February 5, 2014 • 20 mins
Rosa's arrest for breaking bus segregation laws catalyzed the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the keystones in the American Civil Rights Movement. It was widely covered in the national media, which brought more attention to the struggle for equal rights.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Trac Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. They were going
to pick up where our previous episode left off. We're
talking about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. So
(00:24):
previously we talked about sort of the historical context of
what was going on in the United States prior to
the civil rights movement leading up until the day that
Rosa Parks famously refused to leave her seat on a
Montgomery bus. She was arrested and um she was going
to be tried for breaking Montgomery's bus segregation laws on Monday,
(00:46):
December That was just immediately following the weekend of when
she had been arrested. So the Women's Political Council called
for a boycott of the buses on that day as
a protest. They pretty much started make king and distributing
handbills announcing the boycott right at the same time as
Rosa was arrested, and the handbill read another Negro woman
(01:09):
has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused
to get up out of her seat on the bus
and give it to a white person. This is the
second time since the cloud at Colvin case that a
Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This
has to be stopped. Negroes have rights to for if
Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate.
Three fourths of the riders are Negroes. Yet we are
(01:30):
arrested or have to stand over empty seats. If we
do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue.
The next time. It may be you, or your daughter
or mother. This woman's case will come up Monday. We
are therefore asking every Negro to stay off the buses
Monday in protest of the arrested trial. Don't ride the
buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday.
(01:52):
You can afford to stay out of school for one
day if you work, take a cab or walk. But please,
children and grown ups, don't ride the bus at all
on Monday. Please stay off all buses Monday. So, in
addition to these handbills which were distributed, there was a
lot of word of mouth talk about the boycott and
ministers spoke to their congregations encouraging the boycott. In church
(02:14):
on Sunday and so on Monday, support for the boycott
was huge. About of black bus riders boycott. That is
a massively significant number when you consider that they were
three quarters of the riders. People walked the car pool,
they took cabs. Cab companies owned by African Americans actually
charged passengers the same fair they would have paid for
(02:36):
the bus, like ten cents. Uh. There are stories of
people walking literally twenty miles that day rather than ride
the bus. So At the trial, Rosa's lawyers entered a
not guilty plea, but they didn't really put forth an
enormous defense against the charges. The whole point was that
a guilty verdict could be appealed. So Roso was found
(02:58):
guilty and she was fined ten dollars plus four dollars
in court costs. That same day, a coalition of ministers
and community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association and elected
Martin Luther King, Jr. Its president. Its mission was to
advance the general status of Montgomery, to improve race relations,
and to uplift the general tenor of the community. So
(03:20):
that night, the Montgomery Improvement Association, also called the m
i A, held a community meeting in order to decide
whether to continue the boycott. Obviously, it had been a
big show of support, but the question was if we
keep doing this, can we get actual change to happen.
Doctor King spoke and afterwards Rosa was introduced to the crowd.
(03:41):
She didn't actually speak. They were uh. She was like,
should I say something? And the verdict was like, you
have said a lot by your actions, so it's fine. Um.
In the end, the m i A made three demands
to present to the city's leadership. One courteous treat went
on the buses. The second was first come first surf
(04:03):
seating with whites in the front and blacks in the back.
And three hiring of black drivers for the black bus routes.
This sounds like an exceptionally reasonable set of demands, but
the city refused uh And from this point the m
i A started organizing ways to keep the bus boycott going.
(04:25):
Most African Americans did not own cars, so a long
term boycott was really going to require some support. UH.
They also started working with attorneys to present demands to
try to negotiate with city leaders and the bus company.
So as the boycott stretched on, Rosa wound up losing
her job. Her employer, which was the Montgomery Fair Department store,
(04:46):
said that it no longer needed her work as a
seamstress because it no longer had a tailor. So the
tailor would fit garments to people, and then she would
so based on what the tailor had done. So without
a job, she focused extensively on the boycott. She became
the dispatcher for a network of privately owned cars that
carried about thirty black people to and from work every day.
(05:08):
She also continued to work and support the boycott throughout
its entire thirteen months duration. She spoke, she worked, and
she organized. Her involvement did not end with not giving
up her seat. Life, as you can imagine, became harder
for people who chose not to ride the bus. As
the boycott went on, people lost their jobs because they
(05:29):
supported this effort, and police harassed black people that were
waiting for cabs. Cab drivers were also fined for carrying
black passengers with they charged a reduced fare. Yeah, there
was a pretty concerted effort to attempt to break the boycott.
There was also some targeting of white women who were
driving their maids to and from work. A lot of
(05:49):
like we need to figure out how to get the
white ladies to stop doing this because they're really hurting
our cause. It's all kind of yeah, it was orchestrated
of Actually, a white attorney dug up an old law
that prohibited boycotts, and a grand jury indicted many private
citizens and community leaders who had been boycotting, including Dr King,
(06:11):
the leaders of the m i A, more than twenty ministers,
and Rosa Parks. And as a side note, the famous
picture of Rosa Parks being fingerprinted is in fact not
from her initial arrest after being removed from the bus.
It's from her arrest after this indictment. That's you see
it a lot of times with like completely not the
(06:31):
right caption. Things really started to become violent. Also, the
homes of Dr Martin, Luther King Jr. And Edie Nixon
were bombed. Rosa also got threatening phone calls at her home.
It became an increasingly dangerous situation for the people who
were boycotting and supporting the boycott, and from the city's
(06:52):
point of view, this boycott was having a very clear
economic impact. The buses simply couldn't afford to run without
the fairs from black ride ers and downtown businesses were
really suffering from the absence of customers who had previously
gotten there to shop via bus, but the city would
not budge on the segregation policies even though it was
harming them. So the case that gradually made its way
(07:15):
to the United States Supreme Court was called Browder versus Gail.
Browder was Aurelia S. Browder, who was one of the
women who had been mistreated on a Montgomery bus. Gail
was Mayor William A. Gail and then also part of
the case where other plaintiffs and defendants says, as as
is often true, there were other women who had been
(07:35):
arrested for breaking segregation laws. On the plaintiff side and
on the defendant side were also the chief of police,
the bus company drivers, and other people. Rosa herself was
not actually one of the plaintiffs of the Supreme Court
because at this point she was also being prosecuted on
these other charges, and the attorneys did not want that
to influence the proceedings. A U. S. District Court panel
(07:58):
found in favor of the plaintiff on June five, nineteen
fifty six. The city commissioners appealed in the U. S.
Supreme Court upheld the District Court's decision. On November thirteenth
of nineteen fifty six, city and state officials asked the
Supreme Court to reconsider. The Supreme Court rejected this plea
on December seventeenth of n On December twenty a written
(08:21):
order from the Supreme Court arrived in Montgomery requiring the
buses to integrate, so that the boycott ended. Then it
had taken more than thirteen months, so more than a
year of people not riding the bus. Many of the
boycott's leaders rode together on the first integrated bus. Rosa
herself didn't because her mother wasn't feeling well and she
(08:43):
wanted to stay home with her, But some reporters figured
out where she lived, showed up and wanted a photo
op and drove her into town to get on and
off buses so they could take pictures. So that is
the source of the equally famous pictures of Rosa Parks
riding on an integrated bus for the first time, staged
on behalf of journalist journalists. Uh As was the case
(09:06):
with school integration. Following Brown versus Board of Vegetation, there
was heavy resistance to integrating the buses. There were shots
fired at integrated buses, and there were church bombings that
followed in its wake, so there was still an atmosphere
of very real danger. Yes, and Rosa herself said that
even though the buses had been integrated and they got
(09:27):
what they were after, it didn't really feel like a
victory because she knew just how much work there was
still left to do. And before we talk about some
more of that work that went on, let's take a
moment and talk about a word from our sponsor, and
now we'll get back to the events that unfolded following
the Montgomery bus boycott. Yeah, so the boycott became one
(09:50):
of the keystones in the American civil rights movement. It's certainly, uh,
something we hear about all the time. Like we said
in the beginning of the first episode of this topic,
it's kind of like, uh, the quick sound bite that
you get rose a Park's Montgomery bus boycott. It was
widely covered in the national media, and it brought more
attention to the struggle for equal rights. It was also
(10:11):
a clear indication that it really was possible to change things.
As we referenced at the end of our previous episode,
before the bus boycott, a lot of civil rights activists
genuinely felt like their work was not going to produce
any kind of real change in their lifetimes. Even though
people were working really hard trying to organize at at
(10:32):
a grass roots level, trying to take legal steps to
to address laws that were unjust. It really seemed like
an uphill battle that was going to take a really,
really long time to see any real change on the
success of the bus boycott inspired communities to organize and
to protest, and also sort of gave a template for
(10:55):
for how much work it would take and how much
organization and how many people uh to you have a
unified action on something. And this is also when Dr
Martin Luther King Jr. Started to really emerge as a
civil rights leader. Encouraging non violent protests and civil disobedience
is a way to encourage social change. So this movement
continued on for for many years. We we could have
(11:19):
like a whole series of podcasts that was about the
civil rights movement. There's an awesome book and TV series
called Eyes on the Prize which documents it just astoundingly
um so many important and historic moments that that went
on and culminated in a lot of federal legislation that
made a lot of what was going on illegal. So
(11:40):
while a lot of these things do still happen today,
a lot of these things being things that are there
are obviously discriminatory or racist. They are not legal and
encouraged the way that they were before the civil rights
movement happened. Rosa's own autobiography, which is sort of men
for younger readers. It's called Rosa Parks My Story, doesn't
(12:03):
really say much about her life after the boycott. After
it ended, though, she and Parks couldn't find work because
of their involvement with the boycott and the movement. They
were also accused of being communists because of their civil
rights work and their associations with some civil rights organizations
that did have some communist leanings, and they were harassed
a lot. Parks became increasingly worried about Rosa's safety, so
(12:27):
eight months after this whole event ended, they moved to Detroit,
where Rose's brother had also moved after World War Two,
and even there they had some serious economic troubles because
people did not want to hire Rosa. She continued to
go to meetings and work with civil rights organizations, but
those organizations would not offer her paying work. Yeah, they
(12:48):
were actually like national news stories. Yeah, she was a
little too high profile for people to take a risk
on her. Yeah. And and and there were you know,
there were new stories that covered this story that was
like this civil rights hair when I cannot find a job.
Um for a while, she moved to Hampton, Virginia, where
she had found a job running the sort of combination
(13:09):
dorm slashed guest facility on the campus of Hampton Institute,
which was a black college. But she felt really lonely
and isolated there. She tried really hard to find work
for Parks so that he could come and be with her,
and wasn't able to. She eventually moved back to Detroit,
and it took about five years for her to find
steady paying work. And in Detroit she had Parks continued
(13:32):
to be harassed because of their activism, and even though
interviewers continued to ask her about the progress of civil
rights in the South, she became acutely aware of how
many of the same problems still existed in the North. Yeah.
While the South has often pointed to you as like
the hotbed of all of it, but it really was
all over the country. Yeah, a lot of like registering
(13:52):
to vote was just a crazily convoluted, deliberately demeaning process
for African Americans in the South, uh and and in
the in the North, there were also many steps that
were taken to deliberately disenfranchised African American people. It just
was not as obvious um some of the social things
that we talked about earlier in the in the introduction
(14:15):
to the previous episode, when we talked about sort of
the social context, and we talked about businesses that would
hire only African Americans for service positions. A lot of
that was like fancy hotels in the North who were
hoping to attract Southern business people, and they would maintain
this veneer of like a romanticized slavery version by having
(14:35):
an all black wait staff. It was not just a
Southern thing. In nineteen sixty four, a black candidate named
John Conyers Junior ran for a seat in the House
of Representatives, and Rosa had been following his campaign. He
had been before he got into politics, a civil rights lawyer.
Rosa endorsed his candidacy and he was eventually elected, and
(14:58):
in nineteen sixty five he hired her for a position
in his Detroit office, and she continued to work for
him until she retired. This is a secretarial role, uh,
because she was a woman and this was the sixties.
That was basically the job or limited options, like the
job that a middle class woman could do was basically secretary.
(15:20):
But it definitely gave her the chance to continue with
her activism throughout Detroit and really the rest of the country.
She continued to travel and speak and work for equality
for the rest of her life. There are photographs of
her at anti apartheid rallies as she got into her
later years. This was really a lifelong activism for equal
(15:44):
rights for all people. It was really her purpose, I
mean her personal mission. Uh. And Rosa Parks died at
home on October two thousand five. Representative Conyers introduced a
resolution for her to lie in honor at the Capitol
Road TOUN in Washington, d C. She was the first
woman in the second African American to be given this honor.
(16:07):
And I love her. I think she's amazing. She is.
It's it's like the moment on the bus was an
amazing moment. But to reduce her to this moment like
other amazing there so much amazing stuff. Um. There's a
great book that I read, uh was I was researching
(16:28):
this podcast. It's by Jean Theo Harris, and it's called
The Rebellious Life of Ms. Rosa Parks. And it's this
like it's its whole annotated volume that's about all this
other work that she did for so long, um, and
that you know, even breaking this into two parts, there
are lots of things that we did not talk about
(16:48):
that she did and that she accomplished, and that she
represented on behalf of the civil rights movement and women
which in a lot of ways tended to be a
male dominated movement. While we finger aout on Rosa Parks,
do you also have some listener mail for us? I do,
and this is from Jessica and Jessica this is actually
I have like the file of stuff that I mean
(17:11):
to read and then sometimes I miss something and it's
as later. So this is from like the wayback machine
of my inboxes from Jessica, he wrote to us at
the beginning of December. Um. She says, first of all,
I absolutely love the podcast. I listened on my daily
commute from Boston where I live, to Fall River where
I work. Yes, the same Fall River where Lizzie Borden
was acquitted of acting her parents to death. She has
(17:34):
a little asterisk here and then down at the bottom
it says the general consensus among the people of Fall
River is that she definitely did it. Cracks me up.
I work in fall River as a public defender representing
low income individuals who have been charged with crimes. The
house where Ms Borden's alleged murders took place is actually
(17:54):
right behind our new courthouse. Spooky. It is a bed
and breakfast. Now you can sleep in the very room
where Abbey Borden was hacked to death. If that's something
you're into, I don't know where I fall on that issue.
I recently listened to the Boston Massacre podcast, which was awesome.
I'm really glad you took the time to talk about
John Adams. His defense of the soldiers is something that
(18:16):
I and other public defenders used to explain to others
why we do what we do. Everyone deserves to have
their rights protected, whether it's British soldiers or everyday people
who can't afford representation. So the next time I'm in court,
I'll be thinking about John Adams and trying to forget
the fact that the spooky Lizzie Boardenhouse is right next
to me. Thanks for the great podcasts, Jessica. I kind
(18:40):
of love that there's a spooky Lizzie Boardenhouse right next
to the courthouse. Me too behind it, I guess so.
I always forget that so much stuff in New England
is an easy commuting distance from so much other stuff
in New England. The fact that somebody commutes from Boston
to Fall River that kind of delights me. And the
(19:00):
fact that people are using the story of John Adams
and the Boston massacre to explain the role of public defenders. Yeah,
I think that is awesome. If you would like to
write to us, we were at History Podcast at Discovery
dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com
slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in History.
Are tumbler mist in history dot tumbler dot com, and
(19:22):
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(19:46):
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Trac Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. They were going
to pick up where our previous episode left off. We're
talking about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. So
(00:24):
previously we talked about sort of the historical context of
what was going on in the United States prior to
the civil rights movement leading up until the day that
Rosa Parks famously refused to leave her seat on a
Montgomery bus. She was arrested and um she was going
to be tried for breaking Montgomery's bus segregation laws on Monday,
(00:46):
December That was just immediately following the weekend of when
she had been arrested. So the Women's Political Council called
for a boycott of the buses on that day as
a protest. They pretty much started make king and distributing
handbills announcing the boycott right at the same time as
Rosa was arrested, and the handbill read another Negro woman
(01:09):
has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused
to get up out of her seat on the bus
and give it to a white person. This is the
second time since the cloud at Colvin case that a
Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This
has to be stopped. Negroes have rights to for if
Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate.
Three fourths of the riders are Negroes. Yet we are
(01:30):
arrested or have to stand over empty seats. If we
do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue.
The next time. It may be you, or your daughter
or mother. This woman's case will come up Monday. We
are therefore asking every Negro to stay off the buses
Monday in protest of the arrested trial. Don't ride the
buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday.
(01:52):
You can afford to stay out of school for one
day if you work, take a cab or walk. But please,
children and grown ups, don't ride the bus at all
on Monday. Please stay off all buses Monday. So, in
addition to these handbills which were distributed, there was a
lot of word of mouth talk about the boycott and
ministers spoke to their congregations encouraging the boycott. In church
(02:14):
on Sunday and so on Monday, support for the boycott
was huge. About of black bus riders boycott. That is
a massively significant number when you consider that they were
three quarters of the riders. People walked the car pool,
they took cabs. Cab companies owned by African Americans actually
charged passengers the same fair they would have paid for
(02:36):
the bus, like ten cents. Uh. There are stories of
people walking literally twenty miles that day rather than ride
the bus. So At the trial, Rosa's lawyers entered a
not guilty plea, but they didn't really put forth an
enormous defense against the charges. The whole point was that
a guilty verdict could be appealed. So Roso was found
(02:58):
guilty and she was fined ten dollars plus four dollars
in court costs. That same day, a coalition of ministers
and community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association and elected
Martin Luther King, Jr. Its president. Its mission was to
advance the general status of Montgomery, to improve race relations,
and to uplift the general tenor of the community. So
(03:20):
that night, the Montgomery Improvement Association, also called the m
i A, held a community meeting in order to decide
whether to continue the boycott. Obviously, it had been a
big show of support, but the question was if we
keep doing this, can we get actual change to happen.
Doctor King spoke and afterwards Rosa was introduced to the crowd.
(03:41):
She didn't actually speak. They were uh. She was like,
should I say something? And the verdict was like, you
have said a lot by your actions, so it's fine. Um.
In the end, the m i A made three demands
to present to the city's leadership. One courteous treat went
on the buses. The second was first come first surf
(04:03):
seating with whites in the front and blacks in the back.
And three hiring of black drivers for the black bus routes.
This sounds like an exceptionally reasonable set of demands, but
the city refused uh And from this point the m
i A started organizing ways to keep the bus boycott going.
(04:25):
Most African Americans did not own cars, so a long
term boycott was really going to require some support. UH.
They also started working with attorneys to present demands to
try to negotiate with city leaders and the bus company.
So as the boycott stretched on, Rosa wound up losing
her job. Her employer, which was the Montgomery Fair Department store,
(04:46):
said that it no longer needed her work as a
seamstress because it no longer had a tailor. So the
tailor would fit garments to people, and then she would
so based on what the tailor had done. So without
a job, she focused extensively on the boycott. She became
the dispatcher for a network of privately owned cars that
carried about thirty black people to and from work every day.
(05:08):
She also continued to work and support the boycott throughout
its entire thirteen months duration. She spoke, she worked, and
she organized. Her involvement did not end with not giving
up her seat. Life, as you can imagine, became harder
for people who chose not to ride the bus. As
the boycott went on, people lost their jobs because they
(05:29):
supported this effort, and police harassed black people that were
waiting for cabs. Cab drivers were also fined for carrying
black passengers with they charged a reduced fare. Yeah, there
was a pretty concerted effort to attempt to break the boycott.
There was also some targeting of white women who were
driving their maids to and from work. A lot of
(05:49):
like we need to figure out how to get the
white ladies to stop doing this because they're really hurting
our cause. It's all kind of yeah, it was orchestrated
of Actually, a white attorney dug up an old law
that prohibited boycotts, and a grand jury indicted many private
citizens and community leaders who had been boycotting, including Dr King,
(06:11):
the leaders of the m i A, more than twenty ministers,
and Rosa Parks. And as a side note, the famous
picture of Rosa Parks being fingerprinted is in fact not
from her initial arrest after being removed from the bus.
It's from her arrest after this indictment. That's you see
it a lot of times with like completely not the
(06:31):
right caption. Things really started to become violent. Also, the
homes of Dr Martin, Luther King Jr. And Edie Nixon
were bombed. Rosa also got threatening phone calls at her home.
It became an increasingly dangerous situation for the people who
were boycotting and supporting the boycott, and from the city's
(06:52):
point of view, this boycott was having a very clear
economic impact. The buses simply couldn't afford to run without
the fairs from black ride ers and downtown businesses were
really suffering from the absence of customers who had previously
gotten there to shop via bus, but the city would
not budge on the segregation policies even though it was
harming them. So the case that gradually made its way
(07:15):
to the United States Supreme Court was called Browder versus Gail.
Browder was Aurelia S. Browder, who was one of the
women who had been mistreated on a Montgomery bus. Gail
was Mayor William A. Gail and then also part of
the case where other plaintiffs and defendants says, as as
is often true, there were other women who had been
(07:35):
arrested for breaking segregation laws. On the plaintiff side and
on the defendant side were also the chief of police,
the bus company drivers, and other people. Rosa herself was
not actually one of the plaintiffs of the Supreme Court
because at this point she was also being prosecuted on
these other charges, and the attorneys did not want that
to influence the proceedings. A U. S. District Court panel
(07:58):
found in favor of the plaintiff on June five, nineteen
fifty six. The city commissioners appealed in the U. S.
Supreme Court upheld the District Court's decision. On November thirteenth
of nineteen fifty six, city and state officials asked the
Supreme Court to reconsider. The Supreme Court rejected this plea
on December seventeenth of n On December twenty a written
(08:21):
order from the Supreme Court arrived in Montgomery requiring the
buses to integrate, so that the boycott ended. Then it
had taken more than thirteen months, so more than a
year of people not riding the bus. Many of the
boycott's leaders rode together on the first integrated bus. Rosa
herself didn't because her mother wasn't feeling well and she
(08:43):
wanted to stay home with her, But some reporters figured
out where she lived, showed up and wanted a photo
op and drove her into town to get on and
off buses so they could take pictures. So that is
the source of the equally famous pictures of Rosa Parks
riding on an integrated bus for the first time, staged
on behalf of journalist journalists. Uh As was the case
(09:06):
with school integration. Following Brown versus Board of Vegetation, there
was heavy resistance to integrating the buses. There were shots
fired at integrated buses, and there were church bombings that
followed in its wake, so there was still an atmosphere
of very real danger. Yes, and Rosa herself said that
even though the buses had been integrated and they got
(09:27):
what they were after, it didn't really feel like a
victory because she knew just how much work there was
still left to do. And before we talk about some
more of that work that went on, let's take a
moment and talk about a word from our sponsor, and
now we'll get back to the events that unfolded following
the Montgomery bus boycott. Yeah, so the boycott became one
(09:50):
of the keystones in the American civil rights movement. It's certainly, uh,
something we hear about all the time. Like we said
in the beginning of the first episode of this topic,
it's kind of like, uh, the quick sound bite that
you get rose a Park's Montgomery bus boycott. It was
widely covered in the national media, and it brought more
attention to the struggle for equal rights. It was also
(10:11):
a clear indication that it really was possible to change things.
As we referenced at the end of our previous episode,
before the bus boycott, a lot of civil rights activists
genuinely felt like their work was not going to produce
any kind of real change in their lifetimes. Even though
people were working really hard trying to organize at at
(10:32):
a grass roots level, trying to take legal steps to
to address laws that were unjust. It really seemed like
an uphill battle that was going to take a really,
really long time to see any real change on the
success of the bus boycott inspired communities to organize and
to protest, and also sort of gave a template for
(10:55):
for how much work it would take and how much
organization and how many people uh to you have a
unified action on something. And this is also when Dr
Martin Luther King Jr. Started to really emerge as a
civil rights leader. Encouraging non violent protests and civil disobedience
is a way to encourage social change. So this movement
continued on for for many years. We we could have
(11:19):
like a whole series of podcasts that was about the
civil rights movement. There's an awesome book and TV series
called Eyes on the Prize which documents it just astoundingly
um so many important and historic moments that that went
on and culminated in a lot of federal legislation that
made a lot of what was going on illegal. So
(11:40):
while a lot of these things do still happen today,
a lot of these things being things that are there
are obviously discriminatory or racist. They are not legal and
encouraged the way that they were before the civil rights
movement happened. Rosa's own autobiography, which is sort of men
for younger readers. It's called Rosa Parks My Story, doesn't
(12:03):
really say much about her life after the boycott. After
it ended, though, she and Parks couldn't find work because
of their involvement with the boycott and the movement. They
were also accused of being communists because of their civil
rights work and their associations with some civil rights organizations
that did have some communist leanings, and they were harassed
a lot. Parks became increasingly worried about Rosa's safety, so
(12:27):
eight months after this whole event ended, they moved to Detroit,
where Rose's brother had also moved after World War Two,
and even there they had some serious economic troubles because
people did not want to hire Rosa. She continued to
go to meetings and work with civil rights organizations, but
those organizations would not offer her paying work. Yeah, they
(12:48):
were actually like national news stories. Yeah, she was a
little too high profile for people to take a risk
on her. Yeah. And and and there were you know,
there were new stories that covered this story that was
like this civil rights hair when I cannot find a job.
Um for a while, she moved to Hampton, Virginia, where
she had found a job running the sort of combination
(13:09):
dorm slashed guest facility on the campus of Hampton Institute,
which was a black college. But she felt really lonely
and isolated there. She tried really hard to find work
for Parks so that he could come and be with her,
and wasn't able to. She eventually moved back to Detroit,
and it took about five years for her to find
steady paying work. And in Detroit she had Parks continued
(13:32):
to be harassed because of their activism, and even though
interviewers continued to ask her about the progress of civil
rights in the South, she became acutely aware of how
many of the same problems still existed in the North. Yeah.
While the South has often pointed to you as like
the hotbed of all of it, but it really was
all over the country. Yeah, a lot of like registering
(13:52):
to vote was just a crazily convoluted, deliberately demeaning process
for African Americans in the South, uh and and in
the in the North, there were also many steps that
were taken to deliberately disenfranchised African American people. It just
was not as obvious um some of the social things
that we talked about earlier in the in the introduction
(14:15):
to the previous episode, when we talked about sort of
the social context, and we talked about businesses that would
hire only African Americans for service positions. A lot of
that was like fancy hotels in the North who were
hoping to attract Southern business people, and they would maintain
this veneer of like a romanticized slavery version by having
(14:35):
an all black wait staff. It was not just a
Southern thing. In nineteen sixty four, a black candidate named
John Conyers Junior ran for a seat in the House
of Representatives, and Rosa had been following his campaign. He
had been before he got into politics, a civil rights lawyer.
Rosa endorsed his candidacy and he was eventually elected, and
(14:58):
in nineteen sixty five he hired her for a position
in his Detroit office, and she continued to work for
him until she retired. This is a secretarial role, uh,
because she was a woman and this was the sixties.
That was basically the job or limited options, like the
job that a middle class woman could do was basically secretary.
(15:20):
But it definitely gave her the chance to continue with
her activism throughout Detroit and really the rest of the country.
She continued to travel and speak and work for equality
for the rest of her life. There are photographs of
her at anti apartheid rallies as she got into her
later years. This was really a lifelong activism for equal
(15:44):
rights for all people. It was really her purpose, I
mean her personal mission. Uh. And Rosa Parks died at
home on October two thousand five. Representative Conyers introduced a
resolution for her to lie in honor at the Capitol
Road TOUN in Washington, d C. She was the first
woman in the second African American to be given this honor.
(16:07):
And I love her. I think she's amazing. She is.
It's it's like the moment on the bus was an
amazing moment. But to reduce her to this moment like
other amazing there so much amazing stuff. Um. There's a
great book that I read, uh was I was researching
(16:28):
this podcast. It's by Jean Theo Harris, and it's called
The Rebellious Life of Ms. Rosa Parks. And it's this
like it's its whole annotated volume that's about all this
other work that she did for so long, um, and
that you know, even breaking this into two parts, there
are lots of things that we did not talk about
(16:48):
that she did and that she accomplished, and that she
represented on behalf of the civil rights movement and women
which in a lot of ways tended to be a
male dominated movement. While we finger aout on Rosa Parks,
do you also have some listener mail for us? I do,
and this is from Jessica and Jessica this is actually
I have like the file of stuff that I mean
(17:11):
to read and then sometimes I miss something and it's
as later. So this is from like the wayback machine
of my inboxes from Jessica, he wrote to us at
the beginning of December. Um. She says, first of all,
I absolutely love the podcast. I listened on my daily
commute from Boston where I live, to Fall River where
I work. Yes, the same Fall River where Lizzie Borden
was acquitted of acting her parents to death. She has
(17:34):
a little asterisk here and then down at the bottom
it says the general consensus among the people of Fall
River is that she definitely did it. Cracks me up.
I work in fall River as a public defender representing
low income individuals who have been charged with crimes. The
house where Ms Borden's alleged murders took place is actually
(17:54):
right behind our new courthouse. Spooky. It is a bed
and breakfast. Now you can sleep in the very room
where Abbey Borden was hacked to death. If that's something
you're into, I don't know where I fall on that issue.
I recently listened to the Boston Massacre podcast, which was awesome.
I'm really glad you took the time to talk about
John Adams. His defense of the soldiers is something that
(18:16):
I and other public defenders used to explain to others
why we do what we do. Everyone deserves to have
their rights protected, whether it's British soldiers or everyday people
who can't afford representation. So the next time I'm in court,
I'll be thinking about John Adams and trying to forget
the fact that the spooky Lizzie Boardenhouse is right next
to me. Thanks for the great podcasts, Jessica. I kind
(18:40):
of love that there's a spooky Lizzie Boardenhouse right next
to the courthouse. Me too behind it, I guess so.
I always forget that so much stuff in New England
is an easy commuting distance from so much other stuff
in New England. The fact that somebody commutes from Boston
to Fall River that kind of delights me. And the
(19:00):
fact that people are using the story of John Adams
and the Boston massacre to explain the role of public defenders. Yeah,
I think that is awesome. If you would like to
write to us, we were at History Podcast at Discovery
dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com
slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in History.
Are tumbler mist in history dot tumbler dot com, and
(19:22):
our pinterest is pinterest dot com slash miss and history.
If you would like to learn more about what we
talked about today, you can come to our website and
put the word civil rights into the search bar. You
will find a timeline of civil rights. You can do
all of that and a whole lot more at our website,
which is how stuff works dot com for more on
(19:46):
this and thousands of other topics. Because it has stuff
works dot com. Audible dot com is the leading provider
of downloadable digital audio books and spoken word entertainment. Audible
has more than one hundred thousand titles to choose from
(20:09):
to be downloaded to your iPod or MP three player.
Go to audible podcast dot com slash history to get
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