Defining Moments in Black History by Dick Gregory

(When black folks got on at the back, they might find white boys in the back flirting with the black sisters, and most of those women would be flirting back, smiling and saying, 'Aw, come on, Ed. But here's one thing I didn't know: they had to get on the bus at the front door, pay the fare, and then get off and walk to the back door. In Montgomery, Alabama, where it happened, Negroes had to sit at the back of the bus, behind the white folks. In 1955 Rosa Parks' quiet, but determined refusal to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., to a white man sparked the beginning of The Montgomery Bus Boycott. White folks like to say she was just some tired housewife who didn't want to stand up on the bus that day, but she was no less an activist than Martin Luther King Jr. So, instead, he had to make do with sitting on his porch with his double-barrel shotgun daring white folks to mess with him.Īt the time of the bus incident, Rosa was a secretary for the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. But Marcus Garvey didn't accept light-skinned Negroes, and Rosa's dad was one. Garveyites were those black folks who followed Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born black nationalist who advocated Pan-Africanism and the economic and political empowerment of blacks. Her daddy was one angry man because he wanted to be a Garveyite. Rosa was born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. She sounded almost like she was in a trance: 'I just couldn't get Emmett Till off my mind,' she said. You tell me what happened.'Īnd when she did, she caught me by surprise. That's what we let historians get away with. White folks try to say that if Rosa hadn't been too tired to get up from her seat that day, none of it would ever have happened - everything that sparked the civil rights movement.

And they wanted to say you wouldn't give up your seat because you were tired.' That day I spoke to her - we were just kicking back, having dinner at a hotel - I was only playing when I said, 'Look at your pretty feet. When she refused to give up her bus seat to a white dude, and got arrested for it, black and white folks rallied around her. She didn't have a church behind her, like King did, but look what she did. That's why all we ever heard of him on the TV networks were sound bites - 'Goin' to the mountaintop' and the rest of that stuff you hear year in and year out on his birthday.īut think about Rosa Parks and the effect she had on the whole planet.

And he had that twang that Baptist preachers have that white folks can't understand. His consciousness came from the white schools he went to. Martin Luther King Jr., who gets all the credit for everything, was just an earnest Baptist preacher.

Defining Moments in Black History by Dick Gregory