The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  While in jail, Parks struck up a conversation with her cellmate, who had been in jail for nearly two months. The woman had picked up a hatchet against a boyfriend who had struck her—and, with no money for bail, was unable to let her family know where she was. Parks promised to try to get in touch with the woman’s family. Then abruptly the warden came to get her, but she hadn’t taken the paper where her cellmate had written down the phone numbers. The woman threw the small paper down the stairs as Parks left, and she surreptitiously picked it up. “The first thing I did the morning after I went to jail was to call the number the woman in the cell with me had written down on that crumpled piece of paper.”27 Parks reached the woman’s brother. A few days later, she saw the woman on the street looking much better.28

  Nixon had gone down to the jail with Clifford and Virginia Durr. The Durrs had no money, and Nixon put up the $100 bail. But he wanted the white couple to go with him to ensure the police actually released Parks after taking the bail money.29 Around 9:30 p.m., Parks walked out of jail to greet her friends. Virginia was struck by her appearance: “It was terrible to see her coming down through the bars, because . . . she was an exceedingly fine-looking woman and very neatly dressed and such a lady in every way—so genteel and so extremely well-mannered and quiet. It was just awful to see her being led down by a matron.”30 With tears in her eyes, Durr embraced her and was struck by how Mrs. Parks was “calm as she could be, not cheerful, but extremely calm.”31 As they were leaving, Raymond appeared with a bail bondsman, so Rosa rode home with him.

  Nixon, the Durrs, and the Parkses convened in the Parkses’ Cleveland Courts apartment to talk over the next step. They drank coffee and discussed matters until about eleven that night. Clifford Durr thought he could get the charges dismissed if she wanted him to, because there had not been an open seat for Parks to move to. But Nixon saw this as the bigger opportunity they had been waiting for to launch an attack on bus segregation. “Mr. Durr’s right,” Nixon explained, “it’ll be a long and hard struggle. It’ll cost a lot of money. But we’ll get the NAACP behind it, I promise you that. It won’t cost you and Mr. Parks anything but time and misery. But I think it will be worth all the time and misery.”32 Nixon talked and talked, answering questions and explaining what he saw as the possibilities. Parks knew she never would ride the segregated bus again but had to consider making a public case and step into the line of attack.

  Raymond did not initially agree. He “was pretty angry,” Rosa recalled. “He thought it would be as difficult to get people to support me as a test case as it had been to develop a test case out of Claudette Colvin’s experience.” They discussed and debated the question for a while. After an hour or two, the Durrs left, but Nixon stayed for a while longer. “In the end, Parks, and my mother supported the idea. They were against segregation and were willing to fight it.”33 With decades of political experience, Raymond Parks understood the physical and economic dangers this stand entailed and the difficulties he, his wife, and other activists had faced in building a unified mass movement. The community had not stood together for long in previous cases, particularly in Colvin’s, so Raymond worried. The economic and physical violence unleashed on protesting blacks, along with class divisions within the black community, had made a mass movement near impossible in the past. There would certainly be a price to pay for that resistance, and Raymond worried for the safety, physical and emotional, of his wife.

  Virginia later highlighted Raymond’s reluctance, casting it differently than Rosa did. “He kept saying over and over again, ‘Rosa, the white folks will kill you. Rosa, the white folks will kill you.’ It was like a background chorus, to hear the poor man, who was white as he could be himself, for a black man, saying ‘Rosa, the white folks will kill you.’ I don’t remember her being reluctant.”34 Historians have latched on to Virginia’s version of Raymond’s reluctance. But there is a certain racialized and gendered cast to Virginia’s explanation—something emasculating in her description of Raymond’s fear and the ways she explicitly marked his light skin.35 It is unlikely that the Durrs had ever visited the Parks apartment socially before, and they did not know Raymond. So the unusualness of the circumstances likely affected how Virginia experienced and remembered the evening. E. D. Nixon provided no such description of Raymond.

  Rosa contextualized Raymond’s response: “He was concerned about the way I was treated like any husband would be.”36 Fifty-two years old on that December evening, Raymond had a long history of activism. He had known people, as had Rosa, who were killed for their stands against racial injustice—and was even more soul weary than Rosa. He had experienced the ways people grew uncertain and movements crumbled under the immense pressure of white backlash. Virginia did not acknowledge the ways Raymond’s own activist experience came to bear that evening, let alone the responsibility he likely felt in trying to protect Rosa from the hardship that pursuing the case publicly would entail. For Rosa, faced with the possibility of retaliation against the entire family, it needed to be a communal decision. Talking to a coworker the next day, Raymond continued to worry that he and Rosa would be killed because of her arrest.37

  Later that weekend, Rosa asked Virginia to speak at an NAACP meeting. She agreed to do so but “trembled at the thought of it being in the papers the next morning.”38 Even as a middle-class white woman, Durr feared public exposure of her beliefs. In interviews long after the boycott, Durr talked about how terrifying this period was. In 1954, she and Clifford had been red-baited for their civil rights beliefs and their connections to the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), and she had been called before Senator James Eastland’s Internal Security subcommittee and “expos[ed] . . . as a nigger-loving Communist.” She refused to answer questions—making national headlines as she stood silent before Eastland, occasionally powdering her nose. Despite their important contributions behind the scenes, the Durrs, in fact, often avoided situations where they would be publicly identified for their civil rights work. When Alabama State professor Lawrence Reddick decided to write a book on the boycott in 1956 and wanted to include description of the Durrs’ role, Virginia Durr said no. She explained her decision to a friend, “[Letting ourselves] be written up as having played a part, however it may seem to History, simply means that our tenuous hold here is lost for good. . . . I hated to have to tell him that History cannot feed your children or pay their school bills.”39 And yet, Virginia was unable to extrapolate her own fears about economic and physical retaliation to Raymond and rendered his fears for Rosa and his family’s safety unmanly.

  Nixon knew Rosa Parks “wasn’t afraid”40 and that once she committed to things, she did not waver: “If Mrs. Parks says yes, hell could freeze but she wouldn’t change.”41 After talking with her mother and Raymond, who both came around to her taking this stand, Parks agreed. Later that evening, she called Fred Gray and asked him to provide her legal representation. Gray recalled that from that moment, “my days of having little to do in my fledgling law practice were over.”42

  BOYCOTT: A COMMUNITY RESPONDS

  “God provided me with the strength I needed at the precise time when conditions were ripe for change,” Parks observed.43 This was not some lucky happenstance. Rosa Parks and her colleagues had labored for years to seed the ground for a movement to grow in Montgomery, and those efforts had made the conditions ripe for a movement. In Stride Toward Freedom, Dr. King observed that Parks had “been tracked down by the Zeitgeist.”

  She wasn’t “planted” there by the NAACP, or any other organization; she was planted there by her personal sense of dignity and self-respect. She was anchored to that seat by the accumulated indignities of days gone and the boundless aspirations of generations yet unborn.44

  Parks’s arrest proved the last straw for many in Montgomery—the “rightness” of the moment created by the people of Montgomery in the years previous to Parks’s bus stand and over the next 382 days of the boycott.

  As Parks herself would note,
“Many people cannot relate to the feelings of frustration that we, as black people, felt in the 1950s. . . . But because we went along with it then did not mean that we would let it go on forever. . . . It was a long time coming, but finally, as a group, we demanded, ‘Let my people go.’”45 Her arrest would provide the impetus. Because she “had been active in the NAACP ever since she was grown,” Horton explained, Parks was “a perfect case . . . somebody whom everybody had confidence in, in Montgomery. Some person who people respected to provide the basis on which you could build a movement.”46

  According to WPC founder Mary Fair Burks, Rosa Parks “possessed sterling qualities” that those in the civil rights establishment “were forced to admire in spite of their usual indifference.”47 Initially Burks was surprised to hear that Parks had been arrested. Having attended Miss White’s school with Rosa, she remembered her as a “quiet, self-composed girl . . . [who] avoided confrontations and suspension.” Yet those same qualities had also enabled Parks to make this stand. After “reflect[ing] on what I knew about her,” Burks noted, “I decided it had not been out of character after all. No, Rosa as a rule did not defy authority, but once she had determined on a course of action, she would not retreat. She might ignore you, go around you, but never retreat.”48

  As the community began to react following Parks’s arrest, Claudette Colvin experienced a rush of mixed feelings: “I was glad an adult had finally stood up to the system, but I felt left out. I was thinking, Hey I did that months ago and everybody dropped me. . . . They all turned their backs on me, especially after I got pregnant. It really, really hurt. But on the other hand, having been with Rosa at the NAACP meetings, I thought, Well maybe she’s the right person—she’s strong and adults won’t listen to me anyway.’”49 Decades later, Colvin reflected on the community reaction. “When I look back now, I think Rosa Parks was the right person to represent that movement at that time. She was a good and strong person, accepted by more people than were ready to accept me. . . . Mine was the first cry for justice and a loud one. I made it so that our own adult leaders couldn’t just be nice anymore.”50

  Parks also reflected on why her case incited people to react more than Colvin’s had. “Now in the case of this young girl I just mentioned, the dissatisfaction and the resentment was very prevalent. But I never did know why they didn’t take the stand in her case as they did mine, unless it was because by my being a mature, middle-aged person, it probably created more sympathy. And I had been working in the community enough for people to know that I didn’t initiate this trouble that came on and that it was unjustly put on me.”51 While people proved more willing to stand by Parks than Colvin, part of what spurred that resolve was community anger at the city’s empty promises following Colvin’s arrest. As black teacher Sarah Coleman explained, “When the high school girl was arrested last spring . . . the bus company promised us they would do something and in six months they never did anything.”52

  A number of people in Montgomery, including Parks, shared Burks’s criticisms about the “the usual indifference” of many blacks in Montgomery. King wrote of the “tacit acceptance of things as they were” by the black middle class and the “passivity of the majority of the uneducated.”53 This complacency was rooted largely in fear—fear of being publicly singled out, fear of economic retaliation, fear of imprisonment, fear of violence—the arsenal of weapons whites used well to maintain the racial status quo. A hard life could be made even harder, and the many small comforts of the middle class could quickly disintegrate. “I have known Negroes killed by whites without any arrests or investigation,” Parks explained. “This thing called segregation is a complete and solid . . . way of life. We are conditioned to it and make the best of a bad situation.”54 Amidst that fearsome climate, Johnnie Carr noted, “Many Negroes lost faith in themselves.”55

  Indeed, Alabama State professor J. E. Pierce, a longtime NAACP member, initially opposed the one-day boycott because he did not believe the black community would stick together.56 King had also been struck by the “appalling lack of unity” among Montgomery’s many black leaders and feared the division “could be cured only by some miracle.”57 Parks thought her bus incident “would pass without too much notice as many others had.”58

  Before going to bed, Nixon remembered one more person he needed to tell and telephoned Parks’s childhood friend and fellow NAACP activist Johnnie Carr, informing her “they put the wrong person in jail.” Carr was dumbfounded. “You don’t mean they’ve arrested Rosa Parks,” she asked Nixon incredulously.59 Carr was surprised. “I was noisy and talkative, but she was very quiet and stayed out of trouble. . . . She was so quiet you would never have believed she would get to the point of being arrested.”60 Explaining the plans to pursue the case, Nixon informed Carr he had to leave town on a Pullman run for the weekend, but that there was much work she and Mrs. Parks would need to attend to.61

  “THE NEXT TIME IT MAY BE YOU”: THE CALL GOES OUT

  Not everyone went to bed that evening. The boycott was actually called by the Women’s Political Council.62 While the news of Parks’s arrest spread like wildfire, “a numbing helplessness seemed to paralyze everyone,” according to Jo Ann Robinson. “There was fear, discontent, and uncertainty. Everyone seemed to wait for someone to do something, but nobody made a move.”63 The neighborhood was “buzzing,” according to Rosalyn Oliver King, Rosa’s neighbor at Cleveland Courts.

  Gray had called Robinson to talk about Parks’s arrest. Robinson called the WPC’s leadership. Rather than risk having their efforts thwarted as they had been in Colvin’s case, they decided to call for a one-day boycott of Montgomery’s buses on Monday—the day Mrs. Parks was scheduled to appear in court.

  Despite the dangers of being a black woman out in the dead of night, Robinson left home for Alabama State College. With the help of two students and a colleague who gave her access to the mimeograph machine, Robinson stayed up all night making leaflets announcing the one-day boycott. The leaflets, printed three to a page because they had thousands to make, read,

  Another Negro woman has been arrested . . . If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue . . . We are therefore asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial.64

  Noting the economic clout the black community had vis-à-vis the buses, the leaflet reminded readers this was the second arrest since Colvin’s and “the next time, it may be you, or your daughter, or mother.” The leaflet stressed the mistreatment of African American women—perhaps in the hope that this would gird people’s resolve to act.

  Robinson called Nixon around 3 a.m. to tell him of their plans—but she didn’t inform Rosa Parks. In fact, Robinson claims that after talking to Fred Gray on the phone, she jotted down some notes on the back of an envelope which read, “The Women’s Political Council will not wait for Mrs. Parks’s consent to call for a boycott of city buses.”65 This note, and Robinson’s conviction that she didn’t need to obtain Parks’s consent or to even apprise her of the one-day boycott, likely stems in part from Robinson’s determination to act quickly and in part from the class divisions in Montgomery’s black community. Though Robinson and Parks had worked together previously, they moved in very different circles. The fact that the reserved Parks had a long history of political activity was not necessarily known to Robinson.

  Between 4 and 7 a.m., Robinson and her students mapped out distribution routes for the notices.66 In the early morning, they were met by nearly twenty women who ensured that “practically every black man, woman and child in Montgomery knew the plan and was passing the word along.”67 Over the next days, the WPC distributed more than thirty-five thousand leaflets to barber shops, stores, bars, factories, and at Dexter Avenue Church, where the ministers would meet Friday night.

  When Robinson arrived back on campus to teach her class that morning, there was a message for her to report to the president’s office. President Trenholm had found out about the leaflets and wa
s furious, “so angry his cheeks just quivered.”68 Exhausted, and worried that she was going to be fired, Robinson summoned her resolve. “I described the frequent repetition of these outrages, how many children, men, and women, old and middle-aged people, had been humiliated and made to relinquish their seats to white people.” Trenholm’s mood softened. Robinson promised to keep Alabama State out of their activities and paid the college back for all the leaflets.69

  Early the next morning, Nixon began calling Montgomery’s black ministers. Nixon wanted to get things in place before leaving on his Pullman run. He made his first call to the Reverend Ralph Abernathy of First Baptist Church and then around 6 a.m. called a relatively new minister in town, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.—to convince them to support the protest. Nixon saw in King the kind of mind, spirit, and oratorical ability to help galvanize the community. King was new to Montgomery and didn’t have set alliances, enemies, or much of a public reputation, making him a useful choice in trying to unify the ministers behind this bold action. And perhaps most important, Nixon wanted to use King’s church to hold the meeting because Dexter Avenue was centrally located in downtown Montgomery.