In the racially segregated American South of the Nineteen Fifties a Black girl sits within the part of a bus reserved for white passengers. Bodily and verbally abused by the driving force, she is pressured off the automobile. The Nationwide Affiliation for the Development of Coloured Individuals (NAACP) takes up her case, submitting a go well with that claims her constitutional rights have been violated. Her trigger strengthens the willpower of Black activists to abolish segregation not solely on buses however in all areas of public life.
This story will sound acquainted, but the girl was not Rosa Parks however Sarah Mae Flemming, the town not Montgomery, however Columbia, South Carolina. Her identify not often seems in histories of the civil rights wrestle, however her story is necessary in exhibiting how the momentous motion taken by Parks in 1955 was not a spontaneous determination however pertained to a broader political offensive by Black feminine activists.
On 22 June 1954 Sarah Mae Flemming, aged 20, boarded a crowded bus to the Columbia suburb the place she labored as a maid. Pressured at first to face, Flemming discovered a seat vacated by a departing white passenger. The driving force later claimed she had sat in entrance of two white girls. When he demanded she transfer, Flemming discovered the rear exit blocked by commuters, so headed to the entrance exit as a substitute. The livid driver reacted to this breach of racial etiquette by putting her within the abdomen.
With the help of South Carolina NAACP Secretary Modjeska Simkins, Flemming filed go well with for $25,000 plus punitive damages. The case was sophisticated and protracted. A district court docket twice dismissed the case on the grounds that the driving force had carried out his authorized obligation to implement segregation. It was overruled on each events by appeals judges, who dominated that following the current college desegregation determination by the US Supreme Court docket in Brown v. Board of Training, the doctrine of ‘separate however equal’ might not be ‘considered an accurate assertion of the regulation’. The bus firm tried however did not have the Supreme Court docket hear the case.
Civil rights activists believed the Flemming case might be the decisive breakthrough towards bus segregation. Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier proclaimed ‘separate however equal’ was ‘as useless as a dodo’. The end result was much less decisive. Flemming misplaced her case to a jury consisting fully of white males. However the appeals court docket’s assertion that segregation was unconstitutional served as a precedent within the Browder v. Gayle case that, in 1956, dominated in favour of the Montgomery bus boycott.
This missed episode emphasises the incremental function of Black feminine activism within the combat for racial equality, not solely by way of Flemming’s braving the hostility of the white political, judicial and media institution but in addition the help she obtained from Simkins. This was additionally clear in Montgomery, the place the Girls’s Political Council led by Jo Ann Robinson had lengthy campaigned for reform and seemed for an appropriate case to check bus firm practices. One candidate was 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, arrested 9 months earlier than Rosa Parks, however activists believed her youth and being pregnant would expose her to harsh recrimination. She was nonetheless one of many 4 Black feminine plaintiffs within the Browder case.
When Flemming, Parks and different girls of the fashionable civil rights period fought again, they have been persevering with a longstanding custom of Black feminine resistance. African American girls have been on the coronary heart of Black activism within the post-Civil Warfare South. Their activism – which frequently targeted on financial rights and neighborhood constructing – developed over the next century to incorporate extra direct confrontations with segregation corresponding to Flemming’s. In that sense, the story of Rosa Parks’ refusal to face up – historically instructed as the start of the Montgomery bus boycott, and thus the spark for the civil rights motion – needs to be seen as a narrative of the end result of a generations-old custom of African American feminine activism.
The contribution of Black girls to the civil rights motion stays underappreciated, regardless of the very best efforts of historians over current a long time. In dominating the public-facing management roles, it’s the phrases and actions of male activists that echo loudest. Girls, in the meantime, have been usually excluded from decision-making and restricted to community-facing roles away from the media highlight: elevating funds, recruiting help and sustaining communication hyperlinks with motion leaders. Because of this, this important grassroots work, which sustained the motion on a day-to-day foundation, is relatively much less properly understood and celebrated.
Even when feminine activists have been included into the historical past of the African American freedom wrestle, we are sometimes given solely a restricted sense of who they have been and what they did. Rosa Parks – maybe essentially the most well-known feminine civil rights activist of the twentieth century – is popularly understood virtually completely by way of her refusal to surrender her seat on a Montgomery bus in December 1955. In actuality, her life was marked by a long-standing dedication to the combat for racial justice. She had joined the Montgomery NAACP and have become its secretary as early as 1943, 12 years earlier than her arrest, and was nonetheless, as she neared her eightieth birthday within the early Nineties, working with a non-profit social work and youth improvement institute in Detroit.
Upon her loss of life in 2005, Congress moved to have her physique lie in state on the Capitol Rotunda, making Parks solely the second non-public citizen and first African American girl to be honoured in that manner. Though Parks is among the few girls to have been immortalised in civil rights historical past, the story of Sarah Mae Flemming, and of others, exhibits us that, as exceptional as Parks was, she was not an outlier.
Tom Adam Davies is Senior Lecturer in American Historical past and Clive Webb is Professor of Fashionable American Historical past on the College of Sussex.
