Sharon McMahon
speaker
324 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 25 Feb
Sharon McMahon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And these are the kinds of messages that I think people need in this moment when it seems like the rich and powerful have usurped the reins of power for themselves. This is a phrase from George Washington in his farewell address. Beware excess partisanship and factionalism, lest unscrupulous men usurp for themselves the reins of government.
And I think Americans, maybe they wouldn't say it in those words, unscrupulous men usurp for themselves the reins of government, but they feel that sentiment. That unscrupulous men and women have stolen the reins of power from the American people. And the people in this book show what it means to be able to make change because you make the choice to have hope.
That's a great question. Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on the bus before Rosa Parks ever gave her seat up on the bus. And Claudette Colvin was a 15-year-old girl when she refused to give up her seat on the bus. And in the moment these white law enforcement officers get on the bus and are telling her to give up her seat, there's a white woman who wants...
Not just her seat, but she wants all of the African-Americans in that row to get up and exit the row because she refuses to sit even in the same row. That would mean they were equal if they could sit in the same row. And Claudette Colvin is like, I paid for this seat. I am sitting in the black section of the bus. I have every right to sit here.
Yes, because the white section had filled up.
The bus driver is yelling at everybody, you know, move back, move back.
Everyone back. Precisely, precisely. Yeah, yeah. Exactly right. And Claudette says in that moment, she feels the hand of Harriet Tubman on one shoulder and the hand of Sojourner Truth on the other. And she feels them sort of like pin her down in her seat. You know, if she had been alive today and she had seen Hamilton, she would know the phrase history has its eyes on you.
That she refuses in that moment to get up. They actually pick her up and carry her off the bus and bring her to jail. Oh. They bring her to an adult jail. Again, she's 15 years old. She's sitting in the backseat of the police car while the two officers who are driving her, one wedges himself in the backseat next to her.
They're having a conversation about her bra size amongst themselves while she said she's riding in the backseat of the car, like, pinning her knees together, repeating scripture to herself that she will not be sexually assaulted by these police officers. Aight. Because for hundreds of years, Black women were sexually assaulted by white men and nothing ever happened as a result of it.
So eventually Claudette Colvin gets pregnant. And so she is a pregnant 16 year old during the Montgomery bus boycott. And she is essentially excluded from being the face of the civil rights movement because she's a pregnant teenager and she's not the right one. And one of the reasons, right, the optics of it were important. They needed somebody who was regarded as quote unquote respectable.
Yes. And pregnant teenagers of any race were not viewed as respectable people.
That's right. Yeah. We had to kick Claudette out of school, which is what they did. You weren't allowed to stay at school. And Rosa Parks was viewed as, again, quote unquote, respectable. She was a seamstress, a quiet, mild-mannered, pleasant-looking mom figure who was not viewed as quote unquote problematic, like perhaps a pregnant teenager would have been. But again,
Claudette Colvin ultimately feels abandoned by the civil rights movement. Like they just cast her to the side. When she gives birth, nobody contacts her and tries to help her with her baby. Nobody sends her a welcome baby gift.
No, she has never publicized who the father of her baby was, but some people presumed that he was a white man with whom she had a consensual relationship. But yet Claudette talked openly about how she had absolutely no idea where babies came from. She was taken advantage of by an older man who was married. But we don't know his identity. We don't know for sure if he was white.
But she talked about how they had a consensual relationship with each other. But again, she's a teenager. Yeah. How consensual can it be?
That's right. She gives birth and she raises her child and all of these things. And ultimately, Claudette Colvin was the party to an important civil rights lawsuit regarding the bus boycott, Browder v. Gale. The Supreme Court ultimately declared segregation on Montgomery buses unconstitutional.
And she has the courage, even though she's been abandoned by the civil rights movement, on the morning that this trial is starting, she's one of the witnesses on this trial, she has to like pump her breast milk because she has a new baby. But
Nothing fancy. So that she's not a breastfeeding teenager leaking milk everywhere in a courtroom where she knows that the opposing counsel is going to try to destroy her character. And she was smart enough to anticipate what it was that they were trying to do to her. They kept trying to trip her up. They kept trying to get her to admit that Martin Luther King put her up to it.
Kept trying to get her to admit that she was a pawn in this bigger party.
Yes. Yeah. And she's smart enough to know that she shouldn't take the bait. And ultimately, the lawsuit was successful. And she had an incredibly important role in the first domino that falls in segregation in the United States. But because she was a pregnant teenager, she was relegated to the sidebars of history and
Showing 281–300 of 324 · page 15 of 17
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