The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  Colvin’s arrest had a profound impact on Montgomery’s black community. “I don’t mean to take anything away from Mrs. Parks,” lawyer Fred Gray later observed, “but Claudette gave all of us the moral courage to do what we did.”56 Durr also underscored the impact Colvin’s arrest had in Montgomery. “I mean this is just like genius, it just strikes; just like God strikes in a way because this child just wouldn’t move.”57 Many black people were awed by Colvin’s actions. “That little teenage girl must have had a steel testicle,” Andrew Young pointedly observed.58 The arrest angered Rosa Parks—all the committees, meetings, petitions to address bus segregation without “any results . . . just a brush-off.”59

  Bailed out by her minister and mother, Colvin returned home proud but extremely fearful. “I had challenged the bus law. There had been lynchings and cross burnings for that kind of thing. . . . Dad sat up all night long with his shotgun. We all stayed up. The neighbors facing the highway kept watch.”60 Montgomery’s black leaders were outraged by Colvin’s arrest and some in the Women’s Political Council called for a boycott of the buses.61 Faced with Colvin’s arrest, according to WPC president Jo Ann Robinson, some “could not take anymore. They were ready to boycott. . . . But some members were doubtful; some wanted to wait. The women wanted to be certain the entire city was behind them, and opinions differed where Claudette was concerned. Some felt she was too young to be the trigger that precipitated the movement . . . Not everybody was ready.”62 Robinson, Rufus Lewis, and a new minister in town, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., met with the city to discuss a plan where blacks would not be forced to move once they had taken a seat—and they were given assurances that city policy would be investigated and that Colvin’s case would receive a fair trial.63

  Martin Luther King Jr. had moved to Montgomery in 1954 to succeed the militant Vernon Johns as pastor of the downtown Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The church had sought a minister more erudite, middle-class, and less confrontational than Reverend Johns, who had long chastised his congregation for their complacency. After Montgomery authorities had beaten a black man to death for a speeding violation following another act of police brutality, Johns posted the title of his forthcoming sermon, “It’s Safe to Murder Negroes in Montgomery,” outside the church. As Dexter Avenue’s billboard faced the Alabama state capitol building, this landed him before a grand jury, who sought to prevent him from preaching the sermon. He preached it that Sunday, anyway:

  Last week, a white man was fined for shooting a rabbit out of season. But of course, it’s safe to murder Negroes. A rabbit is better off than a Negro because in Alabama niggers are always in season. . . . A Negro man was stopped by a trooper for speeding and brutally beaten with a tire iron while other Negroes stood by and did nothing. What would God have said when he looked down and saw an enraged police officer take up a young colored boy and use his head as a battering ram when the boy’s father said nothing, did nothing? I’ll tell you why it’s safe to murder Negroes. Because Negroes stand by and let it happen.64

  Unlike many in the congregation who considered spirituals low-class, Johns occasionally added them to the church service. Committed to independent black economic development, he established an African American food cooperative and often sold vegetables, fruits, and hams in the basement after church on Sundays. The final straw for his parishioners came when he took to selling watermelons on the campus of Alabama State.65 While many did not appreciate Johns’s political sermons, they shook up the congregation, instigating conversations about Christian social action, which laid the groundwork for Dr. King’s leadership.

  The first time Rosa Parks met the reverend who succeeded Johns was at an NAACP meeting in 1954. “I had arrived early, before the people started to come in. I saw this young person sitting there and nodded hello to him. I had no idea at the time who he was. He looked so young, just like a college student.”66 Parks was thus surprised to find out that this young man was the evening’s speaker. Most of the thirty people gathered to hear the twenty-five-year-old Martin Luther King speak on the Brown decision were women. When he began speaking, according to Carr, their “jaws dropped.” Parks was “amazed that one so young could speak with so much eloquence and to the point.”67 After this meeting, King joined the NAACP’s executive committee; he also considered running for president of the organization but decided not to. Parks sent him his letter of appointment to the executive committee.68 And in January 1955, King addressed the new officers, stating that “we have come a long way but have a long way to go.”69

  THE COLVIN CASE

  Rosa Parks and Virginia Durr began fund raising for young Colvin’s case, and more than one hundred letters and a stack of donations streamed in to Parks’s apartment. Parks was hopeful that the young woman’s arrest would embolden other young people and spark interest in the NAACP youth meetings.70 She encouraged Colvin to get active in the youth chapter. Colvin recalled her first conversation with Rosa Parks. “She said ‘You’re Claudette Colvin? Oh my God, I was lookin’ for some big old burly overgrown teenager who sassed white people out. . . . But no, they pulled a little girl off the bus.’ I said, ‘They pulled me off because I refused to walk off.’”71

  At an NAACP branch meeting on March 27, Rosa Parks highlighted the importance of Colvin’s case, noting it could act “as a stimulus in getting members especially in her neighborhood.”72 J. E. Pierce worried about the publicity and the pressure that might “be exerted on the family in some way.” They stepped up the fund-raising for the case. Leona McCauley baked cookies; Colvin recalled Mrs. Parks scolding her for eating a bunch—“we won’t have any to sell.”73 Parks also encouraged Colvin to run in the NAACP popularity contest that the branch sponsored to raise money for the case, which she did, though she didn’t win. Parks made the crown for the winner.74

  At a second meeting with city officials, a group of black community leaders took a petition to the bus company and city officials asking for more courteous treatment and no visible signs of segregation on the bus. Tired of the city’s obfuscation, Parks refused to join them: “I had decided I would not go anywhere with a piece of paper in my hand asking white folks for any favors.”75

  Then in April, a young black veteran celebrating his release from the hospital was acting silly on the street and got in the way of a bus. The driver swerved around him but then came back and proceeded to beat the man with his transfer punch, turning his face to a bloody pulp. Mrs. Parks attended the driver’s trial and was sickened when he was only fined twenty-five dollars for the assault and allowed to keep his job.76

  Colvin’s case went to court on May 6, 1955. The Judge dropped two of the charges (for disturbing the peace and breaking the segregation law) but found her guilty on the third for assaulting the officers who arrested her. The decision revealed the “extreme limits of stupidity and absurdity and horror,” Durr wrote a friend, and how authorities were “so scared that the appeal on the constitutionality might be sustained that they dropped all the charges on the segregation issues.”77 Since Colvin had strategically only been convicted of assault, appealing her case could not directly challenge the segregation law. “The thing that is so awful,” Durr continued, “is that no one sees how absurd the system makes them appear—how brutal and cowardly—THREE HUGE BIG POLICEMEN against one little scrawny, fifteen year old colored girl.”

  Following the judge’s decision, most black people in Montgomery were outraged. According to Robinson, “Blacks were as near a breaking point as they had ever been. Resentment, rebellion, and unrest were in evidence in all Negro circles. For a few days, large numbers of people refused to use the buses, but as they cooled off somewhat, they gradually drifted back.”78 For the young Colvin, the experience was transformative. After appearing in court, Colvin decided to stop straightening her hair. “By wearing it natural, I was saying, ‘I think I’m as pretty as you are.’ . . . I told everybody, ‘I won’t straighten my hair until they straighten out this mess.’ And that meant until we go
t some justice.”79 But many of her classmates didn’t react well to her. “Kids were saying she should have known what would happen,” one classmate recalled. “Everything was reversed, everyone blamed her rather than the people who did those things to her. . . . We should have been rallying around her and being proud of what she had done, but instead we ridiculed her.”80

  Colvin was seen as “feisty,” “uncontrollable,” “profane,” and “emotional” by some community leaders who worried that she was too young and not of the right social standing to organize a broader campaign around. The Colvin family was poor and lived on the north side of town. After paying the family a visit, Nixon decided Colvin was not the kind of plaintiff they wanted and pulled back from pursuing her case.81 He also claimed that Colvin’s mother didn’t want her involved.82 Jo Ann Robinson vehemently disagreed with Nixon’s assessment of Colvin’s unsuitability and told him so, though the WPC did fear that the witnesses to the case might get frightened and recant.83

  Worrying that the press “would have a field day” with Colvin, Parks raised money for Colvin’s case. According to black lawyer Fred Gray, who thought the Colvin arrest would make a good test case, Parks “shared my feelings that something had to be done to end segregation on the buses.”84 Ultimately Colvin was deemed an unsuitable plaintiff for a legal case or mass action—which took a toll on the young Colvin.

  Parks never said explicitly that she disagreed with Nixon’s assessment, although her growing impatience by the end of the summer suggests that this may have been the case. When Parks attended the two-week workshop at Highlander in August, Colvin’s arrest—and the community’s reaction—was still on her mind. Longing for a stiffening of resolve among Montgomerians to confront the issue of segregation, Mrs. Parks hoped that Highlander would help her find a way to accomplish that. “I wanted our leaders there to organize and be strong enough to back up and support any young person who would be a litigant, if there should be some action in protest to segregation and mistreatment.”85

  According to Colvin, Parks was the only adult leader who kept up with her that summer.86 Colvin had become a member of Parks’s Youth Council before the arrest and continued to attend NAACP Youth Council meetings. Parks made Colvin secretary of the council, trying to nurture the young woman’s spirit and budding leadership.87 Claudette Colvin recalled that she only went to Youth Council meetings “if I could get a ride, because I didn’t want to ride the bus anymore. If I couldn’t get a ride back, I’d stay overnight at Rosa’s—she lived in the projects across the street. Rosa was hard to get to know, but her mom was just the opposite—warm and talkative and funny . . . There was nothing we couldn’t talk about.”88 Parks exhibited a certain forcefulness and strictness with the young people. According to Colvin, Mrs. Parks had a different personality inside and outside of the meetings. “She was very kind and thoughtful; 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 meeting 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.’”89 Parks would make Colvin tell the story of her bus arrest over and over. “After a while they had all heard it a million times. They seemed bored with it.”90

  Late in the summer, Colvin realized she was pregnant by an older man who had befriended the young and vulnerable teenager. According to Durr, Colvin’s pregnancy bothered Parks, who regarded it as “a kind of burden that Negro women had to bear for so many generations, you know, of being used . . . and not having their person’s [sic] used.”91 Montgomery’s civil rights leaders had decided before learning of Colvin’s pregnancy that they wouldn’t actively pursue her case, but now they increased their distance from her, eventually asserting her pregnancy was the reason for their decision.92 Indeed, Nixon would claim that when he went to visit the family in May, Colvin’s mother told him of her pregnancy. Other accounts would have Nixon see a pregnant Colvin when he got there. Virginia Durr would claim that Colvin’s brother called up to say that Claudette would not be able to come to court because she had taken a tumble.93 (This would have been impossible, since Colvin’s son Raymond wasn’t born until March 29, 1956.)

  Parks encouraged the young people of her NAACP Youth Council to challenge segregation. In the wake of Colvin’s arrest, she instructed her young charges on how to proceed if they were arrested to “make certain that they knew how to conduct themselves in a way that they couldn’t be accused of disorderly conduct or resisting arrest.”94 Some of these young people took action, occasionally by taking the front seats. A couple of young men reported back to her that they’d sat in the front “and the driver didn’t say anything.” Parks figured the reason the driver didn’t do anything was “he didn’t know what these youngsters would do. I always asked them if they . . . [wanted] to do what we could to break down racial segregation.”95

  On October 21, eighteen-year-old Mary Louise Smith (who was not a member of Parks’s Youth Council) was arrested. Smith had attended St. Jude’s School, where the nuns taught that all people were equal and deserved respect—which fueled Smith’s stand on the bus.96 That day, she had trekked across town to collect twelve dollars owed to her by the white family she worked for, but they hadn’t been home. So she had spent twenty cents on bus fare and was returning home empty-handed. The driver told her twice to move. She refused and was briskly arrested. Her father came down and paid the fine. Smith’s family was poor and her father rumored to be an alcoholic. Nixon also paid this family a visit, describing the Smith home as “low type.” He claimed that if “the press had gone out there” they would become a “laughingstock to try to build a case around her.”97 Smith later challenged these characterizations, saying her father worked two jobs to support her and her five siblings and did not have time for drinking.98

  Nixon claimed that both Colvin and Smith were “vulnerable to exploitation by a white lawyer or a white-controlled media,” explaining that “white people have used the media to destroy things they dislike.” He worried that neither young woman was strong enough to withstand the attacks a case would engender.99 Some in the WPC disagreed with Nixon, believing that the principles of the case were more important than the plaintiff and that it was time to take a stand. But Nixon was a force to be reckoned with. One of the few activist community leaders, Nixon’s backing was necessary for any successful black mobilization in Montgomery. People faced with a legal injustice would telephone him, and he would come to their assistance. He knew many people in the police and sheriff’s department, at city hall and at the jail, along with most lawyers, white or black. Thus Nixon’s endorsement was seen as crucial. But his leadership, according to Robinson, had its limits. “People respected Mr. Nixon for his bravery. But he wasn’t always able to follow up. . . . He was willing, I’ve never seen anyone more willing, but I think his leadership stopped where he couldn’t go anywhere further.”100

  While worrying about finding a plaintiff who could withstand the press, Rosa Parks grew frustrated with the lack of any forward movement. Parks recalled having discussions with Robinson “about how a boycott of the city buses would really hurt the bus company in its pocketbook” but she didn’t sense much public support for a boycott.101

  Civil rights leaders had been engaged in a long-standing negotiation with the city with little result. The city’s tactics, nuanced and belabored, dragged Montgomery’s black citizens along in a byzantine process of blame shifting where the city and the bus company attempted to foist responsibility for bus segregation onto each other. Moreover, Montgomery’s buses were operated by a northern company—National City Lines—so Montgomery’s segregation was not simply parochial, and its economic ramifications extended well beyond the Cradle of the Confederacy. Like their counterparts across the South and the North, Montgomery’s officials offered meetings and professed concern about race problems yet did nothing. Shortly after the boycott ha
d started, Parks told a journalist of her growing outrage at the “run-around” the city had given Montgomery’s activists.

  In Montgomery long before our protest began, on some occasions I had been on committees to appear before the city officials and bus company officials with requests that they improve our conditions that existed that were so humiliating and degrading to our spirit as well as sometimes physical discomfort in riding the bus. We would have some vague promises and be given the run-around and nothing was ever done about it.102

  By the time of Colvin’s arrest, she had come to feel that “we had wasted a lot of time and effort” with the petitions and meetings with Montgomery officials.103 Mrs. Parks was looking for more concrete action.

  December 1, 1955

  “It was a strange feeling because . . . even before the incident of my arrest, I could leave home feeling that anything could happen at any time.”104 On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks finished work at Montgomery Fair. That Thursday had been a busy day for the forty-two-year-old Parks. During her coffee break, she had talked with Alabama State College president H. Councill Trenholm to finalize plans for her NAACP workshop on campus that weekend. As usual, she had lunch at Fred Gray’s office and then spent the afternoon hemming and pressing pants. Her shoulder was bothering her.105 She was looking forward to a relaxing evening at home and had some NAACP work to do.