Myths and realities in the Civil Rights struggle
This was an incredibly eye-opening read for me. I knew the mythical version of event wasn't true (I've learned some in the last decade or so) but so much of this was completely new to me.
Like @prisonculture.bsky.social, I've been worried about the ways popular myths of the civil rights movement make it hard to see how to struggle today. On the 70th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott, the things we get wrong & what a fuller history shows us: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
— Jeanne Theoharis (@jeannetheoharis.bsky.social) 2025-12-07T13:51:12.140Z
I knew about Claudette Colvin's earlier refusal to give up her seat, but I don't think I knew the consequences for her.
Then, eight months before Parks’s act, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat and was arrested. When she struggled against the police manhandling her, they also charged her with assaulting an officer...the judge threw out the segregation charge and only found Colvin guilty of assaulting an officer .
"Assaulting an officer" and "resisting arrest" have become the favourite charges against protestors these days, and against random people dragged out of their vehicles by ICE/CBP/HSI.
There are other details in there I didn't know. Rosa Parks and her husband Raymond lost their jobs and never found regular work in Montgomery again. Claudette Colvin's struggles to find regular work in New York (because of her criminal record) aren't even mentioned in that article.
The lesson in all this isn't what we've been taught. It isn't the perfect strategy that works. So much of it, it seems, is trying everything to resist injustice.
We won’t know how and when the moment will come, but it will; much like water on the rock, as it runs over and over, the rock breaks down.