Photo of Randolph Miller from 1910The name of seamstress Rosa Parks is known by Americans today for her refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Ala., bus on Dec. 1, 1955, signaling a more than year-long boycott by blacks and stamping her in history as the “mother of the civil rights movement.”
The 60th anniversary of the event, which led to a desegregation of the city’s bus system, was marked in the Alabama capital city last week.
Had an effort 50 years earlier been successful, though, history might have recorded Chattanooga as the locale for such an event and local resident Randolph Miller as its catalyst.
Sensing the continually encroaching fingers of Jim Crow laws, which in Tennessee came in the form of a 1905 law segregating public transportation, Miller, the black Weekly Blade newspaper publisher, organized a boycott of the three streetcar lines that operated in the city.
“They have taken our part of the library,” Miller editorialized that year. “They have moved our school to the frog pond; they have passed the Jim Crow law; they have knocked us out of the jury box; they have played the devil generally; and what in thunder will they do no one knows.”