7053. Or: Taking the Bus in 1955. Or: Rosa Parks Day

"When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, 'No, I'm not.' And he said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested.' I said, 'You may do that.'"



Two days are dedicated to Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (1913-2005), the "first lady of civil rights" and "mother of the freedom movement" who would have turned 100 in 2013: her birthday in February and the day of her arrest on 1 December 1955.



That day Parks refused to obey the bus driver's order to give up her seat in the "coloured section" to a white passenger as the "white section" was filled. It was, by the way, the same bus driver that in 1943 had told her to to leave the bus and  - following the city rules - enter it again from the back door. Parks exited the bus but could not reboard it as the driver drove off and left her in the rain.



Refusing to give up her seat meant violating the segregation law of the Montgomery City Code which had been passed in 1900. Parks was arrested for civil obedience. Only a few days later the Montgomery Bus Boycott was announced asking people to stay off the buses on the day of boycott. Some rode in carpools or took black-operated taxis that only charged the fare of the bus; most of the people walked, some of them for about 30 km (via)... Rosa Parks stood up by sitting down (via).



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



Photos via and via and via and via and via

Born this day: Claudette Colvin

“Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, Why don't the adult around here just say something? Say it so they know we don't accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can't sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right'. And I did."
Claudette Colvin



Claudette Colvin, born on 5 September 1939, refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger while riding home on a city bus after school (that was having "Negro history month" studying black leaders like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth) in March 1955 - nine months before Rosa Parks refused to do so. When the bus driver told her to give up her seat she replied:

"It's my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my fare, it's my constitutional right."

Colvin was 15 years old when she stood up against segregation in Alabama; she was arrested for violating the city's segregation laws, was put in handcuffs by two police officers, was branded a troublemaker, had to drop out of college, could not find a job due to her reputation and served as one of four plaintiffs in the landmark legal case Browder v. Gayle that helped end segregation on Montgomery public buses.

"While Parks has been heralded as a civil rights heroine, the story of Claudette Colvin has received little notice."

The reason why Claudette Colvin never became the symbol Rosa Parks became was that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People did not decide to use her case to challenge the segregation laws as a) she was very young and teenagers were not considered to be reliable, b) she was pregnant and an unwed mother would attract too much negative attention in a public legal battle and, according to Colvin, c) Rosa Parks's "skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle class" (via and via).



"All I remember is that I was not going to walk off the bus voluntarily."
Claudette Colvin

"I just couldn't move. History had me glued to the seat."
Claudette Colvin

"I felt like Sojourner Truth was pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman was pushing down on the other—saying, 'Sit down girl!' I was glued to my seat."
Claudette Colvin

"We couldn't try on clothes. You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot ... and take it to the store. Can you imagine all of that in my mind? My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through. It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn't get up."
Claudette Colvin



The following excerpts are taken from "Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice", by Phillip Hoose via

CLAUDETTE: One of them said to the driver in a very angry tone, "Who is it?" The motorman pointed at me. I heard him say, "That's nothing new . . . I've had trouble with that 'thing' before." He called me a "thing." They came to me and stood over me and one said, "Aren't you going to get up?" I said, "No, sir." He shouted "Get up" again. I started crying, but I felt even more defiant. I kept saying over and over, in my high-pitched voice, "It's my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my dare, it's my constitutional right!" I knew I was talking back to a white policeman, but I had had enough.

One cop grabbed one of my hands and his partner grabbed the other and they pulled me straight up out of my seat. My books went flying everywhere. I went limp as a baby—I was too smart to fight back. They started dragging me backwards off the bus. One of them kicked me. I might have scratched one of them because I had long nails, but I sure didn't fight back. I kept screaming over and over, "It's my constitutional right!" I wasn't shouting anything profane—I never swore, not then, not ever. I was shouting out my rights.

It just killed me to leave the bus. I hated to give that white woman my seat when so many black people were standing. I was crying hard. The cops put me in the back of a police car and shut the door. They stood outside and talked to each other for a minute, and then one came back and told me to stick my hands out the open window. He handcuffed me and then pulled the door open and jumped in the backseat with me. I put my knees together and crossed my hands over my lap and started praying.

All ride long they swore at me and ridiculed me. They took turns trying to guess my bra size. They called me "nigger bitch" and cracked jokes about parts of my body. I recited the Lord's Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm over and over in my head, trying to push back the fear. I assumed they were taking me to juvenile court because I was only fifteen. I was thinking, Now I'm gonna be picking cotton, since that's how they punished juveniles—they put you in a school out in the country where they made you do field work during the day.

But we were going in the wrong direction. They kept telling me I was going to Atmore, the women's penitentiary. Instead, we pulled up to the police station and they led me inside. More cops looked up when we came in and started calling me "Thing" and "Whore." They booked me and took my fingerprints.

Then they put me back in the car and drove me to the city jail—the adult jail. Someone led me straight to a cell without giving me any chance to make a phone call. He opened the door and told me to get inside. He shut it hard behind me and turned the key. The lock fell into place with a heavy sound. It was the worst sound I ever heard. It sounded final. It said I was trapped.

When he went away, I looked around me: three bare walls, a toilet, and a cot. Then I feel down on my knees in the middle of the cell and started crying again. I didn't know if anyone knew where I was or what had happened to me. I had no idea how long I would be there. I cried and I put my hands together and prayed like I had never prayed before. (...)

But I was afraid that night, too. I had stood up to a white bus driver and two white cops. I had challenged the bus law. There had been lynchings and cross burnings for that kind of thing. Wetumpka Highway that led out of Montgomery ran right past our house. It would have been easy for the Klan to come up the hill in the night. Dad sat up all night long with his shotgun. We all stayed up. The neighbors facing the highway kept watch. Probably nobody on King Hill slept that night.

But worried or not, I felt proud. I had stood up for our rights. I had done something a lot of adults hadn't done. On the ride home from jail, coming over the viaduct, Reverend Johnson had said something to me I'll never forget. He was an adult who everyone respected and his opinion meant a lot to me. "Claudette," he said, "I'm so proud of you. Everyone prays for freedom. We've all been praying and praying. But you're different—you want your answer the next morning. And I think you just brought the revolution to Montgomery.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
images via and via

International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims

On 21 December 2010, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 24 March as the International Day for the Right to the Truth concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims.



The purpose of the Day is to:

- Honour the memory of victims of gross and systematic human rights violations and promote the importance of the right to truth and justice;
- Pay tribute to those who have devoted their lives to, and lost their lives in, the struggle to promote and protect human rights for all;
- Recognize, in particular, the important work and values of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, of El Salvador, who was assasinated on 24 March 1980, after denouncing violations of the human rights of the most vulnerable populations and defending the principles of protecting lives, promoting human dignity and opposition to all forms of violence. (literally via)



Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez (1917-1980) was the fourth Archbishop of San Salvador. He spoke out "against poverty, social injustice, assassinations and torture" and was assassinated while offering Mass in the chapel of a cancer hospital in 1980 - one year after the Revolutionary Government Junta came to power. A sniper from a right-wing death squad shot him in the heart. Three years before, his friend Rutilio Grande, a Jesuit priest who created self-reliance groups among the poor, was assassinated (via and via).

"When I looked at Rutilio lying there dead I thought, 'If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path'". Oscar Romero

Romero was the "voice of those witout voice", the "most outspoken voice against the death squad slaughter", a priest who told the poor to seek justice in this world and not to wait for the next. His assassination plunged El Salvador into a civil war that left 80.000 dead and 8.000 disappeared. Little was done to investigate his murder, details went to grave with him and thousands of others who were killed (via and via).

"For me, though, Archbishop Oscar Romero is not just the greatest bishop in Christian history, he is one of the greatest human beings in history — right up there with the likes of Jeremiah and Isaiah, Francis and Clare, Mahatma Gandhi and Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, Thich Nhat Hanh and Archbishop Tutu. Oscar Romero is the epitome of what it means to be a Christian — a prophet of peace, justice and nonviolence.
And that’s precisely the problem. That’s why he was killed. That’s why so many church authorities ignore him, resent him, even hate him." John Dear

In 2015, Pope Francis declared Romero a martyr for his faith (via). What Óscar Romero and Pope Francis very much have in common is the philosophy of liberation theology which says that the Gospel contains a preference for the poor and that the Church has the duty to work for political, economic and spiritual change. This theology is not appreciated by conservatives in the Catholic Church who regarded the pro-poor movement as a Marxist Trojan horse and spent more than three decades blocking Romero's path to sainthood (via).

"For centuries, the Church had been telling the poor that their sufferings were God’s will, but now young priests were coming to rural areas to tell them that an unjust political and economic system, not God, was to blame for their miserable condition. God wanted them to live decent lives in this world, before they went to Heaven. The church was there to help them. It was a radical change, a revolution. The poor now had religious support to organize and defend themselves against the landowners, the oligarchy, the wealthiest people in one of the most unequal regions in the world, and against their repressive military apparatus." Carlos Dada

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
photographs via and via