1955 | Human Rights, Social Justice
Human Rights, Social Justice
Former NAACP secretary Walter F. White dies of a heart attack at New York March 21 at age 61. His autobiography How Far the Promised Land is published anonymously, but the nation still has three lynchings, down from scores per year when he began his work.
Black farmer and political leader Lamar D. Smith, 63, is shot to death August 13 in front of the Lincoln County Courthouse at Brookhaven, Miss., after seeking to qualify blacks to vote. More than 20 people witness the World War II veteran's shooting, including several blacks, but nobody admits to having seen anything and no witnesses testify against the three white men charged with the murder. Black minister George W. Lee is killed gangland style at Belzoni, Miss., after a week of terror during which whites have vandalized blacks' property. The blacks have refused to send their children to racially segregated schools, the whites have retaliated by refusing credit to blacks at local stores, and Lee had campaigned for black voting rights.
The brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till August 29 at Ruleville, Miss., exacerbates racial tensions. A visitor from Chicago, Till converses with a white woman, the wife of grocery store co-owner Roy Bryant (allegedly on a dare). His body, savagely beaten, shot in the head, and bound with barbed wire, is found 8 days later in the nearby Tallahatchie River. Many people make little of the incident, but the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier and other black newspapers publish a photograph of Till's body, his face beaten beyond recognition, together with a photograph of his alleged white murderers laughing about it. The photographs enrage the black community, evoking cries for social justice. Bryant's half-brother J. W. Milam will acknowledge that he and Bryant murdered Till, saying, "I like niggers—in their place . . . But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers ain't gonna vote where I live . . . They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger even gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired of living."
The U.S. Supreme Court orders desegregation of public golf courses, parks, swimming pools, and playgrounds November 7 in a decision based on the 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.
The Interstate Commerce Commission acts November 25 to ban racial segregation on interstate buses and trains and in terminal waiting rooms. Tuskegee-born Montgomery Fair department store seamstress and NAACP worker Rosa Parks (née Rosa Louise McCauley), 42, refuses to give up her seat on a downtown Cleveland Avenue bus to a white man December 1 (see Morgan v. Virginia, 1946). The same bus driver who ejected her 12 years ago and had her arrested for entering his bus by the front door instead of the rear door says, "If you don't stand up I'm going to call the police and have you arrested." Given a summons, Parks decides with her mother and husband to make hers a test case challenging segregation, and her action precipitates a general boycott of Montgomery buses. Some 35,000 handbills are mimeographed at a midnight meeting of the Women's Political Council: "We are . . . asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial . . . You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don't ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday." Black-owned taxis pick up fares at every municipal bus stop, collecting only the standard 10¢ fare charged by city buses. "There comes a time that people get tired," says Dexter Avenue Baptist Church minister Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 27, to a crowd at the Holt Street Baptist Church that evening; King married budding soprano Coretta Scott 2 years ago and he leads the bus boycott (see 1956).
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When Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus she won support for a civil rights protest movement.
Indonesia and Nicaragua grant women the right to vote on the same basis as men. Peru's Odria dictatorship grants voting rights to women September 7.