Rosa Parks. 27th June to 12th July 2020

'Rosa Parks' by Phoebe Hubbard. Mixed media. Price - £25 including charity contribution to The Rainbow Centre.

Created for The Dolly Project in 2019, this customised Ddung doll is a recreation of the arrest of American Civil Rights activist & Feminist Icon Rosa Parks.

Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist who refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. On 1st December, 1955, she rejected the bus drivers demand that she give up her seat in the 'coloured' section of the bus so that a white passenger could sit down as the 'whites-only' section was full. She was subsequently arrested for 'civil disobedience' under Alabama law. Having been humiliated and mistreated by bus drivers, including the driver of that vehicle james F. Blake, before (Blake had taken her fare payment, then driven off and left her standing in the rain before she had a chance to re-enter the bus through the 'coloured' door in a previous incident) Parks decided that she had had enough. She said "My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest. I did a lot of walking in Montgomery."

In her Biography she wrote of the incident:

 'People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in'.

Although not the first person to resist bus segregation, she made a court challenge against the segregation laws (with support from the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People). Her actions inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the first major direct action campaign in the American Civil Rights Movement, during which coloured people boycotted the Montgomery busses for over a year. Its success launched nationwide efforts to end racial segregation of public facilities.

Despite the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, activists like Rosa and Martin Luther King suffered severe penalties for their actions. parks lost her job due to her activism, and received death threats for the rest of her life. Celebrated as the 'First lady of Civil Rights' and 'Mother of the Freedom Movement', she continued to organise for Civil Rights and education for the rest of her life, including supporting the Selma-To-Montgomery marches, the Freedom Now Party, the Black Power Movement and the Black Panthers. She also worked on freeing the Wilmington 10, the RNA 11 & Gary Tyler, all wrongfully accused of crimes against white people.

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Exhibitions Coming Soon:

Charlotte Chapman - 13th July to 26th July

Threadbare Woman - 27th July to 9th August

Katie Bradley - 10th August to 23rd August

Shane Record - 24th August to 6th September

Constance MacQueen - 7th September to 20th September

Sutured Specimens - 21st September to 4th October