Majority of Readers Favor Replacing Jackson With A Woman on Future $20 Bills

The Sunday Poll was about who should be on future $20 bills — Andrew Jackson or one of four women from our history.  It was easy to predict the single answer with the most votes would be Andrew Jackson.

Q: Who should be on future $20 bills?

1. Andrew Jackson — former President 11 [29.73%]
2. Rosa Parks — civil rights activist 8 [21.62%]
3. Harriet Tubman — abolitionist, underground railroad 7 [18.92%]
4. TIE 4 [10.81%]
   1. Wilma Mankiller — 1st female Native American Tribe chief
   2. Eleanor Roosevelt — former first lady
5. Unsure/No Answer 3 [8.11%]

But we can look at these numbers another way:

1. Change 23 [62.16%]
2. Don’t change  11 [29.73%]
3. Unsure/No Answer 3 [8.11%]

A majority picked an answer that involves changing the $20 from Andrew Jackson to a woman. Be sure to vote for which of the four finalists you’d like to see on a $20 by 2020 — vote here.

— Steve Patterson

Today Is Rosa Parks Day

Today marks an important day in history:

Most historians date the beginning of the modern civil rights movement in the United States to December 1, 1955. That was the day when an unknown seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. This brave woman, Rosa Parks, was arrested and fined for violating a city ordinance, but her lonely act of defiance began a movement that ended legal segregation in America, and made her an inspiration to freedom-loving people everywhere. (source)

I was born less than a dozen years later, my oldest brother was 5.  I can’t imagine  the kind of trouble I’d have gotten into trying to fight racial segregation.  Or would I have thought it was the way the world worked?

— Steve Patterson

Sit anywhere on the bus

Fifty-four years ago today a 42 year old (my current age) woman refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama.   Of course the woman was Rosa Parks:

Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, December 1, 1955, triggered a wave of protest December 5, 1955 that reverberated throughout the United States. Her quiet courageous act changed America, its view of black people and redirected the course of history.  (source: rosaparks.org)

I am so grateful to her for refusing to give up her seat simply based on her race. But it wasn’t so simple:

Montgomery’s segregation laws were complex: blacks were required to pay their fare to the driver, then get off and reboard through the back door. Sometimes the bus would drive off before the paid-up customers made it to the back entrance. If the white section was full and another white customer entered, blacks were required to give up their seats and move farther to the back; a black person was not even allowed to sit across the aisle from whites. These humiliations were compounded by the fact that two-thirds of the bus riders in Montgomery were black.

Parks was not the first to be detained for this offense. Eight months earlier, Claudette Colvin, 15, refused to give up her seat and was arrested. Black activists met with this girl to determine if she would make a good test case — as secretary of the local N.A.A.C.P., Parks attended the meeting — but it was decided that a more “upstanding” candidate was necessary to withstand the scrutiny of the courts and the press. And then in October, a young woman named Mary Louise Smith was arrested; N.A.A.C.P. leaders rejected her too as their vehicle, looking for someone more able to withstand media scrutiny. Smith paid the fine and was released. (Source: TIME)

We have come a long way but we still have so far to travel. We all owe Parks (and so many others) for chipping away at the walls of hate that were commonplace at that time.

– Steve Patterson