Barbara Pope was the Rosa Parks of DC

Image courtesy of Ann Chin

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.

Now a story in the Washington Post by David Taylor tells of the work her grand-neice Ann Chin and others are doing to bring her accomplishments back to light - work that build on sources found in Library of Congress archives.

From the Washington DC Evening Star, October 16, 1906.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045462/1906-10-16/ed-1/?sp=14&st=text&r=0.505,0.919,0.246,0.418,0

From the article:

“Ann Chinn grew up hearing family stories that her grandmother’s sister Barbara Pope had been a published writer. But recollections were short on details; it was so long ago. Chinn, 74, only knew that her great-aunt wrote stories.

In fact, Barbara Pope, a D.C. native, ranks among the most stunning forgotten American lives. She was, in addition to being a high school teacher, an author of fiction about social change at the turn of the 20th century, and her literary voice was celebrated on the international stage by no less than W.E.B. Du Bois. Her stories probed relationships among men and women, Black and White, with a modern voice and a sharp eye for detail and character. In her story “The New Woman,” the main character is a smart, industrious and beautiful Black woman who asks her husband if she can clerk for him in his law office, as she did for her father. “The bargain was that you would practice law and I take charge of the home,” she tells him, “but neither of us must be selfish, and each will call on the other for assistance when needed.”

But perhaps her greatest accomplishment was the stand she took against racism in transportation nearly 50 years before Rosa Parks’s bus ride…”