The Study of Racialism

Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks has died. Parks, 92, reportedly died
around 7 p.m. Monday at St. John Hospital on Detroit's east side.

Parks' refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery,
Ala., in 1955 landed her in jail and sparked a bus boycott that is
considered the start of the modern civil rights movement. The bus is
on display at the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn.

Parks, was born Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Ala. She lived in Detroit.


Parks, Rosa Lee


1913—2005, American civil-rights activist, b. Tuskegee, Ala. A
seamstress and long-time member of the Montgomery, Ala., chapter of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), her Dec. 1, 1955, refusal to give up a seat on a municipal
bus to a white man provided the impetus for the Montgomery bus
boycott.

This successful protest, which lasted just over a year, marked the
emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr., to national prominence as a
civil-rights leader and fixed the model for future nonviolent
movement actions. In 1957, Parks moved to Detroit, where she
remained active in the civil-rights movement. She was awarded the
Congressional Gold Medal, Congress's highest honor, in 1999.

Schoolteacher on the Streetcar


New York Times
By KATHARINE GREIDER
Published: November 13, 2005


American Women's Journal
Elizabeth Jennings, who helped break down barriers in New York.

Emmet Collection, New York Public Library
The corner of Pearl and Chatham Streets where Elizabeth Jennings hailed a horse-drawn streetcar on her way to church.
AS the civil rights figure Rosa Parks lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda two weeks ago, her 19th-century Northern forerunner, a young black schoolteacher who helped integrate New York's transit system by refusing to get off a streetcar in downtown Manhattan, rested in near-perfect obscurity.

Mrs. Parks's resistance on a bus became a central facet of American identity, a parable retold with each succeeding class of kindergartners. But who has ever heard of Elizabeth Jennings?

The disparity is largely an accident of timing. Thanks to television, Americans around the country became a witness to events in 1955 Montgomery, Ala.; by contrast, Jennings's supporters had to rely on a burgeoning but still fragmented mid-19th-century press. By 1955, when Parks refused to be unseated, segregation was emerging as an issue the nation could not ignore. When Jennings, 24, made her stand, on July 16, 1854, the first eerie rebel yell had yet to rise from a Confederate line. Segregation was a local or perhaps a regional story. It was slavery that was tearing the nation apart.

If Elizabeth Jennings was ahead of her time, she was also, on that midsummer Sunday, running late. She was due at the First Colored American Congregational Church on Sixth Street near the Bowery, where she was an organist. When she and her friend Sarah Adams reached the corner of Pearl and Chatham Streets, she didn't wait to see a placard announcing, "Negro Persons Allowed in This Car." She hailed the first horse-drawn streetcar that came along.

As soon as the two black women got on, the conductor balked. Get off, he insisted. Jennings declined. Finally he told the women they could ride, but that if any white passengers objected, "you shall go out ... or I'll put you out."

"I told him," Jennings wrote shortly after the incident, that "I was a respectable person, born and raised in New York, did not know where he was born ... and that he was a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church."

The 8 or 10 white passengers must have stared. Replying that he was from Ireland, the conductor tried to haul Jennings from the car. She resisted ferociously, clinging first to a window frame, then to the conductor's own coat. "You shall sweat for this," he vowed. Driving on, with Jennings's companion left at the curb, he soon spotted backup in the figure of a police officer, who boarded the car and thrust Jennings, her bonnet smashed and her dress soiled, to the sidewalk.

But, like Mrs. Parks a century later, Elizabeth Jennings had her own backup. She had grown up among a small cadre of black abolitionist ministers, journalists, educators and businessmen who stood up for their community as whites harshly reasserted the color line in the decades after New York had abolished slavery in 1827. Her father, Thomas L. Jennings, was a prominent tailor who helped found both a society that provided benefits for black people and the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which later moved to Harlem.

The daughter had worked in black schools co-founded by a "conductor" of the Underground Railroad. Her own church - First Colored American - was a place of learning and political rebellion, where, one evening in 1854, addresses on God and the Bible alternated with talks on "The Duty of Colored People Towards the Overthrow of American Slavery" and "Elevation of the African Race."

After the incident aboard the streetcar, Jennings took her story to this extended family. Her letter detailing the incident was read in church the next day; supporters forwarded the letter to The New York Daily Tribune, whose editor was the abolitionist Horace Greeley, and to Frederick Douglass' Paper, which both reprinted it in full. Meanwhile, her father made contact with a young white lawyer named Chester Arthur.

Arthur, who would go on to become president upon the assassination of James Garfield in 1881, was at the time a beginner in his 20's only recently admitted to the bar. He nevertheless won the case, against the Third Avenue Railway Company; a judge ruled that "colored persons if sober, well behaved, and free from disease" could not be excluded from public conveyances "by any rules of the Company, nor by force or violence," according to newspaper reports. "Our readers will rejoice with us" in the "righteous verdict," remarked Frederick Douglass' Paper.

NEW YORK before the Civil War resembled the Jim Crow South of Rosa Parks's era in at least this respect: A pervasive racial caste system decreed that a great deal of space - in schools, restaurants, workplaces and churches - was strictly off-limits to African-Americans. The city's transit system, in its infancy, was a particularly bitter proving ground.

In the 1830's, when the first omnibus routes were established, the newspaper The Colored American told black New Yorkers, "Brethren, you are MEN - if you have not horses and vehicles of your own to travel with, stay at home, or travel on foot" rather than be "degraded and insulted" on city coaches. But by the time Elizabeth Jennings boarded the streetcar at Chatham and Pearl Streets, the avenues churned with horse-powered public transportation, and the city stretched far beyond 42nd Street, a long way to walk.

Jennings's legal victory did not complete integration of city transit. But blacks actively tested her precedent, in part through the Legal Rights Association, which her father founded for that purpose. In 1859, another case brought by that group resulted in a settlement, and by the following year nearly all the city's streetcar lines were open to African-Americans.

And Elizabeth Jennings? The details of her life have been told most painstakingly by John H. Hewitt, who, in his 1990 study in the journal New York History, reported that he had not uncovered a single biography of the woman, "not even a thumbnail sketch."

But a few things he did learn. She kept teaching. She married a man named Charles Graham. During the 1863 draft riots, when largely Irish rioters vented their rage at a new conscription law on the black people who were their most direct competitors for jobs and homes, Elizabeth and her husband were likely at home on Broome Street, bent over their ailing year-old son, Thomas. According to his death certificate, the child died of "convulsions," perhaps a last manifestation of one of the infectious diseases that sent urban death rates soaring in those years. While the city was reeling in the aftermath of its worst street melee yet, the couple were laying their son's small body to rest in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn.

As an older woman, Elizabeth Jennings Graham established, on the first floor of her house at 237 West 41st Street, the city's first kindergarten for black children. The children made art; they planted roots and seeds in the garden. "Love of the beautiful will be instilled into these youthful minds," read an article on the school.

It was there, too, that the woman who boarded the streetcar at Chatham and Pearl Streets died. The year was 1901. She was buried in Cypress Hills, near her son, and a few thousand Union dead.

do you think [Parks's] look helped in bringing about sympathy from both sides of the divide, in a way that maybe someone of a more African look might have not?

Salsassin wrote:
do you think [Parks's] look helped in bringing about sympathy from both sides of the divide, in a way that maybe someone of a more African look might have not?

I never thought of that, but now that you bring it up it is worth considering. I know that when the Montgomery NAACP discussed her project, one of their considerations was choosing just who would be the one to refuse to give up a bus seat. Gender and age entered into their discussion. I have never heard anyone suggest that phenotype was also a criterion, but who knows? Interesting thought. [FWIW, Homer Plessy's European phenotype was pivotal to his being selected as the one to sue the railroad in 1896, although his lawyers did not explicitly argue that this made him White.]

This is an interesting idea. I am going to see if I can find any info on it, though I doubt I will. Plessy's ancestry, if memory serves, was described as "1/32nd Black."

[Homer Plessy] was 1/8th black (octoroon). I'm pretty sure that if he would have been 1/32 black, he would have been legally white at that time in Lousiana.

I am sure Rosa Park's lighter skin color and quiet, refined demeanor could not have hurt the cause for racial justice.

I read somwhere that Parks was not the first to this in the south. There was another black woman who did the same thing, but she was surly and low class in her behavior and unacceptable as a person to inspire a campaign against segregation. Can anyone confirm this?

...they just used Rosa parks as an example for the Bus Boycott.

Rosa Parks and history
By Thomas Sowell

Oct 27, 2005


The death of Rosa Parks has reminded us of her place in history, as the black woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, in accordance with the Jim Crow laws of Alabama, became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Most people do not know the rest of the story, however. Why was there racially segregated seating on public transportation in the first place? "Racism" some will say -- and there was certainly plenty of racism in the South, going back for centuries. But racially segregated seating on streetcars and buses in the South did not go back for centuries.

Far from existing from time immemorial, as many have assumed, racially segregated seating in public transportation began in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Those who see government as the solution to social problems may be surprised to learn that it was government which created this problem. Many, if not most, municipal transit systems were privately owned in the 19th century and the private owners of these systems had no incentive to segregate the races.

These owners may have been racists themselves but they were in business to make a profit -- and you don't make a profit by alienating a lot of your customers. There was not enough market demand for Jim Crow seating on municipal transit to bring it about.

It was politics that segregated the races because the incentives of the political process are different from the incentives of the economic process. Both blacks and whites spent money to ride the buses but, after the disenfranchisement of black voters in the late 19th and early 20th century, only whites counted in the political process.

It was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of the white voters to demand racial segregation. If some did and the others didn't care, that was sufficient politically, because what blacks wanted did not count politically after they lost the vote.

The incentives of the economic system and the incentives of the political system were not only different, they clashed. Private owners of streetcar, bus, and railroad companies in the South lobbied against the Jim Crow laws while these laws were being written, challenged them in the courts after the laws were passed, and then dragged their feet in enforcing those laws after they were upheld by the courts.

These tactics delayed the enforcement of Jim Crow seating laws for years in some places. Then company employees began to be arrested for not enforcing such laws and at least one president of a streetcar company was threatened with jail if he didn't comply.

None of this resistance was based on a desire for civil rights for blacks. It was based on a fear of losing money if racial segregation caused black customers to use public transportation less often than they would have in the absence of this affront.

Just as it was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of whites to demand racial segregation through the political system to bring it about, so it was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of blacks to stop riding the streetcars, buses and trains in order to provide incentives for the owners of these transportation systems to feel the loss of money if some blacks used public transportation less than they would have otherwise.

People who decry the fact that businesses are in business "just to make money" seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.

Black people's money was just as good as white people's money, even though that was not the case when it came to votes.

Initially, segregation meant that whites could not sit in the black section of a bus any more than blacks could sit in the white section. But whites who were forced to stand when there were still empty seats in the black section objected. That's when the rule was imposed that blacks had to give up their seats to whites.

Legal sophistries by judges "interpreted" the 14th Amendment's requirement of equal treatment out of existence. Judicial activism can go in any direction.

That's when Rosa Parks came in, after more than half a century of political chicanery and judicial fraud.