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

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.

What happened was this. I had heard the telephone company would send someone to any school that wanted to use telephones in the classroom to teach communication skills. The principal my suggestion so two weeks later nearly a dozen teachers, including me, were sitting in a classroom after school listening to the woman’s presentation.

Unfortunately, although the woman knew about telephones, she didn’t know as much about history or human beings. She used phrases like “you people” as if she were talking to folks who must appreciate her even being at our school. In fact, the level of education of the teachers was high. As the first junior high school to have a desegregated faculty in the nation’s capital, the teachers had been carefully selected.

Despite the woman’s insensitivity, we were all listening politely, or at least I thought we were, until Mr. Brown stood up.

He didn’t argue, he didn’t glare, he just walked out of the room. Looking back I think he thought attitudes were more important even than good telephone manners. For him, like for Rosa Parks, resisting was no problem. I don’t know how often he had showed his strength before or what organizations he belonged to, but I didn’t think in those terms back then.

Mr. Brown, like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the writer Leroi Brown and thousands of less conspicuous heroes, kept rising above the prejudice and institutionalized violence of their time, and in doing so, taught all of us lessons in courage, staying power and humility.

Rosa Park’s action came to take on heroic dimensions because of its far ranging consequences. In contrast, Mr. Brown’s similar action is probably remembered by only a few people still alive or maybe only by me. To the African-American teachers who witnessed it his act was probably more familiar.

At the time, I was more naÃ?¯ve and less knowledgeable than I needed to be to teach American history. I knew more about the history of Russia and China than I did about the history of my own country. I had to study hard at night to teach the next day. Besides, the students in my classroom were thirteen-year olds who went through the school day with other things on their minds. I only had a few clues in the classroom to either the pride or the history of discontent in the African-American community. I didn’t have any inside information on the widespread organizational effort to erase institutionalized inequality.

So, to me, Mr. Brown represented a universal. As surely as if I had been on the bus with Rosa Parks, I was present when a human being, refused to go along with inequality. In those historic times, Mr. Brown showed me, more than any headline, that any of us has the option to stand up for what is right.