Inez Baskin
(June 18, 1916 - June 28, 2007)

By Teri Greene
Montgomery Advertiser

Inez Baskin helped chronicle the civil rights movement. (David Bundy, Montgomery Advertiser)

Framed certificates line the walls of Inez Baskin's modest home on Mobile Highway.

There are so many, celebrating her key role as documenter of the civil rights movement, that there simply isn't enough wall space for all of them.

"Oh, I just had them around, so I decided to put them up," Baskin said. "There are a lot more in the other room, in a box."

Right now, with stacks of old papers and albums piled on the living room floor, Baskin, 89, is sifting through memories, thinking about the resounding effects of changes brought about 50 years ago.

One of her favorite ways to finish up a statement is to look at the person she's talking to and simply say, "Think about it."

Going over memories with Baskin, there's a lot to think about.

Among the plaques and accolades on the wall is a framed print of a now-famous black-and-white photo, taken on a Montgomery city bus just after the buses were finally desegregated.

That woman in the picture, sitting in a seat in front of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is Inez Jessie Baskin.

She was on the front lines of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, both a supporter of the cause and a journalist assigned the job of covering the unfolding events.

For Baskin, it had been a sudden, courageous leap.

Years before, she was a typist at the Montgomery Advertiser who advanced to become the newspaper's "Negro News" writer, filling what was ordinarily the stock market page with news from the black community. The page was folded into the papers distributed in the black community; if it ever came up missing, a furor always arose, she said.

After Rosa Parks' arrest and the beginning of the boycott, Baskin was surprised to get a call from Bob Johnson of Jet magazine, a black-owned national publication. Johnson asked if Baskin would cover the boycott as a stringer for the magazine, and by extension for the American Negro Press (ANP), a company that delivered news to black communities nationwide.

"People would say things like, 'How did Jet get this story about the boycott?' They didn't know I was the stringer," she said with a laugh.

Baskin juggled her regular Advertiser duties with her volunteer beat for Jet and the ANP.

Inez Baskin holds a photograph of herself riding on the first bus ride following the Montgomery Bus Boycott before the taping of a town hall meeting celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act at the Capitol in Montgomery on August 3, 2005. (Mickey Welsh, Montgomery Advertiser)

She said it was exciting to be putting black people -- those making a change for the better -- in the spotlight.

"There wasn't very much you could read about blacks at that time, unless they were really famous," she said. "The rest of us only ended up on the front page if we stole a can of sardines and a box of crackers. Then we ended up on the front page."

But her stringer job involved reporting not just on the boycott events that were widely witnessed and photographed -- the public marches, the emergence of King as a leader of the movement- - but also exploring more ominous happenings that keenly affected her friends and neighbors.

One episode from that time that stands out for Baskin is the night the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on the lawn of a black family in Prattville. That night, Baskin and ANP photographer Arthur Freeman rode down the street where the cross was burned

After the incident, the Klan rode through town; she remembers glancing into cars and seeing only white sheets.

But that street "was as dark as the inside of somebody's hat," she said. The fear was that the Klan would close off both ends of the street and wreak havoc with residents.

In such times, as a both a journalist and an active community member, Baskin had to make difficult adjustments.

"I had to sort of get myself out of it, get out of myself, because, in the first place, I had never been in that type of situation," she said, remembering the many times during the boycott that her emotions battled with her journalistic objectivity. "And then I was trying hard not to hate the people who did it, because then that would color my writing, my actions and everything else. And I was trying hard not to do that."

It helped that her parents, Cora and Albert Lorenzo Turner, had raised her to be "color-blind" at a time when, for both blacks and whites, that was the exception to the rule.

These days, Baskin tries to extend that message when she speaks to groups of young children from around the country, both about her work during the civil rights movement and her quest to erase hatred.

She said people aren't born hating other people; they're trained in it, and they assimilate it into their lives.

"The idea is, don't make up your mind through your emotions. That's what I am trying to say to all people, of all ages and all backgrounds," she said. "Reaching children at that age, it grows up with them, and they don't even have to think about it."

Baskin continues writing, distributing her own quarterly newsletter, "The Monitor." For years, friends have urged her to write a book about her experiences during the movement.

"I said, 'I really don't have time.' And then I thought about it. I hope I am writing a book, but I'm not using paper for pages. I'm using the minds of children," Baskin said.

"That's better than my writing a book, isn't it?"