(rules for myself)
Grab a history book.
Choosing a book for this week's teaser was no problem. However, selecting just one incredible passage was more difficult. In the end, I decided to play off yesterday's post in which Augusta Scattergood reviewed Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.
Also yesterday, this book arrived on my doorstep.
We Are One: The Story of Bayard Rustinby Larry Dane Brimner
And what a story it is! In 1942, thirteen years before Claudette Colvin refused to give her bus seat to a white person there was this incident.
From the book: (The ellipses indicate omitted sentences)
Then on a trip from Louisville to Nashville in 1942, something happened.
Bayard boarded a bus and took the second seat. Seeing him, the driver told Bayard to move....
"I believe I have a right to sit here," Bayard said...
Bayard considered the child sitting across from him. How many more years was that little white child going to suffer the injustice of thinking that blacks were inferior?
He became steadfast in his determination to remain in his seat.
At every stop, Bayard refused.
Sometimes life cooperated so completely! Baryard had long been reading about Mohandas K. Gandhi and his philosophy of direct nonviolent action in India's struggle for independence. Exasperated, the driver called ahead to the police and, just outside Nashville, four officers dragged Bayard off the bus and began beating him.
Like Gandhi, Bayard did not resist. Instead, he shielded the blows. "There is no reason to beat me," he calmly explained. "I am not resisting you."
There is so much more to Bayard's story - decades of nonviolent action. I want to share much more of this but for now, I'll simply say that author, Larry Dane Brimner has given readers a magnificent gift.
Brimner and We Are One - won the 2008 Norman A. Sugarman Award for the most outstanding biography published in the United States in the last two years.
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