An unsung hero

The world lost a hero February 22nd when Johnnie Rebecca Carr passed from this life to the next. Yet she left behind a world that was markedly better because of her commitment to do the right thing—no matter the cost.

Carr followed Martin Luther King Jr. as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization that led a boycott of city buses in Montgomery in 1955. The action was precipitated by the arrest of Carr’s childhood friend Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat to white riders on a crowded bus.

Neither woman sought the attention their actions gained them. “When we first started, we weren’t thinking about history,” Carr told the Associated Press in a 2003interview. “We were thinking about the conditions and the discrimination.” In a profile of Carr in her city’s newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, she recalled that segregationists’ claim that facilities and services were “separate but equal” was a lie. “It was very much separate, but never equal,” she told the paper.

“We had so many things that we were denied the opportunity and the privilege to enjoy,” Carr said in the profile.

“If you were black, you had to give the driver your money, then get back off the bus, walk around it to the back. You couldn’t just get on through the front and walk through to the back. That route was for whites only.” She noted that sometimes, after a black rider had paid his or her fare, the bus driver would drive away and leave them standing on the street corner. In an ugly irony, the city park across the street from Carr’s house used to be off-limits to her family. The only way a black woman could enter the park was if she was a maid taking a white child to play there.

The odds, so to speak, are fairly good you never heard of Johnnie Carr. The vast majority of Americans don’t know her name or her contributions to our nation. She was an unsung hero, quietly but forcefully pushing forward to right a wrong.

Only a few are unfortunate enough to be in the spotlight. Men like Martin Luther King Jr. who did not seek to be in the public glare but were pushed there by circumstance and need. Most heroes, like Johnnie Carr, labor off-screen.

We need to be faithful to tell the story that there was a day—not that long ago—in our country when a certain group of Americans were treated differently than everyone else. We need to tell the story of Johnnie Carr and Rosa Parks, as well as the thousands of individuals who, at great risk, stood for what was right during a particularly tumultuous time in our country’s history. They paid a price that isn’t measured in dollars and cents, but in blood, sweat and tears.

In spite of their sacrifices, the stench of racism lingers in our society. We are not over the nightmare of prejudice that judges men by the color of their skin. It behooves us to, as Carr told schoolchildren in 2005 on the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ act of bravery on the Montgomery city bus: “Look back, but march forward.”

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