The Rosa Parks of D.C.

Half a century before the civil rights movement, Barbara Pope boarded a train and challenged Virginia’s Jim Crow law. Soon, her story was mostly forgotten.

By David A. Taylor
MARCH 31, 2021

This story was featured in The Optimist newsletter. Sign up here to receive stories of kindness, resilience and the best among us every Wednesday and Sunday.

{snip}

In fact, Barbara Pope, a D.C. native, ranks among the most stunning forgotten American lives. {snip} But perhaps her greatest accomplishment was the stand she took against racism in transportation nearly 50 years before Rosa Parks’s bus ride: In August 1906, Pope boarded a train at Union Station and traveled into Virginia, in the process challenging Virginia’s Jim Crow law requiring segregation on trains and streetcars. She soon gained the support of Du Bois and his Niagara Movement, a precursor to the NAACP. And her case became one of the first steps along the path to the end of legal segregation — leading the way toward the NAACP’s hallmark 1954 Supreme Court victory in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Not long after her case, she left the public stage amid personal troubles and would become remembered mainly among scholars — more of a footnote in history than a history maker. Almost the only place you can find Pope’s work is in the Library of Congress on microfilm. In 2015, however, literary historian Jennifer Harris wrote a profile of Pope for Legacy, a journal of American women writers, that aimed to bring Pope back into the spotlight. Harris used her archivist investigator skills to unearth Pope’s fiction and seek out her story from surviving family members, including Chinn.

{snip}

Pope was born in 1854 and grew up in a progressive family in Georgetown’s Black community. She began a teaching career in 1873 and taught for a year at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. She also advocated for reforms in the District’s Colored School System. ... In the 1890s, Pope, who never married, started publishing fiction. Du Bois included some of her stories in an exhibition he organized for the Paris Exposition of 1900 that presented Black Americans in their own words and images. (A beautifully illustrated volume based on that exhibition came out in 2019 as “Black Lives 1900: W.E.B. Du Bois at the Paris Exposition.”) In those years, the Black community of D.C. was divided between Booker T. Washington’s supporters and younger backers of Du Bois. Against her father’s wishes, Pope in 1906 joined the Niagara Movement. She was among its first female members.

Her pathbreaking train ride toward a Virginia hot springs resort that summer didn’t start as a statement. When Pope went to buy her ticket, she simply wanted a peaceful ride, she told the ticket agent. She “had been annoyed before” by Virginia’s Jim Crow rule and “didn’t want to be annoyed that way” again, according to her testimony in court records. ... She boarded at Union Station and saw the “colored” compartment was cramped and its seats faced backward. She took a seat in the main compartment instead. After they crossed the Potomac into Virginia, a White conductor came and said she had to move. She refused. He threatened her with arrest. She refused again. ... When the train stopped at Falls Church, Pope was escorted off by constables and detained for hours at the mayor’s office. Even after posting bail, she was held for public humiliation in the train station, waiting for her hearing. The mayor set up a kangaroo court in the station. Pope was tried for “violating the separate car law of the State of Virginia” and fined $10 plus court costs.

{snip}

David A. Taylor is a writer in Washington.

Design by Christian Font. Photo editing by Dudley M. Brooks.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached at 1-800-273-8255.