TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Saturday, July 14, 2007

From Washington Post July 12, 2007:

"That's Mary Custis Lee, Gen. Robert E. Lee's adventurous eldest daughter. In 1917, she stored these wooden trunks ...

[...]It's a strange and eclectic collection. There are postcards that Mary Custis Lee gathered in Paris, Egypt and Atlantic City. And a fan she picked up in China. And a dried rose she plucked in a garden in Khartoum. There's a list of 266 slaves owned by one of her ancestors in 1766. And an account book kept by her mother's step-great-grandfather, George Washington. There's a handful of letters her father wrote to her during the Civil War. And another collection of letters that illuminate -- but do not quite solve -- the mystery of how Robert E. Lee's daughter happened to be arrested in Alexandria in 1902 for refusing to leave the black section of a trolley car.

[...]

Buried among the ephemera -- and the priceless letters from her father -- was a packet of papers related to the events of June 13, 1902, when she was arrested in Alexandria.

"She was sitting in the African American portion of the streetcar and a conductor told her to move and she refused," Shepard says. "He came back and she refused again. They took her to the police station, and when they found out who she was, she was released."

"BREAKS COLOR LINE," reads the headline in an unidentified newspaper article found in her trunk.

"Miss Mary Custis Lee of Alexandria, Va., has some of her celebrated father's disinclination to yield ground in response to coercion," begins another article from the trunk, this one fastened together with a rusty pin. It ends with a bit of editorializing: "It is nothing but petty tyranny for the state of Virginia to prohibit Mary Custis Lee from riding with negroes if she choose to ride with them."

The arrest made news around the world, inspiring several people to write, congratulating the general's daughter for defying segregation. "Please accept my thanks for your human action in breaking the color line in the sunny south," wrote a man from Alberta, Canada. "Only a dear good girl with a Christian heart would do that. God will reward you for such kindness of heart."

Was Robert E. Lee's daughter... a forerunner of Rosa Parks?
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| Posted at 11:54 | PERMA-LINK |

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