re: Pictures from days gone by....

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Mel Brooks…Blazing Saddles

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On this day in 1944, a black woman refuses to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Greyhound bus in Virginia. No, it wasn’t Rosa Parks. That famous act of civil disobedience was still more than a decade in the future.

Instead, the heroine on this day was a woman whose name you may not know: Irene Morgan. Her action would help lay the groundwork for Parks’ success in December 1955.

Morgan had been visiting family in Virginia, but now she was returning home to her husband and children in Baltimore. The bus was crowded, but she eventually found a seat toward the back.

She might have been sitting near the back of the bus, but she was still sitting in front of a white couple. That was a big “no-no” during the Jim Crow years. She wasn’t really supposed to be doing that. Making matters worse, two new white passengers soon boarded the bus. “You’ll have to get up,” the driver said dismissively to Morgan and her seatmate.

But Morgan’s seatmate was holding a baby. And Morgan herself had been dealing with some health problems. She didn’t want to stand, and she didn’t think that the young mother should have to move, either.

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Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia, also known as Progress Carrying the Light to Asia, was a plan for a colossal neoclassical sculpture. Designed in the late 1860s by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the project was to be a statue of a robed female fellah or peasant bearing a torch at the entryway of the Suez Canal in Port Said, Egypt. The statue was to stand 86 feet high and its pedestal was to rise to a height of 48 feet. The proposed statue was declined by the Khedive, citing the expensive cost.

After the failure of the Egyptian project, Bartholdi recycled his design as Liberty Enlightening the World, better known as the Statue of Liberty, which was installed in the New York Harbor in 1886.

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“The grand total for proposed demolition was 416 buildings that housed 2,200 families, 365 retail stores, and 480 other commercial establishments,” wrote Anthony Flint in Wrestling with Moses.

The highway would have qualified for 90% federal funding, as being part of the interstate highway system. The expressway had the support of the city, the Regional Plan Association, the American Institute of Architects, the Municipal Art Society, business groups and construction workers’ associations. Once again, Jane Jacobs set about forging a diverse local coalition to stop it.

The support network consisted of a diverse set of local residents, Puerto Ricans, Italians, intellectuals, laborers and, rumor has it, even the mafia—united by a common opposition to their homes and businesses becoming a merge lane.

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Good call. Fieros didn’t go into production until 1983. Gulf Oil was acquired by somebody (Chevron?) in 1985.

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