Today In Black History
Facts You Should Know!
Issue #426 Black History Friday, December 1, 2023
Welcome to this Today in Black History post. Black History IS American History, no matter how hard some people try to erase our history and contributions.
Most of this information is available at yenoba.com, blackfacts.com, and onthisday.com.
This post is free to read. To have 365 24/7 access to all our posts and podcast episodes and financially support “We Are Speaking” for no more than $5 per month, please subscribe at the paid level.
Today’s Black History WOW! The Montgomery Bus Boycott
On December 1, 1955, sixty-eight years ago, Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, going against the Jim Crow-era segregation laws of Montgomery, Alabama. She was arrested and jailed, and the “Montgomery Bus Boycott” began.
At the time, Black passengers had to go into the front door of the bus to pay the fare, then go back out and go through the back door to take a seat in the “Colored” section. If any white person wanted their seat after the “white” section was full, the Black passengers had to move further back or stand for the remainder of their trip.
The “sanitized” version of what Mrs. Parks did was that she was just a regular seamstress who was tired after a day of work and didn’t feel like moving. That popular paradigm diminishes the true work and contributions of Mother Parks.
In actuality, Mrs.Parks, in partnership with her husband Raymond Parks, became an NAACP activist in Montgomery in 1943, participating in several high-profile civil rights campaigns. On March 2, 1955, a 15-year-old high school student, Claudette Colvin refused to give up her bus seat to a white woman, because as she said, she knew “her rights.” Ms. Colvin was also arrested, jailed, and tried, but appealing her case would not have directly challenged the segregation laws.
So, several months later, Rosa Parks, who was older, married, more experienced with civil rights actions, and not afraid to be arrested, was chosen to make her stand on December 1, 1955. The incident was planned by the NAACP because the organization knew that through appeals, they could work on dismantling the segregation laws.
After a full year of the boycott by Black passengers in Montgomery, costing the bus line a lot of money, and propelling a very young minister, 26-year-old Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the forefront of the modern civil rights movement the boycott ended.
After the boycott, primarily due to losing her job and receiving death threats, Mrs. Parks and her husband moved to Detroit and she started working in the office of Congressman John Conyers. Mother Parks also continued to work for social justice and with the Black Power Movement. Raymond Parks died in 1977. Mrs. Parks died in Detroit in 2005 at the age of 92.
We must give Mother Parks her props. She was so much more than a “tired seamstress.”
Today In Black History
- In 1641, Massachusetts became the first of several colonies to give statutory recognition to slavery.
- In 1774, slave-owning President George Washington signed the Fairfax Resolve Act to end the importation and exportation of slaves.
- In 1865, HBCU Shaw University was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina.
- In 1873, Mifflin Wister Gibb was elected to be a city judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, and became the first Black person to hold such a position.
- In 1874, Black inventor T. J. Byrd received a patent for railway car couplings.
- In 1877, the first Black state supreme court justice, Jonathan Jasper Wright, resigned from the Court in South Carolina after the overthrow of the Reconstruction government.
- In 2016, the UN admitted that its peacekeepers were responsible for the 2010 cholera epidemic in Haiti that killed 30,000 people.
Let’s discuss these facts in our community on Substack Notes.
Thank you