Letters of March 21

Racism at a restaurant
I always knew there was racism, but I had never really seen it up close until that day. I was coming from my middle school orientation to learn everything I needed to know for sixth grade next year. My mother’s boyfriend and I were heading home when Ma called and suggested we go out for some food at Cooper’s Hawk. I LOVE it there since they let me sit in the Grown-Ups side. Then the usual, we ordered drinks and food. I ordered the angel hair with a side of a fruit cup.
But something caught our attention. Three cops surrounded these two Black ladies. The cops were asking one of them to leave or she would be arrested, and then they escorted both of them out of the restaurant. We walked out to see what was going on and we saw the two women standing there. My mom talked to them and said “F*ck this shit, it is just fu*king racism” and the two ladies said “Yeah, f*ck this shit” and then apologized for their language around me.
I said “It’s ok, I have heard worse.”
Then my mom asked who they were and why did they get escorted out by the police? They said they did not even know. They were at the bar  just getting a birthday tasting. A stranger gave them his tasting and that is when someone complained about them.
As we were talking, one of the women said “ You know what, I want to go find out why I was kicked out.” So she went in to ask the bartender why was she kicked out. We followed her. She asked why and the bartender  said nothing. Then the manager came and said “I thought the cops escorted you out.” My mom was trying to talk to him but he deliberately ignored her.
That day in school we had just learned about people’s rights. When they are arrested, they must be read their Miranda Rights. But the manager called the cops and they arrested her without blinking. She kept asking, “Why am I being arrested?” But they ignored her and did not even read her Miranda Rights. You might be thinking maybe they read it in the car, but you would be wrong.
When my mom said you need to read her the Miranda Rights, they said “We don’t do that. We don’t know what you are talking about.”
Then my mom started screaming her butt off, saying the woman needed to know why she was being arrested. The woman was all calm and my mother was shouting, but they arrested the Black woman. They took her away to the Oak Lawn police. As we drove my mom said how this world is messed up and cops don’t care about your rights.
She said this is a good lesson to learn. Racism is everywhere and the cops are racist. I didn’t think I’d see it or they’d treat women that way. It was very upsetting, but it reminds me why we always have to fight back.
*****
Four women preceded Rosa Parks
Claudette Colvin grew up in segregated Montgomery, Alabama. On March 2, 1955, when she was 15 years old, she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith did the same and were arrested, as was Colvin. When Rosa Parks was arrested, the NAACP considered her most suitable for a test court case. But Colvin, Browder, McDonald and Smith have largely been left out of the history books.
Also largely missing from the history books is the 1953 Baton Rouge bus boycott where the riders were 80 percent Black. For eight days Black workers and students rode in free taxis or private cars or walked to protest the segregated busses. Not only was the segregation law significantly weakened, bus the Baton Rouge action inspired and was a model for the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.
Similar to Baton Rouge, in Montgomery over 75 percent of the bus ridership was Black. Parks refused to move on a Thursday. That weekend members of the Women’s Political Council stayed up all night mimeographing (old fashioned photocopying) 35,000 leaflets calling for a bus boycott on Monday. Sunday morning the word was gotten out to all the Black churches. By Monday morning the boycott was on and lasted for 381 days.
In February 1956 attorney Fred Gray filed a landmark federal lawsuit (Browder v. Gale). The Parks lawsuit was bogged down in state courts. On December 17, 1956 the U. S. Supreme Court ended segregation on public transportation in Alabama. Claudette Colvin was a star witness. On December 21, 1956 the Montgomery Bus Boycott ended.
Rosa Parks got experience from the anti-racist struggles of the 1930s led by the Communist Party. The biggest was the worldwide fight to free the Scottsboro Boys, eight young Black men falsely accused of raping a white woman. Parks attended some Communist Party meetings. According to Black historian Robin Kelley “the infrastructure that was laid forward becomes the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, was laid in many ways, …by the Communist Party” in the 1930s (NPR, 2/16/2010).
*****
U.S. orchestrated Iran Coup
The March 7 issue of CHALLENGE reports, “in 1953, the U.S. backed a coup in Iran that brought the murderous Shah into power.” Actually, the CIA orchestrated the coup.
Prime Minister Muhammad Mossedegh had nationalized the oil industry which had been controlled by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company The British asked senior CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. (a grandson of Teddy Roosevelt) to lead a covert operation to force out Mossedegh. The go-ahead was given by a committee composed of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA director Allan Dulles and Secretary of “Defense” Charles Wilson.
In 1946, the Shah had fled to Iraq. On August 19, 1953, Roosevelt picked up the Shah — bribing him with $1,000,000 to carry out the coup to overthrow Mossedegh — and drove him to the palace, covered in the back seat with a blanket. Pro-coup gangs in the streets — financed and organized by the CIA — took the Shah from the basement where Roosevelt was hiding him and carried him upstairs to return the Shah to power.
In 2000, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright said, “In 1953, the U.S. played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister Mossedegh.” (FAS.org archives July 7, 1915)
Just another example of the U.S. overturning of an elected government on behalf of U.S. and British oil interests.
*****