Mrs. Rosa Parks’ courage in refusing to get up and give her seat to a White man ignited the Montgomery bus boycott. Mrs. Parks was not by any means the first Black person to sit down in the front of a segregated bus in the South. My friend and legal scholar, the late Pauli Murray, author of Proud Shoes, and I often shared stories during Yale Law School days about our protests against segregated public transportation. Pauli’s protest in Washington, D.C. preceded Mrs. Parks’ by many years. When I was a freshman returning at night from my first interracial seminar at the Atlanta YMCA, I sat down in the front of the bus. I am sure Mrs. Parks’ Montgomery example had affected me but my panic-stricken Black Spelman chaperone begged me not to cause trouble so I relented somewhat by standing in the aisle halfway between the White and Black sections. I remember gazing at the empty seats before and behind me and feeling enraged at the stupidity of the South’s dehumanizing racial caste system.
Who knows what emboldened Mrs. Parks in 1955 not to move after riding segregated buses all her life? Was it her tired feet or her tired soul saying enough, or the seeds from the Highlander Folk School citizenship training she had attended some weeks before, or all of these? Perhaps sharing time and grievances with others from across the South and feeling part of a community of fellow strugglers unleashed long repressed emotions and courage.
Mrs. Parks was just the right person at the right time to light the spark that lit the movement that Montgomery NAACP head E. B. Nixon had been vigilantly working, watching, and waiting for. He had a plan and an infrastructure ready to go when the right case and opportunity arose. Who knows whether and when a movement in Montgomery would have swelled up without an E. B. Nixon and his organizational capacity to translate an incident into a communitywide mobilization. He understood and shared the simmering discontent of Montgomery’s Black community about their oppressive segregated environment. And E. B. Nixon recognized the crucial role that Black churches and ministers could play in mobilizing the Black community to challenge segregation. Without a strong moral base, movements cannot soar or be sustained over time.
It was E. B. Nixon who anointed the young Martin Luther King, Jr., who had just arrived in Montgomery, rather than Reverend Ralph Abernathy or another more established Montgomery pastor to lead the movement and rally the people. “God has,” Andy Young says, “ways of acting anonymously” to set the stage for the workings of His justice. God chooses the actors, the times, the places, sets the stage, lifts the curtain, and begins the drama. Our task is to be ready to play our parts and to do the work God assigns us without anxiety according to the strengths and gifts we are given.
There might not have been a Civil Rights Movement so soon or so sweeping without a King or a Parks or a Nixon, or a Houston or a Marshall whose legal groundwork came to fruition in Brown. The movement might have died out without Black college students like Ezell Blair in Greensboro, Diane Nash in Nashville, and hundreds of others who said it’s time to sit down and eat without discrimination. I was among them, waiting for an outlet, inspired by what had happened in Montgomery. I cannot ever remember a time when I did not detest segregation and I knew one day that I would find a way to fight it. The sit-ins became that outlet.
The movement might have petered out if freedom riders, Black and White, had given up or if brave people like Diane Nash, Jim Bevel, James Farmer, Jim Peck, and others hadn’t insisted on continuing them despite President Kennedy’s and Robert Kennedy’s reluctance. The movement might have ground to a halt and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 might never have been enacted if A. Philip Randolph had not threatened to march on President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Washington in 1941 and finally did it twenty-two years later in President Kennedy’s and Dr. King’s time with Bayard Rustin’s brilliant coordination. It might have died before the Voting Rights Act was enacted if Diane Nash, Jim Bevel, John Lewis, Hosea Williams, and others had not courageously responded to the cruel bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church by planning to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery and if Dr. King and thousands of others had not finished their quest after the first marchers were brutally attacked. It might have waned if Bob Moses and his SNCC co-workers had not gone to Mississippi and tried to register poor Black citizens to vote at risk of life and limb. It also might have faltered if SNCC, with Al Lowenstein’s help, had not recruited White students to join Black citizens in the Mississippi freedom struggle; SNCC gained national visibility by enlisting the middle-class White youths America cared more about. The chronic racial violence against Blacks in Mississippi might never have received a national response if two White mothers’ sons hadn’t joined one Black mother’s son in being ambushed and murdered by lynchers wearing law enforcement badges in Philadelphia, Mississippi. This racist reality is reflected again in response to White youth shootings in suburban schools, although Black children have been dying from guns for years largely unnoticed.
The Montgomery movement might have stalled and ended through attrition if organized national legal groups like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund—with a national vision and strategy—and its local cooperating attorneys like Fred Gray had not won the legal case which ended racial segregation on Montgomery buses and came as a Godsend to the young King. How long before tired feet would have become tired wills if some success could not have been shown?
And the movement might never have realized its enormous potential to transform southern politics if Ella Baker and Septima Clark had not picked up where Mrs. Rosa Parks left off. Mrs. Baker understood that individual marches and demonstrations without organizational infrastructure and a larger strategy or vision could not engage a critical mass of people or institutionalize change. Mrs. Septima Clark understood that the ability to read was essential if exercising the right to vote was to become real. And there might have been no movement without the preaching and mass meetings and music like Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer’s singing “This Little Light of Mine, I’m Going to Let It Shine” that held us together as a community of ragged and often scared activists, giving us courage and spiritual nourishment. Zylphia Horton and Guy Carawan’s adaptation of “We Shall Overcome” from a Negro spiritual became the theme song of the Civil Rights Movement and helped drown out our fears of the dogs and hoses and mean White mobs and police and Klan. The music allowed us to tell God all about our troubles and hopes, to plead with God to guide our feet, hold our hands, bolster our lagging determination, and quell our doubts.
If many faith groups and affluent supporters like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier had not raised money for bail, if ordinary people hadn’t displayed extraordinary hospitality and courage in opening up their humble homes and sharing their beds and loaves and fishes with “outsiders” like me (I was the third person sharing a bed in a Mississippi shack on my first visit as a student), and if poor families hadn’t shared what they had with strangers, the movement may not have survived and thrived.
Too many of our children in inner-city, suburban, and rural areas, in Ivy League, Black, and other institutions of higher education, do not know about the movement that crumbled America’s racial Berlin Wall. Too few Whites and Blacks alike remember beyond a Martin Luther King holiday celebration or reading Dr. King’s still unrealized great dream of an America that judges children by “the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin” and enables all children to achieve their God-given potential. Dr. King believed that America could provide a roof over every citizen’s head, an education for their minds, a job to support their families, and freedom to pray and grow and sing and worship and feed their spirit. He led us towards that land promised in the Declaration of Independence but could not stay to go with us. But in Memphis in his last speech he promised us we would get there. It is time for us to cross over.
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GREAT BLACK WOMEN MENTORS AND MOVEMENT BUILDERS
Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune, Septima Clark, and Ella Baker
I ALWAYS KNEW and heard about str
ong and accomplished Black women when I was growing up. I write here about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune and Septima Clark and Ella Baker.
Ida B. Wells, who helped end lynchings that took over 3,400 Black lives in this century, and who would be appalled to know that more young Black males under twenty-five today die from guns every year, was held up to me as well. I learned about Nannie Helen Burroughs, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Elizabeth Evelyn Wright who started schools to educate Black children since White public schools excluded them completely or educated them unequally. They would be leading the fight today for our poor Black children, one of whom drops out of school every fifty seconds, and standing up to those both inside and outside our public school systems who do not expect or help our children to learn.
Anna Julia Cooper, who received her Ph.D. at the Sorbonne at a time when few Black or White women even went to college, later served as principal of the superb M Street School in Washington, D.C. Today she would be telling Black children in the nation’s capital about the vibrant Black renaissance period on the U Street corridor and in the Shaws/Le Droit Park/Howard University neighborhood where Duke Ellington lived and played, and Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown and Paul Lawrence wrote and read their works, and Black intellectuals from Howard and political leaders debated issues affecting Black and American life and created poems and novels that we need to read and learn from today.
I understood early that if Black women had not done what they always do—most of the organizing and scut work—while men got most of the credit and publicity, our families and communities would not have held together through slavery and segregation. Black mothers never lost sight of the holy seed in the stump after slavery’s destruction tried to chop off the limbs of our humanity. Black mothers and grandmothers never stopped dreaming and working towards a world where in Langston Hughes’ great poem, “Whatever race you be, will share the bounties of the earth and every man is free.”
Brave Black girls like Linda Brown and Prathia Hall and Sophia Bracey challenged segregated schools in court and in school, and a little six-year-old girl like Ruby Bridges in New Orleans and Deborah Lewis and the Carter children in Mississippi endured mean White heckling day after day as they sat alone or in classrooms where others mistreated them in order to achieve the better education that Brown v. Board of Education promised.
Mrs. Parks sat down and refused to move from her bus seat, and the Civil Rights Movement was ignited. Montgomery’s Black community wouldn’t have stood up to end segregation in public transportation in America without her witness. Montgomery Black women walked to their jobs as maids or found means other than buses to get where they needed to go with the help of some White women like the feisty Virginia Durr whose husband Clifford Durr got Mrs. Parks out of jail. All of these women, sung and unsung, helped the boycott succeed and raised up a new young leader named Martin Luther King, Jr., to be our greatest twentieth-century national prophet.
HARRIET TUBMAN AND SOJOURNER TRUTH
As a child, I read books about Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad and knew there was a fearless former slave woman named Sojourner Truth. After becoming chair of Spelman’s board of trustees, I convinced fellow trustees to name the two concourses in our new student center after these two unlettered but extraordinary Black women freedom fighters so that generations of Spelman women leaders would know their names, remember their legacies, and carry forth their struggles for justice.
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth represent the thousands of anonymous women whose voices were muted by slavery, segregation, and confining gender roles throughout history. Harriet Tubman freed herself from slavery then went back South through forests and streams and across mountains countless times to lead fellow slaves to freedom. She was tough. She was determined. She was fearless. She was shrewd. Harriet Tubman trusted God completely to deliver her and her fellow slaves from their pursuing captors who had placed a bounty on her life. “ ’Twa’nt me. ’Twas the Lord. I always told Him, I trust You. I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I expect You to lead me. And He always did…. On my underground railroad, I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger,” she was quoted as saying. No train, bus company, or airline can match this slave woman’s record and partnership with God.
What Frederick Douglass wrote to Harriet Tubman on August 28, 1868 eloquently summed up her life and that of so many Black women:
The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scared, and foot-sore bondmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt “God bless you” has been your only reward. The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witness of your devotion to freedom.
Like Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth was a brilliant but illiterate slave woman, a great orator and powerful presence who also possessed great courage. She challenged the racial and gender caste system of slavery by suing for the return of a son sold away from her. She got thrown off but kept getting back on Washington, D.C. streetcars until they let her ride. She stood up with fiery eloquence to opponents and threatening crowds who tried to stop her from speaking. When a hostile White man told her that the hall where she was scheduled to speak would be burnt down if she spoke she replied, “Then I will speak to the ashes.” When taunted while speaking in favor of women’s rights by some White men who asked if she was really a woman, she bared her breasts and famously retorted, “Ain’t I a woman?,” detailing the back-breaking double burden of slavery’s work and childbearing she had endured. When heckled by a White man in her audience who said he didn’t care any more about her antislavery talk than for an old flea bite, she snapped back, “Then the Lord willing, I’ll keep you scratching.” And when decrying her exclusion from America’s life and Constitution she asked, “God, what ails this Constitution? I feels for my rights and don’t feel any there.” She said God replied, “‘Sojourner, there some little weasels in it.’”
Since Sojourner Truth’s day, Black and White and Brown and other excluded and marginalized women have been trying to ferret out the weasels in the Constitution and our national life and to build a just America and world for themselves and their children. That effort must accelerate and reach a mighty roar.
MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE
Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune completely commanded the dinner table at Benedict College as she recounted stories about straightening out White folks as I sat listening as a young girl. When a White hat shop clerk attempted to prevent her from trying on a hat Dr. Bethune asked her, “Do you know who I am? I am Mary McLeod Bethune.” In the South, Black customers were expected to look, buy, but not try on clothes or sit down for lunch while shopping. It was from Mrs. Bethune that I first heard the saying, “The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice.” She exuded great pride in her God-painted very Black skin.
The power of her forceful personality in a room—even one mostly full of men who listened very attentively to her—never left me. She was confident about who she was, proud of what she had achieved, and never ashamed of where she came from. She built Bethune-Cookman College on top of a garbage dump with faith, will, and an initial investment of five dollars. It has educated thousands of Black youths since then and continues today. She founded the National Council of Negro Women, and her successor, my dear friend and role model Dorothy Height, carried it on with brilliance and dignity for forty-one years and still serves as its chair. Mrs. Bethune was friend to Eleanor Roosevelt through whom she would transmit messages to President Franklin Roosevelt that “the President needs to see me!”
One of my favorite Be
thune stories was her reply to a White train conductor who called her “Auntie” and asked whether she could cook biscuits. She answered, “I am Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. I am a college president, a founder of a national women’s organization, and a friend of the President of the United States. And yes, I also can cook good biscuits.”
I thought about this many decades later when I was sitting alone in an Aspen, Colorado restaurant, peacefully reading a book and drinking a cup of coffee when a White woman about my age disturbed me to announce she was looking for a maid and was I interested. I asked her how much she was paying and then told her what I would cost. I was not as gracious as Mrs. Bethune.
SEPTIMA CLARK
Without Septima Clark’s foresight in teaching illiterate Black citizens to read so that they could vote on John’s Island, South Carolina, Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference would not have a training infrastructure to provide the skills for illiterate Black citizens to gain the right to vote, a process that transformed southern politics. Septima Clark took her citizenship school model to the Highlander Folk School begun by Myles Horton near Knoxville, Tennessee, where she became Highlander’s education director. Mrs. Rosa Parks attended one of these Highlander training sessions shortly before she triggered the Montgomery bus boycott. Mrs. Parks later acknowledged Septima Clark’s important role, noting that she had sat down once, but Septima Clark kept on working and building: “I am always very respectful and very much in awe of the presence of Septima Clark because her life story makes the effort that I have made very minute. I only hope that there is a possible chance that some of her great courage and dignity and wisdom has rubbed off on me. When I first met her in 1955 at Highlander, when I saw how well she could organize and hold things together in this very informal setting of interracial living, I had to admire this great woman. She just moved through the different workshops and groups as though it was just what she was made to do, in spite of the fact that she had to face so much opposition in her home state and lost her job and all of that. She seemed to be just a beautiful person, and it didn’t seem to shake her.”
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