The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  His first trip to St. Louis as a Pullman porter was transformative. He explained,

  I was dumbfounded when I got up there and found black and white sitting down at the same table eating in the station. It had a heck of an impact on me. Here you have been conditioned traditionally to “This is the way of life,” and all your life that’s all you have known . . . and then all at once you see something like black and white eating together and it’s just like water that’s been backed up in a dam, and it breaks out and flows over. By the time I got back to Montgomery at the end of that first four-day run, I had started to think, “What can I do to help eliminate some of this?”9

  In 1928, Nixon went to a meeting with labor leader A. Phillip Randolph, who was helping the porters organize a union. Randolph’s speech had a decisive impact on him. “It was like a light. Most eloquent man I ever heard. He done more to bring me in the fight than anybody.” Nixon joined the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a militant group of porters trying to organize and get recognized as the union. When he returned to Montgomery, his boss told him he’d heard that Nixon had attended a Brotherhood meeting and that was not allowed. Nixon had prepared his reply: “Before I joined it I thought about what lawyer I was gonna get to handle my case. Anybody mess with my job, I’m gonna drag ’em into court.”10 Nixon was bluffing but his boss backed down.

  Nixon’s courage and political sensibility—a “Gandhi with guns,” according to Harrison Wofford, special assistant for civil rights to President John F. Kennedy—informed his lifelong conviction that racial inequality should be challenged directly.11 And with Rosa Parks at his side, he would confront the old leadership of Montgomery’s NAACP chapter, running for and winning the position of Montgomery branch president in 1945. Nixon, according to Parks, was “the first person beside my husband and my immediate family and my mother to really impress upon me the freedom that was ours and [that] we had to take a stand to at least let it be known that we want to be free regardless of the conditions under which we were living.”12 Like her accounts of getting to know Raymond, Rosa’s descriptions of the bold Mr. Nixon reflected how liberating she found meeting other race activists. Some people dismissed Nixon because he lacked formal education and class respectability. But Rosa Parks saw his substance. “In ways that matter . . . he was truly sophisticated.”13

  After a period of renewed activism in the late 1930s that stemmed in part from the organizing around the Scottsboro case, the Montgomery NAACP had seen a precipitous drop in membership in 1940, losing 90 percent of its members.14 Through the work of local activists like Nixon and Parks and outside support from NAACP visionaries like Ella Baker, the membership rolls picked back up over the course of the 1940s. The branch primarily focused on legal cases, in an effort to challenge white brutality and legal lynching in the state. The chapter had also begun a campaign for voter registration. Only thirty-one black people were registered to vote in Montgomery out of several thousand. The application for voter registration required potential voters to identify their employer, their business and educational background, and any drug and alcohol use and pledge not to “give aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States Government or the government of the State of Alabama.”15 This exposed potential black registrants to direct retribution from that employer.

  It also required a person to state whether she had “previously applied for and been denied registration as a voter,” providing another mechanism for denial. In order to register, potential voters, if they did not own property, were required to take a test. The registrar determined the questions on the tests, and often black people would be given more difficult tests than whites. Even people with PhDs and other advanced degrees had difficulty because the questions asked of black would-be registrants were obscure and nitpicking. People were “real discouraged,” according to Parks, because the voter registration board was “so hostile.” “If they didn’t come right out and be abusive,” Parks observed, “they would act as if you just weren’t supposed to be there even talking about registering to vote.” Customarily, a white person would have to vouch for each black person who wanted to register to vote. Even when black people succeeded in registering, their names would be printed in the newspaper (inviting possible retaliation). In addition, a successful registrant would be forced to pay poll taxes for each of the past years they had been eligible to register—a hefty sum for working-class families.16

  Nixon had organized the Montgomery Voters’ League in 1940. In 1944, he assembled a group of 750 black people to go down to the courthouse and ask to register to vote.17 Rosa had to work, but her mother and cousin joined the group—and did succeed in getting registered. Nixon had called on the help of Arthur Madison, a Harlem lawyer who had grown up in Alabama. Viewed as a troublemaker by police, Madison was jailed for his attempts to register black voters and ultimately disbarred in Alabama. Parks was appalled by the ways the Montgomery NAACP did not stand up for Madison.

  From 1943 to 1945, Rosa tried numerous times to register to vote “under hazardous conditions” and was repeatedly denied.18 Refusing to be cowed, the Parks family held Voters’ League meetings at their apartment—and Rosa exhorted her fellow Montgomerians to register, despite the enormous poll taxes and the unfair registration tests. She wanted to build an independent group of black voters “without having to go to a white person and be vouched for.”19 On Parks’s second try, two young white women were also registering to vote. They asked the registrar “to give them the answers and she, of course, indicated that she would be helpful.”20 In her presence, the registrar told the young women to wait a few moments, with the implication that she would help them after Parks left. In order to cover up the diversion of blacks, the registrar’s office rarely served whites and blacks at the same time. “They didn’t have to give you a reason” for denial, recalled Parks, and would usually simply inform blacks that they did not pass.21

  On her third attempt, “pretty sure” she passed the test and having tired of the registrar’s chicanery, she hand-copied all the questions so she could use them to bring suit against the voter registration board.22 The registrar noticed what Parks had done. She soon received a letter certifying her registration. Even when black people succeeded in registering, they had to wait for confirmation in the mail; white people received it immediately on site. She was then forced to pay back poll taxes—$1.50 for each year she had been old enough to vote, $18 in total, a formidable amount of money for a working-class family like the Parkses. Such poll taxes posed a great obstacle for people who succeeded in registering but “hardship or not, almost every Negro finally found some way to get the money and have his name placed on the books.”23 And so Rosa Parks cast her first vote for maverick governor James Folsom in 1945, and she and Raymond joined the crowds cheering his inaugural parade.24

  Rosa’s success was somewhat of an anomaly, and her tenacity in getting registered was a clear hallmark of her determination. Very few black Montgomerians succeeded in registering in this period. Relentlessly segregated, Montgomery in 1951 was 37 percent black in population, but only 3.7 percent of eligible black voters were registered.25 “There was not even a token representation,” Parks recalled.26

  Raymond tried for years to register and encouraged others to do so. He belonged to a Men’s Social Club and tried to get members to pool money for socials to help people pay back poll taxes. But the other club members were not interested, and so he dropped out. He also “tried on his own to interest people in getting registered,” according to Rosa, “but it was just considered too dangerous or too risky.”27 Raymond came to disparage his own voter registration attempts, saying, “I was ignorant enough to actually believe that they would let us register and vote after we paid up. After the taxes were paid, those registrars would sit there and ask you 21 questions that even a good white lawyer couldn’t answer.”28 Even though a couple of white people offered to vouch for him, he refused to go under those terms.29 After numerous attempts, he gave up, disheartene
d. He would not succeed in registering until the family moved to Detroit.

  Rosa’s brother Sylvester, who had served in the 1318th Medical Detachment Engineering Services Regiment during World War II, returned to Montgomery in December 1945. Despite his military service in both the Pacific and European theaters of the war, he was treated like an “uppity Negro” and could not find work or register to vote. Returning veterans, Rosa explained, “found that they were treated with even more disrespect, especially if they were in uniform. Whites felt that things should remain as they had always been and that the black veterans were getting too sassy. My brother was one who could not take that kind of treatment anymore.”30 Sylvester and his family left Montgomery for Detroit in 1946, never to return. While Detroit was also rife with economic and political inequality, Sylvester found the climate less hostile and ultimately secured work as an auto assembly worker.

  Beginning with Scottsboro—and lasting throughout her life—Parks focused on the mistreatment of African Americans under the law. Black men often were tried for “crimes” that not infrequently amounted to having a consensual relationship with a white woman or not being properly submissive. Simultaneously, black people found the law unresponsive to instances of white brutality against them—and black women were particularly vulnerable, as sexual assault by white men went unpunished. Parks and Nixon thus sought to use the law to seek justice for black victims of white violence and to expose the legal lynchings of black people, work that was dangerous and controversial. “Mrs. Parks will tell you this,” Nixon explained, “her mother said the white folks was going to lynch us, her and me both. Mrs. Parks and I were in the NAACP when other Negroes were afraid to be seen with us.”31 White minister Robert Graetz underscored how “extraordinarily brave” Parks was in her willingness to be publicly identified with the NAACP in this period.32 One of Parks’s “main duties” as NAACP secretary was to record dozens of cases of violence or unfair treatment against black people, in the hopes of possible redress.33

  After a twenty-four-year-old black woman was gang raped by six white men at gunpoint near Abbeville, Alabama, in 1944—and authorities made no move to look into the crime—the Montgomery NAACP sent Parks one hundred miles south to assist. Her father hailed from Abbeville, and she still had family there. Taylor, married with a three-year-old daughter, told Parks that she had been walking home from a church meeting when six white men pulled up, forced her into their car at gunpoint, took her to a deserted spot, and raped her. Then they blindfolded her, dropped her off in the middle of town, and threatened to kill her if she said anything. Nonetheless, Taylor reported the crime to police, who did nothing.34

  According to historian Danielle McGuire, Parks arrived at Taylor’s home and copiously took down her testimony. During their conversation, the police drove by the Taylors’ small cabin repeatedly. Finally, the deputy sheriff barged into the Taylor home. Making clear he didn’t want “any troublemakers here in Abbeville,” he ordered Parks to leave or face arrest.35 Parks describes her involvement in the Recy Taylor case in a 1988 interview with Jim Haskins somewhat differently: the person who instigated the Montgomery NAACP’s involvement in Taylor’s case was a white woman named Carolyn Bellin, and it is Bellin, not Parks, who was manhandled by the sheriff in her attempt to visit Taylor. Parks does not mention any run-in she had with the sheriff.36

  Along with Nixon, Rufus Lewis, and others, Parks worked to draw attention to the case with the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor. The committee used the organizational infrastructure built around the Scottsboro case to reach out to labor unions, African American groups, and women’s organizations to pressure Governor Chauncey Sparks to convene a special grand jury.37 According to McGuire, Parks and Nixon’s work “paid off” when the Pittsburgh Courier ran an exposé on the case in their October 28, 1944, issue.38 A number of key black women on the Left took up the struggle, including Esther Cooper and Audley Moore. Prominent writers and political leaders like Countee Cullen, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Mary Church Terrell, and Adam Clayton Powell joined the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor. Hundreds of letters poured into Governor Sparks’s office from across the country. Postcards and petitions also came from the core group of Montgomery activists, including Rosa and Raymond Parks, E. D. Nixon, and Johnnie Carr.39

  Disturbed by the mounting campaign, Governor Sparks and other prominent officials in the state worried about “Communist infiltration.” They stirred up a backlash against the organizing, trying to paint it as the work of “reds.” Given the anti-Communist climate of the time, the committee was increasingly attacked for sedition, and organizers like Cooper Jackson had to leave the state. With increased attention to the case, some of the men confessed to having sex with Taylor but they said it was consensual and Taylor was a prostitute. When it became clear that the men were not going to be indicted, the committee began to focus on other cases. Fearing for Taylor’s safety, Nixon and Parks helped Mrs. Taylor and her family move and find work in Montgomery.40

  Parks and Nixon wanted to make the Montgomery branch a more activist chapter that vigorously stood up for black women and men. In December 1945, Nixon ran for branch president to “return the N.A.A.C.P. to the people as their organization” and get black Montgomerians to “wake up and . . . build it into a powerful organization.”41 This was a class-based call. Nixon and Parks hailed from Montgomery’s working-class west side—very different from Robert Matthews, who worked for Pilgrim Insurance.

  In order to continue this local organizing, according to McGuire, Parks, Nixon, and Carr distanced themselves from their more radical allies.42 This did not mean that Parks became an anti-Communist. In fact, over the course of her political career, she would not shy away from working with people and groups, particularly the Highlander Folk School, that came under attack for their “subversive” actions. In the late 1950s, she received letters from Audley Moore, also known as Queen Mother Moore, so her ties from this earlier organizing seem to have continued.43 In spite of anti-Communist sentiment in the national NAACP by the late 1940s, Parks never publicly disassociated herself from Communists. At the NAACP’s annual meeting in 1950, an anti-Communist resolution called for investigating the “ideological composition and trends of the membership” and “expel[ling] any branch . . . coming under Communist . . . domination.”44 A vocal minority challenged the resolution—and objected to the suspension of suspected Communists from the organization. According to New York tenant leader Lee Lorch, one of the people opposed to the purge was Rosa Parks.45 Back home in Montgomery, according to white civil rights advocate Virginia Durr, the Montgomery branch didn’t “redbait themselves or even pay attention to that kind of thing.”46

  Branch membership in Nixon’s first two years as president increased from 861 to 1,600. The organization, under his leadership, pressured the governor to reprieve the death sentences of three black men—Worthy James, John Underwood, and Samuel Taylor—charged with rape.47 Another case involved a young black serviceman accused of rape by a white nurse on the base who had been unable to find a lawyer to take his case.48 There were no black attorneys in Montgomery in 1943; even white attorneys were ostracized and punished for taking on black clients, so few would assist. Parks helped pull together the affidavits in these cases and tracked membership rolls. She learned how to type—“it didn’t come with your regular tuition in high school”49—taking an evening class from a woman she knew to pick up what she could.

  Parks’s growing activism was given a lift, according to historian Barbara Ransby, after attending an NAACP leadership conference run by veteran organizer Ella Baker in March 1945 in Atlanta and then another in Jacksonville in 1946.50 A seasoned organizer who saw local activists as key to the work of the organization, Ella Baker was then serving as the NAACP’s Director of Branches. Baker shunned the hierarchy and class leanings of many in the organization. In the mid-1940s, Baker sought to develop the NAACP’s local chapters and the grassroots leadership wit
hin them. She instituted a series of conferences (like the ones Parks attended) to train local leaders in developing ways to attack community problems and encourage them to see local issues as part of larger systemic problems. Baker left the Director of Branches position in 1946, in part because she had grown disappointed by the ways the national office did not adequately support the work and vision of the local chapters. Baker later became branch president of the Harlem NAACP, helped found In Friendship to support the emerging Montgomery protest, served as the first acting executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and then helped to establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

  Baker made a powerful impression on Parks. Calling her “beautiful in every way,” Rosa Parks noted how “smart and funny and strong” Baker was and wrote to tell the national office how “inspired” she was by the Jacksonville meeting.51 From then on “whenever she came to Montgomery, [Ella Baker] stayed with me. She was a true friend—a mentor.”52 At a time when Parks’s own political activism was increasing and Montgomery’s most prominent activists were men, Parks looked to Baker, who was older, with decades of political experience, as a mentor. Civil rights activist Anne Braden noted “the profound effect” Baker had on Parks.53 Like Baker, Parks was committed to working with young people and saw them as key to promoting a new movement spirit.