This book for young people tells of Sarah Keys Evans, an unsung Civil Rights hero, who, as a young woman in the Women’s Army Corps in the summer of 1952, did what Rosa Parks did—three years before Rosa Parks.
Arrested in 1952 in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina—while in her Army uniform—for refusing to move to the back of a bus she was taking to go from her Army base in New Jersey to her childhood home in North Carolina for a family visit, Sarah Keys Evans found a way to stand up for her rights and managed to achieve a remarkable victory: A ruling by the ICC in 1955 that effectively outlawed race-based seating in inter-state transportation. Her ICC ruling was announced in newspapers around the nation just one week before Rosa Parks took her historic stand on a local bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
It would take many more protests and legal maneuvers before the Jim Crow era finally ended. But Sarah Keys Evans played an important part in helping to crumble the walls of that shameful time in our nation’s history.
Unfortunately, her story has been overlooked by most books on the Civil Rights movement. This book aims to correct that oversight.
Her story is especially important for young people because of the lessons it illustrates—that it’s not just famous people who make history, that in troubled times ordinary people can step up and accomplish amazing things. Her story also shows that change is a step-by-step process. Mrs. Evans’s contribution was one step in the right direction that helped prepare the way for other steps that would follow later, to help bring about big shifts in attitudes and laws. As Mrs. Evans showed, an individual can indeed make a difference!
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102218521
The above link is to a comment posted by Amy Nathan on the NPR website (a copy of which is below):
The comment is regarding an addition to an interview that NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday did on March 15, 2009:
Amy Nathan (authorofchildrensbooks) wrote on the NPR website:
Something else to add to the story about Claudette Colvin from last week (for which you gave a factual correction today, March 22): There were others who challenged Jim Crow seating restrictions in other states before 1955. One is SARAH KEYS EVANS, also featured in a book for kids titled: TAKE A SEAT--MAKE A STAND by Amy Nathan (a book for which Mrs. Evans shares equally in the royalties with the author). Mrs. Evans's challenge of her arrest that occurred while she was in her Army uniform in 1952 at a busstop in North Carolina resulted in a victory at the ICC in 1955 which effectively ended race-based discrimination in seating in inter-state travel. Her ICC victory was announced to great fanfare in newspapers around the country just one week before Mrs. Parks made her courageous stand in Montgomery, Alabama. But even before Mrs. Evans, there were other brave individuals who also challenged these unfair seating rules, incuding Irene Morgan in Virginia in 1944 whose case went to the Supreme Court, and still others stretching all the way back to Homer Plessy. An amazing history. Important examples of courage for all of us.
March 22, 2009 9:08:36 AM EDT
