Rosa Parks had challenged Jim Crow laws in Montgomerybus policy twelve years before she boarded the bus on December 1, 1955, and started the Nine months before the boycott, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was dragged off a Montgomery bus by police, handcuffed and jailed on March 2, 1955. Her case, got little notice and no support. Review and purchase Claudette Colvin at links on left.In 1943, Parks refused to board the bus using a rear entry, the door for black bus riders. Parks and her mother had always refused to enter the bus through the rear door, while other black riders had to use the rear door.
On March 2, 1955, nine months before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was dragged off a Montgomery bus by police, handcuffed and jailed, but her case, got little notice and no support.
Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have A Dream,’ written after Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, ignited the Civil Rights Movement against Jim Crow laws.
Photo: Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott
Martin Luther King, starting with Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, came into national prominence fighting Jim Crow laws. During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King was assisted by both black and white members of an organization he founded, the Montgomery Improvement Association. This organization’s purpose was to raise money to finance the activities of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, money to bail those involved in the boycott out of jail and buy gasoline for drivers.
When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to another bus rider, she set the nonviolent tone used by Martin Luther King in his nonviolent protest methods that left quite a legacy for both civil rights activists in their fight against Jim Crow laws. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, including the Woolworth Sit-ins and Freedom Riders, were modeled on the nonviolent style and tactics of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.
Rosa Parks, Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells created a century-long movement (1850s-1950s) against Jim Crow laws that allowedrape and lynching of black women and girls.
My mother said people who create, participate in and appreciate art are better thinkers than those who do not.
Sunny Nash Signs Her Book
“Those interested in literature and art handle conversation better,” she said. “It has to do with the way their brains work and how they decide to live their lives; maybe because they read.” Over the years, I have to admit that she was right dragging me to see exhibitions, making me read biographies about artists like Rodin and listening with me to classical music.
It wasn’t enough to just own a book. My mother said, “You’re no better off, if you don’t read the book, than you would be if you didn’t even own it.”
During the era of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Jim Crow laws, my mother tried to give me an elevated experience, I was not as receptive to it as she would have liked. I was distracted by the Civil Rights Movement that heating up when I was still young. So, she subscribed to national black periodicals and made me read about Brown v the Board of Education, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Riders and the Woolworth Sit-ins. Some of these events happened when I was so young that I was picking out words, one at a time, and asking her what they were. I wasn’t too happy about all that reading, either, but I began to appreciate her insistence that I become educated outside of my segregated world.
“Being a thinker means you want to know something about art,” she said. My Mother & The Thinkers.
In the 1950 and 1960s, there was segregation in schools and most other facilities and services in the Southern United states and many areas of the North. To maintain Jim Crow laws, our city like many others sent a bookmobile into certain neighborhoods to discourage African Americans from using the downtown library. A bookmobile was a converted bus with rows of shelves with books. The bookmobile was most active in summer and came to area parks and other public places where African Americans were allowed to gather.
Times do change.
That same library in my hometown has hosted celebrations of my career and actively collects my work. However, when I was a child, until we were allowed to use the library, my mother and I took a Greyhound Bus 100 miles away to Houston to use the Houston Public Library. It was an all day affair, but worth it, even if we didn’t qualify for library cards because we were from out of town and not because we were black. We sat among all those art books on the shelves and read until it was time for us to catch our bus back home. At the time, we concentrated on art because there wasn’t a great deal written in books about people like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. At that time, neither neither my mother or me imagined that I would write books and take photographs chronicling African Americans that would be collected by the Houston Public Library; or maybe Littie did imagine that when I was a child.
However, the thinking part had to do with getting a college education. Without education, she said, perhaps you won’t be able to go as far as you can.”
WHEN I LEARNED ABOUT MARTIN LUTHER KING, ROSA PARKS, CIVIL RIGHTS AND JIM CROW LAWS, AMERICAN SCHOOLS, MOVIES, TELEVISION AND POLITICS WERE ALSO BLACK AND WHITE IN RACIAL TERMS.
A little blue door leading up rickety stairs on the outside of the movie theater to segregated smelly balcony seating did not stop my mother from taking me to see movies in the 1950s and ’60s.
Black children my age being abused by southern white law officials like Bull Conner did not stop me from watching fifteen-minute national news broadcasts on television. That’s what television was for me back then, a medium that led to change in the Jim Crow laws in America.
What I realized over the years is that people were set in their ways of thinking. And their behavior was based on their ways of thinking. It takes a lot of energy and creativity on both sides of an issue to break old habits. But it can be done. Once you look at yourself honestly, you can be shamed into changing your behavior. Television and movies were a big part of shaming people into changing their behavior and changing the way the America looked at itself. Even the staunchest haters and believers in inequality cringed at the sight of themselves and those who represented their views on screen.
In the neighborhood I grew up in, guns, knives, fists, chains and other weapons were common. I saw first hand what guns and other violence could do to a neighborhood, a family, a childhood.
On weekends, people got drunk and forgot what they had been taught at home, if they had ever been taught anything at home. As a child, I saw this behavior around me, no matter how hard my mother tried to shield me from it. The behavior was in my family. Cousins, aunts, uncles who visited sometimes had too much to drink, and sometimes started fights with each other or friends or neighbors or anyone handy.
Walking home from school, I passed five beer joints where drunks staggered to the sides of the buildings to relieve themselves in plain view. Fights were so common, we simply crossed the street to avoid being hit by flying beer bottles. My cousin was shot in the arm passing by a beer joint at mid-day. All the violence around me was hard to digest. People were saying it was because poor black people felt cheated and discriminated against; and they didn’t know any other way to handle their frustrations than violence.
Even the president wasn’t safe from the violence. President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas as I watched on television with the rest of my schoolmates. Some Americans said they were not saddened by his assassination and blamed his liberal Civil Rights policies for his death.
President John F. Kennedy
At the time, I was child struggling with a life that was filled with violence. If the president of the United States could not be protected from violence, how could I feel safe? Television was filled with police violence against civil rights marchers and bus riders. Dogs were even set loose on little school children protesting Jim Crow laws.
When a man killed a cousin of mine by beating her to death with a car chain, he went to prison for about a year. I vowed to kill him when he got out, not because I was afraid of him. I felt pure vengence when I stole my grandmother’s gun from her underwear drawer. But I couldn’t find her bullets. She discovered my plan and confronted me. Later, she presented me with a Brownie camera and said, “Now, you can shoot without a gun.
Read more about Sunny Nash’s childhood in her book, Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s, about life with her part-Comanche grandmother, Bigmama, during the era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Nash’s book is recognized by the Association of American University Presses as essential for understanding U.S. race relations; listed in the Bibliographic Guide to Black Studies by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York; and recommended for Native American collections by the Miami-Dade Public Library System in Florida.
