VIRGINIA--Eleven years before Rosa Parks, there was Angela McLinn. Twenty-four years before the Civil Rights Act, there was Angela McLinn.
But history missed her somehow.
In 1944, McLinn and three other Howard University female African-American students refused to move to the back of the bus in Virginia. They were jailed, but their courage, unlike Parks' rebelliousness, received only local media attention.
"I don't think of myself as courageous," McLinn, 89, said last week at her Oakland apartment. "I told myself then, 'This is something that's wrong, and I'm going to go for it.' Nothing scares me."
In 1955, Parks' refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., led to her arrest and her firing as a seamstress, but it brought about the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott that helped eradicate segregation laws in the Deep South.
Parks' defiance was a linchpin to the Civil Rights Act of 1968, but McLinn also was a hero in the struggle for racial equality.
McLinn, who had not one, but several defiant acts as a civil rights activist, recalls her pride at learning of Parks' fearless stance.
"We said, 'Hooray. Right on. Bully for her,' " McLinn said.
Angela Jones McLinn was adopted as an infant. She never knew her birth parents. As a teenager in New York City's Harlem neighborhood, she marched to the state capital, Albany, with future congressman and pastor Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to protest discriminatory hiring policies of white-owned department stores.
Then as NAACP chapter president at Howard University in Washington, D.C., she organized sit-ins and picket lines at restaurants that refused to serve blacks. One such restaurant went out of business.
The seeds of her activism? Leaving New York City by train, then having to switch to a blacks-only train car in order to reach Virginia, where she was forced to drink from blacks-only water coolers and use blacks-only bathrooms.
So when the bus incident happened, she was more than ready to fight back.
"We had visited a professor of ours in Virginia," she recalled. "All four of us sat unanimously at the front of the bus. The driver told us we had to sit in the back. All of us were in the Howard NAACP, so we didn't mind protesting. And we were from the North; we didn't know about sitting in the back."
The driver called the police, who showed up and ordered the four students to move to the back. They refused and were taken to jail, where they once again didn't shrink from authority.
"We asked for water, blankets, pillows -- anything we could think of," McLinn said. "The fellows in the next cage asked us, 'What you in for?' "
That same professor, a white woman, was able to get the four released.
"We had to come back for a trial," McLinn said. "My three classmates were brown-skinned, while I'm light-skinned. In the courtroom, I sat next to my white professor. So they couldn't identify all four of us and let us go."
She received a psychology degree from Howard, where she met her husband, the future Dr. Harry McLinn, a dentist. They married in 1944 and Angela earned a master's degree in counseling from New York University in 1952.
Their wedlock led to three children, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Angela's husband died in 1998, and she moved to Oakland in 2004 to be near her children.
You can read her full story in "Pioneering Spirits: A Legacy of Courage," a book about 12 Oaklanders, written by Nancy Thompson, and available for $12 by calling 510-268-1146 or e-mailing nthompson46@aol.com.
Angela McLinn put the "a" in activism.
"It's the same reason that I would swing from the rings at the YMCA," she said of her youth. "I never thought anything could happen to me."
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Thursday, September 16th 2010 at 1:49PM
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