Will help Public Health officials and emergency authorities make decisions, but they should shut down events, weather reactions to the pandemic are working. That is the power of gis. We are going to transition from medical geography to how gis can help you moving forward because you are going to leave here in a few moments from this online conference and you are back to the reality we live in. Think of, in your work, when does location matter . About distance . Direction . Territory,d, region, or, with my kids, i say turf. Working from the regional, national, global scale. If you teach and you have any of these themes, you need to consider getting gis a try, particularly as many of us will be teaching online, i will share resources that are ready to go in which you can have your students doing gis at home and it might not be as powerful as you in front of the class, but it will be pretty powerful given that you are far away. To show you one option, we will be eating every day. I have an activity called map that recipe. Tuesdays are taco tuesdays in my house. Probably the cleanest my counter has ever been. Idea of the this Great Exchange and agriculture, every day we cook, youre living a history lesson. How can you use gis to do that . First, take your kids out, to the greatest change activity. Show them how food is diffused. Then say, where is the her of the food we are eating today . Pull up a recipe, let each ingredient be a row injured data. Use the directions as you use the geographic inquiry, show them, this is how much corn we grow, watch them go, i had no idea we grew that much corn. Most of it is not eaten. Directions that i will share with you, create a geoform, a form students fill out in which they map out every ingredient, this is the ingredient, this is the dish, i want to put it on a map. Have them put it on a map. These are ingredient spy students put on the map a few weeks ago, learning about agriculture. We used this with my World History class, teaching about exploration. There is a different pattern for ingredients that there are four recipes. Recipes come from many other areas that were colonized in the areas where ingredients were coming from. Why they that is why there is a glow in italy and france. There is also the will of the silk road. A lot of recipes we enjoy today come from western europe. Then you can say, like the student,les, he is a he is a native of tanzania, we researched his favorite recipe, there is a tool called connect origins to destination. Think airline map. What you think, what is going on here . He is like, i have no idea. My native dish is so global. Now you are learning. You got more out of this than you did out of reading about it in a textbook. Then you can say, lets shift that to a story map. Find some more interesting things. This is when on a student who did hamburger pie and found the word casserole comes from the french word for saucepan. More etymology, i like that. Then shifted into a story map. Have them tell you the story of their favorite recipe and connected to the age of exploration cultural diffusion. Then, just for fun tomatoes on snow on them and make a heat map. I did not have to give you research from old archaeology studies, your ingredients showed me the course of World History. Fertile crescent, india, southeast asia, right there on the map. Cool, iaid, that is dont have time for that, i want something quick and easy, give the geo inquiries a go. They are ready for you. The script is written. Short,son the script is we realize teachers dont follow scripts. I will also make sure you have in the resources at the bottom of this keynote, links to worksheets for your students so they dont see the answer key. Look at the geo inquiries, see which one to support your research. My wife is starting a book club for local students in the Area Neighbors and so forth. They will use the water teens the watsons go to birmingham to conceptualize things for my second and fourth grade children. Check out the story maps. Story map gallery. Have your students sit with them. What didhem and say, you find surprising, interesting . If you find anything troubling . Then, if you are having to cover curriculum and you want to review world war i, check out this project on digitizing, a project i worked on in the past. Remember that saying, produced a single, improve the noise. This is the government commissioned map of the uganda offensive. The battle was a mess. The teachers on the map and digitized it into an interactive, online map. Table, top is the the map, we then went with a group of teachers and collected digital artifacts from the western front so you could bring the western front home to your students. Take your students on a virtual field trip honoring service and achievements and sacrifice during world war i. Many students find it hard to believe there are over 14,000 american soldiers buried along the western front at the cemetery. This takes students on a field trip in which they learn why they are there and why the u. S. Government cares about this spot. They see 3d videos of trenches and so forth, all in a very interactive gis map. The website is called teaching and mapping the geography of the meuse argonne offensive. There are essays, lessons, and it want to through it. If you are looking for a way to jazz up world war i for your newents, there is a activity check this site out. ,then we also have the Virginia Geographic Alliance at the library of congress in which we developed story maps on placing primary sources. They were presented in a poster today. These are story maps designed by teachers of u. S. And World History on benchmark topics you have taught or will teach. They are dynamic, ready to go, you get lesson plans with answer keys, a contextual essay, no experience, no problem. Not much energy, not much time, no problem. The activities available, one, mapping and placing americas journey westward, looking at the impact of the evolution of Political Parties in america, looking at the causes leading up to the civil war and the steppingstones to war, placing u. S. Immigration, placing u. S. Global expansion, over there the story of the , American Expeditionary forces. This map does use one of the maps from the meuse argonne offenses, but it really looks at the mobilization of forces in america leading up to world war i, so more than the activities i showed you previously. Looking at how that looks differently when you shift locations, shift lenses. Looking at world war ii in the pacific, island topping, and this shows an interactive graph that shows what would happen to the casualty rate as u. S. Forces got closer to japan. U. S. Involvement in World War Ii Allied victories in europe. , placing cold war conflicts. When i get to this point, this was created by a wonderful teacher of western albemarle high school, she wanted a one stop shop for her students to learn all about the geographic complexities in the cold war. This is the story map for you. Placing civil rights in time and place and looking at the evolution of segregation in the united states, and the fight to end that. This places civil rights in time and place around the united states. Then, lets say you like, i like all this, but im curious about the coronavirus dashboard, go check out how you can create your own monitoring covid19 dashboard. It is a one hour activity. Then, if you look at this bentley, this shortened web address, this is a survey. If you think about it we are , mapping out our responses to where coronavirus and covid is occurring around the world. This is a survey to allow teachers and educators to map out how we are responding, how we are teaching and so forth, and they have a data dashboard that is tracking our responses. Please go in here, and lets share other stories about this, not just the virus, but how we as a society and a people are responding. Thank you. This is so exciting. I want a book on everything at once. On behalf of everybody, we thank you so much. Chris volunteered to do this a week ago. That is amazing. He put this together and realized there was a need to get this out there, and we are delighted he was able to put this together. Chris i want to give a quick shout out, thank you to you and the staff for pulling together an online conference in five days, and thank you for having me. Sunday at 3 00 eastern, a study session for the advanced placement u. S. History exam. Jason stacy and Matthew Ellington coauthors of fabric of a nation, a brief history with skills and sources for the ap course, explain how this years exam is structured differently, provides strategies for the free response answers, and demonstrate how to analyze historical documents. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] cspan has unfiltered coverage of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic with white house briefings, updates from governors and congress, and our daily call in program, washington journal, hearing your thoughts about the coronavirus is crisis, and if you missed any of our live coverage, watch anytime on demand at cspan. Org coronavirus. Television has changed since cspan began, what our mission continues, to provide an unfiltered view of government. This year, we have brought you primary election coverage, the president ial impeachment process, and now the federal response to the coronavirus. You can watch cspans Public Affairs programming on television, online, or our free radio app, and be part of the National Conversation through washington journal, or through our social media. Cspan, created by private industry, americas Cable Television company, as a public service, and brought to you by Gray Television private writer your television provider. Up next on lectures in history, Wellesley College professor Breanna Greer debunks some of the myths about rosa parks on the montgomery bus boycott. She asserts rosa parks was not first africanamerican to refuse to give up her seat and that the boycott had planning and precedent. She also explores why the simple the simplified of this history has become so widespread. Prof. Greer our focus today is the montgomery bus boycott. Thats what you read your sources for, except the pain article that gave you a larger focus. To do that, we will go back to our discussion of origin points, our favorite slide. Which you are going to be so sick of. Representing the narrative arc of the popular story of the Civil Rights Movement. We are going back to our topic of origin points, again, with the objective of troubling it. One, putting those events in context, but also troubling the idea of them as origin points. Last week, we discussed brown v. Board of education, the decision, response, the impact, but also the legacy. I want to talk more about the legacy as we go forward. We are not going to do that today. On tuesday, we spent time talking about the emmett till case, the lynching of emmett till in august of 1955. We used a mix of secondary and primary sources to consider how ideologies of race, gender, and justice impacted that case and impacted the lived experiences of the people in the case. I wanted to take a moment to pull out and say that this week, what happens this week that is of significance in relationship to the till case. Anybody paying attention . Yeah . [laughter] go ahead. Student [indiscernible] legislation. Prof. Greer they passed the emmett till antilynching act, it designates lynching as a hate crime under federal law. This legislation is coming 65 years after tills lynching and 120 years after Congress First considered antilynching legislation. That is 120 years of Congress Failing to, choosing not to pass such legislation. In 2005, congress did see fit to apologize to the descendents of lynching victims, but it took another 15 years for both the senate and the house to pass the legislation, and it will go to the white house for signing by president trump. You can imagine there are a lot of responses going onto this. The prominent one is, why now . People are asking, is this commemorative . Is it a cause for celebration or a cause for concern . Is this preemptive . What is the context now that is making this bill feasible within congress, when it has been 120 years and that hasnt been the case . I want to take a moment to point out ida b. Wells. A lot of people are talking about this antilynching legislation are asking about wells. Ida b. Wells was an activist and journalist in the late 19th century who publicly and doggedly and consistently was condemning and publicizing lynching. Most notably through her publication, a red record. She did this at great personal cost. Her printing outfit was burned down and she was run out of town. You can understand why some people might say not that emmett till should not be attached, but where is the recognition of ida b. Wells . We will come back to wells when talking about montgomery. Going back to origin points, i wanted to point that out. Today, we focus on the montgomery bus boycott, and i want to put it in the timeline that we were talking about, or that i showed you last time. So, we have the brown v. Board of education decision in may of 1954. Immediately after white citizen counsel for him. Then we have brown v. Board of education ii the following year, may of 1955. Then the emmett till lynching in august of 1955. I dont think a lot of people realize how close to the till lynching the montgomery bus boycott was. Rosa parks was arrested on december 1 of 1955, a thursday. The following monday on december 5, the montgomery bus boycott begins. That is a little bit of context for you, to put it in a visual form. We are going to use the readings today to consider the bus boycott. These readings gave you a lot of information about events and circumstances leading up to, but not so much information necessarily about the boycott. We will also talk about that and we can continue the conversation in our next lecture as well, and certainly if people have questions. I want to focus on montgomery because, more than any of the other origin events we have talked about, montgomery is most often cited as the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement within the popular narrative. That assigned the popular narrative of the boycott itself, in the larger narrative, to be somewhat problematic. I want to dig into that myth, that story of the montgomery bus boycott. In doing that, i think an effective way of doing that is looking at a central figure in that myth, rosa parks. I want to look at what i call the mythic rosa parks. I want to make a real distinction between rosa parks as a person, as a woman, and rosa parks as an icon. We are going to be talking about both. Those are two separate things. I want to ask you if you can give me, some of you may have more information about rosa parks. We have a lot more Information Available to us now. But if you could give me a sense of the popular narrative, the enduring narrative or idea of rosa parks, as you likely learned when you were in Elementary School, or typically celebrated through black History Month. Anybody want to go up there . Student i think what i learned about her in Elementary School was definitely she refused to give up her seat. She was just, like an ordinary , woman coming from work, and it was a manifestation of the common attitudes of the time. She was just an ordinary woman and a martyr, honestly. That is how it was portrayed. Prof. Greer she became a martyr in that sense. Anyone else . Student i guess the way i learned about it is that she was the catalyst for this movement, as if she was the only woman or person that had been arrested for not giving up their seat. As if it was a single incident that happened, and it was her. Prof. Greer yeah. As much as the montgomery bus boycott is seen as the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, she is seen as the beginning of the bus boycott. Thats where the title mother of the Civil Rights Movement comes from. On our best day, how many of us can hope for such a title . But going off of those points, she was typically described as this elderly woman. She was 42. I need that not to be elderly. She was not elderly. She was described as an elderly seamstress, many accounts did not give her a name. An elderly seamstress with tired feet who spontaneously took a stand by sitting down and singlehandedly sparked the modern black freedom movement. Right . I dont want to deny her any of her importance. This is actually the rosa parks that, with the best of intentions, my mother introduced me to when i was very young. I held onto that picture all the way through college, all the way to my history classes in college, well into my graduate studies. It was only when i started doing my own research as a masters student that that image started to crumble. And not just crumble, but become really frustrating to me. I think that this ideal of parks really frustrates or negates her actual history, particularly her activist history. In the recent years, we have had historians who are really working or have really worked to break down that kind of idea and to give us a more complicated picture. I want to point to these two books in particular. Anyone read any of them . At the dark end of the street, by daniel mcguire, and the rebellious life of mrs. Rosa parks. That already tells you it will be a corrective narrative. If you have a desire to know more about rosa parks as a woman , as an activist, these are great sources. I am drawing on them some to do that with you today. I want to use these books or use the information i have from books in my own research to kind of deconstruct that myth. I am going to ask you if you know more about rosa parks, or if what you are holding onto you can just raise your hand, you dont have to answer if what you are holding onto, for how many people you are holding onto this typical, iconic idea. That gets celebrated in black History Month . For how many of you is that the image you are most familiar with . Wow, ok. [laughter] all right. That is really not surprising, because i think that image circulates in museums, newspapers, definitely Elementary Schools and Childrens Books, so its not surprising but it is troubling to me. It is very troubling. What i want to point out is how simple and inaccurate that representation is. I will just start at the beginning. Beginning in the 1930s, rosa parks was campaigning on behalf of the scottsboro boys with her husband. Melanie brought up the scottsboro boys in our last class in terms of these nine africanamerican man who were accused of raping two white women on a train. It was a long, drawnout case in which many of them spent years and years in prison. Rosa parks was actively campaigning on their behalf. Which is notable, because these were africanamericans who were defended by the communist party. Right there, that is a subversive kind of activity. Dont worry about writing this down, i will send it to you immediately after. Just listen to the story. Just listen to the story. Particularly if this is the first time you have had any encounter with this woman. I promise you. She sat as a lookout on the steps of her own home while there were naacp meetings held in her house, where she discusses she had never seen so many guns on her kitchen table. She never seen so many guns until the meetings were in her house. She joined the naacp in 1943, either the second or third woman in montgomery to do that. So i should say, the montgomery chapter of the naacp. She became the secretary almost immediately because nobody else wanted to do it. That, in and of itself, is a woman, who was unusual in montgomery at the time. Less unusual, one of the other women of the two or three was her mother. You can see some modeling going on there. This is key. In her role as a secretary of the naacp in the 1940s in montgomery, alabama or alabama, she traveled around the state by herself to gather evidence or proof or testimony from blacks who had witnessed or experienced white on black violence. Think about that. How many of you have seen a picture of rosa parks . She is not a formidable woman. She is a black woman traveling by herself through the jim crow south to get material that many whites or Authority Figures would have been upset about. This is a dangerous thing she is doing. Quite in contrast to the image we have of her. Beginning in the 1940s, she organized on behalf of sexually abused black women. Sexually assaulted, abused black women. Very openly. That is what theo harris book is about. Both of them touch on that, but theo harris really traces that history of parts advocating parks advocating on behalf of sexually abused black women, largely by white men. She made repeated attempts to register to vote in the 1940s. Repeated attempts. As we will talk about and as im sure you know to some extent this too could be a dangerous , act at this point in time. She protested segregation on the buses before 1945. 1955. She was kicked off a bus by the same bus driver almost a decade earlier for resisting the instructions of that bus driver. She spoke she was a featured speaker at the naacp state convention in 1948. I dont think that is an image that we generally have of rosa parks. In fact, when i was doing my research, i found an audio clip of her on a new york radio interview and i remember hearing her voice for the first time and being like, of course, she is southern. It just surprised me. Because i had never heard her. I had never heard her. But here she is speaking before a convention crowd in 1948. Very public. Very public. She trained at the Highlander Folk School in tennessee. This is before her arrest. She did a two week training in desegregation at the Highlander Folk School, which was pegged as , it is it was not a communist , school. It was a leadership training institution. It was precisely because of brown v. Board of education that these workshops were being held. It was to help learn how to facilitate that process. Hopefully peacefully. She never fully embraced nonviolence, and she is on the record about that. She is on the record about not knowing if threatened with violence or messed with in a particular way, if she could turn the other cheek. She certainly supported some of the nonviolent activities of the Civil Rights Movement, but never fully supported nonviolence. For how many of you razor hands is that surprising . Right . That is, again, troubling to me. But not at all surprising. My question then i will allow for a couple of answers, why do you think there is no right answer because you are the ones who know why do you think there is such an investment of that mythic parks as i call her, has survived so long, well after her death . She died in 2005. Why do you think that has such currency that idea . Student i think when i learned about this, i think i was in Elementary School, so 8, 9, 10 years old. I think it is easier for her to be a onedimensional character in the story we tell children when we are first learning about this history, than it is for her to be a complex human being that has more to offer the story than just sitting on a bus. Prof. Greer yeah. Morgan. Student to me is also thinking about how a lot of us learned about this in Elementary School, very strategic on public education, and educators role in general to tell children and push this narrative that black people get what they want if they are nonviolent and pacified. But there are so many world events, Historic Events we learn about that are achieved through violent means in European Countries and by white people generally. Revolutionarywise. This is remembered as a catalyst for a Larger Movement and we are being told this person was nonviolent, peaceful, old, tired woman, when that was not the case. Maybe that is strategic. Prof. Greer at least politically significant, if not intended. Anyone else want to speak to that . Look at yall. [laughter] student i also think this narrative presents her as a political agent, which even broader for women of all races, that is something that is not really mentioned, that she is someone who was very strategic in what she did. Even in terms of what organizations she associated with. It shows her agency in a way that we are reluctant to talk about regarding women. Prof. Greer yeah. Remember, i told you to draw mamie till bradley forward. In terms of thinking about how parks presented herself. We also have to think about how parks might have been presenting herself. We will talk more about that at a different time. I agree with all of you to an extent. The montgomery bus boycott i think is one of our greatest national fairytales. Its just a really nice story in its popular form of good versus evil, david and goliath, and good americans bear out. Theres those aberrant, racist southerners, but good americans bear out. I think when you have a fairytale, you have simple good versus bad, and rosa parks is the hero, along with Martin Luther king. They are the hero of this fairytale. Its always interesting to me. How many of you learned about rosa parks for the first time in Elementary School . Ok. How many of you learned anything else about her after . Ok. Its always interesting to me, because i think you are right in the sense that people think that children need simple characters. To me, the sad thing is that is when, i think, minds, attitudes are very flexible and can take in complex information. I often use the example of when i was in graduate school, a Childrens Book came out about Martin Luther king and my professor brought it in and read it to us. It said on april 4, 1968, Martin Luther king died. Which is not inaccurate, right . But, he was assassinated. That showed a hesitancy to deal in that material. Then i point people to grimms fairy tales, which are horrifying and scary. But there is this idea that we need to sanitize stories for children, and i think that would be fine, but it would be ok if there was at any other point where you were learning, building on that story. My experience is, and im sure it is different in different regions and different schools, but my experience is that most people dont then have more education on the Civil Rights Movement and or rosa parks. Student i learned about rosa parks when i was young, preschool probably, and in Elementary School. And then later, i think in middle school or high school, i learned how she was not the first person to not give up her seat. I think that is really interesting. In one of the articles about the origins of montgomery bus boycott, they quoted rosa parks had the caliber of character to get the city to rally around us. I thought that was an interesting for me, that was a moment. I was always curious about why rosa parks . This happened before rosa parks, which the article laid out. I thought it was interesting that we focus specifically on her we dont talk about the back story when we are learning about her. Prof. Greer and let me speak to that, lets go through that. One of the reasons i focus on this symbolic, mythic rosa parks, or start there, is because i think she is propping up this bigger myth of the montgomery myth, and i would argue that is also obscuring information about the Montgomery Movement and the montgomery bus boycott that would be helpful to us now. Information about organizing, information about how funded things, information about what forms their theories or strategies. I want to speak to that because that is a huge question why . Why do we not have that information . The montgomery myth. Here are some aspects. Dont worry about writing it down, i will send it to you. Rosa parks is this accidental activist. She has had enough. Rosa was tired and has had enough. Shes going home and is like, i am not taking this anymore. That she was the first one to take the stand and the boycott is unprecedented and the boycott is spontaneous. That is part of what allows it to have the container idea of the Civil Rights Movement. Like suddenly there was organizing on this issue of civil rights. Martin luther king jr. Organized the boycott, the masses followed king, the masses walked, the boycott ended segregated buses and the boycott was short. I want to kind of tick through those and speak to those. The first one being the idea that parks was the first. That she was the first woman, black woman to resist segregated public transportation. That is not even true there are examples from the previous century, one of them being ida b. Wells, who protested on a railroad. And won. She sued and won. Sojourner truth protested on d. C. Streetcars. And homer plessy, where plessy versus ferguson comes from. We have examples of African Americans boycotting segregated transportation before. In other locations, birmingham, alabama, we have two examples. I only wrote one down. Pauline kart in 1943. She was a teenager when a bus driver treated her poorly, she spit on him and cursed him, and she spent 30 days in jail. As a teenager. Then there is an instant of another woman who got a shoving match with a white man on the bus. She cursed him while she was riding the bus and when she got off the bus, she was arrested and sentenced to spend time in jail. But in montgomery, to the points several of you have made, there are several documented incidents of women doing exactly what parks did. Some of them did more than once. The first one being epsie worthy. Who, in 1943, she argued with the driver, she got off the bus, the driver followed her, spit on her, beat her, and, according to eyewitness testimony, she gave as much as she got. I dont know what happened to her, but im thinking she probably spent time in jail. Henrietta brinson in 1953, she sat in front of a white couple on a bus and was targeted by the bus driver, but she avoided jail because the white couple agreed to move. What you need to understand about segregated buses, generally speaking, there are 10 seats in the front and 10 in the back. Or 16 and 16 seats, im sorry, white, black, then there was a no mans land. But depending on who was in the bus, seat went to the white patrons and africanamericans had to move when instructed to. What is important is that bus drivers had police powers. They had police powers. That makes resisting doubly risky. They could do what a Police Officer could do in those circumstances, including violence. Two other examples, rosa parks resisted a decade before she resisted. One of the worst cases is viola white, who in 1943, refused to give up her seat, the driver try to remove her, she resisted, she was beaten, arrested, jailed, she was found guilty, she appealed the case, and as reprisal, white Police Officers kidnapped her 16yearold daughter and raped her in a cemetery. That was for her resisting. So it tells you the significance of crossing that line. Then we also have, as the article pointed out, in the same year, in 1955, you have claudette colvin, a 15yearold teenager who refuses to give up her seat on the bus. The naacp and everyone rallies around her in march of 1955, until she winds up pregnant and then they back off. In april of that year, a month later, ariella browder has an incident on a bus where she is arrested for resisting to give up her seat. Remember that name. In october, mary louise smith, an 18yearold africanamerican girl who refuses to give up her seat, also before rosa parks. We dont know about her because her father came down and paid her fine and she was out before the naacp knew about it. But these women have said things to the effect that they were not in the inner circle. They were too dark and too poor, the smith family was catholic. Which also put them outside the bounds of the circle. We have at least three women who have done the same thing in the same year as rosa parks. We need to think about, we need to scratch off that rosa parks was the first. Just take that off. Yes . Student when you say they are too dark, too poor, are you saying they could not be the figure behind the boycott . Prof. Greer right. Thats what colvin and louise smith believed and there is evidence that supported them in that. You had parks and edie nixon, who you read about, both saying we cant use her, the media will tear us up, particularly with colvin. Student [indiscernible] not seeing rosa parks as a threat. More like an innocent. I think if she was wearing a black panther uniform and a beret, it would be a different story. And of course, her skin complexion has something to do with it because she does not look like the possibly traditional. But yeah, i dont think she was seen as much of a threat in that case. Prof. Greer yeah, and there is definitely evidence. Again, parks says this herself. When she is arrested, edie nixon will is like, hallelujah. Will he is like, this is the one. She is the one. They all gather at her house to convince her of that, but who is against it . Her husband. Hes not an idiot and he knows how dangerous it is. Student [indiscernible] they kind of forged the narrative to make her a figure of the Civil Rights Movement that has been propagated since then . Prof. Greer thats a great question. I dont think robinson did, i think parks did and nixon did. I think robinson was really angry when they backed off of colvin. Colvin was a young girl that parks worked with because parks was in charge of the naacp youth activities. They had a relationship, so when they backed off of colvin, she was really upset. As the article tells you, they are waiting. Robinson has been fighting the fight for a decade. When the brown decision comes out, and she writes, what, four days later, she writes to the mayor, just reminding you, africanamericans make up 75 of the rioters, and if we were to actually boycott, that would be really bad for the bus company. That is a threat, right . The degree to which she could do it. I dont think we can peg that on robinson so much, but i think we can peg it on gender politics of the time and certainly also the politics of color. Because it is not incidental that she is a lightskinned woman and she is chosen. All of these things that allow for the idea of middle class respectability. They allow for the idea of middleclass respectability, despite the fact that rosa parks is absolutely of the working class and arguably of the working poor. She doesnt have that veneer. She does not have a demeanor that is radical. She has a radical activist past, but does not have a demeanor that is radical. There is definitely image politics going on here. And we can decide whether or not we fault them for that or if they are looking at the reality of their situation. We have talked in here about the trap of getting into the image politics game. So one of the things we could consider is, what are the effects of rosa parks having been the symbol . I think it goes back to Morgans Point of who is worthy of justice . We talked about that with mamie till bradley as well. Another thing that i want you to keep in mind is that the question often comes up, why was it primarily women . And it was primarily women who were doing this. And all you need to know is, emmett till. There was a bigger history to that, to do the same type of resistance. To do this same type of resistance as an africanamerican man would be riskier. Also, africanamerican men were not riding the buses as much. If there was a car in the family, the man was taken get to his job. It was women on the bus primarily. Also because they were domestics. They were on the bus in a greater capacity, and often with white people. Those lines were kind of blurred because they might do the Grocery Shopping with the children of their white employer. In that capacity, they set up they sat up front, because the white baby was not going in the back. There is a little more blurring of the line. There are stories of africanamerican men, if there was a scuffle with an africanamerican woman, they would just go out the back door. They suffered psychically for that and were criticized for that. They would get up and go out the back door because they understood how loaded that situation was. I also want to go to the next idea of this movement being unprecedented and spontaneous. I want to try to trouble that or refute it. Theres examples within alabama that refute that idea. There is a boycott in 1900 of the trolleys that lasts about two years. Is not as total as the montgomery bus boycott. The montgomery bus boycott is 95 successful among africanamericans. Robinson is right, if 75 of your clientele is africanamerican and 95 of them stay off of the buses, i mean this crippled the bus company. , they had to keep raising fares. They were very much on the brink of financial ruin, and yet time after time, they refused to segregate the buses. That is important to think about to understand. , montgomery blacks had a boycott of the buses around the Easter Holiday event that happened, and they said they were often bussed out and dropped far away and had to walk in the rain. So they boycotted the buses. That was a short event. In baton rouge in 1953, there was a bus boycott that people in montgomery very much took information from. Thats when i say, if you have a bus boycott narrative as simple as the one we have, you cant do what people in montgomery did in terms of the baton rouge boycott, where they took information and they learned from that to organize their own boycott. And then the idea of it being spontaneous. I think garrow successfully deconstructs that idea. When you look at when that article was written, in 1985. When i ask how many of you have a more complex idea about rosa parks or the bus boycott and you are telling me in the year 2020 that it is still coming down this way, that is troubling. Because weve had this information for a long time now. People, educators, weve had this information a long time. The womens political counsel blows that out of the water, the idea it was spontaneous, that they decided at the last moment. We know from garrow there was a plan in place, at least a loose plan and robinson was just waiting and there had been many meetings between the wpc and city of authorities to address the segregated seating. With all of these half measures, like, let us come in the front door at least. Have more black bus drivers. It doesnt even necessarily have to be that it is an integrated bus. But it is no, no, no to all of those things. A question i have, why didnt we know anything about the womens political counsel until 1985 . Why do you think we dont know anything about her . Or anything about the womens political counsel . Is that, 35 years later . What do you think accounts for that . Student i think part of it is the image of Martin Luther king jr. As the leader and the figurehead in all of this. In a sense, the montgomery bus boycott is the origin point for him, then the story is not that he was the one leading this, he was the pushing this forward, one and that makes things difficult for his narrative. Prof. Greer very much. That is in keeping with what was said before about rosa parks and that simple idea. Do i see another hand there . Ok. Absolutely. The other thing we have to understand is African Americans on the ground are forging these ideas because it is politically expedient and safer to do so. That is important to consider when youre thinking about a marginalized group or oppressed group trying to advance their politics. Within any particular historical moment. The africanamerican women we are talking about, particularly women like joanne robinson, she is an activist but still a middleclass black woman in the south. Im not saying she was limited but she had gender ideologies of how she should behave as a middleclass woman in the south. Those are things we also have to understand. A lot of africanamerican women were putting the black men in front. But there are other practical reasons for why they would do that. One, they think that is the image that should be out there, it makes africanamerican men look stronger. It doesnt emasculate them. And robinson has a job at a university. We learned i love this. I remember learning about robinson and her distributing this leaflet in the middle of the night, getting her students to go to her university and mimeographing this leaflet once rosa parks was arrested, saying this happened to another person, we cant let this happen anymore, boycott the buses on monday. She blankets the black sections of town with this to the point that white ministers in church on sunday are saying, what is happening . Where is this coming from . The news reports on it on sunday that afternoon saying, where does this come from . Because she does it in the middle of the night. And she gets in trouble for it because she has used University Property to do it. But the doityourself kind of nature of this, the hasty nature, she said she already had it written to a large degree and was just waiting to be mobile graft. Mimeographed. But theres a reason she did it behind the scenes. When the Montgomery Advertiser was like, who is responsible for this . The wpc was not like, it is us. In fact, that friday, so, thursday night they distribute the leaflets and that friday the African American male ministers get together and black leaders get together to talk about what to do. That becomes more the site of the organizing or thrust behind that. Then there is this idea connected of Martin Luther king organizing the boycott and that everybody was following his order. That is partially because he was among that group of black male leaders. Its also because he was elected as the president. On monday afternoon, the day the boycott starts, he was elected the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which is the organization that was the official representative of the boycott. Why do you think he is elected . Does anybody know anything about king at this point in time . He is 26 years old and has just moved to montgomery. Student as a minister, he kind of provides a level of respectability to the movement. Prof. Greer definitely. Everybody agrees, he has a phd, at 26. He has a phd in theology, he is articulate which, that is a coded word. He is articulate, he presents well. Definitely. But he is also new. He kind of gets pushed out front because he doesnt have any of the relationships, patronage relationships some of the other black male leaders do. So he is not loyal to anyone yet, and if he messes up, they dont lose something. Im not saying he was not willing to do this, or volunteered, but think about it, i cant remember who said it, this is also the origin point for Martin Luther king. Was that you . Yeah. 26 years old. No way did he know what this was going to mean for him, how he would be launched onto the national stage. Partly because nobody thought this boycott was going to last more than one day. The reason it was that monday is because that was when rosa parks was going to her trial. Nobody thought the boycott would last more than one day. The other reason people think king was the leader is because , at the mass meetings, like the one described in the reading, he is upfront. His audience is the masses. So it is easy for outside media, which did come and film this, report on it, to see him as a leader. At this first mass meeting, that is what this is a picture of, rosa parks, the presenter, and Martin Luther king said, this person, we are lucky she is the face of our movement, she is not a disturbing factor in the community. She was a disturbing factor in the community. She is standing there and she says, should i Say Something . And the ministers say, you have done enough. Have a seat, you have done enough. I always find that interesting. Because, she does, she sits down. I just wonder what the dynamics were there. If she sits down because she of, you dontft have to do anymore, youve done enough, let us just recognize you, or if it is we got this. But she sits down. It is very easy, you see the mantle shift from parks to king that night. It is also the official debut of the parks we know. This nondisturbing, middleclass, respectable woman. From that point forward, the Media Campaign begins. I told you that the till trial was one of the first media dramas of the Civil Rights Movement. The montgomery bus boycott was a sustained media event. In many ways, a sustained, staged drama. Part of the reason people see him as a leader is because he is standing out front all the time. But throughout the boycott, he and the women who have been , arrested before, and he is saying, i am not the leader. I am a spokesperson, but the masses are leading this movement. Claudette colvin says, the leaders are we ourselves, when she is asked about king to being the leader. She is still a teenager at this point. Again, king is not refuting that. He considers himself lucky to be representing them, but because of the gender politics and the media image and how it is being positioned, there is this idea that he is the leader. But it is interesting to know that on monday, that monday, december 5, everybody gathers at this mass meeting to assess how it has gone. The Montgomery Improvement Association was informed that afternoon. The idea is it is a boycott, very successful, they show their strength, and all of the people in the audience are like, we are not going back on those buses. Especially the maids and cooks. We are not going back on the buses, we are not suffering that humiliation anymore. This is no longer like this is a show of force. The masses decide that night, we will continue this. Then it becomes a matter of how to run a bus boycott. Because it says here masses absolutely. Walking during the bus boycott. Miles outking about of four. You see pictures of buzzes with one let one white lady. An iconic photograph. The process is completely empty. Other africanamericans threaten to drink on the bus. Think thatonable to if they had to walk everywhere that this would have been as successful. That would have been a burden that was really difficult. Looking to the baton rouge example, they form a carpool. A very intricate carpool that is organized and run by the Montgomery Improvement Association. Many of the drivers are middleclass black women who are either housewives of elite black men or teachers at the university. They are driving people around. They also have all of the black taxis doing free or reduced fare rides until the city makes that an illegal activity. There is this really organized carpool that is happening. At the center of it they need funding, they need to put gas in these cars. Recently a woman named Georgia Gilmore has been recognized. She was a cook, an activist in montgomery, and she formed the nowhere club. The name was a joke so that when people would say where . She got these women together to make sandwiches to pay for the fuel. Where did you get these sandwiches . Nowhere. She is getting credit for that. But they had all of this infrastructure behind the boycott, most of which is manned by women, including rosa parks, who was fired immediately after she takes her stand on the bus. She is fired, and her husbands fires. She became one of the people organizing the boycott throughout the spring of 1956. It is primarily women who are running these activities. None of this is visible if you just have the saintly rosa parks and suddenly the powers that be realize this is really wrong and desegregate the buses. There is a lot of work that went into it. There is a book by stuart burns, and there is no narrative, he just compiles all of the documents going on during the boycott, and you see the interoffice memos about events planned, things they need, how they will fund king going different places to talk and things. There is a big machine behind the boycott. This is a huge one, the idea that the boycott, the montgomery bus boycott desegregated the buses. How many of you think this is true or have thought that was true . I wont say it is not true. This is a debatable question. But it did not officially end segregation on public transportation. Any guesses as to what would . Or did . Melody . Student it lasted like 382 days, so if you look at it as a monetary perspective, how much money they were losing, and if they could sustain that, i think it was more a monetary decision. Prof. Greer i think that is a very logical and reasonable yes. It should be. Of course, they are crippling the bus company and making it very difficult. They have to keep reducing bus routes and the fact that that is not the answer tells you how entrenched the city officials were. Student wasnt like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 . Prof. Greer no. But it was legislation. Browder versus gayle. Court case. I think this is a huge injustice. You have fine plaintiffs, eventually reese drops out from harassment. You have five plaintiffs who bring this court case against the mayor of montgomery and the bus company. Looking at the list of plaintiffs, notice any absences . Who is not there . Rosa parks is not anywhere there. She cannot be. She cannot be a test case because she was charged with violating the City Ordinance and not giving up her seat. The City Ordinance says that if there were seats available, africanamericans could sit on them. The state ordinance said africanamericans had to obey whatever the bus said. It was amended in the middle of the trial and her lawyer went to appeal it. Because it was under appeal, she could not be the test case. She is not involved in this case. Any other absences you might notice . There are no men. And there is an appeal for men. And they say at a meetings, seriously guys, you have been riding the apron strings. Its interesting because the black male ministers were less vulnerable because their patronage were black people. They did not have a business, they were not working at a university funded by white people. It is all women, all women who have experienced arrest or harassment on the buses, including colvin, smith, these people considered not eligible, not the right fit for being the face of the movement. And they werent, because none of you knew about them. You dont even know about this case. They were not the face of it. This goes forward, and starts february 1, 1956. It goes forward. This is where you get all of the testimony about women these Court Documents are so useful because you have testimony from all of these women about what happened to them. It brings in all of these other records about their arrest. You have them sing in a public court against the mayor and city of montgomery, this happened to me, that is why i am here, and this is where colvin says the leaders are we ourselves, because they keep trying to find out about king. The leaders are we ourselves. It starts in february. In june, 19 56, the lower court ruled toone in favor of the plaintiffs on the ground of the 14th amendment. City officials appeal, they are not giving up. City officials appeal. November 13, the Supreme Court upholds the Lower Court Ruling and city officials appeal. This accounts for the fact of the 381 days. Africanamericans are like, we are not going back on the segregated buses. December 20, the Supreme Court, they did not hear the case again, they said we wont consider the appeal, we have decided this. That effectively ends the citys attempts to stave off the segregation of city buses. The decree of that ruling reaches montgomery on december 20, 1956. Africanamericans meet in their final mass meeting of the boycott and agree ok, we got what we wanted, we will go on the buses tomorrow, december 21, 1956. That morning, cameras come from all over the country, they go to Martin Luther kings house and watch him, and Ralph Abernathy and other prominent ministers walk to the bus station at 5 00 in the morning, get on the bus, and they take these iconic photographs. At some point in the morning, someone says what about that parks woman . Maybe we should get a photograph of her. They do go and find her, but she is an afterthought. Even after she has become the face of the movement, nothing leader of the movement, she was the one that was relatively taken care of. This is because during the entire year, every time she appears in a public setting in relationship to the boycott, she is with men. Very much the same way mamie till bradley was. She is surrounded i men in suits and ties. She does speak after certain events, but she is right next to these authoritative looking africanamerican men throughout the entire thing. They do become seemingly the strength of that movement. I think it is really an injustice that no one knows about these women. Browder had six children, she was a seamstress, she was a wife and mother, and midwife. She went back to get her bachelors degree in her 30s and got her masters degree. She was an activist. They did not pick her first time because they did not think she could withstand crossexamination. I dont know why. Thats why they did not use her as a test case. Then she becomes the lead of this case, and nobody knows about it. To that end, what melody brought up, the idea that the boycott was short. Just out of curiosity, because most of you have admitted, i had a skewed idea of this how long do you think most people if not yourself thought the boycott was . Now, how long do you think . Just yell out a number. Student a few weeks. Prof. Greer thats what i grew up thinking. Yeah. I think what allows for that is kind of the fairytale idea. Again, some things are wrong would not take that long. With browder versus gayle, my question to you is, did the boycott desegregate the buses . You dont have enough information to make a this is where i am planting my flag. But without the boycott, what do you think . Browder versus gayle put the nail in the coffin of plessy versus ferguson, that was when separate but equal went by the wayside. This was a huge ruling. Arguably more important or as important as brown, as brown v. Board of education. A huge ruling. Do you think the boycott was necessary to that ruling . Student i think it was, because i think the boycott, while it was not an illegal action or might not have produced, might not have taken it down, it changed peoples perceptions of what was happening with separate versus equal. And Media Campaign, it reverberated throughout the country. I think you change peoples hearts, you change peoples minds. Maybe that is playing into the myth, but i think it grew, especially in the north. Student to that extent, you talked about how there were previously cases where they had lost in court. With the buses and desegregating them, i think the boycott was necessary to finalize, like you said, nail in the coffin. Prof. Greer ok. Anyone else . Yeah. I think thats a very strong argument. The Supreme Court, officials are not operating in a vacuum. And so to understand that Public Opinion may be moving in another direction, and theres also legal grounds, but to understand Public Opinion may be moving in he