A More Beautiful and Terrible History by Jeanne Theoharis

Author:Jeanne Theoharis [Theoharis, Jeanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807075883
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2017-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

BEYOND THE BUS: CRIMINAL JUSTICE WAS KEY

Criminal justice was a key through-line in movement efforts. Reckoning with this history shows us familiar moments of the movement anew. The Montgomery bus boycott was sparked in part by the recent acquittal of the two men who had lynched fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. In the decade before the boycott, Montgomery’s small cadre of activists—including E. D. Nixon, Johnnie Carr, Irene West, Rufus Lewis, and Rosa Parks—targeted the criminal justice system as a key arena of injustice. They worked on two interrelated problems: the ways the justice system disproportionately and discriminatorily targeted Black people for policing and prosecution, and the ways that brutality, violence, and sexual aggression against Black people often went unaccounted for and unpunished. They pushed to get the law to be responsive to white brutality against Black people, particularly sexual violence against Black women; in cases such as those of Recy Taylor, who was raped by six white men, and Gertrude Perkins, who was raped by two police officers, they labored mightily to get justice for these women but ultimately the rapists went unpunished.15

And they sought to protect Black people—largely Black men—from wrongful charges and legal lynching. One particularly egregious case was that of teenager Jeremiah Reeves, who was having a consensual relationship with a young white woman, but when they were found out, she claimed rape. Fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin, who would refuse to give up her seat on a bus in March 1955, remembers seeing the police arrest Reeves, whom she knew as a student at Booker T. Washington High School, and the impact his arrest had on her growing political consciousness.16 The police beat the sixteen-year old Reeves and forced the teenager to sit in an electric chair until he confessed.17 Reeves later retracted his admission of guilt but was convicted and sentenced to death. The Supreme Court in 1954 overturned his conviction because of biased jury composition. He was tried again in 1955 and a second all-white jury took only thirty-four minutes to restore his death penalty. Despite years of work by Montgomery activists to try to have him exonerated, when Reeves turned twenty-one in 1958, he was executed.18

Many in Montgomery had been devastated when the news came in August 1955 that Emmett Till, a teenager visiting from Chicago, had been lynched in Mississippi. Having known other cases like Till’s that were swept under the rug, Rosa Parks and her comrades were heartened by national attention to the case. The difference in Till’s case, according to Parks, was that Emmett Till came from the North and Till’s mother’s courageously decided to allow his brutalized body to be photographed by Jet magazine. Organizers such as T. R. M. Howard succeeded in getting news outlets to care. Montgomery activists were hopeful that finally—given the publicity around Till’s murder—there might be justice when his two killers were put on trial in the fall of 1955.

Then, four days before she would make her historic stand, Parks, Nixon, and many of Montgomery’s Black activists

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