April 17 - Happy Birthday, Jo Ann Robinson

Posted on April 17, 2018

Do you know who organized the successful bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955?

You probably think it was Martin Luther King, Jr., right?

Or maybe Rosa Parks?

Both of those brave and dedicated people were heroes, all right, and both were involved with the bus boycott. But there were PLENTY of heroes involved with creating the Civil Rights movement. The actual organizer of the bus boycott was today's not-all-that-famous birthday, Jo Ann Robinson.

Born in Georgia on this date in 1912, Robinson earned a bachelor's and a master's degree. She was first a public school teacher and then a teacher at a college, and she lived and worked in Georgia, Texas, and Alabama.

Long before Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting on a Montgomery public bus (!), Robinson was screamed at on a Montgomery public bus. Remember, in that city and at that time, the public buses were segregated - white people in the front, and black people in back - but the definitions of "front" and "back" changed depending on how crowded the bus was. 

In the late 1940s, Robinson, a highly educated college teacher, was SCREAMED at by the white bus driver. He had stopped the bus in order to yell at her, and I guess he got out of his driver's seat and approached her, because she fled the bus in fear that he was going to punch her! 

As I bet you've guessed, Robinson was yelled at for sitting in the "white section" of the bus - even though the white section was actually empty!

Robinson was angry at the treatment she and other black people got on the city's buses, so she started to work on desegregating the bus system.

At that point it was 1950, and Robinson was the president of the Women's Political Council. She worked with an attorney to meet with Montgomery's mayor and other city officials. They had no interest in making life more fair for black citizens, so she began to plan a bus boycott.

When Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, Robinson already a plan. She and the WPC planned a 1-day boycott to occur on December 5, just four days after the arrest, and she enlisted the help of several other people, including some students, to make and pass out tens of thousands of fliers calling for the boycott.

Whether you plan a boycott, a protest demonstration, or a march, you never know if people will really support you. There were between 40 and 50 thousand black people living in Montgomery, at the time; if only a few of them joined in, the boycott would not even be noticed.

Black people in Montgomery
walked a LOT during that bus
boycott, and they also arranged
elaborate carpools to help one
another get to where they
needed to go.

But more than a few of the black residents joined in. As a matter of fact, 90 percent of the black residents stayed off the city bus system on December 5!

NINETY PERCENT!! Wow, the boycott was beyond successful!

With that level of participation, Montgomery leaders, including Dr. King, quickly moved to extend the boycott. It ended up lasting about 13 months - and the result of the boycott was a Supreme Court ruling that bus segregation was illegal. Actually, the bus boycott is considered one of the "seminal" events of the Civil Rights Movement - that is, one of the most important and influential events - because the strategy of mass nonviolent protest combined with dignity and ethical behavior ended up being the most used and most successful strategies of the movement.

By the way...

...in case you are thinking that poor Jo Ann Robinson never got any of the glory for what was largely her plan, apparently Robinson deliberately stayed out of the limelight in order to protect her teaching position at the Alabama State College. 

Sadly, her keeping out of the limelight didn't help her escape from unpleasantness. In 1956, a police officer threw a stone through a window of her house, and a few weeks later another police officer poured acid on her car. You know you're in trouble when police officers are breaking laws and destroying your property. I mean, who do you complain to?

Robinson was also arrested at some point! Here is her booking photograph:

Doesn't she look the epitome of dignified and ethical grace?

The governor of Alabama stepped in and ordered state police to guard Robinson's house and the houses of other boycott leaders.

Robinson ended her life near where I live: in Los Angeles, CA.

Also on this date:

National Haiku Poetry Day  

Anniversary of the end of one of the world's longest wars

Bat Appreciation Day

Astronomer Giovanni Riccioli's birthday

Anniversary of the arrival of horses in the New World

Anniversary of George Lucas Writing a Movie Treatment

Syria's Independence Day

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:

• April holidays
• April birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in April

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

• May holidays
• May birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in May

February 4, 2013 - Happy Birthday, Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks is famous for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white rider.

This action sparked a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, and therefore played an important role in the Civil Rights Movement that resulted in many changes to local, state, and national laws.

If you don't know much about this incident, check out this earlier post. It's not just important, it's also interesting! 

Today is Rosa Parks's birthday – she was born on this date in 1913 – so I will ask the question, what was Parks's life before she became a civil rights icon?

Rosa Parks was born Rosa McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her dad was a carpenter, and her mom was a teacher, and she had a mixed heritage that included African, Cherokee-Creek, and Scots-Irish ancestors. Because her parents separated, Parks grew up on a farm with her grandparents, her mom, and her younger brother.

Parks experienced a lot of kindness from white people, but also a lot of racism and hatred. The very structure of her life was filled with discrimination and bigotry; this structural racism showed Parks, even when she was a small child, that the government and the powerful were against “her kind.” Here are a few examples:

• Jim Crow laws had taken away the vote from most black people in Alabama and other southern states (even though the U.S. Constitution guaranteed their right to vote!).
  
  
• Segregation was established by law in public facilities, stores, and transportation.

• School buses carried white children to school, but black children had to walk.

• Police didn't catch and punish Ku Klux Klan members, even when they hurt or killed black people or destroyed their property. (Actually, many police officers were also members of the Ku Klux Klan.)

Rosa Parks struggled to get an education but had to quit school to take care of her mother and grandmother. She didn't get her high school diploma until she was a married adult—but at that point only 7% of all black people in Alabama got their high school diploma!

She also struggled to get around those Jim Crow laws and overcome the resistance of the registrars. On her third try, she was finally able to register to vote.

Rosa Parks took many jobs, ranging from maid to hospital aide, and she became a valued member of the Civil Rights movement. She became the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP (one of the earliest civil rights organizations).

But it was not as secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP that she refused to get out of that bus seat that fateful day in 1943. It was as just a citizen of Montgomery and Alabama and the United States of America, just Rosa McCauley Parks, that she acted for herself, and her people, and all people.

By the way, February is Black History Month.

Also on this date:

Sri Lanka's Independence Day

Astronomer Clyde Tombaugh's birthday

March 12, 2011

Happy Birthday, Charles Boycott

I never really thought about where the word “boycott” came from—but today's a great day to tell the tale of the birth of a word.

On this day in 1832, Charles Boycott was born in England. As an adult, he moved to Ireland and eventually became a land agent. He got caught up in a movement for fair rents and land-ownership practices—and along the way gave the world a new word.

Ireland during the late 1800s was largely agricultural, and farmers who were exploited by wealthy land owners gathered together to fight for their rights and the “Three Fs”: fair rent, fixity of tenure (not being evicted off of their land), and free sale.

Lord Erne of County Fermanagh was due to collect rents. His tenants requested a 25% rent reduction because of a poor harvest that year, but he only allowed a 10% reduction. Boycott was in charge of collecting the outstanding money, and he ended up getting eviction notices for 11 farmers who couldn't (or wouldn't?) pay the full rent.

Some farmers were tempted to do violence to Boycott, but Charles Parnell suggested a better method to fight against Boycott: ostracism.

The concept of ostracism originally came from Ancient Greece, but back then it meant temporary banishment of a citizen from Athens. Crucially, this expulsion wasn't decided on by a political leader or by a court; instead, the punishment was decided by popular vote. Nowadays ostracism still refers to general or society-wide punishment, but now it means exclusion from social acceptance, groups, and friendship.

At Parnell's suggestion, farmers pressured Boycott's servants and laborers to stop working for him, and the town blacksmith, postman, and laundress were also persuaded not to deal with Boycott. Soon shopkeepers wouldn't serve him. Boycott and his family ended up having to run their estate without hired help and had to ship food in from another town. Fifty volunteers from the north worked to bring in Boycott's crops—and they were guarded by more than 1,000 soldiers! And that's how the British government spent 10,000 pounds in order to harvest 350 pounds worth of potatoes!

During the collective efforts to ostracize the “land-grabber,” an important man in the agrarian-rights movement, Father O'Malley, coined the verb “boycott” to mean “to ostracize a land agent or landlord.”

These days...

... the word is usually used for efforts to support social change through refusals to buy certain products or to deal with from certain stores. For example, in the 1950s black people in Montgomery, Alabama, wouldn't use the city buses—protesting the arrest of Rosa Parks and the unfair practices that discriminated against black people. In the 1970s Cesar Chavez, who worked for rights for migrant-workers, asked the general public to help him in his efforts by not purchasing lettuce or table grapes from the land owners who would not provide decent working conditions. These successful boycotts were inspired by the Indian boycott of British goods led by Mohandas Gandhi. Of course there have been many, many other examples of boycotts all over the world.

December 1, 2009

Rosa Parks Day

On this date in 1955, Rosa Parks was riding home from work on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, as usual—and bus driver James Blake asked her to give up her seat to a white male passenger. Sadly, that was usual, too, for the Montgomery bus system.

According to Wikipedia, the bus segregation rules were capricious as well as deeply unfair:

In Montgomery, the first four rows of bus seats were reserved for white people. Buses had "colored" sections for black people—who made up more than 75% of the bus system's riders—generally in the rear of the bus. These sections were not fixed in size but were determined by the placement of a movable sign. Black people also could sit in the middle rows, until the white section was full. Then they had to move to seats in the rear, stand, or, if there was no room, leave the bus. Black people were not allowed to sit across the aisle from white people. The driver also could move the "colored" section sign, or remove it altogether.

Rosa Parks was not sitting in the “white section” of the bus. Instead, she and three other black passengers happened to be in the first row of the "colored section" when the white section filled up. The bus driver directed the four to get up and move back. The other three complied, but Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. She was arrested, fingerprinted, and jailed by the police, and fined $14.

Rosa Parks was not the first black passenger to refuse to give up her seat. As a matter of fact, this was not the first time she herself had made such a refusal—twelve years earlier, she had refused to give up her seat to a white passenger and was forcibly ejected from the bus.* Several other women and girls had refused to give up their seats, including a 15 year old right there in Montgomery.

However, it was Parks' refusal and arrest in 1955 that led to the Montgomery bus boycott and brought national attention to the civil rights movement. That is why Congress called Rosa Parks “the Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement.”

Why her? Why this particular act?

Rosa Parks was the spark the lit the successful bus boycott and furthered the civil rights movement because she was the perfect person to become a symbol of the movement. Unlike that 15-year-old girl mentioned above, she was married, employed, and politically knowledgeable. She was quiet and dignified. She was the secretary of the Montgomery NAACP and was already involved with the civil rights movement, although she had acted that day just as an individual, with no plan in mind.
She was courageous.

Rosa Parks became a powerful symbol, in the U.S. and even internationally, for righteous resistance against racism and discrimination.
She said...

“People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Read and watch an interview with Rosa Parks here.

Draw faces inside the bus on this coloring page.

Listen to Rosa Parks at the History Channel website.

NOTE:
* Rosa Parks had also had a previous run-in with this particular driver, James Blake. One time when she entered the front of the bus and paid, he didn't want the white people sitting in the front to have to tolerate a black woman walking by them, so he told her to get off the bus and walk to the back entrance before she could sit down. Again, this was a pretty normal as well as completely unreasonable request. She started to obey but dropped her purse, and as she picked up her purse, she sat for a moment in one of the “white only” seats. Blake was furious and, after Parks got out of the bus, he didn't wait for her to get back on through the back entrance—he just sped off. That meant that Rosa Parks had to walk home—more than five miles, in the rain—even though she had paid the bus fare!