“Whenever people ask me: ‘Why didn’t you get up when the bus driver asked you?’ I say it felt as though Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on the other shoulder. I felt inspired by these women because my teacher taught us about them in so much detail.”
—CLAUDETTE COLVIN
Chelsea
One of the participants in the Youth Council meetings was fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin. On March 2, 1955, she and her classmates climbed on a city bus to go home from school. When a white passenger boarded, all the seats were taken, and the driver ordered Claudette and her classmates to move to the back and stand. Three of her classmates complied; she refused. Because of the segregation laws, the white woman still couldn’t sit down, since it would mean sharing a row with Claudette.
Technically, Claudette wasn’t breaking the law, and she knew it: Black passengers were not required to move if there were no other seats. She had just written a paper for school on the problems of segregation in Montgomery. She told the driver she had paid her fare and intended to stay where she was. “We had been studying the Constitution in Miss Nesbitt’s class,” she explained later. “I knew I had rights.” As she told me in a radio interview we did together in 2017, “I didn’t move because history, Chelsea, had me glued to the seat.”
The bus driver called the police; two officers boarded the bus. They forcefully handcuffed Claudette and threw her into the squad car. The officers mocked her and made lewd comments; she was terrified. They brought her to an adult jail and left her for hours in a small cell. By the time her mother came with her pastor to post bail, she was shaken and angry. Her father stayed up all night with a shotgun, ready to defend Claudette if the KKK showed up.
Rosa Parks leaped into action, fund-raising to support Claudette’s impending court case. Ultimately, the court dropped two of the three charges against her, including the charge of breaking Montgomery’s segregation law, which meant she couldn’t challenge it.
“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day.… No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
—ROSA PARKS
Hillary
On December 1, 1955, nine months after Claudette’s stand, Rosa decided that she, too, had been pushed far enough. Just four days before refusing to give up her seat on the bus, she had attended a meeting about the murder of Emmett Till and lynchings across the South. A seasoned activist, she carefully considered her options when the bus driver demanded she move that day. “I didn’t even know if I would get off the bus alive,” she reflected. In the end, she made up her mind: “I felt that, if I did stand up, it meant that I approved of the way I was being treated, and I did not approve.” She kept her seat and was arrested for civil disobedience.
The night Rosa was arrested, the Women’s Political Council swung into action, passing out flyers that called for a bus boycott on December 5, the date Rosa was due in court. That day, tens of thousands of black passengers walked or carpooled to work. Many buses were completely empty. As Rosa walked into the courthouse, she said, “I was not especially nervous. I knew what I had to do.” She was found guilty and fined fourteen dollars.
In the days to come, black leaders in the community formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and elected a young reverend, Martin Luther King Jr., as their president. Rosa not only sparked the 382-day boycott; she was instrumental in sustaining it. She raised money, organized support, and even served for a month as a dispatcher in the citywide carpool effort to help participants get to work and school. When rumors spread that arrests would be made in an effort to stop the boycott, Rosa and her fellow organizers decided not to wait. She presented herself, along with many members of MIA, to the sheriff. The famous photos of Rosa, impeccably dressed and looking absolutely unflappable as she had her mug shot and fingerprints taken, are from that day.
That year Rosa met Eleanor Roosevelt, who noted her “very quiet, gentle” personality. Still, Eleanor wrote in her regular newspaper column of the bus boycott, “These things do not happen all of a sudden. They grow out of feelings that have been developing over many years. Human beings reach a point.… ‘This is as far as I can go,’ and from then on it may be passive resistance, but it will be resistance.”
Chelsea
In 1956, a district court ruled that public bus segregation laws in Montgomery and throughout Alabama were unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling later that year. Claudette was one of the four plaintiffs in the case, all women. Claudette had won, and so had Rosa and everyone else who had the courage to challenge bus segregation in Alabama.
Claudette was glad for the victory. At the same time, she felt abandoned by leaders in the community. They had decided she was a less than ideal public face for the issue: she was too outspoken, too uncontrollable, and too young, not to mention the fact that she came from a low-income family. When they found out she was pregnant it seemed to confirm their own worst biases.
One of the few adult leaders who stayed in touch with her was Rosa. “She was very kind and thoughtful,” Claudette said. “She knew exactly how I liked my coffee and fixed me peanut butter and Ritz crackers, but she didn’t say much at all. Then when the meetings started, I’d think, ‘Is that the same lady?’ She would come across very strong about rights. She would pass out leaflets saying things like ‘We are going to break down the walls of segregation.’ ”
After the Supreme Court ruling, Claudette struggled with college and finding work in Montgomery. She eventually moved to New York, where she worked as a nursing aide for more than thirty years. She has maintained, even after decades of hardship and a lack of recognition, that she would never change her decision to remain seated on the bus that day in 1955. While it’s Rosa’s name we remember, it’s Claudette’s name in the Supreme Court ruling; she, too, is an important figure in American history.
“Mine was the first cry for justice, and a loud one.”
—CLAUDETTE COLVIN
Hillary
Like Claudette, Rosa Parks paid a price for her stand. Strangers called her at home to make death threats. The FBI monitored the activities of the local NAACP. Her coworkers shunned her, and five weeks after she refused to give up her seat, she was “dismissed” from her job. Not long after, Raymond was forced to give up his job, leaving the Parkses without a source of income. She developed insomnia, and painful ulcers that landed her in the hospital, leaving her with a bill she struggled to pay.
In 1957, Rosa and Raymond moved to Detroit to be near family and, they hoped, to find jobs. Still, they continued to face financial hardships, even as Rosa traveled the country speaking out on behalf of civil rights. She took part in the 1963 March on Washington, though no women were permitted to speak from the podium, and went back to Alabama to march from Selma to Montgomery, though because she was not an “official” participant, she was repeatedly pulled out of the procession by police.
Rosa continued her activism in Detroit and, in 1964, volunteered on the long-shot congressional campaign of John Conyers for “jobs, justice, and peace.” When he was elected, he hired Rosa to work in his Detroit office doing administrative duties. She traveled all over the city, meeting with constituents at hospitals, schools, and senior citizen homes. She was dedicated to criminal justice reform, spoke out against the war in Vietnam and the confirmation of Clarence Thomas, and demonstrated against segregation. She took up issues even closer to home, attending meetings on curbing the heroin epidemic in Detroit, marched in support of affordable public housing, and championed the movement to eat locally grown produce.
Decades after her place in history was secured, Rosa came to Washington to sit with me at the 1999 State of the Union. She looked beautiful in a jewel-colored dress with her head crowned in a long braid, just like in her booking photos from the day she was a
rrested. The entire Congress rose to give her a lengthy standing ovation.
“I’d like people to say I’m a person who always wanted to be free, and wanted it not only for myself.”
—ROSA PARKS
Hillary and Chelsea
Too often, the story of Rosa Parks is told as a single inevitable act. It was not. She spent years studying the principles of nonviolent resistance, informing her political beliefs, and helping to shore up a community of activists. Like Claudette’s before her, Rosa’s refusal to give up her seat on the bus was an act of astounding courage and clear-eyed conviction. It was also an act that led to Rosa’s tireless organizing to keep the bus boycott going, and a lifetime of taking action around causes she cared about, often with no recognition and at enormous personal risk. She understood better than anyone that progress takes decades of hard work, persistence, and the courage to keep going.
Coretta Scott King
Hillary and Chelsea
When the two of us think of Coretta Scott King, we think of a woman who lived out her calling—who answered the call by saying “Send me.” She lived her life as an extension of her faith, conviction, and hope.
Growing up in segregated Alabama in the 1930s and ’40s, she didn’t just understand the intersection of racism and poverty—she lived it. Her great-grandfather was enslaved, her great-uncle lynched. At ten years old, she picked cotton to pay for her schooling. When she was fifteen, her house was set on fire. Her father refused to sell his newly opened sawmill to a white man; it was burned to the ground. The racial violence she witnessed firsthand planted the seeds for what would become her life’s work, fighting for justice, opportunity, and peace.
Chelsea
It was also during this time that she encountered her first love: music. Coretta grew up listening to the trailblazing and talented Marian Anderson. She sang spirituals at church on Sundays, solos in the school choir, and Handel’s Messiah every Christmas. After graduating as valedictorian of her high school, she studied music and education at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she joined the local chapter of the NAACP. From Antioch, she went on to earn a degree in voice and violin at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music. “This is where I knew I was supposed to be,” she said later.
Hillary
In Boston, she met a young divinity student named Martin Luther King Jr. through a mutual friend. In her posthumous autobiography, My Life, My Love, My Legacy, she described the sight that greeted her when Martin came to pick her up for their first date in his green Chevy. “My first thoughts reaffirmed what I had anticipated: He was too short and he didn’t look that impressive.” But by the end of their date, she was singing a different tune. “I felt he was a man of substance, not like I had envisioned. In fact, the longer we talked, the taller he grew in stature and the more mature he became in my eyes.” On the drive home, Martin cut to the chase, telling Coretta she had the character, intelligence, personality, and beauty that were everything he ever wanted in a wife.
I can imagine that she thought for a minute, “What am I getting myself into?” In fact, she waited six months to give him an answer, because she had to have known in her heart that she wasn’t just marrying a young man but was bringing her calling to be joined with his. She was a fiercely independent person, true to herself. On their wedding day, they promised to love, honor, and cherish each other—but not to obey. “I had made up my mind that I wanted the traditional language about ‘obeying’ and submitting to my husband deleted from our marriage vows. The language made me feel too much like an indentured servant,” she wrote.
As Martin and Coretta began their marriage and their partnership, it could not have been easy. There they were: young, becoming parents, starting their ministry at a moment in history when they were called to lead. Leadership is something that many who are called refuse to accept. But they made their choice, and they made it together. Now living in Montgomery, Alabama, Coretta took up her duties as a pastor’s wife and continued her own activism every chance she got. She spoke at churches, schools, and civic groups, and while she had set aside her dreams of being a classical singer, she put her musical talents to work organizing a series of “Freedom Concerts” to raise money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization dedicated to ensuring civil rights and eradicating racism.
“I am not a ceremonial symbol. I am an activist.”
—CORETTA SCOTT KING
Chelsea
Coretta did not approach this work blindly. During the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott, their house was bombed, with Coretta and baby Yolanda inside. Her family urged her to leave the city, but she refused. In the midst of the boycott, when strangers called late at night to deliver a hate-filled rant, Coretta started telling the person on the other end of the line: “My husband is asleep.… He told me to write the name and number of anyone who called to threaten his life so that he could return the call and receive the threat in the morning when he wakes up and is fresh.” She was heartbroken and disturbed by the assassinations of President Kennedy and Malcolm X. She would later become close friends with Myrlie Evers-Williams, whose husband, Medgar, had been shot and killed in their driveway by white supremacists on June 12, 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi. The photos from Medgar’s funeral, with Myrlie comforting her crying son, are a portrait of a woman who embodies strength and resilience in the face of horrific violence. I think of those nights when Coretta was putting the children to bed and worrying about the violence, worrying about the threats, and determined not to show any of the natural fear that any of us would feel and to protect her children and her husband. She was courageous every single day.
Hillary
As was evident on their wedding day, Coretta came to her marriage with her own fully formed political views and passionate opinions. She urged her husband to oppose the Vietnam War and took part in the Women’s Strike for Peace during the 1962 Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. When Martin canceled a scheduled appearance at a peace rally in Washington, Coretta still went. When someone asked Martin whether he had educated Coretta on matters of politics and social justice, he answered, “She educated me.”
Four days after her husband was assassinated, Coretta went to Memphis to support the sanitation workers and lead the march he was supposed to have led. I remember listening in amazement, as a college student, to the news reports of this woman, three of her children in tow, taking up her husband’s struggle on behalf of the dispossessed. She told the fifty thousand people gathered in the drizzling rain at Memphis City Hall that she was there to continue his work to make all people truly free. Not just free from the obvious shackles, not just free from the legal segregation, not just free from the oppression that one can see, but truly free inside, knowing that each of us has a personal relationship with God that can take us through any darkness.
I’ll never forget the photos of Bernice King curled up in Coretta’s lap during Dr. King’s funeral, wearing a white dress and pigtails. She is so young and so small, and the expression on her face breaks my heart. Decades later, Bernice King is a minister and a leader in her own right on issues of human rights, civil rights, peace, and justice. When her niece Yolanda Renee, the granddaughter of Coretta and Dr. King, joined Bernice at the March for Our Lives rally against gun violence in 2018, Bernice said she was a “very proud aunt.”
Throughout her life, Coretta traveled the world, speaking out for the causes of nonviolence, peace, poverty, civil rights, human rights, and women’s rights. She trained tens of thousands of people in the principles of nonviolent resistance, and she consulted with world leaders. In 1985, she was arrested with three of her children at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C., protesting apartheid in South Africa. Despite warnings from some of the people closest to her, she spoke out for LGBTQ equality in the 1990s.
Chelsea
In 1986, Coretta wrote to Senator Strom Thurmond to “express [her] sincere opposition” to the nomination of Jef
f Sessions as a federal judge in Alabama. “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters,” she wrote in a nine-page letter. “For this reprehensible conduct, he should not be rewarded with a federal judgeship.” His nomination ultimately failed—the first time a Reagan nominee was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee. But that wasn’t the end of the story—not for Jeff Sessions, and not for Coretta’s letter.
A little over a decade later, Jeff Sessions was elected to the United States Senate; in 2017, he was nominated by the Trump administration to become attorney general. When Senator Elizabeth Warren went to the floor to read Coretta’s 1986 letter, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell cut her off; she was told to “take her seat” and McConnell prohibited her from speaking until after the vote. Later that night he famously tried to justify his actions, saying, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” In other words: She should have known her place and sat down.
My mom was in the Senate for eight years and never saw this happen to any other senator. This unprecedented display of power and sexism against Senator Warren and disrespect toward Coretta Scott King infuriated us both. Senator Warren’s refusal to be silent, and Coretta’s decades of doing the same, inspired the title of my book, She Persisted. I doubt it was Senator McConnell’s intent to create a rallying cry for women around the world, but that’s what he did!
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 25
