Bessemer at the height of Jim Crow must have been wild.
From Unregistered with Thaddeus Russell, Ep 263 with Killer Mike on Dec 13, 2023:
“So in Bessemer, in the late 50s, there was a sort of panic that took over and they called it Push Day.
They said Push Day is coming and everybody had stayed indoors on Push Day.
All the white people in Bessemer stayed indoors on Push Day.
They said that Push Day was the day when all the Black women were going to push the white people off the sidewalks because apparently this had been happening not in an organized way and not even necessarily in a mass way, but on the sidewalks in Bessemer, Alabama, at the height of Jim Crow in the 1950s, you had Black women asserting their right to that space on those sidewalks, right?
This is something, again, we never hear about, but it scared white people.”
