Civil(ian) Rights History
Who told you civilians were the pioneers...?
So… I got a reply to my last ☧ost that began “I am troubled by your recent ‘Beyond Antiwar’ email. It is historically inaccurate and incendiary.” I don’t know about incendiary, that’s in the eye of the beholder, but I definitely got my history right. The problem is that too often we only know the history we’ve been told. Sometimes history is more art than science, an exercise in propagating our own preconceived values and exemplars. At worst, hagiography is little more than a pantheon of our own little gods, from immaculate ‘saints’ to deplorable ‘sinners.’
When I was researching God is a Grunt, I kind of stumbled onto the final chapter I referenced in my last ☧ost. The more I read, the more I learned how selective the read of history is that I was given. If you were ever shocked to learn “Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin” then you know how I felt. If you kept reading, you’ll discover that Colvin was an unwed pregnant teenager, so ‘the movement’ deemed her a little too ‘sinful’ for the press …and the courts.
I get it, they were right. Human institutions are human. What I don’t get is how, when, why, and who decided veterans deserved to be written out of the story too. After all, there were plenty of soldiers and veterans who did what Parks or Colvin did before Parks and Colvin did it. What about them was deemed not up to snuff?
Before Colvin there was Private First Class Sarah Keys, who I mentioned the last ☧ost. On August 1, 1952, she was a 22-year-old enlisted woman on a nonstop ticket from Ft. Dix to her home in NC when she refused to give her seat to a white Marine. Were it not for her WWII Navy veteran father, she would never have filed the complaint that ended up at the Supreme Court. Keys v. Carolina Coach forcibly integrated interstate travel on November 7, 1955, a month before Parks did what Keys had done years prior.
Keys’ legal representation came from Captain Dovey (Johnson) Roundtree, whose story aligned in striking fashing with Keys’. Another NC native, she was a CPT in what was then the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in the early months of 1943 when she refused to forfeit her ticket during a layover in Miami. Her arrest inspired her to practice law at Howard University and her very first client was PFC Keys, the only attorney I can think of whose very first case went all the way to SCOTUS.
The Keys decision closed a loophole left in an earlier SCOTUS opinion, Morgan v. Virginia, which struck down a state’s right to segregate interstate bus travel without forcing states to integrate. Irene Morgan was a defense contractor, a so-called “rosie” who was supporting her family by building B-26 Marauders in Baltimore for (Lockheed) Martin. What’s really interesting with Morgan is the timing, which lines up with at least two other bus incidents, each with VERY different results.
Independence Day fell on a Tuesday in 1944, a little over a month after the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy and signaled the beginning of the end of WWII. Patriotism was high and soldiers waited looked forward to the long weekend and star-spangled festivities. On Thursday July 6th, First Lieutenant Jack Robinson refused to move seats in an Army-chartered, integrated Fort Hood, TX bus line. The kangaroo court-martial that followed effectively ended his military career before he could deploy with the 761st “Black Panthers.”
Two days later in North Carolina, Private Booker T. Spicely got into a shouting match with a bus driver while traveling from Camp Butner to Durham. Unlike the ‘officer and gentleman’ in TX, maybe out of respect for the uniform he was wearing, Spicely apologized for any offense he may have caused before departing. That didn’t prevent the driver from shooting him twice in the back before finishing his route and surrendering himself to the police. Before the sun came up, the driver was bailed out by Duke Power and PVT Spicely was dead. Watts Hospital, now the NC School of Science and Math, had refused to treat the uniformed, wounded soldier 👏 in 👏 a 👏 time 👏 of 👏 war.
Irene Morgan, 1LT Jackie Robinson, PVT Booker Spicely, CPT Dovey Johnson, and PFC Sarah Keys.
It was a week later and 300 miles away, on Sunday, July 16th, that Morgan took her stand in Middlesex County, Virginia. Given the precedent, she faced either death or unemployment by refusing to comply with an unjust segregation law. To her credit, she was prepared to go down fighting, which she did - beating off one sheriff and ruining the uniform of another before finally being arrested. She pled guilty to disorderly conduct, but she fought the charge of violating Jim Crow.
Sometimes called the “First Freedom Ride,” the Journey of Reconciliation did not occur for another three years. One of the arguments used by nonviolent activists like Bayard Rustin was that states were failing to enforce Morgan. Claudette Colvin didn’t have the double assurance of having the Keys ruling as well, but Rosa Parks did. The November 7th ruling stood out for directly rejecting Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 SCOTUS opinion that propped up “separate but equal.”
When Parks took her stand, patriotic sentiment among the military community would have been high. Keys was issued three days before a new national holiday that had been declared a year prior, called Veterans Day. When they had to form a new organization to host the planned boycott, SFC Ralph Abernathy named it the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). After it fulfilled its purpose, gave way to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but those who have served immediately recognize the acronym’s significance, “Missing In Action,” just like veterans’ civil rights.
SFC Ralph Abernathy and some civilian friends.
The civil rights movement remains incomplete. Soldiers and veterans are still denied full benefits of citizenship, including equal opportunity in employment, fair housing, and protection from hate crimes. Martin Luther King may have been the one to say “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” but it is servicemembers who have been the vanguard, who have gone anywhere and everywhere when justice calls them. The outrage of denying veterans the rights they secured for others was used to great effect in the 1960s, but I wonder where that righteous anger is today. Rather than directing it at soldiers and veterans, why not be mad at the injustice itself?
