May 9, 2021

Five Decades before Rosa---"The Rosa Parks of D.C."


      Not to take anything away from Rosa (as if anyone could!), but 50 years earlier, another woman in Washington D.C. took a similar courageous stand.

 "the stand (Barbara Pope) took against racism in transportation nearly 50 years before Rosa Parks’s bus ride: In August 1906, Pope boarded a train at Union Station and traveled into Virginia, in the process challenging Virginia’s Jim Crow law requiring segregation on trains and streetcars. She soon gained the support of Du Bois and his Niagara Movement, a precursor to the NAACP. And her case became one of the first steps along the path to the end of legal segregation — leading the way toward the NAACP’s hallmark 1954 Supreme Court victory in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka."

 Read her story in the Washington Post Magazine HERE.

 


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