Sports reporter, write for @TheWorldGames (all 40 sports) +other sport websites. Prolific traveller and sports volunteer, cyclist and quizzer
Kent, UK, World
Joined December 2012
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Six years ago, I had stopped exercising, was unfit and overweight. For the next two weeks I will be cycling 700 km across Spain. What enabled me to undertake this epic challenge?
inyourarea.co.uk/news/folkes… @ShepwayST @Martin_A_Salmon #Spain #CaminodeSantiago
So distressing to see Lille my favourite city in France become a war zone. It is a beautiful, prosperous, friendly place with stunning architecture. But tonight the entire city centre has been trashed and looted. Absolutely disgusting behaviour.
Excellent article showing that renewable energy sources total cost of construction is extravagantly high, environmentally damaging and has to be made by consuming far more fossil fuels than will be generated. A complete scam
The world consumes roughly 28 million tonnes of copper every year—a mass equivalent to five Great Pyramids of Giza.
Yet that refined metal is just the tip of the iceberg of a far more monstrous physical reality. Beneath those 28 million tonnes of copper sits a massive geological footprint: billions of tonnes of blasted rock, colossal volumes of chemical tailings, vast energy expenditures and trillions of litres of water. This is all fresh, relentless demand.
Crucially, up to 75% of that copper never enters individual turbines, solar panels or electric vehicles. It goes into the invisible grid infrastructure required to link everything together and make it function. When you trace 28 million tonnes of copper backward into the Earth, the true scale and cost is staggering.
The drive to overhaul the global energy structure rests on a profound misunderstanding of physics: it treats energy supply as a 'software' problem while ignoring the devastating raw material gridlock caused by manufacturing billions of solar panels and over a million wind turbines, with hundreds of thousands more in the pipeline.
When an energy system shifts from reliable, high-density fuels—hydrocarbons and uranium—to low-density, intermittent sources like wind and solar, the physical apparatus needed to capture, convert, stabilise and transmit that diffuse flux just explodes.
It becomes an absurd trade-off: expending colossal amounts of finite, high-grade fossil fuels upfront simply to dig up materials for low-density generators—generators that can never run a steel mill, power an ocean cargo vessel or sustain international air travel.
Mining is already a vast consumer of continuous energy. As global copper ore grades decline—frequently dropping to 0.5% or lower—the mass of rock that must be dug, hauled, and crushed grows exponentially per unit of recovered metal.
Crushing rock alone accounts for roughly 3% to 4% of total global electricity consumption. Demanding billions of additional tonnes of processed metal creates a self-defeating loop: huge volumes of reliable, baseline power are consumed just to extract the raw materials needed to construct weather-dependent hardware.
Yet the primary metals drain does not come from the turbines or arrays themselves. It stems from the enormous physical web needed to transport that energy across vast distances. Diffuse generators located hundreds of kilometres from cities require unprecedented volumes of step-up transformers, substations, high-voltage transmission lines and regional grid overhauls.
The heavy overhead wiring looping across the landscape regularly dwarfs the metal required to build the turbine in the first place. Because two centuries of industrial civilisation have already extracted the highest-grade deposits, meeting future demand forces miners to dig deeper, crush harder and manage billions of tonnes of toxic slurry.
This is a twin crisis: the escalating physical cost of ore recovery on the front end, and an unprecedented tsunami of industrial e-waste bound for landfills on the back end. The physical limits of this model are not dictated by how much metal remains in the crust, but by the soaring energy penalty required to dig them up and refine them.
Heavy industrial processes—blast furnaces, chemical synthesis, cement production and deep-shaft mining—all need continuous, high-temperature thermal energy and uninterrupted high-voltage power. Intermittent turbines and panels cannot reliably deliver that dense power to sustain heavy industry, let alone an entire national economy.
The ultimate irony is that the staggering industrial muscle needed to build, maintain, and periodically replace these diffuse energy systems relies entirely on the coal, oil and gas they were meant to replace.
The dream of a fully weather-dependent industrial grid ignores physical reality. It overlooks a looming nightmare of endless ore extraction, refining bottlenecks, and perpetual grid expansion.
Brian Salmon retweeted
.@andyburnham, with respect, you treat the British public with contempt if you expect us to swallow this.
Britain has the dearest industrial electricity in the IEA, and you want us to blame 1986. You say we pay some of the highest energy bills in Europe because we privatised the basics, and you blame conflict overseas. But the data supports neither claim.
British industrial gas prices sit below the IEA median. Industrial electricity does not. In 2023 British industry paid 25.85p per kWh against an IEA average of 17.7p. Over the last decade the premium over the median has run between 17% and 49%. In 2024 we had the highest industrial electricity prices of any IEA member with data available. If gas were the cause, we would be near average. We are at the top. Wholesale costs drove most of the rise since 2021, but they cannot explain why we pay more than our neighbours for the same gas.
Policy can. Taxes and levies on household electricity rose 59% in real terms between 2017 and 2025, when they made up 23% of the average bill. One Oxford Institute for Energy Studies estimate puts policy related costs at 33% of the pre-tax electricity bill once contracts for difference, carbon charges and the capacity market are counted. The government's own analysis has supported British industry paying £86 per MWh from this year, against £69 in France and £60 in Germany.
The relief your government announced in April was a transfer. It scrapped a levy funded efficiency scheme and moved 75% of the domestic cost of the Renewables Obligation onto general taxation. The cost did not disappear. The Treasury now collects it from the same households through tax.
Then the grid. The typical household is on a price cap of £1,723 a year, up £60 since July. Networks made up about 30% of the spring price cap, and Ofgem has set out a further expansion of local networks for 2028 to 2033, paid for by households through higher charges.
Your answer is Great British Grid. It will be funded from Great British Energy's existing budgets and will work with the private sector and network companies. That means no new money, no new cable and one more public body. Your own government has also acknowledged that its buy British approach to grid contracts could add cost, yet no full impact assessment has been carried out. You promise European prices within a decade. You have not shown us the bill.
You speak of lost control. You were a cabinet minister when the Climate Change Act passed in 2008. Ed Miliband, its author, later set the Clean Power 2030 target. Britain refuses new North Sea licences and imports gas it could produce at home. Gas remains the marginal source that sets the wholesale electricity price, so every turbine added on this model leaves the bill tied to gas while households fund the cables and backup behind it.
Public ownership has been tried locally. Nottingham's Robin Hood Energy cost taxpayers an estimated £38m. Bristol Energy, closed this week, left a final bill of £39.3m. Both were Labour-run councils. Solar panels on a library roof are pleasant. They will not move a national price.
Bills fall when costs fall. Remove levies that don't belong on electricity. Licence new North Sea fields. Build nuclear on time. Then publish what your plan costs and who pays for it.
"Burnham was a cabinet minister when the Climate Change Act passed in 2008. Ed Miliband, its author, later set the Clean Power 2030 target."
I want to be honest about how we’ve got to a place where British billpayers are paying some of the highest energy costs in Europe.
Over the past 40 years, we’ve given up control of our necessities, outsourced our essentials and privatised the basics. Water, transport, housing. And of course, energy.
Now the public are paying the price. We haven’t invested in the infrastructure we need. Conflict overseas has pushed up energy costs and it’s hurting our businesses and families.
That’s why we need to take back greater control of our energy system.
This week, I announced Great British Grid, which will speed up connections and push down bills.
We’re also giving mayors, local leaders and communities a stronger role. With funding for People’s Power projects, communities will be able to build solar panels on libraries and town halls, hydro schemes in rivers or publicly owned windfarms on local land.
But it’s not just energy we need stronger public control over. It’s also water, housing, transport and care.
So we’re repealing the ban on public ownership of water companies. We’re building more council homes than this country has seen since the end of World War Two.
We’re reforming the leasehold system so families aren’t squeezed for every penny. And we’re opening up home ownership for first time buyers who can’t rely on the bank of mum and dad.
This week I also announced my determination to introduce a National Care Service, to put people above profit and to give pensioners peace of mind.
Together, we’ll rewire the country from top to bottom so that it works for all people in all places.
That is the only way to put Britain back on the right path. It’s the only way to put power back in people’s hands. And it’s the only way we will bring hope again.
Brian Salmon retweeted
One moment to leave my box then I'll get back in it.
If you're uneducated enough to have an issue with the British government rightly making this statement, lemme put it very simply:
-49,000 slave owners, approx 0.19% of the population at the time, were given money to buy them out of owning slaves. British taxpayers paid to free the slaves.
-For decades during the 19th century, Britain dedicated 1/6th of it's entire Navy specifically to seek and capture other nations' slave ships to free the slaves on board. The economic cost was bore by the taxpayer. 2,000 British sailors lost their lives.
-During the US Civil War, Pres Lincoln blockaded Cotton exports from the USA. This put more than half a million working Britons out of already very poorly paid work. After months, the mill owners worked a deal with the US govt to reopen trading. More than half a million working class Britons voted AGAINST the deal citing that they didn't ever want to work with goods produced from slavery again.
About half as many (24,000 ish) Brits died from malnourishment, disease etc in the affected cotton factory communities as a direct result of that action as ever owned slaves.
-Britain paid £400,000 to Spain to convince it to stop its slave trade. It also placed diplomatic pressure on France to stop them too.
Of every empire that ever took part in slavery, Britain is the ONLY ONE that grew a conscience, stopped its own, and then set out to stop everybody else without any outside encouragement.
And it is also the only one that has maintained a successful and genuinely beneficial diplomatic network to lift up and empower its former territories- the Commonwealth- which has helped ex-colonies outperform their peer nations in almost every way ever since.
Not to mention endless and unwavering humanitarian relief when a hurricane rips through their islands every season, or when an earthquake buries their brothers and sisters under their own houses.
The British taxpayer has bore the cost of all of that. Britons voted in favour of that responsibility in the 19th century, decades before anybody else grew a conscience of their own- even African Kingdoms such as the Asanti Empire who only stopped slaving when Britain took over Ghana and made it illegal.
You reparationsit types don't harass modern-day Turks over the 6-8 million slaves that passed through the Ottoman Slave trade, or modern-day Ghanaians for the millions that the Ghana and Asanti empires captured, abused, and traded in the Trans-Sharan and Transatlantic trades. You don't even get on at the Arab and African countries who still enable slavery today. Why?
There is no other demographic/nation/country for which people feel so empowered to blame the crimes of the most miniscule proportion of its ancestry, which were undone and atoned for by exponentially more of its ancestry, on an entire diaspora that has lived for generations with no direct culpability in said crimes.
Every population in the world has been a victim to another population at a given time. The following paragraph should be the one that sticks from this whole rant:
The working class, poor, destitute British man and woman who rotted in workhouses for centuries had more in common with their African slave counterparts than they ever did their compatriot masters. That's exactly why they bloody well did something about it. British people en masse stood WITH the slaves. Not with their feet on their necks.
Reparationism towards the British nation is just politics of division, meant to absolve commonwealth governments of their own failures towards their people at the expense of a population who have never committed the crime they are demanding reparations for, and whose ancestors paid the human and economic price for for the last 2 centuries.
This is the last post I'll make on the matter.
🚨 BREAKING
The UK Government says it “does not and will not pay reparations” for Britain's role in the transatlantic slave trade.
The remarks were made today by a spokesperson for Prime Minister Andy Burnham as Jamaica steps up its campaign for reparatory justice.
#Reparations #Jamaica #JamRadioNews #AndyBurnham
Brian Salmon retweeted
🚨📉THE SLOW DEATH OF BRITAIN:
We have shit water companies so we buy bottled water.
We have rubbish police so we hire private security.
We have terrible healthcare so we pay private hospitals instead.
Airbnbs in Cornwall pay council tax but get no rubbish collection, so they pay Biffa on top.
An awful lot of firemen are now volunteers.
NHS dentists don’t really work anymore, so you go private or you pull it out yourself.
Our roads are littered with potholes nobody fills. Your privately funded tyres and suspension are the collateral.
You are forced under threat of criminal prosecution to fund the BBC, and it’s so bad you pay for streaming to get news or entertainment anyway.
Your bins are collected fortnightly, so you drive to the tip. The tip now requires a booking, a permit and proof you live in the county.
Garden waste is a separate annual subscription. On top of the council tax that used to cover it.
Your GP surgery is an 8am phone lottery, so you pay £40 to an app to speak to a doctor in a different time zone.
CAMHS has a two year waiting list, so parents remortgage for private assessments.
Your child’s SEN provision is a legal entitlement, so you hire a solicitor to sue the council for it. The council spends more fighting you than the support would have cost.
Physio is a forty week wait. Your back does not have forty weeks.
Schools teach in portable cabins bolted to the playground because the actual building is held up by aerated concrete and hope.
Half of them are technically insolvent.
Parents fund the reading books, the glue sticks, the photocopier, the roof and increasingly the teachers wages - all via a PTA raffle and local fundraisers.
The state offers “free” childcare hours that don’t cover the nursery’s costs, so the nursery bills you a “top up fee” for the free thing.
Shoplifting under £200 is functionally legal, so Tesco hires guards - who crucially don’t even try to stop it - and you pay for them in the price of the milk.
999 takes an hour, so you buy the Ring doorbell, gather the evidence, file the report and get a crime number for the insurance you also pay for.
Court backlogs run to years, so anyone with money settles privately and everyone else gets nothing.
Legal aid is gone. Represent yourself.
Passport and DVLA backlogs are chronic, so the state sells you a fast track service to escape the queue the state created.
The trains are late whoever owns them, so you drive on the roads with the potholes.
Public toilets are shut, so you buy a coffee you don’t want.
The library is staffed by pensioners working for free.
Street lights are switched off at midnight to save money in a country with a burglary charge rate near zero.
You pay National Insurance for fifty years and they move the pension age.
You pay the adult social care precept every year and then sell your mother’s house to pay for adult social care.
Leaseholders pay for a “waking watch” because the state signed off the cladding and then billed the residents to fix it.
Social housing sits on the most valuable land in Britain, allocated by need rather than proximity to work, 48% of zone 1 social housing is occupied by foreigners mostly welfare dependent - while the nurses, teachers and other workers who keep zone 1 running commute ninety minutes each way from Kent because we stopped building anything in 1979.
Every one of these is a service you have already bought. The receipt is your payslip.
The tax burden is heading for its highest sustained level since the 1940s. The service level is the worst in living memory.
You are not overtaxed or underserved. You are actually BOTH, simultaneously, and the gap between the two is where your standard of living went.
The state has become a subscription you cannot cancel and cannot use.
We are now officially living in a parallel universe.
There once was a time in Germany when they:
Sold lots of cars
Made sure the trains ran on time
Never missed in a penalty shootout!
The big difference between Thomas Tuchel and Gareth Southgate. Having a one goal lead in the 85th minute, there is no way under Southgate that an England counter attack would result in FIVE England players in the penalty box. So refreshing not seeing England sit back to defend.
Wonderful practical joke by FIFA, trying to persuade us that a country called Curaçao actually exists. To make it believable they showed a rerun of the 2014 World Cup semifinal between Brazil and Germany, just swapping the colour of Brazils shirts and shorts!
Brian Salmon retweeted
Most people know the Army stormed Normandy. The Navy bombarded the shore. The Air Force owned the sky.
Nobody thinks about the Coast Guard.
They should.
The United States Coast Guard is not a combat force. Their entire purpose, the reason they exist, is to save people from the sea. They are trained to swim into storms, to pull drowning sailors from sinking ships, to run toward disaster when everyone else is running away.
On June 6, 1944, the Germans gave them more drowning men than they had ever seen in their lives.
The Coast Guard brought 800 men to Normandy. Five major assault transports were USCG-crewed. Eleven tank landing ships. Twenty-four troop carriers running soldiers directly onto Omaha and Utah Beaches. The USS Bayfield served as the command ship for the entire Utah Beach sector, the nerve center through which an entire army was directed ashore. The USS Samuel Chase led the assault group landing the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One, onto the eastern flank of Omaha.
But the thing almost nobody knows about is Rescue Flotilla One.
60 small Coast Guard cutters, nicknamed Matchbox ships because of how easily they burned, were assigned a single mission: pull men out of the water. As the landing craft were torn apart by German fire, as soldiers drowned in the surf under the weight of their own equipment, as wounded men on the beach were swallowed by the incoming tide, Rescue Flotilla One was already moving.
Their swimmers jumped into the Channel. Tethered to their boats by lines, they swam toward the men going under, grabbed them, and dragged them back. They did this 2,000 yards from shore. Under active German machine gun fire. Under mortar fire. Under artillery.
Again and again, all day long.
Two miles offshore a lookout spotted men from a sunken British landing craft floating in the Channel. One cutter went to them and pulled 24 soldiers and four Royal Navy sailors from the water before they went under.
One Coast Guard LCI was hit 25 times by German fire and kept going. Coxswain Delba Nivens kept driving his craft toward the beach after a grenade caught fire aboard his boat.
By the end of June 6, Rescue Flotilla One had pulled 400 men out of the sea.
400 men who would have drowned. 400 men who went home. 400 men whose families exist today because a Coast Guardsman jumped into the English Channel under machine gun fire and refused to let go.
Out of 800 Coast Guardsmen at Normandy, 15 were killed.
Every branch that fought on D-Day deserves its place in history. But the men who spent that day swimming between the dead to find the living, tethered to a burning ship with the whole weight of the German army trying to kill them, did something that has no good word for it.
They saved people. That's what they were built for.
On the worst day in the history of the sea, they were exactly who they were supposed to be.
Woeful defence from St Helens women in the first quarter of the Womens Challenge Cup Final. Wigan Warriors have hardly any to work for any of their four tries. Amy Hunter in particular has been given te freedom of Wembley.
Saints need to drastically tighten up the defence
Brian Salmon retweeted
He died alone.
73 years old. A hospital bed in Tucson, Arizona. November 2, 2025.
No wife holding his hand. No children at the door. No friends in the waiting room.
Nobody came.
His name was Darrell Lee Arelt. And for the last hours of his life, the richest, most powerful nation on Earth had no idea one of its soldiers was slipping away in the dark.
Because that's what he was.
A soldier.
Second Lieutenant Darrell Arelt. United States Army. Vietnam.
He went when his country called. He came home to a country that looked away. Vietnam veterans got no parades. No "thank you for your service." No welcome home. Just silence, and sometimes worse.
And now, half a century later, here was that same silence again. A forgotten lieutenant, about to be lowered into the ground with no one to fold a flag for.
The hospital had no next of kin to call. The funeral home had no family to notify. The government had a name for a man like this.
"Unaccompanied veteran."
Read that again.
Unaccompanied.
A man who once raised his right hand and swore his life to this country was going to be buried like he never mattered at all.
Then one man said no.
His name is Nick De Gennaro. He owned the little mobile home park where Darrell had quietly lived for four and a half years. When Nick learned this old soldier was going to be put in the earth alone, two days before Christmas, something in him refused.
So he made a decision. He and his wife would go. Just the two of them, if that's what it came to. A veteran would not be buried alone. Not on his watch.
And then he did one small thing.
He posted about it online.
What happened next will put a lump in your throat.
The post traveled. Veterans saw it. Bikers saw it. Firefighters saw it. The American Legion saw it. In 72 hours, the whole of Southern Arizona knew the name Darrell Arelt.
December 23, 2025. Noon. The Arizona Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Marana.
Nick expected two people.
Hundreds came.
Hundreds.
Bikers thundered in by the dozen. The Marana Police Department came in uniform. The Northwest Fire District came. The American Legion came. National Guardsmen came. Active-duty soldiers came.
And the old men came. Vietnam veterans in their seventies. Korean War veterans. Men who could barely stand at attention anymore, standing at attention anyway, for a brother they had never once met.
One of them, James Harmon, looked in his rearview mirror as he drove in. Thirty cars behind him. Forty. A river of headlights flowing to the grave of a stranger.
"As we were driving in," he said, "I'm going, oh my God, this is great."
These were the men America forgot in 1970. And here they were, refusing to let America forget one of their own in 2025.
Another vet, Ed Lytle, stood at the grave and said the words that should be carved in stone:
"No veteran should be buried alone. They've always got a family. I may not have known him then. But he's still a brother."
Darrell Arelt got everything that day.
An honor guard. White gloves. A folded flag.
"Taps" rising slow and clean over the desert.
And a 21-gun salute, cracking into the Arizona sky, fired by men who had never met him, for a life they had only just learned existed.
Half a century after his country forgot to say thank you, hundreds of strangers stood in the December sun and said it all at once.
Nick was handed the flag. The flag that's supposed to go to a man's family.
He's still keeping it. He says if anyone ever knew Darrell, a week from now, a year from now, ten years from now, they can come and it's theirs.
So let me tell you what kind of country this is.
This is a country that will fill a cemetery for a man nobody remembered to love.
This is a country where bikers and cops and firefighters and broken old soldiers will drop everything, two days before Christmas, so one forgotten veteran does not go into the ground alone.
You can criticize America all you want. Go ahead.
But understand this.
On this soil, no soldier is ever truly alone.
Not one.
Not ever.
Rest easy, Lieutenant.
Your country was late.
But your country came. 🇺🇸
How to spot a fake WiFi network that captures all your passwords and financial data. This is vital information to stop you being a victim of phishing or identity theft.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Further evidence that the Meta AI in Facebook is completely deranged and untrustworthy.
Me
But the riddle specifies September has two. You are not even answering your own question!
Meta AI
The answer to the riddle "What comes once in March, twice in September, but never in June?" is indeed the letter "R".
It appears once in the word "March", twice in the word "September", and not at all in the word "June".
Brian Salmon retweeted
In 1893, NYC - A woman in her mid-twenties walks through streets so crowded with humanity they hum like a living organism.
She's following a child. A girl, maybe ten years old, who burst into her nursing class that afternoon begging for help. Her mother is sick. There's no money for a doctor. Will someone please come?
So Lillian Wald goes.
She climbs narrow staircases in a tenement building where the air itself feels tired. The girl opens a door, and Lillian steps into a room that will rewrite the rest of her life.
Ten people. Three hundred twenty-five square feet. A woman lying in a bed that barely qualifies as one, surrounded by peeling walls and the kind of desperation that doesn't announce itself with noise, it just sits there, heavy and inescapable.
Lillian had grown up comfortable. Books on the shelves. A father who ran a thriving business. She'd been bright enough to apply to Vassar at sixteen, turned away only because of her age. When she finally entered nursing school at twenty-two, she excelled. Methodical. Caring. Brilliant at what she did.
But nothing prepared her for this.
She leaves that apartment and enrolls in medical school the next morning. Then she does something even more radical. She quits medical school and moves to the Lower East Side. Not to study poverty. To live inside it.
In 1893, she and her colleague Mary Brewster invent a profession that didn't exist: the public health nurse. Someone who brings healthcare directly into homes, into the places hospitals will never reach and the people who can't afford to ask for help.
Two years later, the Henry Street Settlement opens its doors.
By 1913, it's become something almost unimaginable. Seven buildings. Ninety-two nurses. Two hundred thousand home visits every single year.
But Lillian Wald doesn't stop at nursing. She walks into meetings with presidents. She helps create the U.S. Children's Bureau in 1912, the first federal agency dedicated to children. She co-founds movements to end child labor and protect working women. When the Spanish Flu tears through America in 1918, she leads the Red Cross response, mobilizing an army of nurses she's spent decades training.
She built all of it because one afternoon, a frightened child asked for help and Lillian Wald refused to look away.
Lillian Wald didn't just respond to that moment in 1893. She let it consume her in the best possible way. She moved into the neighborhood, lived among the families she served, and refused to accept that zip codes should determine who gets to survive preventable illness. The Henry Street Settlement became a command center for social change, offering not just medical care but education, job training, and community organizing.
When she opened the Settlement's doors to early NAACP meetings, she risked her funding and her reputation in a deeply segregated America. When World War I created a nursing shortage, she helped professionalize the field and expand training programs nationwide. The Visiting Nurse Service of New York, which she co-founded, still operates today and remains one of the largest nonprofit home healthcare organizations in America.
Here's something remarkable: Lillian Wald never married, never had children of her own, but she's responsible for changing childhood in America. Before her advocacy, five-year-olds worked in coal mines. There was no federal oversight of child welfare. She didn't just dream of a better system; she walked into the White House and made Theodore Roosevelt believe in it too.
When she died in 1940, Carnegie Hall held her memorial. Twenty-five hundred people came. The profession she named, the agencies she founded, and the model of community-based healthcare she pioneered are all still here, more than 130 years later, quietly saving lives in the same neighborhoods where a young nurse once followed a frightened child up a narrow staircase and refused to forget what she saw.
© Women Stories
#drthehistories
Fantastic thread on Civil Rights campaigner Rosa Parks. Her life was not just the one single act of courage that history remembers. It was a continual struggle against the injustice of an entrenched system of prejudice. Her bravery and the cost paid was a lifelong struggle.
The Rosa Parks you learned about in school is a myth...
That story - the tired seamstress who'd simply had enough and refused to give up her seat - a fairy tale that erases twelve years of dangerous organizing work that led her to that pivotal moment. She had investigated lynchings. She had documented rapes. She had collected testimony from people too frightened to speak their own names. And in 1943, she had already defied the same bus driver who would have her arrested twelve years later.
Born in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1913, Rosa Parks would spend her life challenging a system designed to silence her. This is the story of those twelve years. The story of how a movement readied itself, and how one woman made herself ready to meet it.
In 1943, Parks joined the Montgomery NAACP as secretary and began the most dangerous work of her life. Alongside E.D. Nixon -- a union organizer who led the local chapter -- she became the person Black Alabamians turned to when the law abandoned them.
Her title suggested paperwork. The reality was fieldwork. When Black women were raped by White men, Parks was the one who came. When a Black man faced false accusations that could mean his death, Parks traveled to him -- often through hostile territory, always at great personal risk.
"Rosa will talk to you," people whispered throughout Alabama's Black communities.
In 1944, a 24-year-old sharecropper named Recy Taylor was walking home from church when six White men forced her into a car, blindfolded her, and raped her. When word reached the Montgomery NAACP, they sent Parks. She found the sheriff waiting at Taylor's home, driving past repeatedly, eventually entering to demand Parks leave -- no "troublemakers" wanted. Parks returned to Montgomery and launched the Committee for Equal Justice for the Rights of Mrs. Recy Taylor. She made sure the case reached national headlines.
The men who raped Recy Taylor were never charged.
For twelve years, Parks worked cases like Taylor's: Gertrude Perkins, raped. Jeremiah Reeves, a sixteen-year-old facing execution. The Scottsboro Boys, falsely accused. Viola White and Claudette Colvin, arrested for resisting bus segregation. She persuaded traumatized victims to file affidavits that could get them killed -- but were also their only hope for justice. She submitted report after report to federal authorities who looked away.
Most cases led nowhere. No charges. No justice. Just silence and fear. Parks later said it was "more a matter of trying to challenge the powers that be and let it be known that we did not want to continue being second-class citizens." By the summer of 1955, exhausted and discouraged, she questioned whether any of it mattered.
That August, civil rights activist Virginia Durr secured Parks a scholarship to Highlander Folk School, a social justice leadership training center in Tennessee and one of the few integrated spaces in the South. The two-week workshop focused on implementing school desegregation. Parks arrived depleted.
She studied under Septima Clark, a fired teacher who had refused to abandon her NAACP membership. She strategized with Black and White activists together. She slept, ate, and planned in integrated spaces. For two weeks, she glimpsed what an equal society might feel like.
At 42, she wrote, it was "one of the few times in my life up to that point when I did not feel any hostility from White people."
On the final day, someone asked what she thought would happen when she returned to Montgomery. Parks -- ever realistic -- answered that because Montgomery was the Cradle of the Confederacy, nothing would happen there.
But something had shifted. She left Highlander, she later said, with "the strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for Blacks, but for all oppressed people."
© A Mighty Girl
#archaeohistories
The @Lionesses have been outplayed in the second half twice this week. Firstly against Spain and now Iceland. However defensive grit and the outstanding Hannah Hampton have ensured clean sheets in both games. They have been fortunate but still on course to qualify for Brazil 2027
