Clarence Gideon[/caption]Carol Forsloff----Remember when you were picketing something, wrote a letter of complaint, dared to act in your defense or that of someone else, often for altruistic purpose and someone said, “You can’t change the world.” Turns out you can.
There have been so many instances of one person making a difference and actually making big changes in a positive direction, that it would require volumes of written material to describe it all.
That’s the good news and the good reason to continue to bring harmony or help wherever you can, because the act of a single man can move those proverbial mountains. Let’s examine a few of these examples, some of which you might not be familiar, and others you will know and understand once again that one man, or woman, can make a difference.
Clarence Earl Gideon was an obscure man who was living out his years in a Florida prison cell. He had no one to help him, no money for an attorney, and no way out to defend himself against the charges made against him. That was 50 years ago. So he wrote a letter to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court took up the case of Clarence Gideon, this solitary man whose letter cut through red tape at the outset by its very contents. The Supreme Court declared it was unconstitutional for a man like Gideon to be tried in court and not have proper representation, so made the decision that for those who are indigent counsel would be provided by the state. Giden had been accused and convicted of a felony in Panama City, Florida. The local judge refused to give him a new trial, but after the Supreme Court’s decision, Gideon had another chance to face the charges and was acquitted of all of them. Gideon’s act made a difference for him and for others who now can have a lawyer even if they can’t afford one. His case was Gideon vs Wainright.
Claudette Colvin was just fifteen years old when she refused to give up her seat on a bus and move to the back, as the South’s Jim Crow laws required. This was nine months before Rosa Parks did the same thing. Colvin had already set a precedent, sounded the call to resistance that initiated groups of people standing up for themselves in the civil rights movement. When she was 15, she refused to move to the back of the bus and give up her seat to a white person — nine months before Rosa Parks, who wasn't just a frail-looking African American elder but an officer of the NAAP. Colvin had learned in her schoolroom that very day the history of Harriet Tubman, who had risked her life in order to help slaves escape to freedom. And as she said 54 years later to NPR, "All I remember is that I was not going to walk off the bus voluntarily.”
But Colvin got no fanfare. She challenged the laws in court, after she had been arrested for defying the laws of Alabama. She was one of four women plaintiffs in the case of Browder v. Gayle, when the court made its decision to overturn segregations laws in Montgomery and Alabama. She had made a difference, as the years that followed showed more and more people standing up for their freedom in all parts of the South, until the passage of the Civil Rights Act that followed years later, that turned around many of the unjust practices against an entire race of people. Rosa Parks is often remembered for initiating the boycotts and resistance, but this came after a young girl set a precedent for change.
Can you make a difference in some remarkable way with a pen and paper, a willingness to stand up against injustice somewhere, or an act of kindness in some part of the world? History has many examples that you can indeed change the world, and that admonition to walk in their shoes seems to work.
