12-8-17
Before the Bus, Rosa Parks Was a Sexual Assault Investigator
Breaking Newstags: civil rights, Rosa Parks, sex scandals, sexual harassment, womens history
2017 may well become known as the year of #MeToo. But the women standing up today are in fact part of a long history of activists fighting sexual harassment. And one of the activists more commonly associated with another movement was a key figure in early attempts to rectify sexual injustice: Rosa Parks.
Revered as a civil rights icon, Rosa Parks is best known for sparking the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, but her activism in the black community predates that day. She joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1943, 12 years before that fateful commute. In her first years in the organization, she worked specifically on criminal justice and its application in Alabama communities.
One part of this was protecting black men from false accusations and lynchings; the other was ensuring that black people who had been sexually assaulted by white people could get their day in court. This particular issue was close to Parks’ heart as in 1931 a white male neighbor had attempted to assault her.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Raw Fish and Tapeworms: Ancient Latrines Reveal the Diets of Our Ancestors
- Sam Houston Could Soon Be Getting His Own Presidential Library
- Trump delays release of some JFK assassination files until 2021, bowing to national security concerns
- A Lynching Memorial Is Opening. The Country HasNever Seen Anything Like It.
- Gina Haspel’s CIA Torture File
- Historian Erik Loomis makes the case for a federal jobs guarantee
- Michael Beschloss says this isn't the most politically divisive time in America
- This is what happened when a historian with a rural background wrote favorably about gun control in the Washington Post
- Is Economics Going Back To The 1800s? Maybe So.
- Historian: Why destroying archives is never a good idea