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Bernice Delatte: The Rosa Parks of the 7th Ward [1]

['Tammy C. Barney', 'More Tammy C. Barney', 'Verite News']

Date: 2024-04-05  

Bernice Delatte, 17, was going to swim in Lake Pontchartrain with two friends. While riding on the Bomber Base Bus, Delatte moved a screen so that she could sit down.

“No sooner than I had moved the screen, the officer spoke to me in a rough way and told me to move it back where it was,” she told the Louisiana Weekly. “When I didn’t move it back fast enough to suit him, he jumped up and snatched the screen from my hand and said, ‘I will brain you with this.’”

That was Sunday, July 11, 1943 and New Orleans was segregated. Jim Crow laws required Black people to sit at the back of the bus behind race screens engraved with “For Colored Patrons Only.” On crowded buses and streetcars, Black riders had to stand in the aisle as white riders moved the screens back.

Delatte gave the driver an angry look. “What are you looking at,” the officer asked.

“You’re not anything to look at,” Delatte snapped back.

According to Delatte, the officer grabbed and twisted her arm before throwing her off the bus. He hit, kicked and cussed at her while waiting for a police wagon to pick her up.

“Several buses came by as I waited on the road,” she said. “Passengers laughed and winked at the officer and asked how he was doing with the [n-words].”

Delatte was locked in a cell and booked with disturbing the peace. The following week, her attorneys, Joseph A. Thornton and A.P. Turead, got the charge dismissed. Delatte’s and another incident led to “community outcry and an exertion of leadership by the local NAACP, the Seventh Ward League and Josephite Father Harry Maloney,” according to the Creole Genealogical and Historical Association.

Known as the “Rosa Parks of the 7th Ward,” Delatte died in 2010 in Palmdale, Calif.

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[1] Url: https://veritenews.org/2024/04/05/bernice-delatte-the-rosa-parks-of-the-7th-ward/

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