Sarah Mae Flemming
By
John C Abercrombie
- xx
Sarah Mae Flemming is not a well known name, although her actions were valuable to the civil rights movement. Sarah Mae Flemming was kicked off of a bus in Columbia, South Carolina 17 months before the Rosa Parks incident in Montgomery, Alabama. Flemming was assaulted by the driver as she was leaving the bus after being ordered to give up her seat to a White patron.
Sarah Mae Flemming was born on the family farm in Eastover, South Carolina to Mack and Rosella Flemming. She had to drop out of school prior to graduation to help support the family. She worked for an uncle in Ohio for a year before returning to Columbia, South Carolina area where she worked 2 jobs as a domestic worker.
As we look at individual acts of civil rights injustice, we don’t often see the pervasive nature of laws that we take for granted as being racially neutral even though they have deep seated roots in racism and are racially motivated.
Accommodations in transportation was blatant to force the concept of inferiority on a segment of the population based on race. Whether it was having to sit in the back of a bus, drink from a separate water fountain, not have access to restrooms, being relegated to segregated neighborhoods in housing and therefore schools, the practices were deliberate and invasive.
On the face of it, Social Security seems like a neutral system until you actually take a look at it. The Social Security Act of 1935 excludes from coverage half of the workers in the workforce. Among the excluded groups were agricultural and domestic workers, a large percentage of which were Blacks. So pervasive were the effects that some scholars believe there was a deliberate effort to exclude Blacks from the Social Security system. It effectively kept most Black workers out of the system.
Social Security initially excluded farm workers and domestic workers. When President Roosevelt made Social Security a law 65% of Blacks were ineligible and the percentage was even higher in the South.
It was 1954 before all agricultural and domestic workers were covered by the Social Security Act.
Blacks were routinely denied the opportunity to work outside of the domestic and agricultural areas of employment, even when qualified for other work. The jobs offered to Blacks were the most physically demanding and lowest paying available.
Sarah Mae Flemming took a seat that she thought began the row where Blacks were allowed to sit. The driver, Warren H Christmus barked “Can’t you wait until someone gets off the bus before you sit down? Get up and I mean right now!” In his defense, Christmus explained that she was sitting in front of 2 White people.
Despite the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education the previous month, which declared “separate but equal” schools unconstitutional, South Carolina’s public spaces remained rigidly segregated. The placement of the color line on Columbia’s SCE&G buses, which shifted with the number of black and white riders, was enforced by the drivers, who were legally vested with the powers of a deputy sheriff.
Flemming testified at trial that Christmus blocked her exit, punched her and forced her down the aisle to the back door. She was treated at the local hospital for her injuries.
The case was taken up by the South Carolina National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The case was based on the 14th amendment which defines national citizenship and forbids the states to restrict the basic rights of citizens or other persons.
Attorney Phillip Wittenberg was hired to represent Flemming. Cases such as this are dependent on intimidation of the group being suppressed. As in the case of Elizabeth Jennings* who was physically thrown off of a streetcar in New York in 1854 and the case of Harriet Tubman, a civil war veteran who had her arm broken when she was manhandled for refusing to move to the smoking car of a train, even women were subjected to horrific treatment.
Attorney Phillip Wittenberg had an 8 foot cross burned on his home for the act of filing the case. Laws to protect citizens were never enforced for these terroristic acts.
George Bell Timmerman dismissed the case on the grounds that “separate but equal” applied to schools, but not to separate facilities for the races on buses. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund led by Thurgood Marshall and local attorneys Matthew J Perry, Jr and Lincoln C Jenkins, Jr joined Wittenberg for an appeal before the US 4th Circuit Court. The appeals court overruled Timmerman “noting the old doctrine that separate but equal facilities for Negroes are constitutional can no longer be ‘regarded as a correct statement of law.’”
On February 16, 1955, Judge George Bell Timmerman dismissed the case on the grounds that “separate but equal” school facilities had been ruled unconstitutional but did not apply to “separate facilities for the races in defendant’s buses.”
That court overruled Timmerman on July 14, “noting the old doctrine that separate but equal facilities for Negroes are constitutional can no longer be ‘regarded as a correct statement of the law.’”
After a campaign of intimidation, which included the cross burning incident covered earlier in this post, an all-white, all male jury ruled the bus company not guilty of any wrongdoing. The case faded from the public spotlight, however Flemming’s heroic actions provided an important legal precedent for the Montgomery Bus Boycott which drew national and international attention.
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Sarah Mae Flemming BWCAR 2016
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Coffee Maker
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Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State
Did the civil rights movement impact the development of the American state? Despite extensive accounts of civil rights mobilization and narratives of state building, there has been surprisingly little research that explicitly examines the importance and consequence that civil rights activism has had for the process of state building in American political and constitutional development. Through a sweeping archival analysis of the NAACP’s battle against lynching and mob violence from 1909 to 1923, this book examines how the NAACP raised public awareness, won over American presidents, and secured the support of Congress. In the NAACP’s most far-reaching victory, the Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional rights of black defendants were violated by a white mob in the landmark criminal procedure decision Moore v. Dempsey. This book demonstrates the importance of citizen agency in the making of new constitutional law in a period unexplored by previous scholarship.
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Clear Skin
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Our Story Matters: Sarah Mae Flemming
On June 28, Columbia SC 63 unveiled a street sign at the corner of Main and Washington to honor one of South Carolina’s greatest civil rights heroes; Sarah Mae Flemming. This video is the press conference featuring many of city leaders including Mayor Steve Benjamin. At the end of the video, the street sign is unveiled, which closes out the ceremony.
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Finally, here is the fun, easy-to-use guide that African Americans have been waiting for since Alex Haley published Roots more than twenty-five years ago. Written by the leading African American professional genealogist in the United States who teaches and lectures widely, Black Roots highlights some of the special problems, solutions, and sources unique to African Americans. Based on solid genealogical principles and designed for those who have little or no experience researching their family’s past, but valuable to any genealogist, this book explains everything you need to get started, including: where to search close to home, where to write for records, how to make the best use of libraries and the Internet, and how to organize research, analyze historical documents, and write the family history.
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Sarah Mae Fleming is just one person in a long line of people both male and female who have suffered humiliation, physical and financial injury, even death for exercising rights and freedoms that are assumed to be granted to all American citizens.
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