The Real Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott – w/ Emilye Crosby
Teaching Hard History
Learning for Justice
4.2 • 588 Ratings
🗓️ 8 December 2020
⏱️ 95 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Everyone thinks they know the story, but the real history of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott is even better. This episode details the events that set the stage for Ms. Parks' civil disobedience. You'll meet the leaders and organizations who transformed a moment of activism into a 13-month campaign. And you'll learn about the community that held fast in the face of legal and political attacks, economic coercion, intimidation and violence.
Language Advisory: This episode contains historical reenactments of interviews and courtroom testimony which contain some profanity and racial slurs.
Be sure to check out the enhanced full transcript of this episode for resources to help you teach the full story of the Montgomery Bus. Boycott.
For more movement music inspired by this episode, check out the new Spotify playlist.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Other than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks is the civil rights activist who is taught the most in schools. |
| 0:08.0 | And other than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., she is also the civil rights activist who is mistought the most in schools. |
| 0:19.0 | On December 1st, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat |
| 0:25.1 | to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, she sparked a year-long boycott that ended |
| 0:31.8 | segregated public transportation in the heart of Dixie. When this veteran N.AACP activist was asked what motivated her, |
| 0:40.3 | Parks, who was only 42 years old at the time, |
| 0:44.3 | explained that she was tired of yielding to the dictates of Jim Crow. |
| 0:51.3 | And Parks' activism did not end when the Montgomery Bus Boycott was over. |
| 0:57.0 | She continued to fight for African American freedom rights for several decades, |
| 1:01.0 | only slowing down when failing health made it impossible for her to do more. |
| 1:07.0 | But the Rosa Parks, who was a fierce, lifelong civil rights champion, isn't the Rosa Parks most students learn about. |
| 1:16.2 | They learn instead about a tired seamstress, who hadn't thought much about Jim Crow. |
| 1:21.8 | They learned instead about a quaint old lady who didn't have a history of activism before sitting down on that bus, and who didn't have a history of activism before sitting down on that bus |
| 1:28.7 | and who didn't have a history of activism after she refused to get up. Ignoring Parks's |
| 1:36.0 | rebellious spirit and erasing her history of activism not only distorts her life and legacy, |
| 1:42.7 | but also mangles the movement. |
| 1:45.6 | Among other things, it overstates the contributions of some while understating the contributions |
| 1:51.5 | of others. |
| 1:53.0 | So how should we teach Rosa Parks? |
| 1:56.5 | Well, let's find out. |
| 2:08.4 | I'm Hassan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History. |
| 2:13.2 | We're a production of teaching tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. |
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