In March 1857, eight slaves from Dorchester County, Maryland, escaped following a route provided by Harriet Tubman, who also previously escaped from Dorchester County.
Tubman had told the fugitives to contact Thomas Otwell, a free black man and underground railroad conductor in Dover, Delaware. Unfortunately, instead of guiding them North to the next step of the railroad, Otwell led them to the Dover jail in expectation of collecting a $3,000 reward. However, despite the betrayal, the “Dover Eight” were able to escape the jail. All of them eventually made their way to freedom.
The slaves were discovered when a man approached Sheriff Green with the information about eight runaway slaves. The man arranged to have the slaves with him in Dover that night.
At about 4 o’clock on a Tuesday morning, the man along with the slaves appeared at the jail. While the sheriff was getting dressed, they all entered the jail and went upstairs. The eight slaves found an open room. The sheriff, knowing the group was upstairs, headed up there to dead bolt the room and seize them.
However, the sheriff found them in the entry way. He turned around and went back to retrieve his revolver, but the slaves followed him down to his room. The slaves entered the room where the sheriff’s wife and children were sleeping before he could seize his revolver.
One of the slaves reportedly became suspicious of the sheriff. The law enforcement officer quickly seized the man and, while in a struggle, the other slaves burst through a window and escaped. They made a fire scatter across the floor, which resulted in awakening the sheriff’s family. The sheriff released the slave for a split second, which allowed him to escape as well.
Six of the eight slaves were later tracked down to a house in Camden, but the officers could not enter the home because they did not have a proper warrant. Later, the six men were moved through the country by the forest woods, which was later known as the “underground railroad.” The other two escaped slaves were seen heading north right after they escaped.
As a teenager, she made history, but it took decades for her to become recognized for her courage and achievements.
source: biography.com
first posted 2015
A full nine months before Rosa Parks‘s famous act of civil disobedience, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin is arrested on March 2, 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus.
Colvin was traveling home from school when the bus’ driver ordered her, along with three fellow Black students, to give up their row of seats to a white passenger. Colvin’s friends obliged, but she refused to move. At school, she had recently learned about abolitionists, and later recalled that “it felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn’t get up.”
On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black passengers to relinquish seats to white passengers when the bus was full. Blacks also were required to sit at the back of the bus. Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system and led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation.
I did not get on the bus to get arrested; I got on the bus to go home.
Quiet Strength: the faith, the hope, and the heart of a woman who changed a nation. Reflections by Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Pub. House, 1994. p23.
Rosa Parks: “Why do you push us around?” Officer: “I don’t know but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.”
Quiet Strength: the faith, the hope, and the heart of a woman who changed a nation. Reflections by Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Pub. House, 1994. p23.
Rosa McCauley was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. In 1932, she married Raymond Parks and with his encouragement earned a high school diploma. The couple was active in the Montgomery Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) External. While working as a seamstress, Mrs. Parks served as chapter secretary and, for a time, as advisor to the NAACP Youth Council. Denied the right to vote on at least two occasions because of her race, Rosa Parks also worked with the Voters League in preparing blacks to register.
“We Shall Overcome.” Silphia Horton, Frank Hamilton, Guy Carawan, and Pete Seeger; New York: Ludlow Music, Inc., 1963. [Courtesy: Ludlow Music, Inc., 11 West 19th Street New York, NY 10011.] The Civil Rights Era. In The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship. Music Division Probably first used in 1945 by striking South Carolina tobacco workers, “We Shall Overcome” became the anthem of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The protest song’s first separate publication, shown above, credits Silphia Horton of the Highlander Folk School with shared authorship.
Following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the NAACP choose Rosa Parks to attend a desegregation workshop at the Highlander Folk School External in Monteagle, Tennessee. Reflecting on that experience, Parks recalled, “At Highlander I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society…I gained there the strength to persevere in my work for freedom not just for blacks, but for all oppressed people.”
Although her arrest was not planned, Park’s action was consistent with the NAACP’s desire to challenge segregated public transport in the courts. A one-day bus boycott coinciding with Parks’s December 5 court date resulted in an overwhelming African-American boycott of the bus system. Since black people constituted seventy percent of the transit system’s riders, most busses carried few passengers that day.
The success of the boycott mandated sustained action. Religious and political leaders met at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (later the Southern Christian Leadership Conference). Dexter’s new pastor, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., was appointed the group’s leader. For the next year, the Montgomery Improvement Association coordinated the bus boycott and King, an eloquent young preacher, inspired those who refused to ride:
If we are wrong—the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong—God almighty is wrong! If we are wrong—Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to earth. If we are wrong—justice is a lie. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” 1
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Montgomery, Alabama, 1955.
During the boycott, King insisted that protestors retain the moral high ground, hinting at his later strategy of nonviolent resistance.
This is not a war between the white and the Negro but a conflict between justice and injustice. If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don’t ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love. 2
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Montgomery, Alabama, 1955.
In December 1956 the Supreme Court banned segregation on public transportation and the boycott ended over a year after it had begun. Rosa and Raymond Parks moved to Detroit where, for more than twenty years, the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement” worked for Congressman John Conyers. In addition to the Rosa Parks Peace Prize (Stockholm, 1994) and the U.S. Medal of Freedom (1996), Rosa Parks has been awarded two-dozen honorary doctorates from universities around the world.
Rosa Parks died on October 24, 2005, at the age of ninety-two, at her home in Detroit, Michigan. On October 30, 2005, Parks became the first woman to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.
Martin Luther King Jr. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. ed. Clayborne Carson (New York: Intellectual Properties Management in Association with Warner Books: 1998), 60. (Return to text)
Today, November, 22, 2014, we all should remember Tamir Rice
On November 22, 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice is shot dead by police officers in Cleveland, Ohio. Rice, who was carrying a realistic-looking toy gun at the time, was one of several African Americans killed by American law enforcement at the time whose deaths garnered national attention, making him a martyr of the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement.
Rice was playing with an Airsoft plastic pellet gun at the Cudell Recreation Center in Cleveland on the afternoon of the 22nd. An observer called the police to report him, specifically mentioning that the gun was likely a toy and that Rice appeared to be a minor. The police dispatcher, however, simply told Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback that the suspect had a gun. Loehmann and Garmback arrived on the scene and shot Rice in a matter of seconds. Issuing an opinion that both officers should be charged with homicide, a judge would later write, “this court is still thunderstruck by how quickly this event turned deadly.” The boy died of his wounds the next day.
Despite the judge’s opinion, a grand jury declined to charge either officer. The killing of Rice came a few months after the killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown by police in New York City and Ferguson, Missouri, respectively; two days after the killing of unarmed Akai Gurley by the NYPD; and just two days before a grand jury declined to indict the officer who killed Brown. This spate of police killings, many of which were caught on camera and seen by millions of people, led to civil unrest throughout the United States and drew public attention to the excesses of American law enforcement. In 2017, the Cleveland police fired Loehmann, the officer who killed Rice, not for the shooting but for failing to disclose that he had previously been declared emotionally unfit for duty while working for a different police department.
The idea that a journalist, let alone the police and their lawyers blamed Tamir for his own death. This is offensive, tragic, and beyond unacceptable! Right??
The National Association of the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) Silent Protest Parade, also known as the Silent March, was held in New York City on Saturday, July 28, 1917, on 5th Avenue. This parade came about because the violence acted upon African Americans, including the race riots, lynching, and outages in Texas, Tennessee, Illinois, and other states.
One incident in particular, the East St. Louis Race Riot, also called the East St. Louis Massacre, was a major catalyst of the silent parade. This horrific event drove close to six thousand blacks from their own burning homes and left several hundred dead.
James Weldon Johnson, the second vice president of the NAACP, brought together other civil rights leaders who gathered at St. Phillips Church in New York to plan protest strategies. None of the group wanted a mass protest, yet all agreed that a silent protest through the streets of the city could spark the idea of racial reform and an end to the violence. Johnson remembered the idea of a silent protest from A NAACP Conference in 1916 when Oswald Garrison Villard suggested it. All the organizations agreed that this parade needed to be comprised of the black citizens, rather than a racially-mixed gathering. They argued that as the principal victims of the violence, African Americans had a special responsibility to participate in this, the first major public protest of racial violence in U.S. history.
The parade went south down 5th Avenue, moved to 57th Street and then to Madison Square. It brought out nearly ten thousand black women, men, and children, who all marched in silence. Johnson urged that the only sound to be heard would be the “the sound of muffled drums.” Children, dressed in white, led the protest, followed by women behind, also dressed in white. Men followed at the rear, dressed in dark suits.
The marchers carried banners and posters stating their reasons for the march. Both participants and onlookers remarked that this protest was unlike any other seen in the city and the nation. There were no chants, no songs, just silence. As those participating in the parade continued down the streets of New York, black Boy Scouts handed out flyers to those watching that described the NAACP’s struggle against segregation, lynching, and discrimination, as well as other forms of racist oppression.
James Weldon Johnson wrote in his 1938 autobiography, Along This Way, that “the streets of New York have witnessed many strange sites, but I judge, never one stranger than this; among the watchers were those with tears in their eyes.”
Sources:
Jessie Carney Smith, Linda T. Wynn, Freedom Facts and Firsts: 400 Years of the African American Civil Rights Experience (Visible Ink Press, 2009); James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008); James Barron, “A History of Making Protest Messages Heard, Silently,” The New York Times (June 2012); “Snippet From History #2: The Negro Silent Protest of 1917,” http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2013/02/28/snippet-from-history-2-the-negro-silent-protest-of-1917/; “The Negro Silent Protest Parade,”
Be a Seed for Change 
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