February 22, 2018 • 51 mins
Rosa Parks finishes out our Black History Month episodes in grand fashion. While most know her from that fateful day on the Montgomery city bus, she actually had a long life as an advocate, protestor and agent of change. Join us today as we celebrate one of America's great history makers.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. We've already made our big tour announcement for
the year, but this is a little different because we
have added a show because Denver sold out, so we
have added a second show in Denver. Nice. Yeah, we're
going to be there on Wednesday. Then we added a
show the day before the same place, Gothic Theater, Englewood, Colorado.
And you can go to s Y s K live
(00:21):
dot com to get info and tickets for that show
and all the rest of our shows to Chuck. That's right, Boston,
April fourth, d C April five. St. Louis, Mayo and Cleveland, Ohio.
Come out and see us. Welcome to Stuff you Should
Know from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome
(00:45):
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,
there's Jerry over there. So it's Stuff you should know
the podcast Clean Studio version. I know it feels a
little weird in here, like, uh, like it's too good
for us or something, you know what I mean. Yeah,
just so you folks know, Jerry Test a couple of
(01:07):
the editor engineers here with coming in and cleaning up
the pile of spaghetti that used to flow from the
back of her workstation, not that it was Jerry's fault,
and she said, clean up my mess. Well, she clapped
twice in the whole. It looks good though, it does.
(01:27):
But now we actually have room to put stuff, so
we should put some stuff in here. I agree. It's
a little bear a papasan right, there would be nice.
I don't know. Well, we could put a small papason.
Most people don't realize. But this place is lousy with
Ikea lamps, I mean everywhere, and the cheapest ones, like
they're one of them is on fire right now? Yeah,
(01:49):
that one, Yeah, smoldering, smoldering, still fire, chuck, speaking of fire, Yes,
you want to know somebody who had some fire in
her more than most people realize. Rosa Parks, who is
now one of my all time heroes because before the
(02:10):
Rosa Parks I knew again it was like the Harriets
Hubman episode. Learned about her in school. Um, she was
a great American, respect her, revere her. Here's why she
didn't give up her seat on the bus. No, like,
not only is that like just the tip of the iceberg.
It wasn't until about the last five or so years.
(02:32):
I think you know about the last four years, they're
like a full picture of this woman and who she was,
and like what she stood for and what drove her
emerged not just to the public in general, but to
two historians even because her personal papers were basically held
up in auction for years and years and years. And
now now that they've been donated for ten, like ten
(02:53):
years to the Library of Congress, we're starting to get
a clear picture of her, and she was even more
worth revering. And then people knew before. Yeah, I mean,
I think the what the story isn't uh is Rosa
Parks was just a quiet lady who was super tired
on the bus one day, so she didn't want to
get up. Her dogs were yapping. Yeah, not true. And
(03:15):
she even makes a point in her personal papers saying
I was forty two years old. Uh, I was no
more tired than I was after any day at work.
But what I was tired of was being told to
get up by a white bus driver to make room
for a white passenger that was not My dogs weren't barking, right,
so she um she I think one of the reasons
(03:38):
why she was kind of whittled down into this this
woman who was just tired and wasn't going to give
up her seat because she shouldn't have had two in
the first place. And then she was a very meek,
quiet person. Also is another way that she was drawn. Um.
I think one of the reasons why she was whittled
into that package was because she became an icon for
(04:02):
the civil rights movement. And one of the things that
the civil rights movement had to do, for better or worse,
was to get uh, the establishment, both white and black,
on the side of the civil rights movement, which was
a movement of agitation. Um. And if you agitated at
the time, this is the Jim Crow era that meant trouble.
(04:23):
This wasn't like just trouble like people are gonna yell
at you on Twitter. This was trouble like the cops
might arrest you for some made up in fraction and
then be and rape you on the way to the jail,
and then you would end up in the prison system
kind of trouble like. This is the kind of trouble
that a woman who refused to give up her seat
on the bus faced it at this time. Um. So,
(04:45):
the idea of taking a woman who was I guess
palatable to as many people as possible, and and saying,
look at this woman, we need to protect this woman's
rights and do what's right. Um. I think that's why
she got kind of wood old down into that. But
if you were looking back now historically she there's so
much more to her than than just that, and she
(05:06):
was certainly not meek and mild. Yeah, I mean, distilling
the story down for school books is uh is one thing,
but like I'm glad now that people can get a
more robust picture. Um. So a lot of this comes
from a website called Great Black Heroes dot Com had
a really good, lengthy article. Uh. And then also I
want to shout out a book series called Little People,
(05:30):
Big Dreams, And it's a kid's book series that we've
been reading to my daughter. In fact, it's kind of
all she wants to read right now. And they are
on great women in history and kind of brutally honest
for to be reading to kids. But they didn't. It's
kind of cool they weren't. They didn't whitewash anything. It's
sort of like, uh, Maya Angelo was not treated well
(05:55):
by white people, like you read that to your kid
and Rosa Parks this one, and then there's Free to Carlo,
Coco Chanel, Amelia Earhart, Mary Curie at Christie and more.
But um, but it's pretty brutal, like they draw Amelia
Hearts Skeleton on the Beach, kind of brutal. You know what.
That's the only one we haven't gotten to yet because
every night it's read free to Read, freed To But
(06:17):
it's literally like frieda Carlo is lying in the street
after she gets hit by a taxi and she's bloody
and her legs don't work again after. So, I mean,
it's pretty brutal stuff, But I don't know, it's kind
of cool, like kids can read the stuff and digest it.
I think it's a good way to begin them on
the path towards true stories and to sharpen them to
(06:38):
like a razor's edge at a young age, you know,
look out for taxis. Yeah, that's good. You know, that's
good advice at any age. All right, So Rosa Parks, Uh,
let's go back to where she was born in Tuskegee, Alabama,
on February four, nineteen thirteen. Uh too. While she was
born Rosa Louise Macaulay to James and Leonora mcaulay, who
(06:59):
are a carpenter and school teacher respectively. Right, her parents split,
I guess she I don't know how old she was.
I guess she was younger than six, But her father
went to go look for work up north, and her
mom wanted to stay in the South, so she and
her mom and her brother moved in with her mother's parents,
her grandparents, and her grandfather played a really distinct role
(07:24):
in shaping her because she moved in with him when
she was, like I said, around six, and at the
time in this place Pine Level, which is outside of Montgomery, Alabama. Uh,
there was a lot of clan violence, a lot of
violence against blacks of the hands of the Ku Klux Klan,
and Um, her grandfather was not having it. He was
actually he was the son of a slave woman and
(07:48):
slave owner, so he was um I believe half white.
Uh he was. He was a slave himself. He had
an owner UM at a young age who really brew
really mistreated him, trying to starve him for a little bit.
And her grandfather developed, um what she called, a very
intense passionate hatred for white people and definitely im part
(08:11):
of that to his daughters and his granddaughter grandchildren, wouldn't
let his grandchildren play with white kids, didn't let his
daughters work for white families. He was very much UM
and it sounds like pretty well founded against white people.
And definitely some of that rubbed off on Rose at
the very least her eyes were opened to just how
(08:32):
unjust the system was at the time when she was
growing up. Well, yeah, and just it wasn't even just
through his eyes. Like she went to a segregated school
that she had to walk to. White students were picked
up and bus to the school. Um. She went to
UH an elementary school called the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls,
very cool school. It was created by some UH northern
(08:56):
white Northerners to basically UM try and foster education in
these more rural black communities in the South. And that
didn't go over well educating kids, so that school was
burned down twice. And then coupled that with all the
you know, influence from her grandfather, and it's no surprise
that Rosa Parks from a very very early age was
(09:19):
UH was an activist. So and being an activist, we're
talking like from age six onward, right, So she dropped
out of school, which would have been a huge turning point. Um.
She had to take care of her grandmother and then
I think her mom later on because they both fell ill.
And she met I think age seventeen or eighteen, and
(09:41):
then later on, at age nineteen, married her husband, Raymond Parks,
and he encouraged her to go back and finished school
and she did. It was a huge move because she
was very much meant to be an educated person. So UM,
the fact that she she met Raymond was a huge
influence in that respect. He was also a big influence
(10:02):
on her because she said that he was the first activist,
like real activist, that she ever met. And I believe
this was even before the n double a CP was
in town. This guy was like a grassroots activist. UH.
And he and his group were basically armed. Do you
remember in the Black Panthers episode where like the whole
idea of arming yourself came out of the South. Um.
(10:24):
So this guy was like Raymond Parks was one of
the the real deal people who originated that UM and
he and the group of activists that he um he
met with, UH would but they would all come to
the house and everyone to have a gun. UH. And
apparently Rosa Parks said sometimes there were so many guns
(10:45):
on the table that she didn't have any place to
set the refreshments during these meetings. But these meetings weren't like,
you know, how are we going to get white people back?
It was how are we going to protect like the
Scottsboro Boys from false rape accusations? Um, he was he
was an early activists in Montgomery. Yeah, and later on
was a member of the Inn Double A CP. Uh.
(11:06):
We should do a show on the Scottsboro Boys at
some point. Uh, it's too much to get into here,
but the short version is, um, a group of black
men on a train were accused of rape by two
white women who uh just made up the story. Basically
went to trial a few times, and UM, well you
(11:27):
know what, we'll save the outcome, okay, because they are
all kinds of outcomes because it went to trial so
many times. Um. So she did finish high school and
she became involved along with her husband in the Montgomery
chapter the in Double A CP and worked as their
secretary for fourteen years. So not only was she an activist,
but she was um involved in in service of these organizations,
(11:52):
like she worked for them, like whatever, you need done,
I will do. And anyone who's ever volunteered like knows that, UM,
I guess footch soldiers, for lack of a better term,
are some of the most important people to like in
the Black Panthers episode when you know, the women didn't
get nearly the recognition they should have gotten for just
keeping that organization running on time. So but she was
(12:14):
more than a volunteer though. She had some really some
jobs with some real gravity. Like she was an investigator
of UM sexual assault of Black women by white men UM,
which is a very dangerous thing to do because you're
going to like interview witnesses to crimes that aren't being
(12:35):
prosecuted because they were perpetrated by white people. UM. She
uh was Justice for Prisoner advocate. She did a lot
of like really important stuff. And as she was doing
this stuff as the secretary for the local and WLE
and double a CP, she was also making contacts that
would later become really important in this nascent civil rights
(12:57):
movement that large grew out of the Montgomery bus boycott
we're going to talk about. I had no idea how
big of a an event it was, but I didn't
realize how far reaching the effects of it were oh yeah, uh.
And this another kind of important thing happened to her
as far as integration goes, is she got a job
(13:19):
type job at Maxwell Air Force Base for a little while, which,
because it was a federal institution, was integrated. And this
was the first time that she had um first time
she had worked in a basically been in a professional
integrated atmosphere. Uh. And that along with the Highlander Folk School,
(13:39):
which is maybe we should do a show on that too, uh.
In n she went to a meeting a workshop at
the Highlander Folks School. And this is in the hills
of Tennessee. Uh. And it is still open today as
the Highlander Research and Education Center. Uh, not in that
original building, but um, it was just this great folk
school where they prepared kids for activism. UM workers tried
(14:01):
to get people involved in civil rights and she actually
got sponsored by the white couple that she worked for,
uh to um go to these meetings at mont Egal, Tennessee.
So and that Maxwell Air Force Base you mentioned. One
of the things she later said, I think they found
in her papers was a description of like because it
was an integrated base, the bus service on base was
(14:22):
integrated as well, so she would be riding next to
like a white friend on the bus on base, and
then once they would get off of the bus on
base and get onto a city bus, they would have
to stop their conversation and get into the different sections,
the white section in the colored section. And that was
just the reality of it. Um. And one thing that
(14:43):
has really come through from her papers is that she
made a conscious decision to to never normalize that can
not be like, well, that's just how it is, that's
just life. That she would never let herself do that,
and instead it was this is this is messed up.
This has to be changed. Um. She was able to
(15:05):
get through her day with this knowledge, but she was
never like this is normal or this is okay. Yeah,
I mean she said it required I think quote was
a lot of mental gymnastics just to survive day to
day as a black person in America. Uh So in
other words, yeah, not accept it and do everything I
can to wrap my head around what I can do
moving forward. Uh. Should we take a break? Yeah? Man,
(15:29):
all right, take a break and we'll come back and
we will um start on December one, very important day. Alright,
(15:57):
So it's December one, five Rosa Parks is working as
a seamstress at the time at a department store. She
gets off work like she does every day and boards
bus Cleveland Avenue bus at about six o'clock h And
here's the deal with the buses at the time, is uh,
(16:17):
there were a certain amount of rows set aside for
white people, and then there was a sign that said,
you know, black people were They probably said colored people
back then can sit from here back, but that sign
could move, so as more white people get on the bus,
the bus driver gets up and moves that sign back
and says, all right, black folks, you gotta get up,
get out of your seats because now the white section
(16:39):
is here, and just keep doing that until sensibly the
entire bus could be full of white people and they
just say, sorry, I'll have to get off. Right Yeah.
You either had to get up and move your seat.
If there were not seats left, you had to stand.
If there was no standing room, you had to get
off the bus right um. And then if the bus
you were getting on, if you were African American, if
(17:00):
the white section was already full, you had to get
into the front of the bus, pay, get off of
the bus and get onto that back door. You couldn't
even walk through the white section, right, and then you
you know, you could take your seat in the colored section. So, um,
there was a lot going on here. At least half
of this law was unwritten custom right. The local ordinance
(17:23):
in Montgomery, Alabama said that busses had to be segregated.
There was a white section and there was a colored section.
They put it right. All that stuff about moving the sign,
about getting up and like having to leave the bus
if there wasn't any standing room for you if more
white people came on, all of that was just customary.
That was not law, That was not the local ordinance,
(17:44):
but it was so practiced on a daily basis that
it might as well have been the law for sure. Um,
And that's really all that matters is if everyone was
playing ball, that's what was going to happen. Yeah, Because
like the courts would even prosecute as if you had
broken the law, if you had not actually broken the law,
but had broken this custom. So yeah, for all intensive purposes,
(18:06):
it was the law. So the driver of that bus
was one James Blake, and Rosa had uh, well, she
had a long memory and a previous incident with Mr
Blake twelve years previous, uh ninety three. She had paid
her fair and like you were talking about with um,
the fact that they couldn't even walk through the white section.
He said, you gotta get off the bus, go around
(18:28):
to the back. Uh forced her. Well, she had already
gotten and said no, you gotta re enter on the rear.
She got out and he was like psych, closed the
door and drove off with her bus fare. Right, Yeah,
she had already paid. Yeah that was and she remembered
twelve years later who James Blake was. I would probably
not forget that bus driver. So on on this day
(18:51):
she got on and um, she took her seat in
the colored section and when she sat down a in
she was behind the sign. And I guess after a
couple of stops, and think about this man ament riding
the bus and say you have like seven stops, think
about that pit that would be in your stomach on
(19:12):
a daily basis, Like, am I gonna have to get up?
I'm gonna have to be humiliated? I am I gonna
have to give up my seat to a white person?
Because even if somebody who was told that they had
to get up because a white person needed to sit there,
even if they just kind of quietly complied that that
doesn't that doesn't get the point across how they were feeling. Right,
then anybody would be humiliated by that. And I read
(19:35):
that one of the reasons why busses, not just in Montgomery,
but throughout the segregated South, they were kind of flash
points because they were people were in such close quarters.
It was the racism was right up in your face
in front of a bunch of other people, so the
humiliation was even more pronounced. Right. So, so Rosa Park
gets on the bus. She takes her seat in the
(19:56):
colored section, and after a few stops, some white people
got on and the the driver, James blake Um, said
that it was time for them to move, that these
white people needed a seat, and uh he was moving
the sign back at least one row. Yeah. So at
this point, Um, there's one white dude left without a seat.
(20:19):
Uh So, as his custom, he made four black folks
get out of their two seats on that row. Everyone
had to move back because there had to be a
whole new white road just for this one guy. Three
of the passengers got up been moved. Rosa Parks just
slid over to the window seat and sat there and
he said, are you going to get up? And she
said no, I'm not. He said, well, if you don't
(20:40):
stand up, I'm gonna have to call the police and
have you arrested. And she said you may do that. Aw,
I don't know, man, I mean, just so brave. And
so the police did come. She was arrested, She was booked,
charged with the disorderly conduct, and bailed out by Clifford
der and Edgar Nixon, who were the local president of
(21:02):
the the chapter of the Double A c P at
the time. Right, So, um, she's out at least temporarily. Yeah,
the next evening, so she spent the night in jail.
I don't I didn't run across any any statements or
any kind of evidence that she was like physically mistreated
or verbally abused by the police. Um, but that that
(21:23):
seems to be unusual for people who were arrested for
not giving up their seats on the bus. That she
was not mistreated. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure they didn't
throwout the welcome at No. You no, but um, there's
this is actually this is no worthy here. Do you
want to talk about how she was not the first
person that year, not the first woman to have been
(21:46):
arrested for not giving up her seat on the bus. Yeah. Sure,
this is something I didn't realize, and I think a
lot of people didn't realize this. But there were at
least two other women in Montgomery who were arrested that
same year. One was Claudette Colvin. She was fifteen at
the time. She got pregnant afterwards. Um, but she was
(22:07):
fifteen and uh, she in March was arrested for not
giving up her seat on the bus. Um. She said
at the time she was scared to death. But she
felt on one side, so journal Truth was holding her
down and on the other side, Harriet Tubman was holding
her down and she was not about to get up.
So they took her off the bus and arrested her.
(22:28):
And um, apparently she was ridiculed and treated rather roughly. Um.
There was another woman. Her name was Mary Louise Smith.
I believe she was eighteen at the time. She had
been arrested, like uh in October, um for the same thing.
I didn't get the impression that she was necessarily treated roughly.
But um. But Rosa Parks when she was arrested from
(22:49):
what I can tell, she was treated like the the
with the respect that would be afforded to a middle
class black woman at the time in Montgomery, Alabama, which
is to say, with maybe the slightest measure of respect,
which is to say, she wasn't beaten on the way
to jail. There's a book, by the way called Claudette
Colvin Colin Twice Towards Justice from phil Who's or Who's?
(23:14):
And Uh, I think a lot of people these days
are trying to shine a little light on some of
the lesser known figures of the civil rights movement, and
books are being written and stuff like that, which is
pretty awesome. And she she was asked, Claudette Colvin was
asked like, why why does she think it was Rosa
Parks and not her? And she had a whole list
of reasons and all of them are pretty legitimate. That
you know, Rosa Parks was a very again, a palatable
(23:37):
person to a large swath of people. Uh. And more
to the point, she was also fifteen, and the n
double a CP didn't think that a fifteen year old
was going to be the most reliable icon to kind
of project into the national forefront. Yeah, not to say,
um that a lot of people have said over the
years that it was staged, so because they set Rosa
(23:58):
Parks up or not set her up, but they picked
her to do this because she was palatable. They staged
this whole thing to make which you know would have
been fine, uh, if that's the way you want to
kick start the bus boycott. But from all accounts, it
was a in the moment decision. She said, I didn't
know that I was gonna get arrested and then I
was gonna sit down. It's just something that happened, and
(24:20):
so so on the one hand, the people who say
that no, this was staged, Um, the n Double A
CP and even before then Double A CP was around.
Busses had been like a target of black activists in
Montgomery in particular for decades. I think the first bus
boycott was in nine and it wasn't even a bus.
There was a trolley line as well as boycotted. So
(24:43):
she and having already been the secretary of the N
Double A c P and an activist herself for years
by then, she must have been fully aware of the
potential outcome, which proved to be the actual outcome from
her arrest for not giving up her seat. But the
idea of saying that this was all staged, it does
a couple of things. It's almost like, um, a casually
(25:06):
racist way of just kind of diminishing it because it
does two things. One, it takes away her bravery, because
if if it was, if it was staged to make
her own support the whole time, would have it would
have taken away a measure of fear um. And then secondly,
it also makes the double A C P look kind
of sneaky, like there's socially engineering stuff and then pretending
(25:28):
like that's not the case. So I think by saying like, no,
this was staged, it really undermines the reality of the situation,
which is that this brave woman said she'd had enough. Yeah,
and you're right, she probably it probably occurred to her
the ramifications of this, but I bet you anything in
the moment, she was just like, Nope, nope, not getting up.
(25:51):
That's what I understand, That's what she's always said. Yeah, So, um,
here's what happened from there. She was arrested, like I said,
she gets out on bail um over that weekend, and
a bunch of churches got together and they started talking
boycott UM on the winter trial comes around as a
group called the Women's Political Council, and they handed out
thirty five thousand handbills that basically said, uh, please children,
(26:16):
grown ups, don't ride the bus at all on Monday.
Please stay off the buses on Monday. Let's really try
and make a difference here. Because it was I think
at the time black people made up seventy of the
passengers UM, so it could have a real impact on
like the finances of the bus company. Yeah, and it
(26:36):
just started out as a boycott for one day for
the Monday following Rosa Parte's arrest, which was that happened
on a Thursday. Uh, And they were just gonna do
it for one day. But the the success of it
was so surprising. I think they were hoping for like
fifty reduction. It turned out I saw both ninety and
(26:59):
reduction in ridership by African Americans that day, and that's
a big loss for the city bus line. Right. So
it was such a success that they said, well, let's
maybe let's keep this going and see what we can
do with this. Because initially the demands of the Montgomery
Bus boycott of n was that, Um. One of them
(27:22):
was black black riders be treated with courtesy. Pretty low
hanging request. Um. Another one was that, uh, the the
seats be given on a first come, first serve basis,
which was the law, and that black people sit from
back to front, White people sit from front to back.
(27:42):
So they were still saying like, we can keep the segregation,
but but people shouldn't have to give up their seats.
And then the last one was they wanted, um, black
bus drivers to be hired to drive the predominantly African
American routes so that that you didn't have to deal
with an armed, yeah, and armed white bus driver because
they were armed and they had basically police powers to
(28:04):
enforce segregation on the bus. So the original boycott thing,
their demands were not extraordinarily radical. And when the boycott
was a success on that first Monday, UM, they decided
to extend it and they also decided maybe they should
expand their demands a little more. So while all this
is going on, she was she was found guilty on
(28:25):
that Monday. She was fine ten bucks plus court costs
of four dollars for fourteen dollars total, and said, uh, nope,
I'm gonna appeal this conviction. She challenged the basically she
was what she was challenging was segregation in general, uh,
not being constitutional, and that ended up being the argument
that was, well, we'll get to the court case and
(28:47):
how it escalated. But um, she was found guilty and UM.
The other notable thing that happened was one Ralph David
Abernathy and Dr Martin Luther King, who was young minister
in town of Dexter Avenue Baptist. Uh. He was elected
president of what was called the m i A, the
Montgomery Improvement Association, UM, which they formed because the success
(29:11):
of the boycott. So you have this new organization. Uh.
Then about a month later, UM, a month and a half,
at the end of January, Martin Luther King's home was bombed. Um.
Everyone was unharmed in the incident, but it really ramped
up um the stakes of what was going on. Yeah,
well for sure. And the they apparently the Montgomery Improvement
(29:34):
Association is credited with making the boycott successful. And the
way that they made it successful was through a car
pool they set up. They bought a bunch of station
wagons and put them in the name of some of
the black churches in town, and these these station wagons
would basically recreate the bus routes. They drove pre predetermined
(29:56):
routes UM and they were they were giving like twenty
thousand people arride every day. That's how successful this was.
And they put such a crimp UH in the finances
of the city bus line that had a couple of
things happened. One, they had to lay off workers, closed
(30:17):
down lines, raised their fares like it really hurt the
city bus lines. And then secondly, the city and I
believe maybe even the state sued the Montgomery Improvement Association
for for this boycott, which is apparently illegal under Alabama law. Yeah,
they they sued against the car service specifically saying that
(30:39):
the bus company had an exclusive franchise UH and they
did get an injunction UH in November of nineteenfty six.
But all of this comes out of the fact that
in like thirty something years earlier in Alabama passed an
anti boycott act which basically said it's it's illegal for
(31:01):
you to not ride the bus in this case. In
that case, sure or at least organized people and get
them to not ride the bush. It was something like
it was a misdemeanor to organize against somebody carrying out
lawful business or whatever. So they were getting them on
two things, that boycott and then infringing on the bus
(31:21):
lines franchise in that city, right, right, So what do
you do if you are suing or I'm sorry if
you're uh, if you have an anti boycott act? I mean,
you can't arrest everyone. So they go after um, I
think eighty nine Martin Luther King Jr. And eighty nine
other other members of the m i A. And obviously
(31:43):
because they're the most I think how many of them
twenty four more ministers. They're the most prominent members. And
he's find five hundred bucks and I spent a couple
of weeks in jail. He said he's very proud of
his crime. Should be yeah, sure. So, um, now Martin
Luther King is um appealing. So you've got a few
(32:03):
things going on here. You've got Rosa Parks who has
been convicted and now is appealing her her ten dollars
plus four dollars in court costs fine for breaking the
city ordinance even though she didn't. You've got Martin Luther
King now who is appealing his five dollar fine for
the boycott and the infringing on the bus lines franchise.
(32:26):
And then you have something else. You have a class
action suit called Um Browder versus Gail and was Um
named after oh, what's her name? The the woman who's
the lead plaintiff in the case, her name is Aurelia S.
Browder Uh. And the Gail in the case was the
(32:47):
Montgomery um the Montgomery mayor, I think, William Gail. And
we'll talk about that. We'll let's take a break and
we'll talk about this case, and we'll we'll come back
to the drumbeat of the core system starting to kick in. Alright,
(33:23):
So appeals run slow anyway, but in the South, if
it's a if it's a case like this, it's gonna
go super slow because the hope from the white establishment is,
you know, maybe enough time will goes by, time will
go buying. These people just sort of get in line
and forget about it, get tired of this boycott and everything.
(33:44):
We'll just go back to normal. Yeah, which is kind
of a gamble because this boycott was not showing any
signs of cracking, So they were basically making that bet
on the back of the city bus line and on
the jobs of the drivers who are being laid off
because ridership is down so low days. Right um, so
(34:06):
the like I said that this court, the drumbeat of
the court system was starting to grow a little bit
louder um. And you had three big cases Martin Luther
King's case, Rosa Park's case, and you had Browder versus Gail,
and Broder versus Gail represented four women originally five, but
four women who had been convicted of of breaking the
(34:28):
law for not giving up their seat on the bus
in Montgomery. One of them was Claudette Colvin, another was
Mary Louise Smith, I believe, and then um Aurelia Browder,
and then lastly was McDonald's Susie McDonald. Right. So, um,
these four women got together and sued the mayor, the
(34:50):
bus line, a few bus drivers, the city Public Works Commission, um,
just a big group of people. And they were suing
to to All three of those cases were suing the
question the constitutionality and the legality of segregation in general,
but specifically on the bus lines. And there was a
(35:11):
talk at first by Freddie Gray, who was the lead
lawyer in the Browder e Gael that um of including
Rosa Parks, but he very very wisely kept her separate
from that case because he said he wanted the courts
to just consider one thing, not whether Rosa Parks is
guilty or not, but whether the segregation on the Montgomery
(35:34):
buses was was legal and constitutional. So he kept those separate,
very very smartly. Yeah. I think he knew that he
could get this to the Supreme Court. Uh. This way
was a test case, and that was his his ultimate
goal because it was a state statute though in the
state Constitution of Alabama. It was of course first brought
before District court, three judges in U. S. District Court
(35:57):
on June. They ruled two to one that segregation was unconstitutional.
Of course, they cited Brown versus Board of Education as
president uh. And it eventually wound its way to the
Supreme Court on December. Actually that was pretty quick considering UH,
and they rejected all appeals and voted nine to nothing,
(36:21):
nine to zero that it was unconstitutional nine to nothing, um,
which is I mean, that's really saying something unanimous Supreme
Court decision regarding segregation in Yeah. So um, that was
a that was huge. I think Dr King was in
court that day when he was told by a reporter
about that decision, the Supreme Court decision. Um. And even
(36:44):
after he said, we're we're keeping up the boycott because
we're well, when they implement this desegregation on the buses
will stop the boycott. And after the Supreme Court ruling
came through the city of Montgomery, I saw pretty clearly
that there wasn't any way to keep this up any longer.
And I believe within three days the buses were desegregated.
(37:07):
And on the first day that they were desegregated, Rosa
Parks took her seat on a bus, uh, in the
front row, I believe. Yeah, they hired black bus drivers. Uh.
And this is after, by the way, three eighty one
days of a total sales loss of sixty five so um. Yeah.
And on the other side, Ralph David Abernathy's home was bombed.
(37:28):
Martin Luther King's home was bombed. Uh. People were in jail,
people were in court. It was a big struggle down
in Montgomery. Yeah. So in December twenty one, Dr King
and his white friend Reverend Clint Smiley sat together on
the front row with Ralph David Abernathy. Street here in Atlanta,
named for him, Edie Dixon and Fred Gray, the the
(37:51):
attorney that saw that case. So that was that was
a huge thing that did a number of things. It
made Rosa Parks and icon. Yeah, it projected um Martin
Luther King into the national spotlight. That was basically where
he first found national fame as and basically was like, well,
this guy's the leader of the civil rights movement now, um.
(38:11):
And it also was a huge domino in the idea
of desegregation in general, not just on busses, not just
in Montgomery, but the concept it followed in the in
the wake of plus E v. Ferguson, which it was
just one of those court cases that said separate facilities
(38:32):
is inherently racist because the only reason you would have
separate facilities is because you think one group is superior
over the other and they shouldn't have to consort or mix.
That's inherently unconstitutional. And this was one of those dominoes
that fell in that chain that led to desegregation across
the Jim Crow South. And like a laser, this particular
(38:56):
case and the changes it brought were focused right onto
Rosa Parks, her act, her courage, what she did. Yeah,
and this was this was within our parents lifetime. I know,
I was wondering. I was like, why am I so
much more jazz about this than Harriet Tubman. I love
Harriet Tubsman Tubman story, but I remember when I was researching,
(39:20):
I wasn't new least dess and I realized, like, I
can relate to this woman so much better, just because
this is pretty pretty recent, you know. Well yeah, and
just the notion that, uh, where we are as a
country now racially, um, this was not that long ago.
So for the the people in the camp of saying
(39:40):
just get over things, um, African Americans, just get over things,
It's like this was not hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
This was very recently. These like my peers parents had
to live through this. Well, one thing Rosa Parks is
now known for what they didn't realize before is, you know,
she her act and like the civil rights movement that
(40:02):
grew out of over like the next ten years, fifteen years,
there's this idea that around. There was a button put
on that and it was like, you guys were successful,
way to go, we can stop doing this now. Rosa
Parks was like, no, no, it's not done. This hasn't
changed up until she died in two thousand and five.
She was like, the struggle is still continuing. People didn't
(40:26):
realize that about her until this collection was opened. Yeah,
she um, this all came. There was significant cost to
her family, to her, her husband. Um. Her and her
husband both suffered through stomach ulcers because of this. They
lost their jobs. Um. Eventually they left Alabama, said let's
(40:47):
go to Virginia. And Virginia wasn't a whole lot better
that they said, all right, let's go to Detroit. Kept
going north. Uh. And then finally, after not having a
job for a long time, she lets hired a secretary
for John Conyers, brand new, brand newly elected black congressman
who she would work for for twenty three years. And uh,
(41:10):
Mr Conyers, you know, he was the one who stepped
down last year after sexual assault allegations after serving many
many years in Congress. Um and was a civil rights icon.
So it's kind of a very sad ending to that story.
But Rosa worked for him. Um and seventy seven, her husband,
James died of cancer, her brother died of cancer three
(41:31):
months later. Her mom died two years after that. But
I get the sense that after that, it really, uh,
it really kind of freed her to really go back
to work and devote herself once again to the cause,
because after those family members passed away, she established the
Rosa Parks Scholarship Foundation, uh in the Rosa and Raymond
(41:51):
Parks Institute for Self Development, and wrote to memoirs she
was busy, she was uh and then very sadly And
I remember this in um when she was home invaded
and robbed, hit over the head by a guy named
Joseph Skipper. Yeah, man, that was just like, I mean,
(42:14):
for you kidding me with that for fifty eight bucks
of all the houses to accidentally break into. Yeah, what
do you think he knew it was Rosa Parks. I
don't know. I don't know, but he has seen nothing
to indicate that that was true. He knew that, um,
that he would go down as the man who robbed
and beat Rosa Parks. So, um, yeah, I don't. I
(42:38):
don't think he was he she was targeted because she
was Rosa Parks or anything like that. I think she's
just a little old lady. The impression I have is
it doesn't matter if she was Rosa Parks or not.
Sure you know what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, so she
that was nine four, you said. And then like right afterwards,
there was a huge national outcry and she um moved
(42:59):
into a very secure high rise in Detroit, where she
lived until she died in two thousand five. I believe
she died in that apartment two years young. She had
a a slew of honors, unprecedented honors in this country. UM.
She was transported her body to Washington, d c uh
(43:19):
and she laid in honor under the rotunda, the US capital.
First woman to get that honor. Uh, the second African
American in the first non government UM American ever to
have this honor. I mean, that is a high honor.
When she died, every flag on public land in the
United States and around the world was flown at half masted,
(43:43):
which is pretty pretty great too. Yeah. George W. Bush
made sure that happened. Uh. And then here's just some
of her lifetime achievement awards. In double A. CP gave
her what's called the spin Garn Medal in their highest honor.
She's in the Mid Sigan Woman's Hall of Fame. Martin
Luther King Jr. Award nineteen eighty UM you could have
(44:05):
just stopped at the Michigan Hall of Fame, Michigan Women's
Hall of Fame. Uh, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in
ros Michigan Women's Hall of Fame, Congressional Gold Medal. No,
now we're in a contest. Um. Time magazine named her
was one of the twenty most influential iconic figures of
the twenty century. It's a big one, okay. Uh. And
(44:28):
then yeah, you mentioned George W. Bush ordered half mass
flags in two thousand five. So again there was this
this idea that she was just a tired, little old
lady who was quietly brave and didn't give up her seat,
and she was kind of meek and quiet um. And
in two thousand fourteen, her personal collection, the Rosa Parks Collection,
(44:50):
was sold to the Howard Buffett Foundation, Warren Buffett's son.
They bought it for a song at like four and
a half million dollars. And it's something like if dostgraphs,
and it is her personal papers, like notes for speeches,
notes for her books, I believe, um correspondence. And it
(45:13):
paints this picture that no one had of her before,
which was no like this lady was an activist they
went through her whole life. She was an activist who
um wanted to talk about and agitate for the rights
of black Americans and how messed up the situation was
that they lived in um and that she wouldn't normalize this.
(45:34):
She would she would learn to to to deal with
it as much as she needed to while she was
working to change it. Um. And there was just a
surprise to a lot of people when they cracked open
these papers and found that that picture of her. Yeah.
I also want to shout out article how history got
the Roads of Park story wrong? Um And this was
(45:55):
written by the same person who wrote the award winning
book The Rebellious Life of Mrs was A Parks. Her
name is Jean Theo Harris the Horus. It's all one word. Yeah,
I know it sounds like it should be hyphenated. It's
really easy to say, but how do you say it?
I have no idea. But Che's professor professor of Policy
(46:17):
at Brooklyn College of c n y Man great lady.
So if you want to know more about Rosa Parks,
go out on the internet, educate yourself. Seen that movie?
Have you seen that the about the bus boycott? No,
I mean it was a significant event. I had no idea. Um, okay,
(46:42):
well I think I said go search stuff in there somewhere.
So it means it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna
call this oh tiny Things alright, Hey, guys, let me
start off by saying, enjoyed the podcast very much. Aside
from being interesting and entertaining, it very much helps my
time in the car. We get that a lot can
(47:04):
you help people would go insane if it weren't for us. Um.
Several episodes ago, believe Chuck mentioned that you love tiny things.
I do, Josh like things that are grossly oversized. That
giant pocket watch over there, it's kind of a pain.
I'm wearing it like play fight. Uh. He mentioned loving
tiny things there's something extraordinarily satisfying about them. I agree,
(47:26):
I love tiny things. Would be remiss if I did
not bring um, bring you to the Museum of Jurassic
Technology that I don't know. I've been there too. Um.
It's in Los Angeles. There are not one, but two
fantastic exhibits of tiny things. But I have the needle
in micro mosaics. I don't think I saw those, did you?
(47:47):
The tiny thing I remember was like the dioramas of
the trailers, and I have the Needle. I remember that. Yeah,
I don't remember. The micro Mosaics I haven't been in
many years, though I have. The Needle features delightful, whimsical
miniature sculptures, actually small enough to fit into the eye
of a needle. There you m that's a little too
small for me. Okay, so you like so you like?
(48:09):
I like the tiny Tabasco bottles, So you get into
you like to feel like you're a giant, not like
a god. Yeah, exactly. I just want to be taller.
The micro Mosaics exhibit also requires a magnifying glass to enjoy.
However beautiful, this exhibit has a slightly creepy aspect to it.
The tiny mosaic pieces are in fact bits of butterfly wings. Yeah,
(48:30):
it's not too creepy. Oh, I mean they kill the
butterflies depends. Yeah, how do they come across those wings?
Where do they road kill? If so, that's fine, Yeah,
what a job, go out and just try and find
dead butterflies. All in all, these exhibits of a wonderful
Field of Magic Realism. Museum also features a lovely rooftop
garden as well of a meditative tea room to enjoy
(48:53):
complimentary cup of tea. Interesting. That is all guys, cheers
from Sandra Williams. Thanks up for the shout out, Sandra.
That is a indeed a great place. If you're ever
in Los Angeles, everybody go check out the Museum of
Jurassic Technology's going with your mind open and thank us later. Yeah,
get out of Ripley's Believe it or Not We'll go
to both. You know, sure I said get out of
(49:17):
Ripley's Believe it or Not? Okay, Yeah, But I mean
Jack Palance Man, how do you how do you pass that?
I don't get it? Remember he was the host of
the TV not Yeah. My brother worked with him on
City Slickers too, and there was one story where, uh,
you know, he's kind of old at the time, where
(49:38):
Scott as the A D s to walk him second
a D is to walk the talent to the set
from their trailer, and it was through the desert, the
rocky desert, and Scott was like, you know, look after
that wrong, Mr Palence or something like that. And one
day he was just like, I don't need you to
tell me how to walk. Scott like shrank down. Of
course I can't remember that's exactly what he said, but
(49:59):
but I'll bet that um Jack Palance felt so bad
for yelling at Scott of all the people do it,
you know that Scott and he didn't delight in Scott
like every next days. Yeah. Well, if you want to
tell us how great you think Scott is, you can
tweet to us. I'm at josh um Clark and at
s Y s K podcast. You can also check out
(50:19):
my website Are You Serious Clark dot com. Charles W.
Chuck Bryant is on Facebook dot com at Facebook dot
com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's also uh facebook
dot com slash stuff you Should Know page. You can
send us all an email, including Jerry the Stuff podcast
at how stuff Works dot com. There's always joined us
at at home on the Web Stuff you Should Know
(50:40):
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how Stuff Works dot com
Hey, everybody. We've already made our big tour announcement for
the year, but this is a little different because we
have added a show because Denver sold out, so we
have added a second show in Denver. Nice. Yeah, we're
going to be there on Wednesday. Then we added a
show the day before the same place, Gothic Theater, Englewood, Colorado.
And you can go to s Y s K live
(00:21):
dot com to get info and tickets for that show
and all the rest of our shows to Chuck. That's right, Boston,
April fourth, d C April five. St. Louis, Mayo and Cleveland, Ohio.
Come out and see us. Welcome to Stuff you Should
Know from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome
(00:45):
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,
there's Jerry over there. So it's Stuff you should know
the podcast Clean Studio version. I know it feels a
little weird in here, like, uh, like it's too good
for us or something, you know what I mean. Yeah,
just so you folks know, Jerry Test a couple of
(01:07):
the editor engineers here with coming in and cleaning up
the pile of spaghetti that used to flow from the
back of her workstation, not that it was Jerry's fault,
and she said, clean up my mess. Well, she clapped
twice in the whole. It looks good though, it does.
(01:27):
But now we actually have room to put stuff, so
we should put some stuff in here. I agree. It's
a little bear a papasan right, there would be nice.
I don't know. Well, we could put a small papason.
Most people don't realize. But this place is lousy with
Ikea lamps, I mean everywhere, and the cheapest ones, like
they're one of them is on fire right now? Yeah,
(01:49):
that one, Yeah, smoldering, smoldering, still fire, chuck, speaking of fire, Yes,
you want to know somebody who had some fire in
her more than most people realize. Rosa Parks, who is
now one of my all time heroes because before the
(02:10):
Rosa Parks I knew again it was like the Harriets
Hubman episode. Learned about her in school. Um, she was
a great American, respect her, revere her. Here's why she
didn't give up her seat on the bus. No, like,
not only is that like just the tip of the iceberg.
It wasn't until about the last five or so years.
(02:32):
I think you know about the last four years, they're
like a full picture of this woman and who she was,
and like what she stood for and what drove her
emerged not just to the public in general, but to
two historians even because her personal papers were basically held
up in auction for years and years and years. And
now now that they've been donated for ten, like ten
(02:53):
years to the Library of Congress, we're starting to get
a clear picture of her, and she was even more
worth revering. And then people knew before. Yeah, I mean,
I think the what the story isn't uh is Rosa
Parks was just a quiet lady who was super tired
on the bus one day, so she didn't want to
get up. Her dogs were yapping. Yeah, not true. And
(03:15):
she even makes a point in her personal papers saying
I was forty two years old. Uh, I was no
more tired than I was after any day at work.
But what I was tired of was being told to
get up by a white bus driver to make room
for a white passenger that was not My dogs weren't barking, right,
so she um she I think one of the reasons
(03:38):
why she was kind of whittled down into this this
woman who was just tired and wasn't going to give
up her seat because she shouldn't have had two in
the first place. And then she was a very meek,
quiet person. Also is another way that she was drawn. Um.
I think one of the reasons why she was whittled
into that package was because she became an icon for
(04:02):
the civil rights movement. And one of the things that
the civil rights movement had to do, for better or worse,
was to get uh, the establishment, both white and black,
on the side of the civil rights movement, which was
a movement of agitation. Um. And if you agitated at
the time, this is the Jim Crow era that meant trouble.
(04:23):
This wasn't like just trouble like people are gonna yell
at you on Twitter. This was trouble like the cops
might arrest you for some made up in fraction and
then be and rape you on the way to the jail,
and then you would end up in the prison system
kind of trouble like. This is the kind of trouble
that a woman who refused to give up her seat
on the bus faced it at this time. Um. So,
(04:45):
the idea of taking a woman who was I guess
palatable to as many people as possible, and and saying,
look at this woman, we need to protect this woman's
rights and do what's right. Um. I think that's why
she got kind of wood old down into that. But
if you were looking back now historically she there's so
much more to her than than just that, and she
(05:06):
was certainly not meek and mild. Yeah, I mean, distilling
the story down for school books is uh is one thing,
but like I'm glad now that people can get a
more robust picture. Um. So a lot of this comes
from a website called Great Black Heroes dot Com had
a really good, lengthy article. Uh. And then also I
want to shout out a book series called Little People,
(05:30):
Big Dreams, And it's a kid's book series that we've
been reading to my daughter. In fact, it's kind of
all she wants to read right now. And they are
on great women in history and kind of brutally honest
for to be reading to kids. But they didn't. It's
kind of cool they weren't. They didn't whitewash anything. It's
sort of like, uh, Maya Angelo was not treated well
(05:55):
by white people, like you read that to your kid
and Rosa Parks this one, and then there's Free to Carlo,
Coco Chanel, Amelia Earhart, Mary Curie at Christie and more.
But um, but it's pretty brutal, like they draw Amelia
Hearts Skeleton on the Beach, kind of brutal. You know what.
That's the only one we haven't gotten to yet because
every night it's read free to Read, freed To But
(06:17):
it's literally like frieda Carlo is lying in the street
after she gets hit by a taxi and she's bloody
and her legs don't work again after. So, I mean,
it's pretty brutal stuff, But I don't know, it's kind
of cool, like kids can read the stuff and digest it.
I think it's a good way to begin them on
the path towards true stories and to sharpen them to
(06:38):
like a razor's edge at a young age, you know,
look out for taxis. Yeah, that's good. You know, that's
good advice at any age. All right, So Rosa Parks, Uh,
let's go back to where she was born in Tuskegee, Alabama,
on February four, nineteen thirteen. Uh too. While she was
born Rosa Louise Macaulay to James and Leonora mcaulay, who
(06:59):
are a carpenter and school teacher respectively. Right, her parents split,
I guess she I don't know how old she was.
I guess she was younger than six, But her father
went to go look for work up north, and her
mom wanted to stay in the South, so she and
her mom and her brother moved in with her mother's parents,
her grandparents, and her grandfather played a really distinct role
(07:24):
in shaping her because she moved in with him when
she was, like I said, around six, and at the
time in this place Pine Level, which is outside of Montgomery, Alabama. Uh,
there was a lot of clan violence, a lot of
violence against blacks of the hands of the Ku Klux Klan,
and Um, her grandfather was not having it. He was
actually he was the son of a slave woman and
(07:48):
slave owner, so he was um I believe half white.
Uh he was. He was a slave himself. He had
an owner UM at a young age who really brew
really mistreated him, trying to starve him for a little bit.
And her grandfather developed, um what she called, a very
intense passionate hatred for white people and definitely im part
(08:11):
of that to his daughters and his granddaughter grandchildren, wouldn't
let his grandchildren play with white kids, didn't let his
daughters work for white families. He was very much UM
and it sounds like pretty well founded against white people.
And definitely some of that rubbed off on Rose at
the very least her eyes were opened to just how
(08:32):
unjust the system was at the time when she was
growing up. Well, yeah, and just it wasn't even just
through his eyes. Like she went to a segregated school
that she had to walk to. White students were picked
up and bus to the school. Um. She went to
UH an elementary school called the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls,
very cool school. It was created by some UH northern
(08:56):
white Northerners to basically UM try and foster education in
these more rural black communities in the South. And that
didn't go over well educating kids, so that school was
burned down twice. And then coupled that with all the
you know, influence from her grandfather, and it's no surprise
that Rosa Parks from a very very early age was
(09:19):
UH was an activist. So and being an activist, we're
talking like from age six onward, right, So she dropped
out of school, which would have been a huge turning point. Um.
She had to take care of her grandmother and then
I think her mom later on because they both fell ill.
And she met I think age seventeen or eighteen, and
(09:41):
then later on, at age nineteen, married her husband, Raymond Parks,
and he encouraged her to go back and finished school
and she did. It was a huge move because she
was very much meant to be an educated person. So UM,
the fact that she she met Raymond was a huge
influence in that respect. He was also a big influence
(10:02):
on her because she said that he was the first activist,
like real activist, that she ever met. And I believe
this was even before the n double a CP was
in town. This guy was like a grassroots activist. UH.
And he and his group were basically armed. Do you
remember in the Black Panthers episode where like the whole
idea of arming yourself came out of the South. Um.
(10:24):
So this guy was like Raymond Parks was one of
the the real deal people who originated that UM and
he and the group of activists that he um he
met with, UH would but they would all come to
the house and everyone to have a gun. UH. And
apparently Rosa Parks said sometimes there were so many guns
(10:45):
on the table that she didn't have any place to
set the refreshments during these meetings. But these meetings weren't like,
you know, how are we going to get white people back?
It was how are we going to protect like the
Scottsboro Boys from false rape accusations? Um, he was he
was an early activists in Montgomery. Yeah, and later on
was a member of the Inn Double A CP. Uh.
(11:06):
We should do a show on the Scottsboro Boys at
some point. Uh, it's too much to get into here,
but the short version is, um, a group of black
men on a train were accused of rape by two
white women who uh just made up the story. Basically
went to trial a few times, and UM, well you
(11:27):
know what, we'll save the outcome, okay, because they are
all kinds of outcomes because it went to trial so
many times. Um. So she did finish high school and
she became involved along with her husband in the Montgomery
chapter the in Double A CP and worked as their
secretary for fourteen years. So not only was she an activist,
but she was um involved in in service of these organizations,
(11:52):
like she worked for them, like whatever, you need done,
I will do. And anyone who's ever volunteered like knows that, UM,
I guess footch soldiers, for lack of a better term,
are some of the most important people to like in
the Black Panthers episode when you know, the women didn't
get nearly the recognition they should have gotten for just
keeping that organization running on time. So but she was
(12:14):
more than a volunteer though. She had some really some
jobs with some real gravity. Like she was an investigator
of UM sexual assault of Black women by white men UM,
which is a very dangerous thing to do because you're
going to like interview witnesses to crimes that aren't being
(12:35):
prosecuted because they were perpetrated by white people. UM. She
uh was Justice for Prisoner advocate. She did a lot
of like really important stuff. And as she was doing
this stuff as the secretary for the local and WLE
and double a CP, she was also making contacts that
would later become really important in this nascent civil rights
(12:57):
movement that large grew out of the Montgomery bus boycott
we're going to talk about. I had no idea how
big of a an event it was, but I didn't
realize how far reaching the effects of it were oh yeah, uh.
And this another kind of important thing happened to her
as far as integration goes, is she got a job
(13:19):
type job at Maxwell Air Force Base for a little while, which,
because it was a federal institution, was integrated. And this
was the first time that she had um first time
she had worked in a basically been in a professional
integrated atmosphere. Uh. And that along with the Highlander Folk School,
(13:39):
which is maybe we should do a show on that too, uh.
In n she went to a meeting a workshop at
the Highlander Folks School. And this is in the hills
of Tennessee. Uh. And it is still open today as
the Highlander Research and Education Center. Uh, not in that
original building, but um, it was just this great folk
school where they prepared kids for activism. UM workers tried
(14:01):
to get people involved in civil rights and she actually
got sponsored by the white couple that she worked for,
uh to um go to these meetings at mont Egal, Tennessee.
So and that Maxwell Air Force Base you mentioned. One
of the things she later said, I think they found
in her papers was a description of like because it
was an integrated base, the bus service on base was
(14:22):
integrated as well, so she would be riding next to
like a white friend on the bus on base, and
then once they would get off of the bus on
base and get onto a city bus, they would have
to stop their conversation and get into the different sections,
the white section in the colored section. And that was
just the reality of it. Um. And one thing that
(14:43):
has really come through from her papers is that she
made a conscious decision to to never normalize that can
not be like, well, that's just how it is, that's
just life. That she would never let herself do that,
and instead it was this is this is messed up.
This has to be changed. Um. She was able to
(15:05):
get through her day with this knowledge, but she was
never like this is normal or this is okay. Yeah,
I mean she said it required I think quote was
a lot of mental gymnastics just to survive day to
day as a black person in America. Uh So in
other words, yeah, not accept it and do everything I
can to wrap my head around what I can do
moving forward. Uh. Should we take a break? Yeah? Man,
(15:29):
all right, take a break and we'll come back and
we will um start on December one, very important day. Alright,
(15:57):
So it's December one, five Rosa Parks is working as
a seamstress at the time at a department store. She
gets off work like she does every day and boards
bus Cleveland Avenue bus at about six o'clock h And
here's the deal with the buses at the time, is uh,
(16:17):
there were a certain amount of rows set aside for
white people, and then there was a sign that said,
you know, black people were They probably said colored people
back then can sit from here back, but that sign
could move, so as more white people get on the bus,
the bus driver gets up and moves that sign back
and says, all right, black folks, you gotta get up,
get out of your seats because now the white section
(16:39):
is here, and just keep doing that until sensibly the
entire bus could be full of white people and they
just say, sorry, I'll have to get off. Right Yeah.
You either had to get up and move your seat.
If there were not seats left, you had to stand.
If there was no standing room, you had to get
off the bus right um. And then if the bus
you were getting on, if you were African American, if
(17:00):
the white section was already full, you had to get
into the front of the bus, pay, get off of
the bus and get onto that back door. You couldn't
even walk through the white section, right, and then you
you know, you could take your seat in the colored section. So, um,
there was a lot going on here. At least half
of this law was unwritten custom right. The local ordinance
(17:23):
in Montgomery, Alabama said that busses had to be segregated.
There was a white section and there was a colored section.
They put it right. All that stuff about moving the sign,
about getting up and like having to leave the bus
if there wasn't any standing room for you if more
white people came on, all of that was just customary.
That was not law, That was not the local ordinance,
(17:44):
but it was so practiced on a daily basis that
it might as well have been the law for sure. Um,
And that's really all that matters is if everyone was
playing ball, that's what was going to happen. Yeah, Because
like the courts would even prosecute as if you had
broken the law, if you had not actually broken the law,
but had broken this custom. So yeah, for all intensive purposes,
(18:06):
it was the law. So the driver of that bus
was one James Blake, and Rosa had uh, well, she
had a long memory and a previous incident with Mr
Blake twelve years previous, uh ninety three. She had paid
her fair and like you were talking about with um,
the fact that they couldn't even walk through the white section.
He said, you gotta get off the bus, go around
(18:28):
to the back. Uh forced her. Well, she had already
gotten and said no, you gotta re enter on the rear.
She got out and he was like psych, closed the
door and drove off with her bus fare. Right, Yeah,
she had already paid. Yeah that was and she remembered
twelve years later who James Blake was. I would probably
not forget that bus driver. So on on this day
(18:51):
she got on and um, she took her seat in
the colored section and when she sat down a in
she was behind the sign. And I guess after a
couple of stops, and think about this man ament riding
the bus and say you have like seven stops, think
about that pit that would be in your stomach on
(19:12):
a daily basis, Like, am I gonna have to get up?
I'm gonna have to be humiliated? I am I gonna
have to give up my seat to a white person?
Because even if somebody who was told that they had
to get up because a white person needed to sit there,
even if they just kind of quietly complied that that
doesn't that doesn't get the point across how they were feeling. Right,
then anybody would be humiliated by that. And I read
(19:35):
that one of the reasons why busses, not just in Montgomery,
but throughout the segregated South, they were kind of flash
points because they were people were in such close quarters.
It was the racism was right up in your face
in front of a bunch of other people, so the
humiliation was even more pronounced. Right. So, so Rosa Park
gets on the bus. She takes her seat in the
(19:56):
colored section, and after a few stops, some white people
got on and the the driver, James blake Um, said
that it was time for them to move, that these
white people needed a seat, and uh he was moving
the sign back at least one row. Yeah. So at
this point, Um, there's one white dude left without a seat.
(20:19):
Uh So, as his custom, he made four black folks
get out of their two seats on that row. Everyone
had to move back because there had to be a
whole new white road just for this one guy. Three
of the passengers got up been moved. Rosa Parks just
slid over to the window seat and sat there and
he said, are you going to get up? And she
said no, I'm not. He said, well, if you don't
(20:40):
stand up, I'm gonna have to call the police and
have you arrested. And she said you may do that. Aw,
I don't know, man, I mean, just so brave. And
so the police did come. She was arrested, She was booked,
charged with the disorderly conduct, and bailed out by Clifford
der and Edgar Nixon, who were the local president of
(21:02):
the the chapter of the Double A c P at
the time. Right, So, um, she's out at least temporarily. Yeah,
the next evening, so she spent the night in jail.
I don't I didn't run across any any statements or
any kind of evidence that she was like physically mistreated
or verbally abused by the police. Um, but that that
(21:23):
seems to be unusual for people who were arrested for
not giving up their seats on the bus. That she
was not mistreated. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure they didn't
throwout the welcome at No. You no, but um, there's
this is actually this is no worthy here. Do you
want to talk about how she was not the first
person that year, not the first woman to have been
(21:46):
arrested for not giving up her seat on the bus. Yeah. Sure,
this is something I didn't realize, and I think a
lot of people didn't realize this. But there were at
least two other women in Montgomery who were arrested that
same year. One was Claudette Colvin. She was fifteen at
the time. She got pregnant afterwards. Um, but she was
(22:07):
fifteen and uh, she in March was arrested for not
giving up her seat on the bus. Um. She said
at the time she was scared to death. But she
felt on one side, so journal Truth was holding her
down and on the other side, Harriet Tubman was holding
her down and she was not about to get up.
So they took her off the bus and arrested her.
(22:28):
And um, apparently she was ridiculed and treated rather roughly. Um.
There was another woman. Her name was Mary Louise Smith.
I believe she was eighteen at the time. She had
been arrested, like uh in October, um for the same thing.
I didn't get the impression that she was necessarily treated roughly.
But um. But Rosa Parks when she was arrested from
(22:49):
what I can tell, she was treated like the the
with the respect that would be afforded to a middle
class black woman at the time in Montgomery, Alabama, which
is to say, with maybe the slightest measure of respect,
which is to say, she wasn't beaten on the way
to jail. There's a book, by the way called Claudette
Colvin Colin Twice Towards Justice from phil Who's or Who's?
(23:14):
And Uh, I think a lot of people these days
are trying to shine a little light on some of
the lesser known figures of the civil rights movement, and
books are being written and stuff like that, which is
pretty awesome. And she she was asked, Claudette Colvin was
asked like, why why does she think it was Rosa
Parks and not her? And she had a whole list
of reasons and all of them are pretty legitimate. That
you know, Rosa Parks was a very again, a palatable
(23:37):
person to a large swath of people. Uh. And more
to the point, she was also fifteen, and the n
double a CP didn't think that a fifteen year old
was going to be the most reliable icon to kind
of project into the national forefront. Yeah, not to say,
um that a lot of people have said over the
years that it was staged, so because they set Rosa
(23:58):
Parks up or not set her up, but they picked
her to do this because she was palatable. They staged
this whole thing to make which you know would have
been fine, uh, if that's the way you want to
kick start the bus boycott. But from all accounts, it
was a in the moment decision. She said, I didn't
know that I was gonna get arrested and then I
was gonna sit down. It's just something that happened, and
(24:20):
so so on the one hand, the people who say
that no, this was staged, Um, the n Double A
CP and even before then Double A CP was around.
Busses had been like a target of black activists in
Montgomery in particular for decades. I think the first bus
boycott was in nine and it wasn't even a bus.
There was a trolley line as well as boycotted. So
(24:43):
she and having already been the secretary of the N
Double A c P and an activist herself for years
by then, she must have been fully aware of the
potential outcome, which proved to be the actual outcome from
her arrest for not giving up her seat. But the
idea of saying that this was all staged, it does
a couple of things. It's almost like, um, a casually
(25:06):
racist way of just kind of diminishing it because it
does two things. One, it takes away her bravery, because
if if it was, if it was staged to make
her own support the whole time, would have it would
have taken away a measure of fear um. And then secondly,
it also makes the double A C P look kind
of sneaky, like there's socially engineering stuff and then pretending
(25:28):
like that's not the case. So I think by saying like, no,
this was staged, it really undermines the reality of the situation,
which is that this brave woman said she'd had enough. Yeah,
and you're right, she probably it probably occurred to her
the ramifications of this, but I bet you anything in
the moment, she was just like, Nope, nope, not getting up.
(25:51):
That's what I understand, That's what she's always said. Yeah, So, um,
here's what happened from there. She was arrested, like I said,
she gets out on bail um over that weekend, and
a bunch of churches got together and they started talking
boycott UM on the winter trial comes around as a
group called the Women's Political Council, and they handed out
thirty five thousand handbills that basically said, uh, please children,
(26:16):
grown ups, don't ride the bus at all on Monday.
Please stay off the buses on Monday. Let's really try
and make a difference here. Because it was I think
at the time black people made up seventy of the
passengers UM, so it could have a real impact on
like the finances of the bus company. Yeah, and it
(26:36):
just started out as a boycott for one day for
the Monday following Rosa Parte's arrest, which was that happened
on a Thursday. Uh, And they were just gonna do
it for one day. But the the success of it
was so surprising. I think they were hoping for like
fifty reduction. It turned out I saw both ninety and
(26:59):
reduction in ridership by African Americans that day, and that's
a big loss for the city bus line. Right. So
it was such a success that they said, well, let's
maybe let's keep this going and see what we can
do with this. Because initially the demands of the Montgomery
Bus boycott of n was that, Um. One of them
(27:22):
was black black riders be treated with courtesy. Pretty low
hanging request. Um. Another one was that, uh, the the
seats be given on a first come, first serve basis,
which was the law, and that black people sit from
back to front, White people sit from front to back.
(27:42):
So they were still saying like, we can keep the segregation,
but but people shouldn't have to give up their seats.
And then the last one was they wanted, um, black
bus drivers to be hired to drive the predominantly African
American routes so that that you didn't have to deal
with an armed, yeah, and armed white bus driver because
they were armed and they had basically police powers to
(28:04):
enforce segregation on the bus. So the original boycott thing,
their demands were not extraordinarily radical. And when the boycott
was a success on that first Monday, UM, they decided
to extend it and they also decided maybe they should
expand their demands a little more. So while all this
is going on, she was she was found guilty on
(28:25):
that Monday. She was fine ten bucks plus court costs
of four dollars for fourteen dollars total, and said, uh, nope,
I'm gonna appeal this conviction. She challenged the basically she
was what she was challenging was segregation in general, uh,
not being constitutional, and that ended up being the argument
that was, well, we'll get to the court case and
(28:47):
how it escalated. But um, she was found guilty and UM.
The other notable thing that happened was one Ralph David
Abernathy and Dr Martin Luther King, who was young minister
in town of Dexter Avenue Baptist. Uh. He was elected
president of what was called the m i A, the
Montgomery Improvement Association, UM, which they formed because the success
(29:11):
of the boycott. So you have this new organization. Uh.
Then about a month later, UM, a month and a half,
at the end of January, Martin Luther King's home was bombed. Um.
Everyone was unharmed in the incident, but it really ramped
up um the stakes of what was going on. Yeah,
well for sure. And the they apparently the Montgomery Improvement
(29:34):
Association is credited with making the boycott successful. And the
way that they made it successful was through a car
pool they set up. They bought a bunch of station
wagons and put them in the name of some of
the black churches in town, and these these station wagons
would basically recreate the bus routes. They drove pre predetermined
(29:56):
routes UM and they were they were giving like twenty
thousand people arride every day. That's how successful this was.
And they put such a crimp UH in the finances
of the city bus line that had a couple of
things happened. One, they had to lay off workers, closed
(30:17):
down lines, raised their fares like it really hurt the
city bus lines. And then secondly, the city and I
believe maybe even the state sued the Montgomery Improvement Association
for for this boycott, which is apparently illegal under Alabama law. Yeah,
they they sued against the car service specifically saying that
(30:39):
the bus company had an exclusive franchise UH and they
did get an injunction UH in November of nineteenfty six.
But all of this comes out of the fact that
in like thirty something years earlier in Alabama passed an
anti boycott act which basically said it's it's illegal for
(31:01):
you to not ride the bus in this case. In
that case, sure or at least organized people and get
them to not ride the bush. It was something like
it was a misdemeanor to organize against somebody carrying out
lawful business or whatever. So they were getting them on
two things, that boycott and then infringing on the bus
(31:21):
lines franchise in that city, right, right, So what do
you do if you are suing or I'm sorry if
you're uh, if you have an anti boycott act? I mean,
you can't arrest everyone. So they go after um, I
think eighty nine Martin Luther King Jr. And eighty nine
other other members of the m i A. And obviously
(31:43):
because they're the most I think how many of them
twenty four more ministers. They're the most prominent members. And
he's find five hundred bucks and I spent a couple
of weeks in jail. He said he's very proud of
his crime. Should be yeah, sure. So, um, now Martin
Luther King is um appealing. So you've got a few
(32:03):
things going on here. You've got Rosa Parks who has
been convicted and now is appealing her her ten dollars
plus four dollars in court costs fine for breaking the
city ordinance even though she didn't. You've got Martin Luther
King now who is appealing his five dollar fine for
the boycott and the infringing on the bus lines franchise.
(32:26):
And then you have something else. You have a class
action suit called Um Browder versus Gail and was Um
named after oh, what's her name? The the woman who's
the lead plaintiff in the case, her name is Aurelia S.
Browder Uh. And the Gail in the case was the
(32:47):
Montgomery um the Montgomery mayor, I think, William Gail. And
we'll talk about that. We'll let's take a break and
we'll talk about this case, and we'll we'll come back
to the drumbeat of the core system starting to kick in. Alright,
(33:23):
So appeals run slow anyway, but in the South, if
it's a if it's a case like this, it's gonna
go super slow because the hope from the white establishment is,
you know, maybe enough time will goes by, time will
go buying. These people just sort of get in line
and forget about it, get tired of this boycott and everything.
(33:44):
We'll just go back to normal. Yeah, which is kind
of a gamble because this boycott was not showing any
signs of cracking, So they were basically making that bet
on the back of the city bus line and on
the jobs of the drivers who are being laid off
because ridership is down so low days. Right um, so
(34:06):
the like I said that this court, the drumbeat of
the court system was starting to grow a little bit
louder um. And you had three big cases Martin Luther
King's case, Rosa Park's case, and you had Browder versus Gail,
and Broder versus Gail represented four women originally five, but
four women who had been convicted of of breaking the
(34:28):
law for not giving up their seat on the bus
in Montgomery. One of them was Claudette Colvin, another was
Mary Louise Smith, I believe, and then um Aurelia Browder,
and then lastly was McDonald's Susie McDonald. Right. So, um,
these four women got together and sued the mayor, the
(34:50):
bus line, a few bus drivers, the city Public Works Commission, um,
just a big group of people. And they were suing
to to All three of those cases were suing the
question the constitutionality and the legality of segregation in general,
but specifically on the bus lines. And there was a
(35:11):
talk at first by Freddie Gray, who was the lead
lawyer in the Browder e Gael that um of including
Rosa Parks, but he very very wisely kept her separate
from that case because he said he wanted the courts
to just consider one thing, not whether Rosa Parks is
guilty or not, but whether the segregation on the Montgomery
(35:34):
buses was was legal and constitutional. So he kept those separate,
very very smartly. Yeah. I think he knew that he
could get this to the Supreme Court. Uh. This way
was a test case, and that was his his ultimate
goal because it was a state statute though in the
state Constitution of Alabama. It was of course first brought
before District court, three judges in U. S. District Court
(35:57):
on June. They ruled two to one that segregation was unconstitutional.
Of course, they cited Brown versus Board of Education as
president uh. And it eventually wound its way to the
Supreme Court on December. Actually that was pretty quick considering UH,
and they rejected all appeals and voted nine to nothing,
(36:21):
nine to zero that it was unconstitutional nine to nothing, um,
which is I mean, that's really saying something unanimous Supreme
Court decision regarding segregation in Yeah. So um, that was
a that was huge. I think Dr King was in
court that day when he was told by a reporter
about that decision, the Supreme Court decision. Um. And even
(36:44):
after he said, we're we're keeping up the boycott because
we're well, when they implement this desegregation on the buses
will stop the boycott. And after the Supreme Court ruling
came through the city of Montgomery, I saw pretty clearly
that there wasn't any way to keep this up any longer.
And I believe within three days the buses were desegregated.
(37:07):
And on the first day that they were desegregated, Rosa
Parks took her seat on a bus, uh, in the
front row, I believe. Yeah, they hired black bus drivers. Uh.
And this is after, by the way, three eighty one
days of a total sales loss of sixty five so um. Yeah.
And on the other side, Ralph David Abernathy's home was bombed.
(37:28):
Martin Luther King's home was bombed. Uh. People were in jail,
people were in court. It was a big struggle down
in Montgomery. Yeah. So in December twenty one, Dr King
and his white friend Reverend Clint Smiley sat together on
the front row with Ralph David Abernathy. Street here in Atlanta,
named for him, Edie Dixon and Fred Gray, the the
(37:51):
attorney that saw that case. So that was that was
a huge thing that did a number of things. It
made Rosa Parks and icon. Yeah, it projected um Martin
Luther King into the national spotlight. That was basically where
he first found national fame as and basically was like, well,
this guy's the leader of the civil rights movement now, um.
(38:11):
And it also was a huge domino in the idea
of desegregation in general, not just on busses, not just
in Montgomery, but the concept it followed in the in
the wake of plus E v. Ferguson, which it was
just one of those court cases that said separate facilities
(38:32):
is inherently racist because the only reason you would have
separate facilities is because you think one group is superior
over the other and they shouldn't have to consort or mix.
That's inherently unconstitutional. And this was one of those dominoes
that fell in that chain that led to desegregation across
the Jim Crow South. And like a laser, this particular
(38:56):
case and the changes it brought were focused right onto
Rosa Parks, her act, her courage, what she did. Yeah,
and this was this was within our parents lifetime. I know,
I was wondering. I was like, why am I so
much more jazz about this than Harriet Tubman. I love
Harriet Tubsman Tubman story, but I remember when I was researching,
(39:20):
I wasn't new least dess and I realized, like, I
can relate to this woman so much better, just because
this is pretty pretty recent, you know. Well yeah, and
just the notion that, uh, where we are as a
country now racially, um, this was not that long ago.
So for the the people in the camp of saying
(39:40):
just get over things, um, African Americans, just get over things,
It's like this was not hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
This was very recently. These like my peers parents had
to live through this. Well, one thing Rosa Parks is
now known for what they didn't realize before is, you know,
she her act and like the civil rights movement that
(40:02):
grew out of over like the next ten years, fifteen years,
there's this idea that around. There was a button put
on that and it was like, you guys were successful,
way to go, we can stop doing this now. Rosa
Parks was like, no, no, it's not done. This hasn't
changed up until she died in two thousand and five.
She was like, the struggle is still continuing. People didn't
(40:26):
realize that about her until this collection was opened. Yeah,
she um, this all came. There was significant cost to
her family, to her, her husband. Um. Her and her
husband both suffered through stomach ulcers because of this. They
lost their jobs. Um. Eventually they left Alabama, said let's
(40:47):
go to Virginia. And Virginia wasn't a whole lot better
that they said, all right, let's go to Detroit. Kept
going north. Uh. And then finally, after not having a
job for a long time, she lets hired a secretary
for John Conyers, brand new, brand newly elected black congressman
who she would work for for twenty three years. And uh,
(41:10):
Mr Conyers, you know, he was the one who stepped
down last year after sexual assault allegations after serving many
many years in Congress. Um and was a civil rights icon.
So it's kind of a very sad ending to that story.
But Rosa worked for him. Um and seventy seven, her husband,
James died of cancer, her brother died of cancer three
(41:31):
months later. Her mom died two years after that. But
I get the sense that after that, it really, uh,
it really kind of freed her to really go back
to work and devote herself once again to the cause,
because after those family members passed away, she established the
Rosa Parks Scholarship Foundation, uh in the Rosa and Raymond
(41:51):
Parks Institute for Self Development, and wrote to memoirs she
was busy, she was uh and then very sadly And
I remember this in um when she was home invaded
and robbed, hit over the head by a guy named
Joseph Skipper. Yeah, man, that was just like, I mean,
(42:14):
for you kidding me with that for fifty eight bucks
of all the houses to accidentally break into. Yeah, what
do you think he knew it was Rosa Parks. I
don't know. I don't know, but he has seen nothing
to indicate that that was true. He knew that, um,
that he would go down as the man who robbed
and beat Rosa Parks. So, um, yeah, I don't. I
(42:38):
don't think he was he she was targeted because she
was Rosa Parks or anything like that. I think she's
just a little old lady. The impression I have is
it doesn't matter if she was Rosa Parks or not.
Sure you know what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, so she
that was nine four, you said. And then like right afterwards,
there was a huge national outcry and she um moved
(42:59):
into a very secure high rise in Detroit, where she
lived until she died in two thousand five. I believe
she died in that apartment two years young. She had
a a slew of honors, unprecedented honors in this country. UM.
She was transported her body to Washington, d c uh
(43:19):
and she laid in honor under the rotunda, the US capital.
First woman to get that honor. Uh, the second African
American in the first non government UM American ever to
have this honor. I mean, that is a high honor.
When she died, every flag on public land in the
United States and around the world was flown at half masted,
(43:43):
which is pretty pretty great too. Yeah. George W. Bush
made sure that happened. Uh. And then here's just some
of her lifetime achievement awards. In double A. CP gave
her what's called the spin Garn Medal in their highest honor.
She's in the Mid Sigan Woman's Hall of Fame. Martin
Luther King Jr. Award nineteen eighty UM you could have
(44:05):
just stopped at the Michigan Hall of Fame, Michigan Women's
Hall of Fame. Uh, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in
ros Michigan Women's Hall of Fame, Congressional Gold Medal. No,
now we're in a contest. Um. Time magazine named her
was one of the twenty most influential iconic figures of
the twenty century. It's a big one, okay. Uh. And
(44:28):
then yeah, you mentioned George W. Bush ordered half mass
flags in two thousand five. So again there was this
this idea that she was just a tired, little old
lady who was quietly brave and didn't give up her seat,
and she was kind of meek and quiet um. And
in two thousand fourteen, her personal collection, the Rosa Parks Collection,
(44:50):
was sold to the Howard Buffett Foundation, Warren Buffett's son.
They bought it for a song at like four and
a half million dollars. And it's something like if dostgraphs,
and it is her personal papers, like notes for speeches,
notes for her books, I believe, um correspondence. And it
(45:13):
paints this picture that no one had of her before,
which was no like this lady was an activist they
went through her whole life. She was an activist who
um wanted to talk about and agitate for the rights
of black Americans and how messed up the situation was
that they lived in um and that she wouldn't normalize this.
(45:34):
She would she would learn to to to deal with
it as much as she needed to while she was
working to change it. Um. And there was just a
surprise to a lot of people when they cracked open
these papers and found that that picture of her. Yeah.
I also want to shout out article how history got
the Roads of Park story wrong? Um And this was
(45:55):
written by the same person who wrote the award winning
book The Rebellious Life of Mrs was A Parks. Her
name is Jean Theo Harris the Horus. It's all one word. Yeah,
I know it sounds like it should be hyphenated. It's
really easy to say, but how do you say it?
I have no idea. But Che's professor professor of Policy
(46:17):
at Brooklyn College of c n y Man great lady.
So if you want to know more about Rosa Parks,
go out on the internet, educate yourself. Seen that movie?
Have you seen that the about the bus boycott? No,
I mean it was a significant event. I had no idea. Um, okay,
(46:42):
well I think I said go search stuff in there somewhere.
So it means it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna
call this oh tiny Things alright, Hey, guys, let me
start off by saying, enjoyed the podcast very much. Aside
from being interesting and entertaining, it very much helps my
time in the car. We get that a lot can
(47:04):
you help people would go insane if it weren't for us. Um.
Several episodes ago, believe Chuck mentioned that you love tiny things.
I do, Josh like things that are grossly oversized. That
giant pocket watch over there, it's kind of a pain.
I'm wearing it like play fight. Uh. He mentioned loving
tiny things there's something extraordinarily satisfying about them. I agree,
(47:26):
I love tiny things. Would be remiss if I did
not bring um, bring you to the Museum of Jurassic
Technology that I don't know. I've been there too. Um.
It's in Los Angeles. There are not one, but two
fantastic exhibits of tiny things. But I have the needle
in micro mosaics. I don't think I saw those, did you?
(47:47):
The tiny thing I remember was like the dioramas of
the trailers, and I have the Needle. I remember that. Yeah,
I don't remember. The micro Mosaics I haven't been in
many years, though I have. The Needle features delightful, whimsical
miniature sculptures, actually small enough to fit into the eye
of a needle. There you m that's a little too
small for me. Okay, so you like so you like?
(48:09):
I like the tiny Tabasco bottles, So you get into
you like to feel like you're a giant, not like
a god. Yeah, exactly. I just want to be taller.
The micro Mosaics exhibit also requires a magnifying glass to enjoy.
However beautiful, this exhibit has a slightly creepy aspect to it.
The tiny mosaic pieces are in fact bits of butterfly wings. Yeah,
(48:30):
it's not too creepy. Oh, I mean they kill the
butterflies depends. Yeah, how do they come across those wings?
Where do they road kill? If so, that's fine, Yeah,
what a job, go out and just try and find
dead butterflies. All in all, these exhibits of a wonderful
Field of Magic Realism. Museum also features a lovely rooftop
garden as well of a meditative tea room to enjoy
(48:53):
complimentary cup of tea. Interesting. That is all guys, cheers
from Sandra Williams. Thanks up for the shout out, Sandra.
That is a indeed a great place. If you're ever
in Los Angeles, everybody go check out the Museum of
Jurassic Technology's going with your mind open and thank us later. Yeah,
get out of Ripley's Believe it or Not We'll go
to both. You know, sure I said get out of
(49:17):
Ripley's Believe it or Not? Okay, Yeah, But I mean
Jack Palance Man, how do you how do you pass that?
I don't get it? Remember he was the host of
the TV not Yeah. My brother worked with him on
City Slickers too, and there was one story where, uh,
you know, he's kind of old at the time, where
(49:38):
Scott as the A D s to walk him second
a D is to walk the talent to the set
from their trailer, and it was through the desert, the
rocky desert, and Scott was like, you know, look after
that wrong, Mr Palence or something like that. And one
day he was just like, I don't need you to
tell me how to walk. Scott like shrank down. Of
course I can't remember that's exactly what he said, but
(49:59):
but I'll bet that um Jack Palance felt so bad
for yelling at Scott of all the people do it,
you know that Scott and he didn't delight in Scott
like every next days. Yeah. Well, if you want to
tell us how great you think Scott is, you can
tweet to us. I'm at josh um Clark and at
s Y s K podcast. You can also check out
(50:19):
my website Are You Serious Clark dot com. Charles W.
Chuck Bryant is on Facebook dot com at Facebook dot
com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's also uh facebook
dot com slash stuff you Should Know page. You can
send us all an email, including Jerry the Stuff podcast
at how stuff Works dot com. There's always joined us
at at home on the Web Stuff you Should Know
(50:40):
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how Stuff Works dot com
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.