Meet Kentucky’s own version of Rosa Parks from decades before. | Opinion

The Rev. Elisha W. Green was “the unknown Rosa Parks,” according to George T. Vaughn, a former Maysville Community and Technical College English professor.

“He refused to give up his seat long before she refused to give up hers,” said Vaughn, who now teaches English at Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield, Ill. “She held fast to what she believed in. He did too.”

A Black seamstress and civil rights activist, Parks was arrested and fined when she wouldn’t move from a white-only section of a segregated Montgomery, Ala., bus. The 1955 incident sparked a Black boycott of city buses. Led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the mass protest helped boost the growing Civil Rights Movement and led to a Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregated buses.

Green, a Baptist pastor from Maysville, didn’t budge when George T. Gould, president of the Millersburg Female College, demanded he surrender his seat on a train in 1883. Enraged, Gould, helped by two other white men —professors from the all-white school — assaulted him.

“Rev. Green saw the start of segregation, which to him seemed like a return to slavery,” said Vaughn, who played Green in the Kentucky Chautauqua, a series of dramatic performances featuring notable Kentuckians that is sponsored by the Lexington-based Kentucky Humanities Council. “So on that train, he decided he simply wasn’t going to sit by and watch things go back to where they were. Rev. Green simply decided that he’d suffered enough.”

Green was born a slave near Paris around 1818 but lived most of his life in Maysville. Ultimately, he bought freedom for himself, his wife, Susan, and some of their children.

But in the mid-1850s, the couple watched helplessly as their son John, his hands bound, was sold away from them, wrote Marion B. Lucas in “A History of Blacks in Kentucky: From Slavery to Segregation, 1760-1891.”

“Now as to the manner in which I considered the act,” Green wrote in his 1888 autobiography, “Life of the Rev. Elisha W. Green.” “I considered it wicked and mean, not having the power to assist him in the least whatever.”

Green had Gould charged with assault and battery. Instead of pursuing criminal charges, Green sued him and collected $24 in damages. “It was a small victory but a victory anyway,” Vaughn said.

Though the Greens called Maysville home, he organized churches elsewhere, including in Paris. He routinely rode trains to pastor at his churches.

Hence, Green wasn’t expecting trouble on June 8, 1883, when he boarded a train for Paris. It was a Friday; he was to preach on Sunday.

When the train stopped at Millersburg, Gould, professors Bristow and Carrington and some college students got on, Green wrote in his autobiography. In the book, he inserted newspaper accounts of the incident including a Maysville New Republican story that detailed the beating.

Gould, according to the story, ordered the conductor to remove Green. When he refused, Gould warned, “If you don’t put him out we will.”

While Gould and Carrington pinned Green, Bristow repeatedly beat him over the head with his brass-bound valise, the New Republican reported. He suffered cuts on his head and fingers, Vaughn said. “He might’ve been hurt worse had the conductor not stopped the attack,” he added.

The New Republican denounced the assault as “double-distilled cowardly ruffianism that we would not have believed any Kentuckian would have been guilty of.” The paper suspected the beating “never would’ve been attempted if he had been white.”

The paper described his assailants as “three strong, vigorous, able-bodied men” and their victim as “advanced in years and enfeebled by an injury received on the [rail]road near the place of his assault several years ago.”

The New Republican declared that the attack proved that the trio was “totally unfitted for the positions they hold as educators of the morals of young ladies,” adding that the men “should be fittingly rebuked by the [Southern Methodist] church to which they belong.” In a parting shot, the paper also editorialized that the beating “betrays the wolf in sheep’s clothing--the most vicious and despicable of characters.”

Other papers reported the assault. In his autobiography, Green, who died in 1893, challenged Gould’s claim in the rival Maysville Bulletin that Bristow hit Green just once “with a small hand bag” and only after Green hit Gould first. He wrote that Gould’s statement lacked even “an ounce of truth,” adding that he’d rather be a truthful Black man “than an educated dude of a white man that can lie faster than the Recording Angel in heaven would have patience to write.”

Berry Craig is a journalist, historian and author from Arlington.