The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  Nixon recounted his initial conversation with King. “When he heard me talk about how long it’d take and how hard the struggle would be, he wasn’t sure. He was a young man just getting started in the ministry. His family was young. His wife had given birth to their first child, a little girl, less than a month ago.” King hesitated that early December morning on what he could realistically commit to, saying to Nixon, “‘Let me think about it a while and call me back.”70 After making some more calls, Nixon called him back. Having already spoken with Abernathy, King quickly assented. Nixon, Abernathy, and King worked through the morning to get other ministers to turn out that evening. By the end of the boycott, Dr. King had gained a national profile. Nixon, however, always reminded people, “If Mrs. Parks had gotten up and given that cracker her seat, you’d never heard of Reverend King.”71 Parks, on the other hand, always stressed that she wasn’t a single actor. “Four decades later I am still uncomfortable with the credit given to me for starting the bus boycott. Many people do not know the whole truth. . . . I was just one of many who fought for freedom.”72

  Before leaving on his run, Nixon had one more person to meet—a young white reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser named Joe Azbell. Nixon and Azbell had known each other for several years. Nixon handed Azbell a leaflet, telling him he had an important exclusive and apprising him about the plans for the boycott. Azbell ran a front-page story on Sunday reprinting the entire leaflet—thereby guaranteeing that those blacks and whites who had not heard of the boycott were now well informed.73 The two local television and four radio stations also picked up the news of a boycott. The protest was now a public event. Indeed it was “panicky white folks,” according to Nixon, who helped make the boycott an initial success and increased police presence, which further dissuaded people from riding the bus. “We couldn’t have paid for the free publicity the white folks gave our boycott,” Nixon noted.74

  Parks went to work as usual on Friday but took a cab.75 The tailor was surprised to see her. “You don’t think that going to jail is going to keep me home, do you?” she quipped.76 Trying to keep a low profile, Parks maintained her composure throughout the days surrounding her arrest, never reaching “the breaking point of shedding tears.”77 The Montgomery Advertiser ran its first story on the bottom of page nine, headlined “Negro Jailed Here for ‘Overlooking’ Segregation.” Later that day, the supervisor came by the tailor shop, clearly displeased with the news of Parks’s bus arrest.78

  During her lunch break, Parks took her lunch as usual to Fred Gray’s office. To her surprise, she found a swarm of media and learned of the plans for the Monday protest.79 Jet magazine “started taking my picture and asking questions.”80 She was not particularly keen on all the attention and never made a statement to the Advertiser. Nixon called to tell her of the meeting at Dexter Avenue Church that evening.81 She asked what it was about; he replied, “You know—about your being arrested.” She agreed to come.82

  That evening, Parks went to the church, slightly nervous. “At that point I didn’t know whether my getting arrested was going to set well or ill with the community—the leaders of the black community.” Nearly fifty ministers and other local leaders, including physicians, schoolteachers, lawyers, and union leaders, had gathered to discuss the plans for Monday, but the meeting began poorly. Reverend Roy Bennett, whom Nixon had put in charge, lectured at those gathered for a half hour, without a mention of Parks or the boycott. People started to leave. Even King joked with a friend about wanting to go but being unable to because it was at his church. Finally, others were allowed to speak. Parks addressed the group and, according to historian Douglas Brinkley, “explained to them her weariness with Jim Crow buses, the circumstances of her arrest, and the need for collective action in response to both. Gender was on her side with this crowd: with a touch of chauvinistic chivalry, many of the ministers did not want to be on record as abandoning a good Christian woman in need.”83 And the forty-two-year-old Parks, who had served as a deaconess and Sunday school teacher at St. Paul’s, was certainly a good Christian woman. Jo Ann Robinson also took the floor and extolled the need for action. Ultimately, the ministers decided to promote the one-day boycott.

  The paradox was this: Parks’s refusal to get up from her seat and the community outrage around her arrest were rooted in her long history of political involvement and their trust in her.84 However, this same political history got pushed to the background to further the public image of the boycott. Parks had a more extensive and progressive political background than many of the boycott leaders; many people probably didn’t know she had been to Highlander, and some would have been uncomfortable with her ties to leftist organizers. Rosa Parks proved an ideal person around which a boycott could coalesce, but it demanded publicizing a strategic image of her. Describing Parks as “not a disturbing factor,” Dr. King would note her stellar character at the first mass meeting in Montgomery, referring to “the boundless outreach of her integrity, the height of her character.”85

  The foregrounding of Parks’s respectability—of her being a good Christian woman and tired seamstress—proved pivotal to the success of the boycott because it helped deflect Cold War suspicions about grassroots militancy. Rumors immediately arose within white Montgomery circles that Parks was an NAACP plant. Indeed, if the myth of Parks put forth by many in the black community was that she was a simple Christian seamstress, the myth most commonly put forth by Montgomery’s white community was that the NAACP (in league with the Communist Party) had orchestrated the whole thing.

  Most whites, however, did not seem to know of Parks’s actual work with the association. Curiously, the Montgomery Advertiser never publicized Parks’s connections to the NAACP. Strategically, then, the success of Parks as the symbol of the boycott turned, in part, on obscuring her long-standing political activity.86 Her history of activism became a secret to keep the movement safe—and she and others would dissemble by calling her a simple seamstress. It was a well-kept secret. It does not appear that state officials, during the boycott, were aware of Parks’s NAACP history or other political activities, as these facts were not mentioned when the state outlawed the NAACP in June 1956.

  Parks herself would even try to deflect the significance of her action on the bus, particularly when she was interviewed by white journalists during the boycott. She would say she did not know why she kept sitting, but it had been a long day and she did not believe she should have to give up her seat. She gave a more extensive explanation of her decision to black journalists in all-black contexts, or to organizers she trusted; later, with scholars or other interviewers, she would be willing to contextualize her action in her broader history of activism. Given her reserved personality, Parks tended to downplay her own actions and as a seasoned political activist understood the importance of foregrounding the roots of this movement in the broader mistreatment of the black community.

  The seeds of the “simple tired seamstress” myth were thus planted in the early days of the boycott to mitigate the repressive atmosphere of the Cold War. Parks’s militancy was played down in service of the movement, but the image of her as a tired seamstress would assume a life of its own.87 Even when black Montgomerians prepared a twenty-year anniversary commemoration of the boycott, there would be a sharp disjuncture between how Parks’s action was described in the public program (“a weary seamstress . . . refused to give up her seat to a white man”) and how it was referred to privately among the organizers (“this brave and lonely act” where Parks “refused to continue voluntarily submitting to segregated seating on public buses in Montgomery Al.”).88 Similarly, the myth of Parks as a plant and her bus stand as a preplanned, staged event has lived on, but the origins of this myth in efforts by Montgomery’s segregationist community to discredit the boycott have long been forgotten.

  The myths also assumed a gendered hue—though her job title was “assistant tailor,” she would come to be referred to as a “seamstress.” This feminized and Americanized
her, evoking another famous American seamstress, Betsy Ross.89 Reverend French even referred to Parks as a “typical American housewife who shared in the support of her household by working as a seamstress in a downtown department store.”90 Over time, the downplaying of Parks’s status as a skilled worker had significant consequences for her and her family. The civil rights community would have difficulty recognizing that the loss of her job and the impossibility of finding another had tremendous consequences for her family’s economic security.

  Parks’s physical attractiveness and composure—her being “above all . . . a lady” as one boycotter put it—were placed front and center in the story.91 Robinson highlighted Parks’s ladylike demeanor: “She was too sweet to even say damn in anger.”92 Referring to her as an “attractive seamstress,” King noted Parks’s radiant persona, describing her as “soft spoken and calm in all situations. Her character was impeccable and her dedication deep-rooted.”93 Alabama State professor L. D. Reddick described Parks in an article for Dissent as “ideally fitted for the role . . . attractive and quiet, a churchgoer who looks like the symbol of Mother’s Day.”94 Originally describing her as a “civic leader” on December 11, the Atlanta Daily World came to prefer more gendered descriptions of her as “a fine, up-minded, meek-mannered, Christian woman” (the contortions of describing a person who willingly risked an arrest as meek-mannered notwithstanding). The Chicago Defender called her “the attractive little spark that ignited the now famous Montgomery, Ala. Boycott.”95 Regularly, descriptions of Parks noted her beauty and adherence to 1950s gender norms. The background material distributed about her by the NAACP described her wearing “smartly tailored suits . . . [who] likes to cook, especially roast and bake drop cookies.” As the boycott went on, the NAACP would urge Parks to “obtain 81/2 x 11 glossy prints of yourself for publicity purposes.”96

  There was a fixation on how she dressed. Alma John, who interviewed Parks for her New York radio program in May 1956, gushed, “Neighbors, I wish you could all see and meet Mrs. Parks. She is one of the most serene, one of the most beautiful women we’ve had the honor to meet. . . . She has on a beautiful straw hat, black and white with a little fluted straw around the edge. And she’s wearing a very smart dressmaker suit that has a gold and black thread running through it and a white bishop’s neck blouse.”97 Youth Council member Rosalyn King remembered that Parks dressed “simply” and “very matronly” and seemed older than she was because of her mannerisms and appearance.98 Articles in the black press during and even after the boycott stressed that she “did not look like a woman that would start a revolution.”99 The fact that the middle-aged, lighter-skinned Parks did not physically resist arrest—like the young darker-skinned Colvin—furthered the construction of her as the proper kind of symbol. And her beauty became part of what made her the right kind of woman to coalesce around. Horton in 1956 directly addressed why Parks’s arrest set off the reaction it did: “Rosa is . . . not only an attractive person to look at but has a beauty of character and was recognized by the people of Montgomery as a person of real dignity and a person that whom [sic] everybody respected. . . . She kind of symbolized some of the finest womanhood in the South. Since she’s been active in civic affairs, church work and all, it was just too much to have a quiet, dignified, intelligent person like Mrs. Parks humiliated.”100 Acknowledging Parks’s physical beauty, Horton’s choice of phrasing—some of the finest womanhood in the South—strategically claimed a gendered citizenship and stature for Mrs. Parks that contrasted with the ways she and other black women were treated in Montgomery.

  PREACHING THE WORD

  On Sunday, King evoked the “awful silence of God,” calling on his congregation to join the one-day boycott to challenge “the iron feet of oppression.”101 Other black ministers across the city followed suit. Not only did the ministers’ participation in the boycott provide an important mechanism for disseminating news of the protest in a space free of white control, it also provided some protection from charges of red-baiting.

  One white minister also joined the call. On Friday, Parks spoke with Reverend Graetz, whose church, Trinity Lutheran, sat next door to the Cleveland Court projects. Robert Graetz had assumed the pastorship of the black Trinity Lutheran Church in 1955, and he and his wife had been viewed as racial oddities since moving to Montgomery from Ohio. The Graetzes sat in the “black” section at the movies. Local whites shunned them in stores. Graetz had heard of the arrest and plans for the boycott but as a white man (even though he ministered to a black congregation) was having trouble getting much information on the events. So he called one of his closest black acquaintances, Rosa Parks, who used his church for her Youth Council meetings. “I just heard that someone was arrested on one of the buses Thursday,” he said to her.

  “That’s right, Pastor Graetz,” Parks replied.

  “And that we’re supposed to boycott the buses on Monday to protest.”

  “That’s right, Pastor Graetz.”

  “Do you know anything about it?”

  “Yes, Pastor Graetz.”

  “Do you know who was arrested?”

  “Yes, Pastor Graetz,”

  “Well, who was it?”

  There was a moment of silence.

  Then in a quiet voice she replied, “It was me, Pastor Graetz.” 102

  That Sunday, like the Reverends King and Abernathy, Reverend Graetz stood in his pulpit and gave a Christian interpretation of Parks’s arrest and the impending one-day boycott. He told his black congregation of his plans to participate in the boycott and to make his own car available to help shuttle people around town, and urged his congregation to do the same.103

  On Saturday, Parks hosted the already-planned NAACP Youth Council workshop at Alabama State College. Only five young people came. Having devoted a great deal of effort to set up the workshop, she was extremely discouraged by the turnout and increasingly anxious about what Monday would bring.

  MONDAY

  That Monday, people woke up early. Martin and Coretta King were dressed by 5:30 a.m. Martin believed if 60 percent of the black community stayed off the bus, the protest would be a success. A bus rolled by nearly empty of black passengers; another bus passed empty. They were elated. Nearly every black person in Montgomery had stayed off the bus. It was a magisterial sight: the sidewalks and streets of Montgomery filled with black men, women, and children walking, waiting, offering rides to people they knew or had never met. “It was really surprising,” Georgia Gilmore, a cook and midwife who in the days to come would emerge as a key organizer and fund raiser, recalled. “We thought well maybe some of the people would continue to ride the bus. But after all, they had been mistreated and been mistreated in so many different ways until I guess they were tired and they just decided that they just wouldn’t ride.”104

  “Gratifying” and “unbelievable” were the words Parks used to describe the sight that Monday morning—the way people “were willing to make the sacrifice to let it be known that they would be free from this oppression.”105 The reaction far surpassed anything she had ever seen. For Parks, this movement had been long in coming, but that December morning it had arrived. “As I look back on those days, it’s just like a dream. The only thing that bothered me was that we waited so long to make this protest.”106

  In a 1966 interview, Parks asserted that her most vivid memory from the entire year of the boycott was waking up December 5, looking out, and seeing the buses “almost completely empty.”107 Robinson explained the “hopeful, even prayerful” feeling that greeted the morning. Most people had not slept well, afraid the one-day action would fail and “the proud black leaders of the boycott would be the laughingstock of the town.”108 But this was not to be. “A quality of hope and joy” marked the day, Durr wrote a friend.109 Montgomery Advertiser reporter Azbell described the mood as “solemn” and noted no black people spoke to white people.110

  Parks dressed carefully for her court hearing: “a straight, long-sleeved black dress wit
h a white collar and cuffs, a small black velvet hat with pearls across the top, and a charcoal-gray coat.” She carried a black purse, and wore white gloves.111 Mrs. Parks well understood the importance of image to this protest, and she chose her outfit to reflect a dignified and proud citizenship, an in-your-face challenge to the degradation that segregation had long proffered. Rosa and Raymond Parks and E. D. Nixon assembled at Fred Gray’s law office at 8 a.m. to figure out the last-minute details and then walked the block and a half over to the courthouse.112 “I was not especially nervous,” Parks recalled. “I knew what I had to do.”113

  Hundreds of people stood outside court and packed the corridors of the courthouse by 8:30 that morning to demonstrate their support. A number of the members of Parks’s Youth Council skipped school to attend.114 Upon hearing the news, Mary Frances, one of Parks’s Youth Council members, observed, “They’ve messed with the wrong one now,” turning it into a small chant.115 The crowd cheered when she entered the building and called out their willingness to help with whatever she needed. For Nixon, the turnout was astonishing. In the twenty-five years he had been organizing, “I never saw a black man in court unless he was being tried, or some of his close friends or relatives.”116 Up and down the street, “from sidewalk to sidewalk,” it was clear that a new spirit had been brought forth in Montgomery. “The morning of December 5, 1955,” Nixon proclaimed, “the black man was reborn.”117 Parks felt an enormous sense of relief. The assembled multitude buoyed her spirits: “Whatever my individual desires were to be free. I was not alone. There were many others who felt the same way.”118

  Judge John Scott heard Parks’s case in City Recorder’s Court. The courtroom itself was segregated, with blacks on one side and whites on the other. Parks, Gray, and the city prosecutor stood. The trial lasted less than thirty minutes. “It was a very emotional experience,” Gray recalled, “because, not only was I representing Mrs. Parks as her attorney, but we were friends. In addition, this was my first case with a large audience. . . . Was I nervous? Maybe a little. Was I determined? You bet.”119