Best of - Rosa Parks and Judge Frank Johnson: Standing Up for Freedom

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Academy of Achievement

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4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 14 February 2022

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the fall of 1955, Rosa Parks refused to stand for a white passenger on the bus, Martin Luther King Jr. was chosen to lead the boycott that followed, and a lawyer named Frank Johnson was appointed to be the first and only federal judge for the middle district of Alabama (also the youngest federal judge in the nation). These three people didn't know each other, and yet, their paths converged in Montgomery, at the crossroads of history. In this episode, you'll hear rare audio of Ms. Parks describing the day of her arrest, and you'll learn the lesser known story of Judge Johnson, a principled and stubborn Southerner from northern Alabama, who issued many of the court decisions decimating segregation throughout the south. The episode was originally published in July, 2017. This encore edition, for Black History Month, includes new audio from a recently-conducted interview with Civil Rights Movement leader, Andrew Young. (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2017-2022

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Alice. A couple of weeks ago we had the opportunity to interview Andrew Young,
0:08.9	one of the last living leaders of the civil rights movement, and a member of Martin Luther King Jr's trusted inner circle.
0:18.0	In March, Andrew Young turns 90 and will pay tribute to him with a special episode.
0:24.0	But while we had the recorder rolling, we took the opportunity to ask him about two important figures he knew,
0:32.0	who were featured in our episode this week for Black History Month.
0:36.4	The first is Rosa Parks.
0:39.2	She was one of the sweetest people I know.
0:42.0	There was nobody that disliked her. There was nobody that
0:45.6	could get angry with her because she was just so soft-spoken and so completely
0:51.5	innocent. and she really sat down in the bus because of somebody else.
0:53.0	She really sat down in the bus because of somebody else. She was the head of the N double ACP Youth Organization.
1:08.0	And one of the young women in the youth organization
1:12.0	got angry because of something that happened to one of her friends.
1:18.0	And she sat down in the front of the bus and they pulled her off and put her in jail and black community didn't stand behind her.
1:28.0	They said, oh, she's a troublemaker.
1:31.0	You know, she should have known better.
1:35.0	And so Rosa Parks knew the young lady, and she decided that she would do the same thing.
1:45.0	Now, the other person we asked Andrew Young about
1:48.0	was the judge who ruled in favor of Rosa Parks
1:52.0	and whose body of rulings had an outsized impact on
1:55.8	civil rights in America, Judge Frank Johnson. Andrew Young sat in his court
2:01.6	many times.
	...

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