December 1st, 1955, in a bus in Montgomery, Alabama,
a black woman refused to get up
to give her seat to white passengers.
This woman was Rosa Parks
and her action was a key element of a symbolic movement in United States:
the civil rights movement.
This movement was orchestrated in response to many
racist, violent and humiliating events
that fuel the need to many black Americans
to fight to get rights, decent lives,
in short, not to be considered like second-class Americans.
The Doctor Who episode "Rosa" spoke very aptly
of racial tensions existing in 1955
in a Southern state like Alabama
and explain succinctly other contemporary events
as well as the rise of the civil rights movement.
It seems interesting to me to go into this in depth
to understand a little better why there was this atmosphere
in a town as Montgomery.
For this, let's go back to 1861, the beginning of the American Civil War.
The American Civil War is not really mentioned in class in France,
but in the United States, 150 years later,
this is still a big subject of tension.
To summarize very roughly, at this time
begans to emerge a split between the Northern states,
abolitionists and rather progressives,
and Southern states, deeply conservatives
and whose economy was largely based on slavery.
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln, figurehead of abolitionist politics,
was elected President of the United States.
Obviously, it didn't please the southern states.
This resulted to a bloody civil war that fought over four years,
but which remained deeply in the minds,
essentially southerners ones.
By the way, you surely know this flag,
the flag of the Confederate States of America,
still, in 2018, highly valued by nationalists of the South,
segregationists and Ku Klux Klan members.
In 2018. That sets the tone.
December 18th, 1865,
the American Constitution raised the Thirteenth amendment:
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,...
shall exist within the United States,
or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
That said... The abolition of slavery did not end inequality between black and white people.
It would have been nice if it were so simple...
But above all, very utopian.
Equality was far from being achieved in the northern states,
where there was strong racism and significant ghettoization,
but it was nothing compared to the southern states and their “Jim Crow laws”:
named in reference to a black jester character from a popular show,
originally interpreted by the white artist Thomas Rice
who was painting his face in black.
This is also the historical significance of blackface.
So, the Jim Crow laws, applied in many states or cities of the South from 1876,
have taken out all attempts at political and social inclusion
of black Americans during the previous decade
and instituted racial segregation.
Segregation is an imposed split, in this case between two ethnic groups.
This meant, depending on the state where one’s was:
schools, public services, transport, water fountains,
restaurants, hotels, theaters, elevators, telephone booths,
shops, toilets, waiting rooms, residential areas, orphanages,
even separate prisons for "Whites" and "Coloreds".
In some states, a white person and a black person could not get married.
The laws were state-specific, which turned, for a Black passenger,
any long-distance trip into a real headache.
What made segregation legal was that it hid behind the laws
claiming that Blacks had access to the same rights as Whites,
they were given their own schools, their own seats in public transports...
Even if it was just an equality of facade.
White people were given priority when transports were full,
schools were less well endowed, etc...
Several Southern states also found,
at the end of the nineteenth century,
ways to bypass the law guaranteeing the right to vote to all citizens,
in order to exclude Black representatives
by limiting the vote of Black citizens.
The most popular was the "literacy test".
To vote, you had to know how to read and understand the Constitution.
But the Black population was mostly illiterate.
How unlucky!
Well, it also cleared out the poor Whites.
Good thing too, isn’t it, eh?
Despite an increase of protests and boycotts,
it was quite difficult for Black people to protest for decades.
Scared at the thought of being beaten or even killed
if they provoked anything,
the feeling that to have accessible services was better than to have nothing at all...
And for the Whites, the southern heritage of a racial separation
that remained culturally marked and therefore seemed quite normal.
To crown this already exacerbated prevailing racism,
Southern states see the growth of a White supremacists organization,
determined to get back and keep by violence
what the American Civil War had made them lose:
this is the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1866,
just after the abolition of slavery.
The late nineteenth century saw a substantial increase of lynchings,
at first beating or whipping Blacks
or Whites having joined forces with Blacks or defending them,
and then, murdering a hundred people each year,
torturing them because of a simple dark look,
sometimes even just to let off steam.
It was illegal, of course,
but a poor and alone Black man found hanged,
was both easily concealable for the authorities
and also a good way to please the supremacists to make them quiet for some time.
In the opposite camp, the civil rights movement was slowly emerging,
with the creation in 1909 of the "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People",
the NAACP, trying to make things happen at its scale, bit by bit.
It was actually the World War II that played a decisive role in the gradual decline of segregation.
People started to see the similarities between the Southern regimes
and the totalitarian regimes they were fighting against,
and a million Afro-Americans have been called at the front,
many of them coming back with the conviction that such segregation was no longer acceptable.
The civil rights movement bounced back.
This led to a decree in 1954:
the prohibition of segregation in public schools, considered unconstitutional.
On paper, it was a big step forward,
but the pill was very hard to swallow and tensions grew on both sides.
And then, we finally arrive in 1955,
but before joining Rosa in Montgomery, Alabama,
we are going to make a stop at the Mississippi River Delta.
Do you remember?
In the episode, Rosa talks about a young black boy killed a few months earlier.
Emmett Till was a 14-year-old from Chicago,
came to spend, during the summer of 1955,
some time at his grand-uncle’s place in Mississippi.
His family had warned him to keep his distance from the Whites so he would not be put in danger.
Emmett, like any rebellious teenager, did not hear it that way.
While he was shopping with a few friends, he would have whistled the manager, Carolyn Wright.
His friends later claimed that it was just provocation,
Emmett having told them he was not afraid of the Whites of the South
because, coming from the north, they would not dare to do anything to him.
Carolyn's version was more exhaustive,
speaking of vulgar remarksand saying that Emmett would have grasped her size.
It was not until 2017 that Carolyn admitted that her version was invented.
62 years too late. Why?
Because four days after the incident, on August 28, 1955,
Carolyn's husband, Roy, and his half-brother kidnapped Emmett to beat him.
The teenager showing that he was not afraid of them, they began to torture him...
Beware, it's graphic...
By shooting at him, strangling him with barbed wire,
pulling his eyes off, before to throw him still alive in a river.
Emmett's mother insisted that to show the mutilated body of her son at the funeral,
so you can find pictures of the corpse easily on the Internet.
I blurred it, but you can search them you have a strong stomach.
Roy and his half-brother were quickly arrested,
but they were acquitted after a quick trial
that will cause waves of outrage across the country.
Waves that resumed with greater intensity in 1956,
when the two murderers told the whole story in a newspaper,
because they could not be judged again in a case where they had been acquitted.
But let's go back to Rosa Parks.
The fact to refuse to leave ones place was not unusual,
but each of the preceding cases was difficult to exploit
because it could easily be countered by bad faith juries.
A complainant sidelined because of an alcoholic father,
another successful but only for commercial reasons...
One of the best-known cases is Claudette Colvin’s:
a teenager, NAACP member, which also included Rosa Parks, that she knew well.
The NAACP refused to organise a plan based on Claudette's gesture,
suspected of being pregnant from a married man, which would have made bad press.
It needed someone without reproach to defend.
Someone distinguished and respectable.
Rosa Parks met those criteria
and she was ready to fight.
All started with his lawyer, Edgar Nixon,
local NAACP president, who called for mobilization.
Afterwards, a local NAACP pastor, Martin Luther King Jr.,
was elected president of a new non-violent civil disobedience association:
the Montgomery Improvement Association.
It also included, among the active members of this association,
Fred Gray, who is in the episode,
the lawyer who defended Claudette Colvin and also defended Rosa Parks
and many other black activists during the years that followed.
On Monday, December 5, 1955, four days after the act of Rosa Parks,
the Montgomery bus boycott started.
Blacks accounting for three-quarters of the users,
it was a monumental loss for the bus company,
which still refused to yield to pressure.
It was the Supreme Court that will resolve the situation
by declaring unconstitutional the segregation in the buses,
leading to the end of the boycott 381 days after its establishment,
in December 21, 1956.
Nonviolent mobilizations have spread, more and more,
bringing together more and more people from all walks of life,
symbolized by iconic figures such as the very active Martin Luther King Jr.
Some demonstrations, like those of Selma,
were strongly repressed by the police
and followed by intimidation or even murders
perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1964 and 1965, segregation was definitely buried
thanks to the Civil Rights Act,
which prohibited all discrimination in public places,
and through the Voting Rights Act,
which removed reading tests to become voters.
Bit by bit, equal rights has gained ground, the supremacists are losing it.
We could say that in 2018, 63 years later,
racism has disappeared.
That would be beautiful, isn't it?
On October 21, 2018, the day of the broadcast of the episode Rosa,
aboard a Ryanair flight,
a passenger insulted his neighbor, a black lady,
calling her "bastard of black" or "stupid and uglyand ugly cow" not speaking his language,
insisting that she changes seat.
Some other passengers called the crew to evict the man from the plane.
Well no.
It is the victim who changed places while the man traveled quietly.
Ryanair's minimal reaction to the ensuing scandal.
63 years have passed since Rosa was expelled from the bus,
yet intolerance and racism are still put first too often.
In short, even after the bus boycott,
the fight continued for everyone, including Rosa Parks,
who moved to Michigan to take a less risky life.
She lived a committed life but after all normal,
participating in pacifist actions until old age.
During her last years of life, she had many financial and health problems,
relying on the support of her church to keep her head out of the water.
She died on October 24, 2005, causing great emotion
and a wave of tributes across the country,
mainly to Montgomery, which has since,
and became the city of the struggle for civil rights.
63 years, it is so close.
142 years since the installation of segregation laws Jim Crow, it's ridiculously close.
So many advances in so little time, but also so much trouble.
No fight is fully won.
We must be vigilant in all circumstances
so that our social and human achievements are not stained.
And even if in the 79th century, there will probably always be supremacists,
this is our duty to be human to fight to preserve the rights of all,
out of respect for the present generations, those to come,
and for all Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Emmett Till,
Fred Gray, Abraham Lincoln and Claudette Colvin who changed history.
