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Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin (2009)
- lstamour 5y ago(2009), but still relevant today.
- dang 5y agoYear added above. Thanks!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bgroins 5y agoFunny enough, I learned about Claudette Colvin from this Drunk History episode. https://youtu.be/Tov2tLSFq5k https://youtu.be/Tov2tLSFq5k
- docdeek 5y agoI heard about Colvin in an episode of The Newsroom during a typically engaging Sorkin-penned monologue: "March 2nd, 1955. A young black woman is arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Alabama. Civil Rights leaders in the ACLU rush to her side. And she will be a symbol of the struggle against segregation. Her name is Claudette Colvin and she is 15 years old. She's also unmarried and pregnant. Civil rights leaders in the ACLU decide that Colvin is not the best foot forward and stand-down. 8 months later Rosa Parks happens, but during that 8 months a brilliant and charismatic young minister gets the attention of the community and is chosen to lead the bus boycotts. If Claudette Colvin doesn't get pregnant, if they'd gone in the spring instead of 8 months later, Martin Luther King is a preacher you've never heard of in Montgomery."
- mc32 5y agoIt’s all connected. She probably needed to sit down what with being pregnant and all. If she hadn’t been pregnant she might not have been on the bus or if she had might not have protested. But if you’re pregnant and tired, most would protest the injustice there.
- paulryanrogers 5y agoIn that era they may have been afraid of reinforcing the stereotype that black people were more likely to have children yoo young and outside of marriage.
- jimmygrapes 5y agoToo bad, because maybe those issues could have been addressed at the same time. Today most of my single mother friends have daughters pregnant before 18 with no father in sight, and yes, they are also black. The stereotype did not need to be proven, but white liberals have done their damndest to encourage it. And no, abortion laws have nothing to do with it; these girls all want their babies.
- paulryanrogers 5y agoHow have white liberals encouraged under 18, fatherless pregnancies?
- manachar 5y agoSome use this to be cynical of the Civil Rights movement. Which is a weird critique, when the reason they had to be careful about their image was because of the general white supremacist and racist ideology of the time. For example, American prisons are generally awful places where we mostly fail to provide prisoners the basic human rights we are required to provide. We even joke about prison rape as being appropriate punishment, despite it being clearly a cruel and unusual punishment. But, since prisoners are often not exactly sympathetic to the majority of the population, prison reform is an uphill battle.
- rufus_foreman 5y agoIs prison rape unusual? I thought it was quite common.
- angelzen 5y agoIt's a reference to the eighth amendment: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
- rufus_foreman 5y agoSomething that is cruel and usual is not cruel and unusual.
- geofft 5y agoIt's very rare for rape to be a legally mandated punishment, which I think makes it an "unusual punishment," even if it's not a particularly unusual occurrence (either among the punished, or among the world at large). A couple thousand US prisoners have died of covid and hundreds of thousands have been infected with it, but that doesn't mean that intentionally inflicting people with covid is now a usual punishment.
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
- Avshalom 5y agoI also recommend Ida B. Wells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_B._Wells#Early_career_and_anti-segregation_activism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_B._Wells#Early_career_and_... http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=356 http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=356