The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  A HISTORY OF BUS RESISTANCE

  “I was not the only person who had been mistreated and humiliated,” Rosa Parks said in an interview on Pacifica radio station KPFA in April 1956.11 Most people had been mistreated, some “even worse than [me],” Parks noted. Before Parks, a number of black Montgomerians had also refused to submit to the terms of bus segregation, often paying dearly for that resistance. That history of brave acts in the decade before Parks’s bus stand accumulated and came together in Parks’s courageous refusal and in the bus protest sparked by her arrest.

  In 1900, when the city first instituted segregation on the buses, Montgomery’s black community boycotted and won a change to the city ordinance to specify that no rider had to surrender a seat unless another was available. In practice, drivers routinely violated this ordinance. Protests particularly heated up during World War II—as the contradiction between black military service abroad and unequal treatment at home heightened black resistance. With two Air Force bases (and thus a significant dependence on federal defense money to sustain the local economy) and a large population of both black and white service people, Montgomery, according to historian Glenda Gilmore, “stood at the epicenter of the guerrilla war on buses.” The city’s buses were rife with altercations between black service people and white bus drivers during the war years. Following a problem with the bus driver, a police officer shot a black airman; in another instance, the bus driver shot a local black GI in the leg when he took a front seat. In a third instance, when a black army lieutenant refused to give up her seat to white passengers, police beat her up and took her to jail. As Gilmore observed, “Rosa Parks would have known each of these hometown stories—and more—by heart.”12

  In 1945, two Women’s Army Corps members in uniform were asked to move for a white man. When they refused, saying that there were other available seats, the bus driver hit and verbally abused them. Referring to it as “one of the worst cases” he had seen, Thurgood Marshall warned that it looked “like dynamite to me.” Bus resistance by army personnel was often met with violence; as Parks observed, “white people didn’t want black veterans to wear their uniforms” because it served as a visible reminder of the fundamental equality imbued in that national service.13

  These disputes extended to civilians. In 1944, Viola White, who worked at Maxwell Air Force Base (like Rosa Parks during this time), was beaten and arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Found guilty, White then appealed her case to the circuit court. “The city of Montgomery knew they couldn’t win,” E. D. Nixon explained, “and we couldn’t get on the court calendar.”14 The case was held up indefinitely. Shortly afterward, the police retaliated, and a white police officer seized White’s sixteen-year-old daughter and raped her. The daughter had the presence of mind to memorize the cop’s license plate and boldly reported the crime. After many attempts by Nixon, a warrant for the officer’s arrest was issued, but the police chief tipped off the officer, who left town.15 And then Viola White died, derailing any further legal action.

  In 1946, Geneva Johnson was arrested for “talking back” to a driver and not having the correct change. She did not appeal but paid her fine. A few years later, Mary Wingfield was arrested for sitting in seats reserved for whites. In 1949, two New Jersey teenagers—Edwina and Marshall Johnson—refused to give up their seats and were arrested. Sixteen-year-old Edwina Johnson told the driver, “Where we come from we can sit anywhere we wish. I paid my fare—and I’m not going to move.”16

  And in 1950, Hilliard Brooks, a veteran who had just returned from service, paid his fare but refused to exit and enter through the back door. Brooks asked the driver for his money back, but the driver refused. Brooks, who allegedly had been drinking, refused to back down. The police were called. Mattie Johnson, a passenger, witnessed the altercation. “And when you’re waitin’ on something awful to happen, you feel it more than any other time. It feels like it’s pressing down on you, getting’ tighter and tighter around you, cuttin’ you off from everything else.” A police officer, M. E. Mills, boarded the bus and hit Brooks with his club. Johnson recalled, “My whole body jerked, like I’d been stuck by a pin.”17 Brooks managed to get free and tried to exit the bus. The officer then shot Brooks, who subsequently died from the wounds. Mattie Johnson never rode the bus again. The killing was ruled a justifiable homicide because the officer said that Brooks had “resisted arrest.”18

  The Brooks family, who had two young children and were expecting a third, lived across the walkway from the Parks at the Cleveland Courts apartments. When the incident occurred, Rosa was in Florida, taking care of a three-year-old white girl whose family was vacationing there. Brooks’s murder “passed unnoticed except by his family and maybe a few others who were concerned at the time,” according to Parks.19 His wife stopped riding the bus altogether.

  The next year, Epsie Worthy exited the bus after the driver insulted her. When he followed her off and began hitting her, she fought back, “defend[ing] herself . . . with all her might.”20 Worthy “gave as much as she took,” according to passengers. The police broke up the fight, but Worthy was charged with disorderly conduct and fined fifty-two dollars.21 The driver was not sanctioned.

  Parks was Nixon’s right-hand woman during many of these cases and personally knew a number of the individuals who had resisted. For her, riding the bus required a persistent struggle; in 1968 she told an interviewer that it was a “constant offense” and that she “was always in conflict with it.”22 Many times, when she could, she avoided the bus. Witnessing the mixture of outrage and courage that led people to make such a stand, she intimately understood the punishment—the cost—they had to endure for that refusal. The notion that she was the first—or even third—to resist or that she made her bus stand impulsively misses her familiarity with the many instances and dangers of bus resistance, and the considerable thought she had given the matter.

  Along with Parks, other Montgomerians had reached their “stopping point” around bus segregation, including some who emerged as key organizers of the boycott. The bus was a closer, more confrontational experience of segregation than many other public spaces. Part of the driver’s power was that he could mistreat black passengers in front of the entire audience of the bus. Indeed, the power of segregation was produced and reproduced each day in the interactions between white bus drivers, black riders, and white riders. Dr. King had been seared by his experience with bus segregation at the age of fourteen. In order to participate in a speech contest, he and a teacher traveled from Atlanta to a small town in Georgia. On the way home, the driver ordered them to give up their seats for white passengers, and though King initially refused, his teacher convinced him to stand. They stood for several hours—and King was “the angriest I have ever been in my life.”23

  So too was Reverend Vernon Johns, who refused to reenter through the back door after paying his fare. After asking for his money back, Johns called on the rest of the passengers to exit the bus with him. No one followed.24 A few days later, one of his congregants who’d been on the bus communicated the thoughts of some of their fellow passengers: “You ought to knowed better.”25

  Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Alabama State College who headed the Women’s Political Council (WPC), had a painful experience on the bus in 1949. Ejected from an almost-empty bus for sitting too close to the front, Robinson fled, afraid the driver would hit her. “Tears blinded my vision,” Robinson remembered, and “waves of humiliation inundated me; and I thanked God that none of my students was on that bus to witness the tragic experience. I could have died from embarrassment.”26 The experience was so traumatic that Robinson couldn’t talk about it, even with close friends.27 But the “hurt of that experience” strengthened her resolve that the WPC needed to demand change on Montgomery’s buses.

  Along with outright resistance, black passengers developed a series of daily tactics, according to historian Robin Kelley, to contest disrespect on the bus. “In Birmingham, there were dozens
of episodes of black women sitting in the white section arguing with drivers or conductors, and fighting with white passengers.”28 Indeed black passengers were arrested—or more commonly thrown off the bus—for “making noise,” whether they talked back to the conductor, challenged another passenger, or gave an impromptu speech on racism.

  One further insult in Montgomery came from the disconnect between the treatment blacks encountered on the integrated trolley on Maxwell Air Force Base and the city’s segregated buses and other public spaces. Indeed, blacks and whites worked together at the Maxwell base, which had an integrated cafeteria, bachelor hall, and swimming pool.29 Rosa had worked at Maxwell for a time, and Raymond’s barber chair was on the base. “You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up,” Parks noted. “It was an alternative reality to the ugly policies of Jim Crow.”30 Parks sometimes rode the bus with a white woman and her child, sitting across from them and chatting.31 When they reached the edge of the base and boarded the city bus, she had to go to the back. Thus, Rosa Parks had direct personal contact with desegregated transportation in her own hometown. This visceral experience highlighted the sheer arbitrariness of segregated public transportation and made riding the city bus even more galling.

  Parks would talk later about how “protest must be in my blood.”32 Many years before her own stand, a driver told her mother, who had sat down near the back next to a young white serviceman, to move or he’d throw her off the bus. Her mother “stood up, very politely smiled in his face, and said, ‘You won’t do that.’” He returned to the front of the bus. Recalling the scene, Rosa said that she could hardly contain herself. “But before I could say anything, here came a very deep bass voice of a brother in the back of the bus. I don’t know who he was or what he looked like, but he said very clearly, very distinctly, ‘If he touches her, I’m hanging my knife in his throat.’ So he didn’t touch her, and I was happy he didn’t, because he would have been pretty badly hurt by me with what I had, only my fingers.”33 This image of young Rosa ready to defend her mother with her hands presents an important context for the origins of her own bus stand.

  But there were also a number of times when Parks’s mother had not been able to resist mistreatment on the bus. These also made a great impression on her daughter. In a 1966 interview, Leona McCauley stated, “Too many times I’ve had to get up and stand up so a white man could sit.”34 Once a white man started cursing at her at a streetcar stop. “I heard her mention how upset she was but the only thing she could do was move over further from where he was standing,” Rosa noted.35 Black women, thus, experienced particular vulnerabilities on public transportation.

  Raymond Parks had largely stopped riding the bus before the boycott began, deciding he’d rather walk than be pushed around, as did Professor J. E. Pierce, who was active with Rosa in the NAACP.36 Rosa herself walked when she could and tried to use alternate means of transportation, particularly after Colvin’s arrest.37 Along with other acts of resistance, these informal refusals show that bus protest had been percolating before the organized boycott emerged and locate Parks in the midst of those radical currents.

  By 1955, the Montgomery NAACP was looking for a court case to test the legality of bus segregation. Some in the Women’s Political Council (WPC) had even suggested a boycott. The WPC had been formed in 1946 by Mary Fair Burks, an English professor at Alabama State College. A sermon about black middle-class complacency by her pastor, Reverend Vernon Johns, inspired Burks to gather women from her church and social circle at Alabama State. Though their appearance suggested indifference, she suspected this was “a mask to protect their psyche and their sanity.”38 Out of this initial meeting the WPC was formed as a predominantly middle-class black women’s organization committed to address injustice.39 Burks was the first president, followed by Jo Ann Robinson. “We were ‘woman power,’” Robinson explained, “organized to cope with any injustice, no matter what, against the darker sect.”40 Rosa Parks knew the group and saw it as a women’s affiliate of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, a largely middle-class congregation where many of these women worshipped.41 Though she was acquainted with some WPC women, Parks was not a member of the council, likely because of the class and education divides that cut through Montgomery’s black community.

  Historian Mills Thornton has called the WPC the “most militant and uncompromising voice” for black Montgomerians in this period.42 By the early 1950s, people knew to bring their complaints about bus segregation to the WPC. The women of the organization, three hundred strong by 1954, collected petitions, met with city officials, went door to door, packed public hearings, and generally made their outrage around bus segregation publicly known.

  Frustration with bus segregation mounted after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown. Black Montgomerians were “worn out with being humiliated,” Parks explained; bus segregation “was taking our manhood and womanhood away.” What people sought “was not a matter of close physical contact with whites, but equal opportunity.”43 Following the Brown decision in 1954, WPC president Jo Ann Robinson sent a letter to the mayor, Tacky Gayle, demanding action on the buses or people would organize a citywide boycott.44 Pointing out that bus ridership was three-fourths black, Robinson reminded city leaders that the buses “could not possibly operate” if black people stayed away.45

  Nixon’s entreaties to the city had also been met with stonewalling, blame shifting, and claims that black people voluntarily chose these practices. Indeed the defense of segregation in a Southern citadel like Montgomery was not univocal. At times its white citizens invoked the political and moral necessity of segregation, while at other times, like their counterparts in the North, they denied that there was a problem or that the city was responsible for it. And like their Northern brothers, Southerners claimed that segregation was not institutional but a matter of personal predilection, that black people preferred it this way too. According to Parks, when Nixon complained to the bus company about black people being told to go around to the back door after paying their money, “they told him your folks started it—they go because they want to do it.”46

  By 1955, frustration was hitting new levels. Early that year, the daughter of a minister was arrested, but, according to Nixon, “her father didn’t want her to be part of a movement like that.”47 So nothing further was pursued.

  CLAUDETTE COLVIN’S ARREST

  Then on March 2, 1955, Claudette Colvin boarded a bus home from school and refused to budge when the driver ordered her to move. Fifteen years old, the tiny Colvin—who Virginia Durr described as a “little gosling”—attended Booker T. Washington High School. Politicized by the legal mistreatment of her classmate Jeremiah Reeves, Colvin had just written a paper on the problems of downtown segregation. “We had been studying the Constitution in Miss Nesbitt’s class. I knew I had rights.”48 On the bus home that day, the white section filled up. A white woman was left standing. The driver called out, and the three students sitting in Colvin’s row got up. She did not. The standing white woman refused to sit across the aisle from her. “If she sat down in the same row as me, it meant I was as good as her,” Colvin noted.49 The driver yelled out again, “Why are you still sittin’ there?” Colvin recalled. “A white rider yelled from the front, ‘You got to get up!’” A girl named Margaret Johnson answered from the back, “She ain’t got to do nothin’ but stay black and die.”50 There were thirteen students on the bus that day, most of them her classmates.

  The driver, Robert Cleere, then called the transit police. In the midst of this, a pregnant neighbor of Colvin’s, Mrs. Ruth Hamilton, got on the bus and, unaware of what was taking place, sat down next to her. When the policeman arrived on the bus, there were now two black people in the row. Initially, Hamilton also refused to get up. But upon the scolding of the police, a man in the back got up and gave Hamilton his seat. Colvin held fast, saying that she was tired of standing for white people every day. “If it had been for an old lady, I would have got up, but it wasn’t.” Colvin refused
to surrender her seat because “I didn’t feel like I was breaking the law.”51 And indeed, in Montgomery, city code asserted that black people should not have to get up if there wasn’t an open seat. Because the transit policeman could not make an arrest, at the next stop the bus was met by a squad car.

  The two cops boarded the bus. The driver, according to Colvin, told the cops, “‘I’ve had trouble with that ‘thing’ before.’ He called me a thing.”52 She was roughly handcuffed by the two officers. One WPC member, A. W. West, described the scene when the police boarded the bus: “Bless her heart, she fought like a little tigress. The policeman had scars all over his face and hands.”53 But Colvin maintained that she went limp, “They started dragging me backwards off the bus. One of them kicked me. I might have scratched one of them but I sure didn’t fight back.”54 In the patrol car, the officers mocked her and made comments about parts of her body. Colvin worried that they might try to rape her and tried to cover her crotch. She tried to put her mind on other things. “I recited Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee, the characters in Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm.”55