Profiles In Courage

This page includes profiles of men and women who exhibited remarkable courage in their lives, often risking imprisonment, serious injury or even death, in standing up for liberty, equal justice, civil rights, etc. Oftentimes these courageous individuals were vilified by the "majority" for believing in, and doing, "the right thing".

What's the difference between a hero and a coward? Nothing. They're both afraid of getting hurt or dying, but it's what the hero does that makes him a hero, and what the coward doesn't do that makes him a coward.--Unknown

"Courage is being scared to death… and saddling up anyway."--John Wayne*

*I never thought I'd be impressed by anything John Wayne said. But this is a great quote, describing my definition of 'courage', perfectly. What is the world coming to?

PAGE CONTENTS:

Jackie Robinson

Rosa Parks

Varian Fry

Harriet Tubman

Jackie Robinson

January 31, 1919 - October 24, 1972

by Jessica McElrath

Jack (John) Roosevelt Robinson was born on January 31, 1919 in Cairo, Georgia. In 1920, his family moved to Pasadena, California. After graduating from John Muir Technical High School, Robinson attended Pasadena Community College. He then transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). While at UCLA, Robinson played baseball, football, basketball, and track.

In 1942, Robinson was drafted into the Army. He served in Kansas and Texas. He eventually became a second lieutenant. While serving in Fort Hood, Texas, Robinson refused to obey an order to move to the back of the bus. Because this was a violation of Army regulations, a court martial heard the matter. However, Robinson was acquitted.

When Robinson left the Army in 1944, he wanted to play baseball. At the time, baseball teams were segregated and had been since the early 1900s. Therefore, African American baseball players played in Latin America and in the Negro Leagues. Not unlike other African American players, Robinson also joined the Negro Leagues. He began playing for the Kansas City Monarchs.

However, Robinson's career in the Negro Leagues was short. In 1945, Branch Rickey, the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, requested a meeting with Robinson. Rickey wanted to integrate the major leagues and was looking for a player who could withstand the hostility that would be faced. After determining that Robinson was up to the task, he asked him to first play for the minor league team, the Montreal Royals. On October 23, 1945, it became official when Robinson signed a contract with the team.

After a successful year playing for the Montreal Royals, Robinson was issued a Dodgers' uniform in April 1947. As expected, his entrance into the major leagues was not without controversy. Some fans were hostile, while others were enthusiastic. Regardless of the reaction, Robinson excelled on the team. For the first few years, Robinson did not respond to the insults. But in 1949, he began speaking out against racism. He attacked the jim crow laws in the South and promoted the desegregation of southern hotels and ballparks.

In 1947, The Sporting News, which had initially been opposed to the integration of the major leagues, awarded him its first Rookie of the Year Award. In 1949, he was also awarded the National League Most Valuable Player. In 1956, Robinson retired. From 1957 to 1964, he worked as vice president of personnel at Chock Full O' Nuts. Robinson was also active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1956. He died in Stamford, Connecticut on October 24, 1972.

More Jackie Robinson Tidbits:

Jackie Robinson was 28 years old when he broke into the Major Leagues, yet he still won the unified Rookie of the Year Award.

Fifty years after he became the first modern black player, Major League baseball chose his number as the first one to ever retire for every team.

In 1982, Jackie Robinson became the first Major League Baseball player to appear on a US postage stamp.

In 1949, Jackie Robinson led the National League in stolen bases and batting average, was named to his first All-Star Game, helped the Brooklyn Dodgers win the pennant by one game, and was named the years Most Valuable Player.

Shortly before his death, Jackie Robinson was selected to throw out the first pitch at the 1972 World Series, the 25th anniversary of his breaking Major League
Baseball’s color barrier.

An outstanding athlete, Jackie Robinson was the first ever four-sport letter winner at UCLA (football, track, basketball and baseball). His accomplishments outside
of baseball included leading the Pacific Coast Conference (later the Pac-10) in scoring twice in basketball, becoming the NCAA champion in 1940 in the broad jump (25 feet, 6.5 inches), and achieving All-American status in football.

Rosa Parks

On December 1, 1955, forty-three year old Rosa Parks boarded a Montgomery, Alabama city bus after finishing work as a tailor's assistant at the Montgomery Fair department store. As all black patrons were required to do, she paid her fair at the front of the bus and then re-boarded in the rear. She sat in a vacant seat in the back next to a man and across the aisle from two women. After a few stops, the seats in the front of the bus became full and a white man who had boarded, stood in the aisle. The bus driver asked Parks, the man next to her, and the two women to let the white man have their seats. As the others moved, Parks remained in her seat. The bus driver again asked her to move, but she refused. The driver called the police and she was arrested. The arrest of Parks sparked the bus boycott in Montgomery, which eventually led to the desegregation of buses throughout the United States.

Parks was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama to James McCauley and Leona McCauley. At the age of two, Parks, her brother, and her mother moved to Pine Level, Alabama to live with her grandparents. At the age of eleven, she began attending the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, which was funded by liberal northern women. She later began attending Alabama State Teachers College.

Upon completion, she moved with her husband, Raymond Parks, to Montgomery. Parks and her husband joined the local chapter of the NAACP. She acted as the secretary from 1943 to 1956. She also worked to help improve conditions for African Americans. She worked on cases involving such issues as, flogging, peonage, rape, and murder.

After her stand against bus segregation in Montgomery in 1955, Parks lost her seamstress job. So Parks and her husband moved to Detroit in 1957, where she later served on staff for United States Representative, John Conyers from 1965 to 1988.

In 1979, Parks won the Spingarn Medal for her civil rights work. Also, in her honor the Southern Christian Leadership Council established the annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award. In 1987, after Raymond Parks' death, she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development to help young people. In 1996, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and in 1999 she received the Congressional Gold Medal.

VARIAN FRY

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Varian Fry

By Denis Mueller

In many ways, Varian Fry was an American Oscar Schindler. Like Schindler, he had a list of individuals he wanted to save from the horror of Nazi concentration camps. Upon his arrival in Vichy controlled Marseilles, Fry set out to help free some 200 endangered writers, artists and intellectuals. Those who wished to flee from the Nazi's control were many and French forces cooperated with the Nazi's to make leaving difficult. To get people out would take a person who was willing to take risks. Fry was up to the job and the list of people whom he saved included Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Arthur Koestler and Max Ophuls.

Born the son of a stockbroker, Fry was constantly in trouble in boarding school and later at Harvard. He loved modernist authors such as Joyce and Elliot and upon graduation, Fry visited Germany. This visit would have a profound influence on his life, for it was here he would speak to former Harvard classmate Ernst Hanfstanegl. Fry listened to Hanfstanegl as he explained how the leaders of the party, Hitler and Goeb- bels, were determined to exterminate the Jews and decided to help. "I volunteered myself. I knew what would happen to the refugees if the Nazi's got hold of them."

Fry discovered layers of courage that he never knew he possessed. Fry's work help save so many but there was another side to him. He liked to have a good time and drank and often told jokes while life and death decisions hung in the balance. It was as if Fry seemed to be hosting a giant party. But it was exciting for Fry and others to live outside the law and to take these risks. Fry saved not only artists and women but also plenty of regular people from the horrors of Nazi Germany. He was most sensitive to those who had been singled out by the Nazis and put them top of his list. But Fry had a dark side. Those that he or his network believed to be communists were rejected, which is important to remember because many of the intellectuals of that time were communists.

Fry was forced to leave in late 1941, and like so many others who find their moment in time at an early age, he went into decline. Back in the states, he drifted from job to job, for nothing he did seemed as exciting as his days in France. "The experiences of 10, 15 and even 20 years have been passed into one," Fry once said. Fry tried being a writer, a film producer and a teacher and at the end of his life he had no income. On Sept. 13, 1967, he was found dead in his bed as a forgotten man. But Fry had done his bit and showed that in times of crises some of the least likely people become heroes.

Sources: Sheila Isenberg, The Story of Varian Fry

HARRIET TUBMAN

Harriet Tubman

By Denis Mueller

Harriet Tubman was born as a slave. She was one of ten children. While still in her late twenties, she set out one summer night in search of freedom. The trail was fraught with danger; Tubman passed armed patrols on horseback, bloodhounds, wanted posters plastered at every tavern along her way to freedom. But that didn't stop Tubman. She crossed the Mason-Dixon line into free territory in Philadelphia. She was as she describes it, "a stranger in a strange land.

Once in Philadelphia, she found employment and soon began to save her money for what would become her life work; the Underground Railroad. Again and again she returned to the South at great peril to herself, and helped others gain their free- dom. The price on her head grew and grew until it finally reached in the neighborhood of $40,000.

Her skin was dark and she was of medium height. Tubman developed an extraordinary muscular strength and endurance. John Brown called her "General Tubman." While the movement was filled with Quakers it included many Catholics, Jews and Protestants and they all pitched in together.

Baltimore was an important stop on the road to freedom. It was a city divided between slavery and the anti-slavery for- ces. It was perilous country back then and a slave hunter named Patty Cannon made it all the worse. Cannon murdered and tortured blacks and she finally took her own life before she would allow herself to be tried for numerous murders.

But whatever the danger, Tubman was a skilled and able navigator. While she did not keep a journal she did describe her exploits to her biographer; Sarah Bradford. The route went from Cambridge toward Camero, Delaware. Tubman carried a revolver to ward of pursuers and to put a scare into the fugitives who had second thoughts.

The great Quaker way station stood at 237 Shipley Street in Wilmington, Delaware and was otherwise known as the home of Thomas Garrett. It was said that 2,700 men found their way to freedom from Garrett's house. In the early days of the Civil War, black freedmen stood outside the doors of Garret's house protecting the man who had risked so much for them.

Philadelphia stood at the center of the Underground Railroad. During these years over 9,000 people passed their way through the Philadelphia junction on their way to other points in Pennslylavana and New York. Tubman called St. Catharines, Ontario her home while William Lloyd Garrison boasted that over 25,000 people had escaped to Canada.

In many ways she was a modern day Moses. It was one of the great moments in American history. People, both black and white, banding together and defying the unjust laws of the United States. The law is not a perfect thing and sometimes it is wrong. It is on those occasions that we have seen our democracy at its best.

Sources: American Vistas 1607-1877

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