The Youth Council met most Sundays at the Parkses’ apartment, except for special occasions when they had speakers and would meet across the street at Trinity Lutheran Church. It was a small group, Doris Crenshaw recalled, and many parents wouldn’t allow their children to join. “Our meetings were to be serious,” recalled Zynobia Butler. Parks stressed “listening skills, taking notes, and neatness. . . . I didn’t appreciate having to redo things so often.”99 Indeed Mrs. Parks highlighted comportment and respectability to the Youth Council and taught her young charges the importance of being active.100 She taught them what had been instilled in her: respectability meant maintaining your own self-worth, comporting yourself properly, and expecting respect from those around you. When Parks took Youth Council members to downtown Montgomery they “always drank from the white water fountain without incident.” According to member Claudette Colvin, most of the young people in the group, unlike her, were the children of professionals. Some went to private schools, “Whenever they said they planned to go North for an education after they graduated, Rosa would scold them, ‘Why should your families have to send you North? Our colleges right here could offer a good education, too—but they’re segregated.’”101
Odaliah Vaughn Garnier joined the Youth Council and appreciated how political Mrs. Parks was compared to her own mother.102 She registered to vote as soon as she turned eighteen, following Parks’s instructions at their NAACP meetings. Mrs. Parks encouraged the young people to take more direct action. Doris Crenshaw was eleven when she joined the Youth Council, along with her sister. She became vice president of the Youth Council at twelve and president as a college freshman, and recalled Parks stressing their rights and the power of the vote. They traveled the state attending meetings, doing citizenship education, and urging adults to register to vote, helping prepare them for the questions on the test, and meeting other active young people. According to Crenshaw, “They had this long, thick voter registration questionnaire that people had to answer to vote. We would go over the questionnaire with them and encourage them to go down and vote . . . people were very fearful of registering to vote. So we encouraged them to go down, to not be afraid.”103 In these trips, the young people met various NAACP activists across the state. Parks also made connections and tried to find funds to enable these young people to attend college.104
Parks also helped organize the Youth Council to challenge segregation directly, including protests at the main library, which did not allow blacks to check out books, requesting to be served. “They did this again and again” but were unsuccessful in changing the practice. Parks drew solace from the action-oriented nature of the young people she worked with: “One of things I did like about the youth . . . [is] they started right in to write letters to Washington [about anti-lynching legislation] . . . they didn’t spend a lot of time arguing over motions and there was a difference in their way of conducting their meetings . . . from the senior branch.”105 Many young people were warned by their parents and teachers not to get involved in civil rights. “There was this very popular phrase saying in order to stay out of trouble you have to stay in your place,” Parks recalled. But then, she added, “when you stayed in your place, you were still insulted and mistreated if they saw fit to do so.”106
THE NETWORK GROWS
In the years before the boycott, the network of personal and political ties that would form the initial infrastructure of the boycott took shape in Montgomery. Parks became friends with Fred Gray, a young black lawyer who had moved back to Montgomery and begun attending NAACP meetings. Gray had attended Alabama State for college but went to Western Reserve University Law School in Ohio to attain his law degree, taking advantage of Alabama’s willingness to pay out-of-state tuition for black students so the state didn’t have to desegregate the law school. Gray became the twelfth black lawyer in Alabama and the second in Montgomery.107
Parks saw his potential as a civil rights advocate and for nearly a year regularly walked to Gray’s office from her department-store job to have lunch and discuss Montgomery’s problems. “We became very good friends,” Gray explained. In these regular conversations, Parks helped Gray “get on his feet” and encouraged his law practice to pursue issues of racial justice. “She gave me the feeling that I was the Moses that God had sent Pharaoh and commanded him to ‘Let My People Go.’”108
Like many in Montgomery’s black community and across the country, Parks, Gray, and Nixon were heartened by the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Excited about the prospect for real change, Parks saw “more possibility of not having to continue as we had.”109 Nixon and several others escorted twenty-three black school children to the newly built all-white William Harrison School. “They wouldn’t let them stay there,” Nixon recalled. “They run them out, and they run me out too.”110 At an NAACP meeting, the group decided to approach the school board directly to press for a desegregation plan. The branch also began to solicit signatures from parents to push for the implementation of Brown in Montgomery. A few parents signed, and the NAACP chapter presented the plan to the Board of Education at the opening of school in 1954.111 In response, Parks noted, the Board of Education published names and addresses of those signatories, opening them to “any type of harassment that might be inflicted . . . and to intimidate us as a people.” Faced with this hostility, black parents were unwilling to pursue the case further and take the city to court. While in the minority, Nixon felt the branch hadn’t done enough and continued to press the chapter—along with the national organization—to do more about implementing the decision.112 The Board of Education continued to stonewall; Parks thought the situation was “hopeless.” She grew discouraged in the wake of Brown by the “apathy on the part of our people.”113 Expanding the vote continued to be a pressing issue for both Nixon and Parks. In the summer of 1954, Nixon was named chair of a voter-registration effort for the Second Congressional District in Alabama and Parks the corresponding secretary.114
Working for the NAACP was unpopular and dangerous in the mid-1950s. At a meeting in September 1955, the branch leadership discussed fears that their mail was being tampered with.115 Hostility to the organization grew precipitously in the wake of the Brown decision. “Today the NAACP sounds like an easy kind of phrase,” Studs Terkel observed in 1973 in an interview with Parks, “a fashionable kind of word to say, safe, but in Montgomery, back in ’55 . . .”116 Parks, in an interview in 1967, was hard-pressed to account for “what we actually accomplished” in Montgomery.117 There were “almost no ways” to see any discernible progress around segregation, despite the various activities of the organization.118 Nixon too lamented to a reporter that “these crackers have did a good job of keeping the Negro afraid and also keeping him unlearned.”119
HIGHLANDER
At the urging of both E. D. Nixon and Virginia Durr, in the summer of 1955, Parks decided to attend a two-week workshop at the Highlander Folk School entitled “Racial Desegregation: Implementing the Supreme Court Decision.” The Durrs had worked with Nixon on various civil rights cases, and on Nixon’s recommendation, Parks had started sewing for the Durr family, one of Montgomery’s most liberal white families. Due to their politics, the Durrs had been ostracized by many white friends and colleagues, Clifford giving up a position at the Federal Communications Commission in Washington because he refused to sign a loyalty oath. Virginia was even more of a firebrand, chairing Henry Wallace’s 1948 Virginia campaign (Wallace was the Progressive Party’s candidate for president), running for Senate herself on the Progressive ticket, and going head-to-head with Senator James Eastland when he called her in front of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee on charges of having Communist ties. The Durrs moved back to Montgomery in 1951 (both Virginia and Clifford had grown up in Alabama). Most white Montgomerians wanted nothing to do with them, making Clifford’s law practice in these years somewhat precarious and Virginia quite isolated. The Durrs had three daughters and not a lot of money, in part
stemming from this red-baiting, and their relatives would send them old clothes to help out. Needing more income for her family, Parks began sewing for them in 1954, altering the clothes to fit the three girls and fashioning some of the garments for the Durrs’ daughter Lucy’s wedding trousseau. Durr and Parks spent a lot of time sitting and talking. Despite and alongside the gulf between white and black women in 1950s Alabama, the two grew friendly, though Parks maintained a certain formality with her employer.120
A member of Highlander’s board of directors, Durr had seen the work Parks was doing with the NAACP Youth Council and knew how discouraged Parks had grown. As Parks recalled, “After that, I began getting obscene phone calls from people because I was president of the youth group. That’s why Mrs. Durr wanted me to come up here and see what I could do with this same youth group when I went back home.”121
Myles Horton had cofounded the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, in 1932 as a grassroots, interracial leadership training school for adults. The school held workshops to help local people develop strategies for pursuing social change and cultivate their own leadership skills. In the mid-1950s, Highlander, which had been integrated from its beginnings in the 1930s, had started to turn its attention to civil rights, having previously concentrated on labor and anti-poverty organizing, largely with white Appalachians.
The Supreme Court had issued its historic ruling in Brown in 1954 but put off the implementation order of the decision for another year, often referred to as Brown II. While Brown declared school segregation unconstitutional, Brown II in 1955 called for a “prompt and reasonable start to full compliance” and returned oversight for the implementation of desegregation to the states, which needed to proceed “with all deliberate speed.” Without a specific timetable and with white resistance to desegregation mounting, this second decision allowed for delay and malfeasance. Civil rights activists and community leaders realized that they would have to press to ensure the decision was actually enforced. Myles Horton saw the need for a workshop focused explicitly on these questions of school desegregation implementation. Though blacks had previously numbered about 10 to 15 percent of Highlander’s participants and had not spoken much at the meetings, the workshop Parks attended signaled a change. About half the participants at that workshop were black, and people participated avidly.
Horton had called Durr to tell her he had a scholarship for someone from Montgomery to attend the desegregation workshop. Durr immediately thought of Parks and how Highlander might help renew her embattled spirit. Nixon also urged Parks to go.122 Durr also called her friend Aubrey Williams, another liberal white Southerner and the publisher of the Southern Farmer, for further financial support because Mrs. Parks could not afford the round-trip bus ticket to Tennessee.
Parks described her state of mind as she embarked for Highlander as “rather tense and maybe somewhat bitter over the struggle that we were in.”123 She was “willing to face whatever came, not because I felt that I was going to be benefited or helped personally, because I felt that I had been destroyed too long ago.”124 Parks’s language reveals the toll that more than a decade of civil rights work had taken on her. Seeing little possibility for racial justice in her life and frustrated with attempts to pursue any form of school desegregation in Montgomery, she placed her hope in the younger generation and in trying to ensure that the Supreme Court’s decision was carried out “as it should have been.”125 Increasingly, she focused her efforts on the youth chapter, from which she hoped more determined action might come.
Upon receiving the Highlander scholarship, Parks wrote a thank-you letter conveying her eagerness to attend the workshop and mentioning that she knew two of the speakers, Dr. Charles Gomillion of Tuskegee Institute and Ruby Hurley, NAACP regional field secretary.126 Parks took two weeks off from her job as an assistant tailor at Montgomery Fair to attend, a significant request and economic sacrifice.
Parks tried to get her husband to go to Highlander with her, but he refused. According to Brinkley, Raymond was “irate” about Rosa going because he considered the school suspect.127 This may have stemmed from his work with Communists and former Communists in the Scottsboro case. Rosa’s mother was not well, but this did not stop her from going: “Parks and my mother could get along without me. He would cook.”128 As a young person, Raymond had taken care of his own mother and grandmother and, as Rosa’s activities took her away from home more often, he assumed some of the caretaker role for her mother.
Because Parks was fearful of being discovered going to Highlander, Durr accompanied her part of the way. “Just getting on the bus,” Parks recalled in language that even decades later reveals how nervous she had been, “I found myself going farther and farther away from surroundings that I was used to and seeing less and less of black people. Finally I didn’t see any black people and was met by this white person. I said to myself that I didn’t know where I was going, but they seemed to be nice enough . . . I was somewhat withdrawn and didn’t have very much to say. Finally I relaxed and enjoyed the stay there very much throughout the entire workshop.”129 The county where Highlander was located was all white—and though the school was integrated, Parks was initially nervous at being surrounded by white people.
From July 24 through August 6, forty-eight people—teachers, union activists, civic leaders, and college students, about half of them black and half white—participated in a workshop designed, according to Highlander’s report, “for men and women in positions to provide community leadership for an orderly transition from a segregated to a non-segregated school system in the South.” The first few days, Rosa Parks barely talked at all, nervous about whether the whites in the group would actually accept her perspectives and fearful about describing the difficult situation activists faced in Montgomery.130 But she admired Highlander’s founder Myles Horton’s spirit and sense of humor. “I found myself laughing when I hadn’t been able to laugh in a long time.”131 And she started to grow more comfortable.
White and black people at Highlander lived, ate, discussed, and debated together—which was, by Southern standards, unimaginable. Parks particularly liked Horton’s tongue-in-cheek response to reporters who repeatedly asked how he managed to get blacks and whites at Highlander to eat together. “And he says, ‘First, the food is prepared. Second, it’s put on the table. Third, we ring the bell.’”132 Parks found herself “cracking up many times” at Horton’s way of pointing out the absurdity of segregation. Her spirits lifted. The variety of ways that Highlander subverted racial custom delighted Mrs. Parks. One of her favorite aspects of the two-week workshop was waking to up to “the smell of bacon frying and coffee brewing and know[ing] that white folks were doing the preparing instead of me.”133
For many workshop participants, white and black, this experience of living with, eating, and having political discussion with people of another race was transformative. Alice Cobb, a white woman, recalled the first uncomfortable night she went to bed in the same room with a black woman. “The Highlander idea of equality and dignity of persons seemed to begin stirring around then for me in a bourgeois sort of effort to put that poor girl at ease and the odd realization that she was doing the same thing for me.”134
Septima Clark, a former South Carolina teacher, ran a number of the workshops. Two years earlier, she had attended her first Highlander workshop. Like Parks, Clark was friendly with a handful of white civil rights supporters, yet the interracial living impacted her as well. “I was surprised to know that white women would sleep in the same room that I slept in,” Clark observed, “and it was really strange, very much so, to be eating at the same table with them, because we didn’t do that.”135 Cobb echoed Clark’s feelings. “The eating together . . . I’ve always felt that eating together is a social sacrament.”136 For Parks and others, the naturalness of the Highlander’s integration—evident but not belabored—was key. Parks had participated in integrated groups and meetings, in particular Montgomery’s integrated Council of Hum
an Relations. But she had disliked those meetings, telling Virginia Durr, “Every time I went to one of those meetings, I came away blacker than I was before, because everything was discussed in terms of race.”137
Septima Clark had lost her teaching job of forty years when she refused to give up her membership in the NAACP. After the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board, many states red-baited the NAACP as a foreign and potentially subversive organization; the state of South Carolina required all employees to renounce their membership or lose their jobs. Clark had chosen to retain her membership and forfeit her position—and in 1955 had come to work at Highlander full-time. Parks was “very much in awe” of Clark. Despite her own political history, Parks believed Clark’s activities made “the effort that I have made very minute” and hoped for a “chance that some of her great courage and dignity and wisdom has rubbed off on me.” Parks noted how Clark “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. While on the other hand, I was just the opposite. I was tense, and I was nervous and I was upset most of the time.”138 Parks found Clark’s calm determination remarkable.
The respite she found at Highlander was evident in her descriptions from a 1956 interview in which she described its “relaxing atmosphere” that was “more than a vacation but an education in itself.”139 She found “for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society, that there was such a thing as people of all races and backgrounds meeting and having workshops and living together in peace and harmony.”140 The atmosphere proved a salve for some of the psychic exhaustion she had been feeling and began to transform what Parks imagined was possible, a society not riven with racism. “I had heard there was such a place, but I hadn’t been there.”141
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Page 7
