Rosa Parks Wasn't Alone in African-Americans' Cause

Learning African-American history by being on the spot

When Rosa Parks stayed in her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, she did it when the time was right, which unfortunately it hadn't been earlier. In keeping her seat she was taking a stand against local custom and law. In doing so, she already knew that several others had done the same thing but, her action sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, she was the one who became the plaintiff in a case backed by civil rights organizations that went to the Supreme Court and eventually changed our national ways.

During this period of change, I was one of a handful of few white teachers in a school where nearly all the students were African-Americans or as the wording was then, Negroes or blacks. But terminology is a detail. Fresh from an Ivy League education, I had been hired to teach American history, geography and English in what was then called a junior high school filled with twelve to fourteen year olds.

To place the time I'm talking about, it was about eight years after Rosa Parks' sit down and a year or so before Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech heard by 25,000 African-Americans on the Mall that runs from the Washington Monument to the Capitol grounds.

I kept learning as much as I taught, in ways that caught me by surprise.

For example, from Mr. Brown.

I his first name but Brown was his real last name, not one I am making up. Like Rosa Parks and thousands of other African-Americans Mr. Brown knew when he had had enough. He was a small, apparently mild-mannered small man probably in his sixties who wore metal-rimmed glasses. Mr. Brown didn't have the physical presence of the much larger, darker man who had told a ninth grader in no uncertain terms that he could not stay in school with his gun. Still, I had heard through the grapevine that during World War II Mr. Brown had held a responsible job supervising typists for the government. I also had heard that students in his business classes paid close attention to Mr. Brown.

Although we taught in the same school, Mr. Brown and I taught on different floors and probably never spoke to each other. But he taught me a lesson that changed me.