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 compelled off the car. The Nationwide Affiliation for the Development of Coloured Folks (NAACP) takes up her case, submitting a swimsuit that claims her constitutional rights have been violated. Her trigger strengthens the dedication of Black activists to abolish segregation not solely on buses however in all areas of public life.
This story will sound acquainted, but the lady was not Rosa Parks however Sarah Mae Flemming, the town not Montgomery, however Columbia, South Carolina. Her title hardly ever seems in histories of the civil rights battle, however her story is essential 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. Compelled 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 ladies. When he demanded she transfer, Flemming discovered the rear exit blocked by commuters, so headed to the entrance exit as an alternative. The livid driver reacted to this breach of racial etiquette by placing her within the abdomen.
With the help of South Carolina NAACP Secretary Modjeska Simkins, Flemming filed swimsuit for $25,000 plus punitive damages. The case was sophisticated and protracted. A district courtroom twice dismissed the case on the grounds that the driving force had carried out his authorized responsibility to implement segregation. It was overruled on each events by appeals judges, who dominated that following the latest college desegregation determination by the US Supreme Courtroom in Brown v. Board of Schooling, the doctrine of ‘separate however equal’ may now not be ‘thought to be an accurate assertion of the legislation’. The bus firm tried however did not have the Supreme Courtroom 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 result was much less decisive. Flemming misplaced her case to a jury consisting fully of white males. However the appeals courtroom’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 position of Black feminine activism within the struggle for racial equality, not solely when it comes to Flemming’s braving the hostility of the white political, judicial and media institution but additionally the help she acquired 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 regarded for an acceptable 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 ladies of the trendy civil rights period fought again, they had been persevering with a longstanding custom of Black feminine resistance. African American ladies had been on the coronary heart of Black activism within the post-Civil Conflict South. Their activism – which regularly centered on financial rights and neighborhood constructing – developed over the next century to incorporate extra direct confrontations with segregation equivalent to Flemming’s. In that sense, the story of Rosa Parks’ refusal to face up – historically advised 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 ladies to the civil rights motion stays underappreciated, regardless of one of the best efforts of historians over latest many years. In dominating the public-facing management roles, it’s the phrases and actions of male activists that echo loudest. Girls, in the meantime, had been typically 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. In consequence, this very important grassroots work, which sustained the motion on a day-to-day foundation, is relatively much less nicely understood and celebrated.
Even when feminine activists have been included into the historical past of the African American freedom battle, we are sometimes given solely a restricted sense of who they had been and what they did. Rosa Parks – maybe probably the most well-known feminine civil rights activist of the twentieth century – is popularly understood virtually solely when it comes to 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 struggle 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 growth 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 method. Though Parks is among the few ladies 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.
