Negro Leagues—and All African Americans—Lacked Adequate Transportation in the Pre-Civil Rights South
To teach about civil rights, we need the stories of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, but we also need the stories of the unsung heroes like Worcy Crawford (1917-2010). Crawford started a bus company that provided transportation for the Ensley All Stars, and it grew to be a company that provided vital transportation for all African Americans in the Birmingham area.
In 2006, several years before his father’s death, Donald M. Crawford, Sr., had the foresight to sit down with his father and record his life experiences as a black business owner (the first known black bus owner) in Birmingham, Alabama. His stories begin in an era when Jim Crow laws were in effect and go through the Civil Rights era and beyond. The resulting book, “The Wheels of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement,” tells an important story of everyday life for African Americans in the South from the 1940s through the end of the century.
In an interview this morning (April 12, 2011), Donald Crawford, Sr., a jazz musician and band instructor in Birmingham, told me of sitting down with his father to capture his thoughts for the book: “My father’s first memories were of his own father, a sharecropper, worrying about how he was going to feed his family since the land owner took the bulk of the produce. From that day forward, my father resolved that he was going to have his own business.”
Last week I wrote about baseball catcher Roy Campanella. Reading his autobiography sent me in search of who, what, when, where, and why about the end of discrimination in professional baseball.