Parks made an active choice in that instance. As poet Nikki Giovanni framed it, “She saw the opportunity and she took it.”169 In the midst of the fear, humiliation, and inconvenience of being asked to give up your seat on a crowded bus, with the real possibility of violence for refusing, to see an opening is testament to Parks’s vision that December evening. In a moment designed to frighten and degrade, she was able to see herself as an agent and claim a space of choice. “It’s only a few people that you can find that can get a glimpse of . . . what is going to happen,” Reverend Johns observed, “and Rosa Parks was one of those rare people who could catch a vision.”170
But that agency was also harrowing. There were other people she knew on the bus, but none came to her defense. Calling it “one of the worst days of my life,” she said, “I felt very much alone.”171 She fantasized about what it would have been like if the whole bus had emptied or if the other three had stayed where they were “because if they’d had to arrest four of us instead of one, then that would have given me a little support.”172 Parks had not expected that others would follow her or come to her defense on the bus—“I knew the attitude of people. It was pretty rough to go against the system.”173 In another interview, however, she admits to wishing they had and seems frustrated, though unwilling to admit it. “I possibly would have felt better if they had taken the same stand. But since they didn’t, I understood it very well. I didn’t bear any grudge against them.”174 In a later interview, she put it more starkly, “When I was arrested, no other person stood and said, “If you put this woman in jail, I am going to . . .”175 In numerous interviews over the years, Parks came back repeatedly to how hard her arrest felt in the moment, describing her stand in less than triumphal terms: “At times I felt resigned to give what I could to protest against the way I was being treated.”176
Parks believed in the responsibility of the individual to stand against injustice. In a speech in Los Angeles a few months after her bus stand, Parks stressed the solitary nature of the protest, which she saw following from the preceding years of relatively lonely activism. “My convictions [against segregation] meant much to me—if I had to hold on to my convictions alone, I would. . . . [Emphasis added.] Over the years, I have been rebelling against second-class citizenship. It didn’t begin when I was arrested.”177 Parks had taken a number of personal stands against segregation before her bus stand—refusing to use the “colored” bathroom, refusing to pay her money and then reboard the bus from the back door, drinking from the “white” fountain, insisting on taking her youth group to the Freedom Train. Here again, she drew a personal line with no way of knowing that a whole community would soon follow. As she described it in 1978, “There were times when it would have been easy to fall apart or to go in the opposite direction, but somehow I felt that if I took one more step, someone would come along to join me.”178 Getting arrested was considered a mark of shame, but Parks resisted this thinking.179
In the years subsequent to her arrest, and particularly in the past few decades, Parks’s decision to remain sitting has repeatedly been called a “small act”; even Parks, on occasion, minimized it. But there was nothing small about her action. Renowned black feminist Pauli Murray, in a tribute to Mrs. Parks in 1965, observed: “Here was an individual virtually alone, challenging the very citadel of racial bigotry, the brutality of which has horrified the world over the past few years.” Murray had also been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus, in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1940.
“Any one of us who has ever been arrested on a Southern bus for refusing to move back,” Murray highlighted, “knows how terrifying this experience can be, particularly if it happened before the days of organized protest. . . . The fear of a lifetime always close to the surface of consciousness in those of us who have lived under the yoke of Southern racism is intensified by the sudden commotion and the charged atmosphere in the cramped space of the bus interior. As one who has known this fear, I suspect Mrs. Parks also felt it, but summoning all of her strength, she disregarded it and held her position.”180
Parks also contextualized her decision within her role as a political organizer: “an opportunity was being given to me to do what I had asked of others.”181 Seeing herself as part of a fledgling movement, she felt she had a responsibility to act on behalf of this larger community. She had been pushing the young people in her Youth Council to step up and contest segregation and had grown disappointed by the ways adults in the community “had failed our young people.”182 NAACP field secretary Mildred Roxborough recalled Parks’s “wonderment . . . thinking I had a role, I became an example of what I preaching.”183 On the bus that December evening, she saw herself at a crossroads and chose to make a stand.
In part, Parks acted because she had grown disheartened by pushing other people to take action who were reluctant to do so. She was frustrated by the Colvin case, by meetings and affidavits that went nowhere, and that December evening her discouragement transformed into confrontation. Indeed, her decision to act arose as much from frustration with the lack of change than a belief that her particular action would alter anything. “I simply did it because I thought nobody else would do anything,” she would later explain.184 But she also chose a more direct form of defiance, refusing to get up rather than just exiting the bus (as she had done previously).
Rosa Parks’s protest has often been reduced to the unwitting action of a quiet seamstress with aching feet. That explanation “started . . . after I moved to Detroit. I never heard it before I left the south,” Parks observed to a reporter in 1980.185 Parks critiqued these popular mischaracterizations:
I didn’t tell anyone my feet were hurting. It was just popular, I suppose because they wanted to give some excuse other than the fact that I didn’t want to be pushed around. . . . And I had been working for a long time—a number of years in fact—to be treated as a human being with dignity not only for myself, but all those who were being mistreated.186
Her quietness has been misread. She may have seemed “schoolmarmish but there was a storm behind it,” observed activist-journalist Herb Boyd.187 That evening, as she waited on that bus, there was thunder in her silence. Years later, Parks clarified what motivated her stand, reframing the discussion away from its narrow idea of a seat next to a white person to the actual goal of equal treatment and full human dignity. “I have never been what you would call just an integrationist. I know I’ve been called that. . . . Integrating that bus wouldn’t mean more equality. Even when there was segregation, there was plenty of integration in the South, but it was for the benefit and convenience of the white person, not us. So it is not just integration.” Her aim was to “discontinue all forms of oppression against all those who are weak and oppressed.”188
Time and again, Parks explained her protest as an intrinsic part of the political work she already was doing, vehemently denying that her protest stemmed simply from physical fatigue. In an August 1956 speech, she explained, “It is my opinion, it has always been and I’m sure it will always be that we must abolish such evil practices.”189 In 1958, she told a full church in Norfolk, “it wasn’t a decision I made that day but the people found out that I had made it long before.”190 And she pointedly made clear that her actions stemmed directly from political commitments she had carried all her life. “As far back as I can remember I knew there was something wrong with our way of life when people could be mistreated because of the color of their skin,” she told a thousand people gathered at an NAACP meeting in Baltimore in October 1956.191 In a later interview with Howell Raines, she explained how her bus resistance “was just a regular thing with me and not just that day.”192 Parks was not unusually tired that day. The source of her decision was a resolve that had long gestated inside her. Simply put, Parks was tired of injustice—“tired of giving in”—and in that tiredness found determination.
In his first mass movement speech, Dr. King echoed this theme of metaphysical tiredness. “There comes a time,” Ki
ng told the thousands gathered at Holt Street Church on the first night of the boycott, “when people get tired.” The crowd roared.193 King spoke of being “tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality.” In many ways, Parks and King tapped into a collective psychic saturation. As one Montgomery domestic explained, “You know, child, you can just take so much and soon you git full. Dat’s what happen here.”194
What Parks found that Thursday evening, what King articulated the following Monday, what black people in Montgomery realized was that the accumulation of tiredness at injustice brought courage and that courage brought a resolve that could withstand whatever lay ahead. In Stride Toward Freedom, King wrote, “No one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over. . . . Mrs. Parks’s refusal to move back was her intrepid affirmation that she had had enough.”195
Parks’s personal act grew out of the lessons she had taken from Highlander. Esau Jenkins stressed how Highlander’s philosophy of transformative personal action had operated that December evening. Highlander taught that “if you have to sit for your rights, sit for it. If you’ve got to crawl for it or wade for it or march for it or demonstrate for it, do that. If that’s what necessary to do at that time to bring the focus, the public, on the evil that is being happening to the people,’ and she said, ‘Well, I’m not going to get up this day.’”196 Parks’s experience at Highlander the past summer had given her new vision and raised her expectations. Durr wrote the Hortons crediting Highlander for its role in Parks’s action. After Parks got back from Highlander “she was so happy and felt so liberated,” Durr wrote, then as time when on “the discrimination got worse and worse to bear after having, for the first time in her life, been free of it at Highlander. I am sure that had a lot to do with her daring to risk arrest as she is naturally a very quiet and retiring person although she has a fierce sense of pride.”197 Septima Clark expressed a similar sentiment in a letter in 1956. “Had you seen Rosa Parks (the Montgomery sparkplug) when she came to Highlander you would understand just how much guts she got while being there.”198 Highlander had furthered Park’s sense of outrage and widened her sense of possibility.
“It was inside you the whole time,” Studs Terkel observed in an interview with Rosa Parks in 1973.199 Parks’s stand was a deeply political, principled act by a woman who well knew the danger of bus resistance. In her bravery, other people would find theirs as well.
CHAPTER FOUR
“There Lived a Great People”
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
PARKS’S FRIEND BERTHA BUTLER HEARD from a woman who’d been on the bus that Mrs. Parks had been arrested, and ran to Nixon’s house to get his help.1 Nixon’s wife phoned him to inform him of Parks’s arrest. “You won’t believe it. The police got Rosa,” Arlet told him “but nobody knows the extent of the charges or whether she’s been beaten.”2 Nixon tried calling the jail for information, but they told him it was “none of his damn business” and would not give him any information. He then telephoned Clifford Durr, who called and was able to learn the charge. After finding out that Parks was safe, Nixon was, in a measure, delighted, observing to his wife, “I believe Jim Crow dropped in our lap just what we are looking for.”3 Nixon saw in Parks the kind of test case they had been seeking—middle-aged, religious, of good character, known and respected in the community for her political work, and brave. He explained, “If there ever, ever was a woman who was dedicated to the cause, Rosa Parks was that woman. She had a deep conviction about what she thought was right. . . . No one, nobody could . . . touch her morally, her character or nothin’.”4 He continued, “The press couldn’t go out and dig up something she did last year, or last month, or five years ago.”5 Perhaps most important for Nixon, Parks was a “real fighter” and wouldn’t be scared off by white backlash.6 People had to be sure that “the person could stand up under fire and remain courageous through out the pressure of a long court fight,” explained Nixon, and he trusted Mrs. Parks’s resolve.7
Word began to travel. Parks’s character and political experience made her a galvanizing figure in many sections of Montgomery’s black community. Working class in income (Parks made about twenty-three dollars a week) and middle class in demeanor, she represented a sympathetic class position for a wide spectrum of black Montgomerians to identify with. This—along with her comportment and faith—gave her a wide appeal, likely broader than if she had been poor or squarely middle class.8 With a barber husband, a live-in mother, and her department-store job doing alterations, she was solidly working class. A devoted churchgoer at St. Paul’s AME Church, Parks lived in a tight-knit community in a modest apartment at the Cleveland Court projects—and Montgomery’s working-class west side rallied around her. At the same time, Parks’s community activism and church work marked her as a steadfast race woman—and thus many in Montgomery’s middle class were also outraged by her treatment on the bus. She was middle-aged, trusted, and demure, and while not economically middle class or college educated (characteristics that had tended to be the requisite for Montgomery’s black middle-class organizations), she had a character that many middle-class blacks admired—a “lady,” according to A. W. West.
Many people of various classes could thus find commonalty with her life and situation. She was “one of the most respected people in the Negro community,” according to Dr. King.9 One Montgomery domestic explained, “Miss Rosie Park, one of our nice ’spectable ladies was put in jail, and the folks got full and jest wouldn’t take no more. . . . We shor fixed ’em.”10 Another woman concurred, “They didn’t have a bitter need to rest Miss Park. All they had to do was talk to ’er lack she was a lady, but they had to be so big and take her to jail. Dey bit the lump off and us making ’em chew it. . . . Colored folks ain’t like they use to be. They ain’t scared no more.”11
Perhaps most important, as Parks herself put it, “the people of the community knew me,” and they respected her long-standing community work.12 The span of Parks’s involvement in her church, the Civic League and other voting registration efforts, and the NAACP, according to Alabama State professor James Pierce, was “rather unique.”13 Part of people’s resolve came from their identification with her. Reverend French explained, “Not only was Mrs. Rosa Parks arrested but every Negro in Montgomery felt arrested.”14 Because they knew her, they also trusted she would not flinch under pressure or sell them out.
To understand how a boycott was built in Montgomery from Parks’s stand requires seeing the power and impact of her action and the host of other people who then turned that action into a movement. In interviews during the boycott, Parks stressed the protracted history leading up to her protest—both her own and that of others who had long been pushing for change—and the actions of many who stepped up after her arrest. Parks herself asserted numerous times that her bus stand was part of a constellation of resistance by a number of people in the city that laid the foundation for a more cohesive movement to emerge. She often prefaced her description of the events of December 1 by describing the boycott’s long background and noting that two other women had been arrested that same year for their refusals on the bus.15 Nixon concurred, “I have told the press time after time that we were doing these things before December 1955, but all they want to do is start at December 1 and forget about what happened . . . over a long period of time to set the stage.”16 Even decades later, Parks was still trying to set the record straight. In an interview in 1988, for instance, she again insisted, “Many people don’t know the whole truth. . . . I was just one of many who fought for freedom.”17 She felt a certain embarrassment at how people focused on her to the exclusion of other people’s roles.
The infrastructure they had laid, the various movements and meetings Nixon and Parks, Jo Ann Robinson and Mary Fair Burks had organized, the impact of Colvin’s arrest—all of this came together in the protest. As Nixon explained, “
The success of the bus boycott was due to the fact that we took all the lessons about using the press and public speaking and the courts and politics and white friends and mass pressure and all the rest and used it all at the same time.”18 The years of lonely organizing and the people primed for action provided the brick and mortar to construct a boycott.
GOING TO JAIL
After being escorted into city hall, Parks laughed to herself. “Who would have thought that little Rosa McCauley—whose friends teased her for being such a goody Two-shoes in her dainty white gloves—would ever become a convicted criminal, much less a subversive worthy of police apprehension, in the eyes of the state of Alabama?”19 Upon getting to the jail, she requested her phone call. Thirsty, she asked for water but was refused; the water was “for whites only.” “Can you imagine how it feels to want a drink of water and be in hand’s reach of water and not be permitted to drink?” Parks wrote later.20 Finally, a policeman brought her some water.21
They asked her if she was drunk. She was not.22 She recalled not being “happy at all” or particularly frightened but found the arrest “very much annoying to me” as she thought of all the NAACP work she had to do.23 That evening she didn’t feel like history was being made but felt profoundly irritated by her arrest, which seemed a detour from the week’s more pressing political tasks.
She repeatedly asked for a phone call. Finally, she was allowed to telephone her family. Her mother answered and upon hearing that Rosa had been arrested, worriedly inquired, “Did they beat you?” Both her mother and Raymond were horrified to learn she was in jail, but Rosa assured her mother she had not been beaten. She then asked to talk to Raymond who promised to “‘be there in a few minutes.’ He didn’t have a car, so I knew it would be longer.”24 Home making dinner, Raymond was angry that no one had informed him of Rosa’s arrest.25 According to Rosa, “There was one man who was on the bus, he lived next door to where we lived, and he could have if he’d wanted to, gotten off the bus to let my husband know that I was arrested. My husband thinks kind of hard of him for not at least telling him.”26
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Page 12
