. Colvin was a junior at Booker T. Washington High School. She hoped to practice law one day and defend people like Jeremiah Reeves, a black classmate who had been convicted of raping a white woman and sentenced to death. The case had her simmering. It was on her mind that bus ride, she explains. And she was angry that twice a day she rode the same bus and here was the driver, ordering her to stand so a white person could sit.
What happened next was impulsive, Colvin says. “I had the spirit of Sojourner Truth inside me, the spirit of Harriet Tubman, telling me, ‘Don’t get up!’” She told a policeman that she was “just as good as any white person” and wasn’t going to give up her seat.
“I was very hurt because I didn't know that white people would act like that and I was crying,” Colvin later testified in court. “And (the policeman) said, ‘I will have to take you off.’ So I didn’t move. I didn’t move at all … So he kicked me and one got on one side of me and one got the other arm and they just drug me out.”
The police said Colvin was “clawing and scratching” as they hauled her off the bus. What Colvin has admitted is screaming again and again, “It’s my constitutional right.” She had paid her bus fare.
Colvin was charged with misconduct, resisting arrest and violating city and state segregation laws. (Eventually she was convicted and sentenced to probation.)
E.D. Nixon, then a leader of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, had been waiting for a test case to challenge bus segregation and vowed to help Colvin after her father posted bail. But then came the second-guessing: Colvin’s father mowed lawns; her mother was a maid. Churchgoing people, but they lived in King Hill, the poorest section of Montgomery. The police, who took her to the city hall and then jail, also accused the teenager of spewing curse words, which Colvin denied, saying that in fact the obscenities were leveled at her (“The intimidation, the ridicule,” she often says now).
Some blacks believed she was too young, and too dark-skinned to be an effective symbol of injustice for the rest of the nation. Then, as local civil rights leaders continued to debate whether her case was worth contesting, that summer came the news that Colvin was pregnant — by a married man.
E.D. Nixon would later explain in an oral history, “I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with.” Rosa Parks, for a decade the NAACP secretary who took special interest in Colvin’s case, was “morally clean, reliable, nobody had nothing on her.”
On December 1, 1955, Parks would board a bus at the same stop as had Colvin, and go on to become the symbol Nixon had been seeking.
In contrast to Colvin, when policemen came to lead Parks away, she asked, calmly, “Why do you all push us around?”
Recently, as the country honored what would have been Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 75th birthday, televisions replayed scenes from the era of burning crosses, hooded Klansmen, “Whites Only” signs, clashes between Southern policemen and peaceful protestors, the “I Have a Dream speech,” and King’s assassination.
But second to Reverend King is the image of serene dignity: Rosa Parks, the unassuming seamstress who galvanized the movement after a long day’s work, because she refused to give her seat to a white person. The legend goes that her feet were tired. She became one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Important People of the Century.
When someone Googles Claudette Colvin, on the other hand, the first item is a dated news release about fourth graders in Milwaukee who made a six-minute film titled, “Claudette Who?”
[...]
Not to take away from the good that came of the adventure but you've all been hoodwinked by the NAACP.
Kate keeps her comments short and sweet... Outside the Beltway has a mini round-up... Stop the ACLU is being far more kind than I expected...
posted by Richard at 06:16
<< Home