Revolution Televised.pdf

Reading the Roots of Resistance 15
of necessity, is never far from the surface and, in the proper place
and time, will rise.
The Transition of Black Political Humor
World War II and its outcome for black Americans on the domestic
front served as a catalyst for profound social change for African
Americans. The hope that the United States would acknowledge the
inconsistency between its explicit policies of world freedom and its
own domestic and repressive racial practices was crushed. The realization
that freedom was not forthcoming was a wake-up call to
a more vocal positioning of African American people and their political
organizations. The postwar U.S. economic and social climate
fostered the continued emergence of black political voices.
The arrest of Rosa Parks on December 1, 1955, and the publicized
Montgomery bus boycott that followed proved to be memorable
moments of a movement in transition from politics that
existed in all-black settings to overt confrontation with the mainstream
U.S. population. These events are illustrative of the multilayered
protests of African Americans to their status as secondary
citizens. As social historian Robin D. G. Kelley posits, “[T]here is
a long history of black working class resistance that has remained
unorganized, clandestine and evasive.” 35 In his discussion of the
Birmingham, Alabama, public transportation system, Kelley notes
the many ways in which black people resisted Jim Crow laws during
World War II:
Despite the repressive, police-like atmosphere on public transportation,
black passengers still resisted. Over the course of twelve months
beginning September 1941, there were at least eighty-eight cases of
blacks occupying “white” space on public transportation, fifty-five
of which were open acts of defiance in which African American passengers
either refused to give up their seats or sat in the white section.
. . . the total number of reported incidents and complaints of
racial conflict reached 176. 36
Young African American passengers sabotaged trolley cables and
threw rocks at streetcars. Zoot suiters and military servicemen
had confrontations, and there were physical altercations with bus
drivers and other white passengers. Sometimes they simply talked
loudly to disturb whites as a critique of Jim Crow practices. 37