She left work. Deciding to wait for a less crowded bus, Parks picked up a few things at Lee’s Cut-Rate Drug. She contemplated buying a heating pad but decided they were too expensive. In short, “this day was just like any other day.”106
The downtown Court Square near Montgomery Fair was decorated with Christmas lights. A banner over one store read “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” This festive atmosphere masked the fearsome race relations that had defined the place for its 150 years of existence. This was the Cradle of the Confederacy. Slaves had been auctioned from that square. Across the street was the Exchange Hotel, which had served as the first headquarters of the Confederacy. Rosa Parks well understood that history of Southern white power and black resistance.
Around 5:30, Mrs. Parks distractedly boarded the yellow-and-olive bus and paid her ten cents. Had she been paying attention, she probably “wouldn’t even have gotten on that bus” because the driver, James Fred Blake, had given her trouble before.107 Back in 1943, Parks had paid her fare, and this very same bus driver insisted that Parks had to exit and reboard through the back door. She felt this practice constituted a humiliation too great to bear. When Parks did not move, Blake grabbed her sleeve, attempting to push her off the bus. She purposely dropped her purse and sat down in a seat in the whites-only section to pick it up. Blake seemed poised to hit her. “I will get off. . . . You better not hit me,” she told him and exited the bus and did not reboard. For the next twelve years, she avoided Blake’s bus.
As with other segregated situations, like drinking fountains and elevators, Parks avoided the bus and walked when she could. But not owning a car, and given her job and community commitments, sometimes she had no choice. Parks refused to pay her money in front and then go around to the back to board. Some drivers told her not to ride if she “was too important . . . to go to the back and get on.”108 According to Parks, some motormen had even come to recognize her because of this. “It seemed to annoy and sometimes anger the bus drivers.”109 One particular driver, if he saw Parks alone, would shut the bus door very quickly and drive on.110 Overall, Parks had long attempted to maintain her dignity on the bus, and there were “almost countless times when things happened. . . . But I always indicated that even if I was forced to comply with these rules that it was very distasteful to me.”111 In an interview in 1956 with white liberal Alabamian Aubrey Williams, Parks said that she had never before that evening been directly asked to give up her seat for a white person.112
Comfortably setting her parcels down, Rosa took a seat next to a black man in the middle section of the bus. The bus was not crowded, with many seats still open in the front. As she admired the sights and sounds of Christmas, her mind turned to her husband and “how we were going to have a good time this Christmas.”113 Raymond was making dinner, and in fifteen short minutes she would be home.114 There were two black women sitting across the aisle from her. They were all seated in a row toward the middle of the bus. As she would clarify repeatedly in the years to come, she was not sitting in the white section but in the middle section of the bus. The middle was liminal space; it allowed space for paying black customers to sit, but that could be trumped on the discretion of the driver by the wants of a white rider. At the third stop, the white section of the bus filled up. The bus had thirty-six seats. Fourteen whites occupied the front section; twenty-two black people were sitting in the back seats.115 A white man proceeded to stand behind the driver.
When Blake noticed, he called back, “Let me have those front seats”—meaning the first row of seats in the middle section where Mrs. Parks and three others were sitting.116 By the terms of Alabama segregation, because there were no seats remaining in the white section, all four passengers would have to get up so one white man could sit down. In Montgomery, technically, black passengers were not supposed to be asked to give up their seat if there was not another one available—but on the “whim” of the driver could be asked to stand for another passenger.117 When the driver ordered them to give up their seats, no one moved. Getting agitated, the bus driver said, “You all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.”
Parks reflected to herself on how giving up her seat “wasn’t making it light on ourselves as a people.”118 She thought about her grandfather keeping his gun to protect their family. She thought about Emmett Till.119 And she decided to stand fast. “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. . . . No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”120
Blake told the four black passengers to move. The white passenger never said anything to Parks. When asked by an interviewer in 1967 if the man seemed embarrassed, Parks replied, “I don’t remember paying him any attention.”121 What she was about to do was much bigger than him.
Her seatmate and the other two women got up “reluctantly,” according to Parks, but she refused.122 She moved her legs so the man sitting in the window seat could get out and then slid into the seat next to the window. She continued to sit, firm in her decision but unsure what would next ensue.
The tall, blond forty-three-year-old driver got up and walked back to where she was seated. City code gave the “powers of the police officer” to bus drivers.123 Blake, like all of Montgomery’s bus drivers, was white and carried a gun. When the boycott began, there were no black drivers on the city’s lines.124 Born nine months before Rosa Parks in the town of Seman, Alabama, Blake had left school after the ninth grade and been hired by the bus company in 1942. Drafted into the army in 1944–45 and seeing active duty as a truck driver in the European theater, he returned to his job in late 1945 and had been driving the city’s buses ever since.
Parks had not planned the protest but “had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed.”125 She “couldn’t take it anymore. . . . It is such a long and lonely feeling. The line between reason and madness grows thinner [due to the] horrible restrictiveness of Jim Crow laws.”126 And so she decided to withdraw her participation in a system of degradation. Parks felt she was being asked to consent to her own humiliation: “I felt that, if I did stand up, it meant that I approved of the way I was being treated, and I did not approve.”127 “Tired of giving in,” Mrs. Parks had reached her stopping point.128
“Besides,” noted Jo Ann Robinson, “she was a woman, and the person waiting was a man.”129 The fact that she was being asked to stand for a man was significant. In a 1964 Esquire article she noted, “It didn’t seem logical, particularly for a woman to give way to a man.”130 This carried another cost—that of marking herself as not a lady since etiquette dictated a man would never take a seat from a woman; indeed, he should offer his seat to her.
There were no other seats on the bus so, according to city code, Parks was entitled to keep hers. But as she told an interviewer in February, she had “made up my mind that I was not going to move even if there were seats in back.”131 She also mentioned this to A. W. West, a prominent black woman in the community, who recalled: “When I asked her what happened, she said that she did not move. There were no other seats, however, she stated that if there had been, she had made up her mind never to move again.”132
Blake wanted the seat. “I had police powers—any driver for the city did.”133 The bus was crowded, and the tension heightened as Blake walked back to her. Refusing to assume a deferential position, Parks looked him straight in the eye.
Blake asked, “Are you going to stand up?”
Parks replied, “No.” She then told him she was not going to move “because I got on first and paid the same fare, and I didn’t think it was right for me to have to stand so someone else who got on later could sit down.”134
“Well I’m going to have you arrested.”
“You may do that,” Parks replied.
Given her NAACP organizing experience, Parks was exceedingly cognizant of the dangers a black woman faced in getting arrested. “I d
idn’t even know if I would get off the bus alive.”135 She knew that Claudette Colvin had been manhandled by police and others had been beaten or shot for their resistance. In her words, “As I sat there, I tried not think about what might happen. I knew that anything was possible.”136 Stories circulated through the black community, according to Doris Crenshaw, of “women being pulled off the bus and raped and not arrested.”137 Parks knew what could happen “but I was resigned to the fact that I had to express my unwillingness to be humiliated in this manner.”138
Parks thought about the possibility of resisting but decided not to put up any physical fight, even if Blake or the police got rough with her. “I didn’t have any way of fighting back. I didn’t have any type of weapon. And I would have been too physically weak to try to have done anything to protect myself against any of these policemen, you know, if they had decided to use violence in handling me.”139 Years earlier, in the bus incident with her mother, Parks had imagined using her hands if her mother was manhandled. But here she did not. Parks was a seasoned activist at this point and understood the value in not resisting arrest—the police had charged Colvin not just with a violation of the segregation laws but also with resisting arrest and assault. Still, faced with the possibility that she might be assaulted, she “wasn’t frightened at all,” she recalled in a 1956 interview.140 Rather, she was somewhat distracted, thinking about all she had to do for the upcoming Youth Council workshop and the December NAACP elections.141
Parks looked to her faith in this moment: “God has always given me the strength to say what is right.”142 She also attributed her courage to the history of the black freedom fighters who had come before her. “I had the strength of God and my ancestors with me.”143 Black women had a long history of bus, train, and streetcar protest, exposing the “irrationality of segregation,” according to historian Blair Kelley, and that evening Mrs. Parks extended the tradition.144 “I could not have faced myself or my people if I had moved,” Parks told a reporter in 1957.145
Framing her decision as a morally important one, Parks described it in terms similar to Gandhi’s ideas about the moral obligation of civil disobedience: “If I did not resist being mistreated, that I would spend the rest of my life being mistreated.”146 She highlighted the “artificial, legal” nature of segregation; to move from her seat legitimated the logic of it.147 Parks refused.
Parks’s frustration came also from how she was expected to act at work, tailoring clothes in the men’s department at Montgomery Fair, and how she was treated in public life. “You spend your whole lifetime in your occupation, actually making life clever, easy and convenient for white people. But when you have to get transportation home, you are denied an equal accommodation. Our existence was for the white man’s comfort and well-being; we had to accept being deprived of just being human.”148 Having spent the day altering and pressing white men’s suits, Parks again was being asked to lower herself so a white man could be convenienced. She refused. As she had learned from her mother and grandparents, part of being respectable was not consenting to the disrespect of her person.
Blake left the bus to call the supervisor from the pay phone on the corner. “I was under orders to call them first.” His supervisor told Blake to put the woman off the bus. “‘Did you warn her Jim?’ I said ‘I warned her.’ And he said . . . ‘Well, then, Jim you do it. You got to exercise your power and put her off, hear?’”149 Blake then called the police. Meanwhile, the tension on the bus grew. Most on the bus, black and white, feared what might happen. They did not want trouble, and many wished she would just stand up. Parks heard grumblings of conversation though she could not make out what they were saying.150 Some black people exited the bus. “I supposed they didn’t want to be inconvenienced while I was being arrested,” she surmised.151
Police officers Day and Mixon boarded the bus. The police were “the front line of the white segregationist army,” according to white Montgomery minister Robert Graetz. While the Klan had for many decades been the central force to keep black people in line, “that kind of illegal [activity] was no longer tolerated, at least officially. Nowadays the task of controlling Negroes was entrusted to the legally constituted constabulary.”152 Montgomery whites saw themselves as sophisticated. They did not have to resort to common vigilantism—at least publicly—and had entrusted the police with maintaining a severely segregated and unequal city. The law was up to the task.
Blake explained to the officers that he had asked for the seats and the “other three stood, but that one wouldn’t.” This phrasing angered Parks. “He didn’t say three what, men or women, didn’t refer to anything, just, ‘that one,’ pointing to me, ‘wouldn’t stand up.’”153 Blake addressed nothing further to Parks after he called in the officers.154
The first officer addressed Parks and asked her why she did not stand up when instructed to. Parks coolly asked back, “Why do you all push us around?”
He replied, “I don’t know but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.”155
Parks thought to herself, “Let us look at Jim Crow for the criminal he is and what he had done to one life multiplied millions of times over these United States.”156
As she exited the bus, one officer picked up her purse and the other her shopping bag. The police officers talked to the driver “secretly, however I did hear one say, ‘NAACP,’ and ‘Are you sure you want to press charges.’” The driver said that he did, and that he would come down after his next trip. The policemen were reluctant, but they had no choice.”157 Blake wanted to swear out a warrant and after he finished his run would come by to finish the paperwork.
In contrast to other troubles Parks had previously had on the bus, Blake chose to have her arrested, rather than simply evicting her from the bus.158 In an interview on February 5, 1956, Parks put the agency on Blake rather than on the officers, who were willing to just put her off the bus.159 That decision, according to E. D. Nixon, “was the worst thing ever happened to him.”160 There is no indication from this interview or others that the officers knew Parks, but they seemed to fear the NAACP and what it might do. At 6:06 p.m., the officers signed warrant 14256 charging Rosa Parks with violating chapter 6, section 100, of the Montgomery city code.
In an interview years later, Blake explained, “I wasn’t trying to do anything to that Parks woman except do my job. She was in violation of the city codes, so what was I supposed to do? That damn bus was full and she wouldn’t move back. I had my orders.”161 But in fact, she wasn’t in violation of the city code, and his orders from the supervisor had just been to have Parks removed from the bus—not specifically to have her arrested. That extra step, Blake’s vociferous defense of segregation and desire to see Parks punished, proved historic. As Parks observed, the first time she had trouble with Blake he had evicted her from his bus but hadn’t called the police. But this evening “he just felt like he wanted to throw his weight around or exercise his power beyond just enforcing segregation law.”162 This was how segregation worked more broadly, endowing a broad cross-section of white people with authority that could be wielded or not wielded at their discretion.
David Levering Lewis, in his 1970 biography of Martin Luther King, claims that Blake recognized Parks’s character, which prompted his decision to call the police rather than physically remove her from the bus.
Had Rosa Parks been less primly composed, had her diction betrayed the mangled speech of the ordinary black passenger, the outcome of Thursday, December 1, 1955, could have been different. . . . [Blake] was not generally given to violence, and to use expletives before the amazed and slightly embarrassed white passengers (several of whom were female) struck him as unprofessional. . . . Blake’s decision to summon the police appeared to offer the most expedient solution to this extraordinary dilemma.163
Parks made the decision to remain in her seat through her own political will and long history of bus resistance. She did not make it because of E. D. Nixon or Myles Horton, though they had cer
tainly been instrumental in her political development. She was not a Freedom Rider boarding the bus to engage in an act of intentional desegregation. If that had been the case, if Parks had been acting on behalf of the NAACP, her former classmate Mary Fair Burks explained, “she would have done so openly and demanded a group action on the part of the organization, since duplicity is not part of her nature.”164
Still, Rosa Parks was an experienced political organizer. She had been galled by bus segregation for years. So that evening as she waited the minutes for the police to board the bus, she thought about what Mr. Nixon would say and perhaps even how they might use this in their organizing.165 In the hundreds of interviews she gave around her bus stand, however, Parks rarely acknowledged thinking of Nixon during her arrest and what they might do. Because segregationists were so quick to call her an “NAACP plant,” she likely felt that any admission risked giving their slander credence. There is no evidence of any sort of plan, no indication till the moment presented itself that Parks knew she could summon the courage to refuse to move from her seat. It is likely that she, like many black Montgomerians, particularly after Colvin’s arrest, had thought and talked about what she would do if she were asked to give up her seat to a white person. But thinking or even talking about it and actually being able to act in the moment are vastly different.
But Parks was well aware of the political situation and the resources she would call on. “I told myself I wouldn’t put up no fuss against them arresting me. . . . As soon as they arrested me, I knew, I’d call Mr. Nixon and let him know what had happened. Then we’d see.”166 In another interview, she also mentions thinking about Nixon in that moment. “It was the only way I knew to let him [Nixon] and the, all the world, know that I wanted to be a respectable and respected citizen in the community.”167 And in a 1967 interview, she explained, “I had felt for a long time, that if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so.”168
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Page 11
