Rosa Parks Research Articles

Biometric-Tuned E-Skin Sensor with Real Fingerprints Provides Insights on Tactile Perception: Rosa Parks Had Better Surface Vibrational Sensation than Richard Nixon.

The dense mechanoreceptors in human fingertips enable texture discrimination. Recent advances in flexible electronics have created tactile sensors that effectively replicate slowly adapting (SA) and rapidly adapting (RA) mechanoreceptors. However, the influence of dermatoglyphic structures on tactile signal transmission, such as the effect of fingerprint ridge filtering on friction-induced vibration frequencies, remains unexplored. A novel multi-layer flexible sensor with an artificially synthesized skin surface capable of replicating arbitrary fingerprints is developed. This sensor simultaneously detects pressure (SA response) and vibration (RA response), enabling texture recognition. Fingerprint ridge patterns from notable historical figures - Rosa Parks, Richard Nixon, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ronald Reagan - are fabricated on the sensor surface. Vibration frequency responses to assorted fabric textures are measured and compared between fingerprint replicas. Results demonstrate that fingerprint topography substantially impacts skin-surface vibrational transmission. Specifically, Parks' fingerprint structure conveyed higher frequencies more clearly than those of Nixon, King, or Reagan. This work suggests individual fingerprint ridge morphological variation influences tactile perception and can confer adaptive advantages for fine texture discrimination. The flexible bioinspired sensor provides new insights into human vibrotactile processing by modeling fingerprint-filtered mechanical signals at the finger-object interface.

Honouring and praising mothers through song: analysing selected songs of Zimdancehall artist, Tocky Vibes

ABSTRACT From antiquity to present, there are notable women who have exercised agency in the best interest of African people. Names such as Nehanda, Queen Nzingah, Queen Mother Yaa Asante waa, Rosa Parks among many others are towering examples of women whose contribution to affirmation of life can only be doubted by those who are against Africa’s liberation and development. This paper pursues the intense interest in the contribution of mothers (both male and female) to affirmation of life in songs of Tocky Vibes, namely, ‘Mhai’, ‘Ndikagaya’, and ‘Aenda nenyika.’ The artist’s expression of the role of mothers in strengthening individuals as members of a family and community is quite inviting and revealing. The songs recognise the contribution of mothers to empowering young members of a society and fully prepare them for life. Among a plethora of other life-enhancing characteristics, the artist reveals that mothers groom individuals, provide love, strength, vision and purpose in life. Nothing short of recognition and recentering of motherhood finds expression in the songs. Motherhood is retrieved from the periphery that Eurocentrism has located it to firmly position it at the centre of positive child development. Critical appreciation of songs is inspired and guided by Africana womanism.

Second-Graders’ Historical Reading, Thinking, and Writing About Rosa Parks

Second-graders engaged in complex reading, writing, and thinking about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Close readings of secondary and primary sources situated students to discover incongruencies between what is reported within trade-books and what is revealed within historical documents. Scaffolding directed students’ scrutiny of secondary sources for historical gaps and of primary sources for historical significance. The scaffolding was differentiated for both text-based and visually oriented primary sources. The assessment—creation of a faux primary source—was discipline-specific and completed through peer- and teacher-led review. Students demonstrated historical literacy, thinking, and argumentation during different phases of this guided inquiry. Teachers and researchers can gain rich, nuanced understandings from examining classroom-based learning.

The Biographical Narrative as a Feminist Counterdiscourse in Julie Dash's "The Rosa Parks Story" (2002)

El filme biográfico en su forma más convencional ha tenido como objetivo principal venerar las vidas y obras de ilustres hombres blancos en su consagración de figuras heroicas. Al reapropiarse de este género para celebrar el activismo de Rosa Parks, Julie Dash consigue otorgarle a una mujer afroamericana la distinción de heroína monumental, un trato poco frecuente para las mujeres negras en el cine comercial. Sin embargo, Julie Dash juega con la forma y rompe los moldes al reflexionar sobre la construcción mediática de las narrativas heroicas. The Rosa Parks Story celebra la complejidad de Parks como ser humano y activista comprometida, y la sitúa en el interior del colectivo de activistas que participaron en las revueltas por los derechos civiles en Estados Unidos. El resultado es un filme elegante, profundo y reflexivo que pone el foco sobre el papel influyente de Rosa Parks y sus «hermanas en la lucha» (Collier-Thomas y V.P. Franklin, 2001, p. 4) en un movimiento cimentado en poderosas alianzas que fueron más allá del reconocido boicot a los autobuses de Montgomery.

“The Rosa Parks of the trans bathroom debate”: Gavin Grimm and the racialization of transgender civil rights

ABSTRACT Gavin Grimm, a white transgender boy from Virginia, successfully sued his school board in Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board and helped secure the right for trans and gender nonconforming students to use public school bathrooms that correspond to their gender identities. His 2021 victory was the culmination of a long legal battle that began in 2014, when the Gloucester County School Board (GCSB) passed a resolution that segregated bathrooms on the basis of “biological gender.” This essay considers the two GCSB meetings at which this resolution was debated as instances of “ordinary democracy,” where local practices of deliberation not only set policy but also sustain community and produce shared opinion. Drawing on Black trans scholarship that proposes the transitivity of Blackness and demonstrates how Blackness is made present in the service of whiteness, I examine how the discussions at the GCSB meetings strategically mobilized civil rights rhetoric and histories of racial segregation to debate Gavin’s entitlement to public space. Blackness, I argue, is invoked and disavowed as a condition of possibility for modern white trans identities and a resource for vernacular articulations of the scope of trans rights.

Localizing Black History

I selected localizing Black history as my research area of focus as growing up a mixed person of colour, I rarely learned about Black history within local contexts as I will introduce you to within this project. Though not taught the full scope of Canadian history during my time as a student in the NCDSB (Niagara Catholic District School board), I was one of the lucky few whose parents took the time to provide tid bits of information about the rich Black History Fort Erie and the Greater Buffalo Niagara region is home to. My goal and aim with this project is to eliminate future students walking down the streets of their hometowns not knowing about the incredible history around them. The research methodology used for this project was performed primarily through archival research at the Fort Erie Historical Museum, the African Corridor in Buffalo NY, as well as online discovery research. However, in order to grasp the gaps missing in current education, and what avenue to take with the product of the project I took advisement from local Black champions pushing for Black education. In my findings most of the past education surrounding Black History in schools until recently has been plagiarized from America. While these two nations share a deep-rooted history, for far too long has Canada has adopted the same Black history narratives as the US, highlighting amazing Black change makers such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King; however, it has failed to mention Canada’s change makers. Currently, there has been an influx to introduce some of Canada’s Black history into “The Ontario Curriculum;” however, just the word “Black,” is only mentioned 14 times for grades 3 – 8, to compare the word “British” which is used 63 times. While the curriculum mentions Black history 14 times, it is not always taught, and is usually a topic, module, or unit that is ‘missed,’ in order to ensure the central focus of the course is completed in its entirety. The archival research completed for this project and subsequent curriculum developed demonstrates the rich local Black history of the Fort Erie and Greater Buffalo Niagara region for those living within these areas and will provide middle school educators with a way in which to introduce this rich history to students in this region.

Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement by Victoria W. Wolcott

Reviewed by: Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement by Victoria W. Wolcott Alison Collis Greene Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement. By Victoria W. Wolcott. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. x, 262. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-226-81725-5.) Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement links several cohorts of twentieth-century utopian radicals who worked to build a world they envisioned in the midst of one they lamented. Among the broader range of liberal and radical freedom movements, Victoria W. Wolcott focuses on utopians tied by an emphasis on racial and economic justice and a commitment to cooperative economics, interracialism, and nonviolent direct action. This “matrix of intentional communities” included key members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and, later, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) (p. 10). Wolcott argues that these utopians—all well-documented individually—together “situated utopian interracialism and radical nonviolence at the center of the civil rights movement” (p. 10). Wolcott’s first chapter opens with “The Workers” at Brookwood Labor College in New York, founded in 1921 by the pacifist Christian labor organizer A. J. Muste, and Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, established by Myles Horton in 1932. The workers’ education movement “went beyond trade unionism to advocate for a new and more just world that would embrace racial and gender equality” (p. 18). Brookwood and Highlander provided a practical democratic education to many women and created “a new generation of Black activists,” including Ella Baker, Pauli Murray, and Rosa Parks (p. 18). This chapter establishes an argument central to the socialist utopianism of the 1920s and 1930s that Wolcott traces directly into the civil rights movement: that “the working classes could only rise on the basis of full racial equality,” and that Black workers in particular faced myriad forms of individual and systemic injustice based specifically on race and not reducible to class (p. 17). To live into a future of racial and economic justice in the midst of the profoundly segregated North was difficult and often dangerous; to do so in the Jim Crow South could be deadly. Chapter 2, “The Cooperators,” explores the Christian socialist dreams that shaped Delta and Providence farms, two agricultural cooperatives constructed to house displaced Black and white sharecroppers in Depression-era Mississippi. As historian Robert Hunt Ferguson has recently argued in his book Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (Athens, Ga., 2018), the farmers’ own dreams carried them through two remarkable decades of work before they fell to racism from within and without. “The Divinites” of chapter 3 proved “the most successful utopian community in the twentieth century”; theirs is not coincidentally also the first Black-led movement that Wolcott discusses (p. 88). Following the lead of scholars Judith Weisenfeld and Father Divine biographer Jill Watts, Wolcott analyzes both the religious and the political work of the Peace Mission movement to demonstrate the real-world value of a utopian vision in which class, racial, and gender hierarchies (and even gendered difference) did not exist and where self-sufficiency came from shared resources and vision. Chapters 4 and 5, “The Fellowshippers” and “The Pacifists,” follow the utopian dreams of the pre–World War II era into Cold War antiradicalism and [End Page 391] the freedom movements led by FOR, CORE, and the inheritors of the prewar socialist Left. Here, Wolcott focuses on a number of outward-facing communes, from cooperative farms to the Catholic Worker movement to the Harlem Ashram. Wolcott contrasts—and defends—these activists’ radical, provocative, and nonviolent interracialism with the ameliorative liberal interracialism of more conventional white-led organizations. Wolcott demonstrates a coherence of vision across civil rights efforts where historians have more often seen fracture and rupture. This is not a consensus history, but it is a history of coherent, deeply rooted, and ideologically cohesive dissent—and a plea for its continuation. Alison Collis Greene Emory University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All- Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War by Chris Lamb

Reviewed by: Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All- Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War by Chris Lamb Chad S. Wise Chris Lamb. Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All- Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 392 pp. Cloth, $35.95. During any given summer, all across America, sounds of baseball can be heard. In 2023, much like 1995, or even 1955, kids are heard riding their bikes and laughing as they make their way to their local school yards, sandlots, or backyards. Bats are held tightly against their shoulders, gloves hanging from bicycle handlebars. Those without bikes often stood on the pegs of the back wheels, getting a free ride from a buddy (usually without helmets . . . gasp)! Some of the kids wore regular tees, while others wore jerseys of Ruth, Griffey, or Trout. The final group wore jerseys (on loan) from their local baseball teams, usually Little League teams. Who doesn’t remember wearing those polyester jerseys on a ninety- degree day, stirrups pulled up and hats pulled down tightly? The official patch on the sleeve of the Little League jersey included a blue baseball field, red lettering, with a white background. Conversely, other leagues, specifically the Dixie Baseball League in the southern states, added a touch of the Confederacy to their jersey patches. Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War is an unsettling and true story about childhood, baseball, and bigotry in the worst sense of the word. Lamb, who did not play baseball in the south, describes the struggles and challenges for kids and adults who grew up living and playing youth baseball in segregated South Carolina. He also describes in detail how the color of kids’ jerseys, hats, and stirrups wasn’t nearly as important as their skin color. Lamb’s book focuses on the year 1955 for several reasons, not all of which are positive. Rosa Parks had refused to move to the back of a public bus and was arrested for her act of bravery. The United States government was in a battle over “separate but equal,” as senators such as Strom Thurmond and Douglas Abrams wrote, “The image of African American boys sharing the same baseball field as white boys was no less acceptable than black children attending schools with white children” (7). How far did these segregated attitudes run? In Lamb’s book, hatred based on racial differences runs all the way to the Little League fields in the southern states, with Charleston, South Carolina, being ground zero. Tackling a subject such as race is no easy task. Readers are familiar with the history of the Civil War, Jim Crow, and Emmett Till. But few people would expect the anger, bigotry, and pure hatred to be shown when an eleven- and twelve-year-old Black Little League All- Star team from South Carolina simply wanted to play baseball in the state tournament. The problem was that no [End Page 142] white teams would play the Cannon Street All- Stars Little League team during the state tournament. Every white team forfeited their games against the team. The Cannon Street team won the state tournament without playing a single game. Little League officials were then left with a major decision, with implications running through both the northern and southern states. The story of the 1955 Cannon Street All- Stars, as Lamb writes, would have “remained buried” if not for a man named Augustus Holt (10). In 1993 Holt’s son, Lawrence, made the All- Star team in the Dixie Youth Baseball League. The Dixie League began in 1955 when white baseball teams refused to play Black teams. Lamb continues his narrative by describing how Holt, an African American and father of All- Star Lawrence, noticed a Confederate flag on the sleeve of his son’s uniform. This was 1993, not 1863! Augustus was furious, as Lamb describes, and his anger switched to curiosity. As he researched the issue he found that southerners didn’t want their white children playing against Black kids in baseball. Hence according to Lamb, the beginning of the Dixie Youth Baseball...

Joseph Fielding Smith's Evolving Views on Race: The Odyssey of a Mormon Apostle-President

Joseph Fielding Smith's Evolving Views on Race: The Odyssey of a Mormon Apostle-President

All Rights Reserved: Behind the Strategic Copyright of “We Shall Overcome”

AbstractIn 2015, musician and non-profit director Isaías Gamboa and filmmaker Lee Butler sued The Richmond Organization (TRO) and its offshoot Ludlow Music over their copyright to the anthem of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.” The copyright had initially been registered in 1960 and named four white folksingers: Guy Carawan, Frank Hamilton, Zilphia Horton, and Pete Seeger. Suspicious of the white names on the copyright, Gamboa wanted to liberate the song from what appeared to be corporate control. The suit was ultimately successful and the song was placed in the public domain. However, while Gamboa and Butler celebrated their win in a Manhattan court, activists across the South took it as a loss. Although overseen by TRO and Ludlow, the copyright's royalties had long gone to the Highlander Research and Education Center (formerly The Highlander Folk School), a pre-eminent and decades-old grassroots organizing hub best known for its work with such icons as Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, and Dr. Martin Luther King. The money was housed there in the We Shall Overcome Fund, which had been created by cultural workers of the civil rights movement in collaboration with those named on the copyright to facilitate the redistribution of royalties to Black artist-activists across the South. Far from facilitating theft, the copyright had strategically scaffolded Black-led community organizing for nearly 60 years. This article traces the history and work of this remarkable effort to turn the civil rights movement's anthem into its most lasting cultural tool.

The Unlikely World of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Solidarity Across Alabama, the United Kingdom, and South Africa by Cole S. Manley

Reviewed by: The Unlikely World of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Solidarity Across Alabama, the United Kingdom, and South Africa by Cole S. Manley Jonathan L. Entin The Unlikely World of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Solidarity Across Alabama, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. By Cole S. Manley. Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2021. 122 pp. $14.95. ISBN 978-1-5883-8452-2. The Montgomery bus boycott represented an iconic chapter of the Civil Rights Movement. The story is familiar: Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus; thousands of local Blacks reacted by staying off the buses for over a year; the protest propelled a previously obscure young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., into worldwide prominence; and a Supreme Court decision invalidating the segregation ordinance vindicated the protest. The details of this familiar story have been filled in by such scholars and journalists as David Garrow and Taylor Branch, as well as participants, including Parks, King, and Fred Gray, the legendary civil rights lawyer who represented both of them and many others over the years. Although the bus boycott resonated beyond this country, the voluminous literature does not really address the boycott’s international impact. Nor do the books by Mary Dudziak [Cold War, Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ, 2000)] and Thomas Borstelmann [The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge, MA, 2003)], which address the nation’s racial problems as a diplomatic challenge for the federal government during the Cold War without deeply investigating the global implications of Montgomery. Cole Manley has begun to fill this void by looking at how the bus boycott reverberated overseas, primarily in South Africa and the United Kingdom. Manley emphasizes the role of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in promoting the boycott overseas. In particular, FOR created and distributed a comic book that explicitly linked Dr. King and India’s Mohandas Gandhi as leaders of nonviolent resistance movements. The comic book circulated among activists in South Africa, which helped to promote ties between opponents of apart-heid there and of segregation in Alabama. In addition, Manley examines a 1963 bus boycott in Bristol, England, that was apparently inspired by the Montgomery protest. The precipitating incident did not involve segregated seating but [End Page 262] rather the bus company’s refusal to hire Black drivers. Also unlike Montgomery, the boycott kept only a minority of Black passengers off the buses and did not enjoy broad clergy support. Still, the Bristol campaign gained support from white university students as well as from several prominent British parliamentarians, including soon-to-be Prime Minister Harold Wilson, which helped to pressure the company into abandoning its discriminatory hiring policies. To his credit, Manley avoids overstating the relationship between the Montgomery boycott and overseas events. He acknowledges the lack of direct evidence of a connection. For example, the FOR’s comic book was published in December 1957, whereas a boycott protesting bus fare increases in South Africa’s Transvaal took place earlier in the year. The Transvaal campaign started shortly after Montgomery authorities desegregated their buses, but there was a history of other bus protests in South Africa dating back more than a decade. Moreover, Manley recognizes the lack of clarity about how the comic book was distributed in that country, though he cites evidence of its impact there. Similarly, the author concedes that it is not clear how Paul Stephenson, the principal organizer of the Bristol boycott, became aware of the Montgomery protest but suggests that the campaign there significantly influenced Stephenson’s thinking about how to deal with racial discrimination where he lived. At the same time, Manley does not hesitate to offer criticism. In particular, he faults FOR for making Dr. King the center of the movement at the expense of Parks and Jo Ann Robinson, whose prodigious organizational work as leader of the Women’s Political Council made the boycott possible. Further, he observes that British politicians who supported the Bristol protest also endorsed immigration restrictions that targeted people of color. Manley might have noted in this connection that those barred by those restrictions included Jagdish Rai Chadha, who won a landmark Supreme Court case after coming to...

Contributing Authors

Say Burgin is assistant professor of history at Dickinson College. Her publications have appeared in the Women's History Review, Journal of American Studies, Journal of International Women's Studies, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her first book project examines the myth that Black Power was “antiwhite” and the white fight for Black Power in Detroit. Say was a regular contributor to Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society. She also co-created the educational website Rosa Parks's Biography: A Resource for Teaching Rosa Parks (https://rosaparksbiography.org/). Follow her on Twitter @sayburgin.Robert T. Chase is associate professor of history at Stony Brook University. His research and teaching interests include the history of mass incarceration and the construction of what historians call “the carceral state.” He is also the co-director of the national organization Historians Against Slavery (HAS). He is an expert in social justice, Latino/a, and civil rights movements, and political and African American history. He is the editor of the book Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance (2019). His book We are Not Slaves won the Best Book Award from the Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice, American Society of Criminology; the Hank Lacayo Best Labor-Themed Award from the International Latino Book Award; and honorable mention for the Betty and Alfred Lee McClung Award from the Association for Humanist Sociology.Simon Hall is professor of modern history at the University of Leeds, where his research and teaching focus on the civil rights–Black Power movements, the student radicalism of the long 1960s, and global protest during the Cold War. His previous books include 1956: The World in Revolt (2016) and Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements in the 1960s (2005).Brandon James Render is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include twentieth-century United States social and intellectual history, post-1945 social movements and “the culture wars,” and public policy. His dissertation, “Colorblind University,” traces the intellectual genealogy of race-neutral policies and practices in higher education through admissions policies, departmental structure, and curriculum design. In addition to service as a graduate research fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy in 2018–19, he is the 2021-22 Mitchem Dissertation Fellow at Marquette University.

The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights by Thomas C. Holt

Reviewed by: The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights by Thomas C. Holt Raymond Arsenault The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights. By Thomas C. Holt. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 151. $18.95, ISBN 978-0-19-752579-1.) An abbreviated format poses a daunting challenge to any author, especially when the subject at hand is as complex and important as the American civil rights movement. Limited to approximately 120 pages of text, Thomas C. Holt had no choice but to avoid literary flourishes and potentially interesting digressions in his effort to produce a book that covers the major topics related to the history of the movement. With this restriction in mind, he set out to write a book that could transcend its brevity by keeping its "eyes on the prize," in the words of a popular movement anthem. The prize, in his view, is to capture the spirit and essence of a grassroots movement that depended heavily on the contributions and sacrifices of the mass of activists commonly known as "foot soldiers" (p. 19). Holt hopes to dispel a common misunderstanding of the civil rights struggle: the belief that the momentum and success of the movement were primarily a function of charismatic leadership and careful management from above. "Freedom," he writes in the final paragraph of the book, "is a prize won not in a single campaign, but in a long struggle waged by a determined and committed people. And, ultimately, it is not exceptional leaders but ordinary people themselves, conscious of the historical possibilities of their moment and acting collectively, who have the capacity to win that fight and change their world" (p. 120). While Holt does not deny the importance of organizational leadership, he is determined to challenge its centrality. This perspective allows him to treat leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and Stokely Carmichael as flesh and blood figures without turning them into mythic heroes. It also encourages greater appreciation for the critical role that women played in advancing the struggle, and a nuanced and balanced assessment of the relationships between local and national movements and the relative importance and connection between legal battles in the courts and the nonviolent direct-action struggle in the streets. The result is a highly sophisticated account that does full justice to both the strengths and the weaknesses of the movement. The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights is truth-telling history that studiously avoids the pitfalls of a comforting, celebratory narrative. Holt begins fittingly with a highly personal, prologue-like introduction that focuses on his grandmother Carrie Lee Fitzgerald, a Black Virginian who [End Page 423] refused to move to the back of a segregated bus in 1944. This simple act of resistance and courage, much like Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat eleven years later, introduces the intimidating world of Jim Crow that movement activists confronted in the years to come. The six chapters that follow offer an effective mix of chronological and thematic analysis, emphasizing change over time and the geographic diversity of discrimination and civil rights activism. One chapter titled "Before Montgomery" sets the stage for two chapters dealing with "Communities Organizing for Change," one subtitled "New South Cities," and the other subtitled "The New 'Old South,'" and a chapter focusing on "Organizing in the 'American Congo': Mississippi's Freedom Summer and Its Aftermath." The final two chapters address "Freedom Movements in the North" and "Legacies: 'Freedom Is a Constant Struggle.'" Despite their brevity, the six chapters offer a wealth of information and interpretive insight on the nature of the post–World War II African American freedom struggle. Holt's command of the secondary literature is sure-handed and reliable, and his conclusions about the complexities of racial discrimination and resistance bear the mark of a veteran scholar at the top of his game. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more valuable or thought-provoking introduction to the history of a movement that changed all of our lives. Raymond Arsenault University of South Florida Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Daughter of the Boycott: Carrying On a Montgomery Family's Civil Rights Legacy by Karen Gray Houston

Reviewed by: Daughter of the Boycott: Carrying On a Montgomery Family's Civil Rights Legacy by Karen Gray Houston Jonathan L. Entin Daughter of the Boycott: Carrying On a Montgomery Family's Civil Rights Legacy. Karen Gray Houston. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1-64160-303-4. 241 pp., cloth, $27.99. The Montgomery bus boycott was a pivotal chapter in the history of the civil rights movement. That 382-day protest, which culminated in a landmark Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in public transportation, helped to make Rosa Parks a national icon and launched the public career of Dr. Martin Luther King. In Daughter of the Boycott, longtime journalist Karen Gray Houston provides important new insights into events that have attracted considerable scholarly and popular attention. The author has a unique perspective: her uncle, Fred Gray (whom she affectionately calls Uncle Teddy), represented Parks and King as well as numerous other civil rights activists and the victims of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Her father, the late Thomas Gray, played an important behind-the-scenes role in the boycott both as a driver in the car pool that enabled black residents to avoid the buses and as a board member of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which coordinated the protest. The book has a significant Ohio connection: her uncle attended law school at Case Western Reserve University before returning home to Montgomery to fulfill his goal of "destroying everything segregated [he] could find" (33). And her father moved to Cleveland not long after the successful conclusion of the boycott to attend law school, so the author grew up mostly in Cleveland and graduated from Ohio University. Because Ms. Houston was a preschooler when the boycott occurred, the book is only partly a memoir but also a work of long-form journalism that reflects her desire to learn more about those events as well as to assess their long-term impact. To be sure, she does provide a wealth of family perspectives. But she begins by telling the story of Hilliard Brooks, a black war veteran who was killed by a Montgomery police officer on a segregated bus more than five years before Rosa [End Page 159] Parks got arrested. And while she provides plenty of family-related details about the origins and implementation of the boycott, her book contributes important new details of this key historical episode through contemporary interviews with people who lived through the events, or their descendants. One chapter focuses on Claudette Colvin, a teenager who had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus several months before Rosa Parks was taken to jail, but whose story was largely forgotten until recently. Houston tracked down Colvin at her New York home a few years ago and obtained her reflections. That same chapter features interviews with other black women who were plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case after having run afoul of the bus segregation rules. Those women (and in the case of the deceased lead plaintiff, Aurelia Browder, her children) had not gotten a chance to tell their stories until now. Other chapters focus on Robert Graetz, a white minister who actively supported the boycott, and his wife, Jeannie; Sally Mosher, the daughter of the Montgomery police commissioner during the boycott; and Sara Jo Bagley, whose father-in-law was the manager of the Montgomery bus company at the time. Houston's reporting offers some hitherto unknown details that even specialists will find illuminating. But the book also provides valuable insights on racial issues in Ohio. Because Houston's father came to the North for law school, she spent much of her childhood in the Glenville section of Cleveland and then in the Ludlow community that straddles Cleveland and Shaker Heights. The family was among the first blacks to move into Ludlow, and Houston recounts some of the controversy (and violence) that resulted, as well as efforts by the neighborhood association to promote stable residential integration. Unlike her uncle Teddy, Thomas Gray stayed here for most of the rest of his legal career and was deeply engaged in civil rights issues in the Cleveland area. So the book offers...

Black Women and Historical Wellness

Black Women and Historical Wellness Kimberly Akano (bio) Stephanie Evans's Black Women's Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace, Albany: SUNY Press, 2021 Amid individual, interpersonal, and sociopolitical stressors, what resources have Black women leveraged to care for themselves and their communities? For some like Harriet Jacobs or Angela Davis, stretching served as a lifeline for dealing with physical confinement during periods of enslavement or imprisonment. For Black women like Anna Julia Cooper, writing and mindfulness nurtured their intellectual health while navigating challenging academic institutions. Still, others such as Eartha Kitt and Tina Turner found comfort while moving their bodies to accomplish daily household chores—out of view from the public eye that typically followed them. For all of these women, such strategies formed the building blocks of robust practices that aligned the mind, body, and spirit. These women and many others are part of a larger tradition of Black women's embodied efforts to pursue health and healing. In Black Women's Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace, historian Stephanie Evans traces an expansive history of Black women's ideas surrounding mental health and physical well-being as they navigate stress and trauma in their everyday lives. This history decenters an emphasis on South Asian and white American iterations of yoga to shed light on African and African American contributions to yoga history—what she ultimately calls "Africana yoga" (365). By adopting a capacious understanding of yoga to include prayer, exercise, and meditation practices, Evans argues that African American women's pursuit of wellness is anything but new. Instead, Black women's healing traditions reflect an enduring legacy of "historical wellness," the sustained ways of being and knowing that Black women apply to prioritize individual and communal health (364). For Evans, a [End Page 329] historical wellness approach to Black women's understandings of wellness requires situating their healing traditions within the larger context of Black women's struggles against racism, sexual violence, and the many other challenges that threaten African American women's flourishing. In doing so, she reorients readers toward a critical examination of the role that both gender and race play in histories of mental and physical health—an aspect that is sorely understudied within most scholarship on yoga. This approach also seeks to consider how the experiences and epistemological contributions of Black women "show us inner peace is possible, historical, practical, and teachable" (136). As a work of intellectual history, Evans attends to a selection of Black women's memoirs and autobiographies to analyze how African American women have narrated their stress management strategies over time. In particular, she focuses on the writings of Black women senior elders (those age seventy and above) and Black women midlife elders (those age fifty and above). Evans situates these writings before and after 1975 when the first issue of Yoga Journal, a national publication, gained national attention. Using her method of "narrative portraiture," Evans artfully weaves biographical data with historical analysis to provide robust depictions of African American women's lives (43). These portraits offer an intimate look at subjective experiences of loss, trauma, and healing. They also suggest that past and present socio-political developments such as enslavement, the Great Migration, and the #MeToo movement required African American women to assess and refashion their varied approaches to health over time. For example, Evans gestures toward an increasing need for Black women to reconsider how nuanced understandings of wellness may positively contribute to more contemporary conversations about social media usage, classroom pedagogy, and public health policy. Indeed, rather than settling for one-dimensional portrayals of Black women that overemphasize life's trials or triumphs, Evans considers the "beautiful, ugly, and healing" moments that inform the dynamism of African American women's wellness writings (36). Perhaps one of the most striking examples of what Evans ultimately calls "Africana yoga" involves Rosa Parks's dedicated yoga practice, which, in part, sustained her lifelong commitment to activism. Evans's keen analysis of Rosa Parks's engagement with yoga stands as an apt illustration of one of her primary assertions that "it is political for Black women to claim ownership or possession, of their own bodies" (47). In other words, Black...

One hundred years before Rosa Parks: Four women who desegregated transit

While the literature on transit segregation beginning with the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction is replete with evidence of Jim Crow in the South, precious little is written about earlier struggles to integrate transit in other parts of the country that formed a precedent for later efforts. Courageous women in New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia played significant roles in the legal activism that would predate Rosa Park’s Montgomery moment in the century preceding her arrest for civil disobedience. This article seeks to situate the historical struggle for transit integration via the narratives of four female figures whose actions set the stage for transit integration and subsequent civil rights movements.

Human Beings Reasonable and Moral: Lessons from the Civil Disobedience of Rosa Parks to Catholic Counselors and Psychotherapists

W artykule skoncentrowano się na funkcji sądów moralnych oraz roli rzecznictwa w tworzeniu tożsamości katolickich księży, osób konsekrowanych i świeckich zaangażowanych w doradztwo i psychoterapię. Postać Rosy Parks (1913–2005) jest przedstawiona jako wzór myślenia i działania w zgodzie z ideałem społecznej sprawiedliwości i równości. Autor wychodzi od analizy tego, w jaki sposób akt nieposłuszeństwa wobec prawa segregacji rasowej w komunikacji miejskiej w Montgomery przyczynił się do ukształtowania się tożsamości Rosy Parks jako osoby rozumnej i moralnej. Jego zdaniem katoliccy doradcy i psychoterapeuci, idąc śladem Rosy Parks, powinni stać się rozumnymi i moralnymi podmiotami promującymi dobrostan własnych klientów. Deklaracja American Counselling Association (ACA) z 2014 r. uznaje za jedną z podstawowych wartości zawodowych doradców zaangażowanie na rzecz sprawiedliwości, co zdaniem autora powinno przełożyć się na rzecznictwo praw człowieka i godności klientów. W tym celu konieczna jest konfrontacja z niesprawiedliwymi, krzywdzącymi, nieefektywnymi i nieodpowiednimi praktykami i systemami społecznymi, które dehumanizują i uciskają klientów. Rzecznictwo wyraża się we wzmacnianiu podmiotowości i działaniach społecznych. Wzmacnianie podmiotowości oznacza, że doradcy i psychoterapeuci prowadzą klientów zarówno podczas sesji, jak i poza nimi tak, aby oni sami stali się rzecznikami swoich praw. Działania społeczne zaś zmierzają zaś do zmian politycznych i reform systemowych, co osiąga się poprzez udział w różnych aktywnościach, od inicjatyw ustawodawczych zaczynając, a na protestach kończąc. Następnie autor omawia zmiany w edukacji, badaniach i praktyce, które przyczynią się do integracji omawianego tu rzecznictwa w proces terapeutyczny osób wyznających wiarę chrześcijańską.

НАУКОВІ ПІДХОДИ ЩОДО КОНЦЕПЦІЇ ГРОМАДЯНСЬКОЇ НЕПОКОРИ У СУЧАСНІЙ ЗАХІДНІЙ ПОЛІТОЛОГІЇ

This article is devoted to the study of the concept of civil disobedience in Western political science. On the most widely accepted interpretation, civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies. There is a tendency to change traditional attitudes of civil disobedience in modern western political science. Of course, this reflects the changes that are taking place in developments in political life during recent decades. There are developed and democratic nations in that citizens can take part in political life without any discrimination and other restrictions. But there are still acts of civil disobedience. Methods include coordinating protests and nonviolent civil disobedience actions, including sit-ins, lock downs and banner hangings. Sometimes it involves direct action and confrontations on the streets. Modern scientists argue that civil disobedience is, in general, a more defensible act than the acts of private disobedience that are often referred to as ‘conscientious objection’. For example, “Rosa Parks” sitting in the whites-only section of a bus was a more conscientious sort of act than a civil registrar quietly refusing to register same-sex civil partnerships. In researching explores, the ways in which the law should recognize and protect civil disobedience, and related conduct. In modern political science argues that the legal justification for disobedience to the law caused by convictions must be recognized. This exculpatory defense is based on respect for personal autonomy and psychological integrity. Given the communicative nature of true conviction, which is not evaded, this legal justification applies to civil disobedience rather than personal disobedience. Recognizing protection would allow society to respect the links between autonomy, psychological integrity and honesty, without requiring us to give always priority to the law over our deep obligations, or always remain covert and selfcensored in our efforts to distance ourselves from the laws we oppose. Many modern political scientists expand the meaning of the concept of civil disobedience in their research. This allows for serious violations of the law during rallies, and selfish motives of participants, and non-recognition of the legitimacy of the political and legal system. That means, factors those in previous ages of research excluded possibilities of these kinds of direct action. Some aspects remain unchanged. So, almost all researchers are inclined to believe that participants in civil disobedience should be clearly aware of their actions and motives, and have a principled position and serious intentions.

Review: Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, by Martha S. Jones

Review: <i>Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All</i>, by Martha S. Jones

Rosa parks visits the Middle East: critical events in a minority arab classroom

ABSTRACT When invited to respond to the story of Rosa Parks through describing whether they encountered similar events within their Israeli context, the minority Palestinian-Israeli EFL ninth-grade students in this teacher research narrated stories resonating with Rosa’s story. Evident in their narratives were events that left an immense impact on them. A critical events analysis of those stories shed light on minority students’ feelings, beliefs, identities, and perceptions of reality as they navigated their daily life amidst a challenging reality of marginalization and silencing. In addition to expanding the understanding of how identities of indigenous minority students are constructed through mundane everyday encounters, this article contributes to literature on using pedagogies that help students to narrate, explore and understand these encounters as a social matter.