Today in Labor History January 30, 1956: Klansmen bombed the home of Martin Luther King Jr in retaliation for the Montgomery bus boycott. No one died in the bombing. However, the explosion destroyed the King’s porch and blasted out their windows. At the time of the bombing, King was giving a speech at the Montgomery Improvement Association at Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church. No one was ever indicted or convicted for the bombing. The authorities did indict King, and 80 other activists, for “interfering with business,” during the bus boycott and demonstrations.
On this day in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott began in Alabama. It was 4 days after Rosa Parks was arrested for her bus protest (https://mas.to/@markwyner/111508079135404554).
The boycott lasted 380 days, ending in a federal ruling (Browder v Gayle) that segregation on buses was unconstitutional.
Today in Labor History December 5, 1955: E. D. Nixon and Rosa Parks initiated the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott lasted until December 20, 1956, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Alabama and Montgomery bus segregation laws were unconstitutional.
On this day in 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her bus seat to a white man.
Of the event she noted:
“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day…no, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
Today in Labor History December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks, a 43-year-old African-American seamstress, refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The authorities arrested her, triggering a year-long boycott of the city bus system. It also led to legal actions which ended racial segregation on municipal buses throughout the south.
@alexanderhay@BlackAzizAnansi Sure, yes. This is the image pushed in supposedly liberal/leftist media, that protests happen spontaneously, no planing. There was an entire episode of #DoctorWho that treated the Montgomery bur protests like they were an accident of #RosaParks' work schedule, as it were Back to the Future with racism.
To read #RosaParks' full statement against the confirmation of #ClarenceThomas to the Supreme Court (issued before Anita Hill's experiences were made public), see here at the Library of Congress.
Alt text: a series of photos of each Black woman with her signature, along with the following captions:
HARRIET LED, 1849
SO ROSA COULD SIT, 1955
SO RUBY COULD WALK, 1960
SO MICHELLE COULD INSPIRE, 2008
SO KAMALA COULD RUN, 2020
SO KETANJI COULD RULE, 2022
Still catching up with #DoctorWho. There's so much of it that one of the pleasures of this series is that I'll probably forever catch up with it.
We've made it into the #JodieWhittaker era. I've heard so much of it. And now that we're halfways through the first season, I have to say that I love it.
Genuinely refreshing and lovely to have stories outside the white Western canon. Chibnall recovers the history aspect with gems like the #RosaParks and Punjab episodes. Whittaker is a joy throughout