At the hearing, the prosecutor moved to change the warrant, charging Parks with violating state law rather than city ordinance (since Montgomery ordinances did not allow people to be asked to give up their seat if another was not available). Gray objected, but the judge allowed it. Parks did not testify. Blake did, as did two white witnesses, one of whom said there was a seat in the back that Parks refused to take, directly contradicting Blake’s testimony that all the seats had been full. Parks was found guilty and fined fourteen dollars. Gray entered her appeal.
Gray and Parks stayed behind to do some paperwork, but Nixon joined the crowd on the street. “If you don’t bring her out in a few minutes,” people yelled, “we’re coming in after her.”120 Delighted by the boldness, Nixon thought to himself, “It was the first time I had seen so much courage among our people!”121 Still, he worried the police were looking for any excuse to react. After Parks came out of the building, he addressed the crowd, “’See this man out here with this sawed-off shotgun? Don’t give him a chance to use it. . . . I’m gonna ask you all to quietly move from around this police station now; Mrs. Parks has been convicted and we have appealed it, and I’ve put her in the car . . . As you move, don’t even throw a cigarette butt, or don’t spit on the sidewalk or nothing.”122 Given the surge of militancy, seasoned organizers like Nixon wanted to protect and nurture it.
Activists in Montgomery’s black community had long worried that it would be impossible to unify the community around a particular action. It was “almost unbelievable,” Parks noted, how successful the one-day protest had been.123 Parks saw one of her Youth Council members and asked why she had not attended the Saturday workshop. The young woman told her that she had been passing out leaflets about Monday’s protest. Though Parks did not frame it this way, these young people had learned her lessons well: “They were wise enough to see . . . it was more important to stand on the street corners and pass these papers out to everyone who passed then to sit in a meeting and listen to someone speak.”124
After her trial, Parks didn’t go to work but returned to Fred Gray’s law office. She wanted to be helpful. He asked her to answer the phone, something he occasionally had her do, and then left for a meeting with King, Abernathy, and Nixon.125 “The people were calling to talk to me but I never told them who I was,” Parks admitted decades later. “They didn’t know my voice so I just took the messages.”126
This moment reveals one of the paradoxes of Mrs. Parks’s own choices about her role in the movement. Parks was a shy person and a political organizer who believed in collective action over individual celebrity. These traits combined to produce the mixture of action and reticence that would characterize her public role in the days and years to come. Over the course of the boycott, she would participate in dozens of programs when she saw it as a way to further the protest. (And over the next half century, this would grow to include thousands of appearances.) But time and again, she actively avoided the spotlight and sometimes obscured the role she was actually playing. So Parks did not sit around in Gray’s office or go home to rest or go back to work that Monday afternoon. She wanted to be useful, so she answered the phone since many people were calling with questions about the protest. But she did not tell the callers who she was. That erasure would have costs, though; Rosa Parks’s own life exemplified many of the currents of African American protest in the twentieth century, but she would come to be known for a “simple act” on a single day. She would stay back, anonymously answering phones, confined to a gender-specific role, while decisions were being made on the leadership of the protest.
The beginning of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) hails from that meeting Gray went to the first afternoon of the boycott, which neither Parks nor Robinson attended. Indeed, while WPC members, churchwomen, and domestic workers would make up the bulk of the boycott’s organizational infrastructure, the leadership (most of whom had their own cars and did not ride the bus) was overwhelmingly male. When some of the clergy at the meeting sought to conceal their identities, Nixon responded angrily that they lacked the courage of Mrs. Parks and were acting like “scared boys.” “Where are the men?” he challenged.127 Nixon took up a highly gendered language chastising the ministers and telling them they needed to catch up to the community. “We need to turn history around and stop hiding behind these women who do all the work for us. I say we stand out there in the open and hold our heads high.”128 He then threatened to take the microphone and tell their congregations that these clergy were “too cowardly to stand up on their feet and be counted.”129 King, entering late, agreed, willing to step forward publicly. King was elected to lead the new organization—his name put forward by Rufus Lewis, in part because King was his pastor and in part because he disliked Nixon and feared the militant porter would become the president of the new organization. Others supported the young minister in part because when the protest failed, they would not be blamed. The only woman elected was Erma Dungee as financial secretary.130 The group drew up three demands: first-come, first-served seating (where blacks would sit starting from the back and whites from the front but no one would be asked to move); respectful, courteous service; and the hiring of black bus drivers.
When asked a decade later whom she would have picked to be the leader, Parks explained that she did not know: “I don’t know if I would have had any particular choice. I had met [King] . . . a number of times and heard him speak. And as far as I was concerned, he was well suited for this particular role because he was, as you said, young, eloquent and, as far as I know, well liked in the community. . . . But I don’t think I would have wanted to have been the one to have selected any one person at the time.”131 Implicit in Parks’s comment (“any one person”) and her reluctance to affirm that she too would have picked King, or conversely Nixon, is her experience within an organizing tradition, exemplified by Highlander, that was wary of picking a single leader. Exemplified by her mentors Ella Baker and Septima Clark, the political community Parks came out of encouraged broad-based structures of decision making and leadership as a way to sustain a mass movement.
“THERE LIVED A GREAT PEOPLE”: THE BOYCOTT CONTINUES
That evening, fifteen thousand people gathered for a mass meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church. Five thousand black Montgomerians packed the church while thousands gathered outside. The streets surrounding the church were clogged with people and traffic. The area was so congested that King had to park many blocks away. Virginia Durr never made it inside, and Reverend Graetz only got to the fellowship hall. Parks fought through the crowds to her designated seat on the platform. With more people outside than inside, the church turned on its outdoor public address system so those standing outside could hear. Relieved by the size of the crowd, Parks described the mood of the meeting as “practically jubilant,”132 though she felt “like it was a bit long in coming because there had been so many incidents when the same action could have taken place. But it seemed that they had not made up their minds until this particular incident.”133
The spirit was moving in Montgomery that December evening—“something that was just all over you,” Gilmore remembered.134 With only a handful of reporters and few other whites, the audience at Holt Street Church was almost completely filled with black people.135 The meeting opened with the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” “What a fellowship, what a joy divine . . . what have I to fear . . . leaning on the everlasting arms,” sang the thousands gathered.
Addressing the crowd, Nixon warned of the difficult fight ahead. “If anybody here is afraid, he better take his hat and go home. . . . We’ve worn aprons long enough. It’s time to take them off.”136 Nixon’s gendered language is worth considering. Nixon seemingly directs his comments to the black men in the crowd, with a call for the men to step up and not be like apron-wearing women. But given that the audience was made up of thousands of women who did domestic labor—as Nixon well knew—the exhortation to take off their aprons also served as a call
for black women to recast relations with their white employers and put their own freedom ahead of the employers’ demands. The crowd roared as Nixon left the podium. The meeting, according to Nixon, was “the most amazing and the most heartening thing I have seen in my life. The leaders were led. It was a vertical thing.”137 Montgomery’s black community was on the move, and those on the podium would have to catch up to them.
Then Dr. King took the pulpit and captivated the crowd. Exceedingly nervous, he had not had time to prepare a speech. But once he started speaking, he found his stride. He spoke of a time “when people get tired. We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us so long that we are tired—tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression.” A tremendous thunder of assent rolled from the crowd. He then called on the dual traditions of Christianity and the Constitution to justify the struggle ahead. “If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. . . . If we are wrong, justice is a lie.” And then Dr. King, with prophetic determination, concluded by extolling the importance of the movement being born in Montgomery for the annals of American history. “Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’”138
Stunned, people were quiet for a moment and then rose to their feet, cheering and clapping. After he finished speaking, King hugged Mrs. Parks. Outside the crowd erupted in thunderous applause. That evening, the fifteen thousand people gathered there decided to continue the boycott indefinitely and formed a new organization called the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The collection taken that night raised $785.139
But Rosa Parks never got to speak. After King spoke, Reverend French presented Parks as “the victim of this gross injustice, almost inhumanity, and absolute undemocratic principle, Mrs. Rosa Parks.”140 French stressed Parks’s reputation as a lady “and any gentleman would allow a lady to have a seat.”141 Introduced as a churchgoer and an industrious, law-abiding citizen, Parks was to play a symbolic role. As Ralph Abernathy explained in his 1958 master’s thesis, “Mrs. Rosa Parks was presented to the mass meeting [because] we wanted her to become symbolic of our protest movement.”142 When Parks was introduced, according to Reverend Graetz, it was “almost pandemonium.”143 The crowd rose to its feet, giving her a standing ovation that lasted several minutes. “She was their heroine,” Dr. King explained. “They saw in her courageous person the symbol of their hopes and aspiration.”144
But Mrs. Parks was not invited to address the meeting. The crowd called for her to do so, but their calls were ignored. “I do recall asking someone if I should say anything,” Parks later explained, “and someone saying, ‘Why you’ve said enough.’”145 In her discussions with Jim Haskins for her autobiography in 1988, she elaborated: “Holt Street Baptist Church—you didn’t hear me make a speech—I didn’t speak—I asked did they want me to say anything—they said you have said enough—you have said enough and you don’t have to speak—the other people spoke.”146 In a conversation with Myles Horton and Eliot Wigginton, Parks noted that she just sat up there. “I think everyone spoke but me,” she said, though “it didn’t bother me at that point.”147 Indeed, while many of the ministers had been reluctant to speak, once they got to Holt Street, many clamored to say a few words.
While Parks imagined that she might speak, she was told that she had “said enough,” even though she had said very little between her Thursday arrest and the Monday meeting. Parks never desired public speaking. She may even have felt relieved not to have to address the huge crowd, but she certainly noticed that while they wanted her up on the pulpit, they didn’t think she should speak. Reverend Graetz saw the decision not to have Mrs. Parks speak as inextricably tied to gender. “Her personality was diminished,” he explained decades later. “It was a male-dominated movement.”148
As with the treatment of other women in the movement, Parks was lauded by the crowd as their heroine but not consulted for her vision of the struggle and subsequent political strategy. If she had gotten to speak, Parks might have connected the injustice on the bus to the travesties of Scottsboro, the brutal rapes of Recy Taylor and Gertrude Perkins, the murder of Emmett Till, and the impending legal lynching of Jeremiah Reeves. If she had gotten to speak, she might have linked her stand to the courageous work of the Highlander Folk School, to the actions of her own Youth Council at the downtown library, and to the successful one-week bus boycott nearby in Baton Rouge. She might have talked about the loneliness of her stand on Thursday and the power of walking together on Monday. She might have thanked them for turning her individual refusal into a collective protest. She might have said that this movement was a long time in coalescing, but what a joyful and holy day it was now that it had come. All this she knew and might have said—or much more. But she did not get to speak.
Parks’s role as a nonthreatening mother figure stemmed from the needs of the movement, which sought to cast her as a nondisturbing symbol, and also from her relationship with many of the young leaders. As Brinkley explained, “At forty-two years old Parks was also a natural maternal figure to the young ministers and lawyers who led the boycott: Gray was twenty-five, King was twenty-six, and Abernathy was twenty-nine.”149 Parks’s role as the mother of the movement largely precluded her from having a decision-making or strategic role despite her behind-the-scenes work, the scores of appearances she would make on behalf of the boycott, and her extensive political experience. She would be held up—and paradoxically relegated—to being its symbol.
Black people in Montgomery described their decision to stop riding the bus as “spontaneous” and “undirected” in part to prevent repression of their organization. Amazed by the militant unity of the boycott and fearful of backlash, organizers like Myles Horton echoed this, describing the boycott as “a spontaneous, unplanned, un-thought-out action that no one dreamed of.”150 However, the idea of the boycott as “spontaneous” would also take on a life of its own, distancing the movement from its own roots in the earlier activism of many of its organizers and the bus incidents that preceded Parks’s arrest. The seeds of the Parks myth—a “quiet seamstress” refuses to give up her seat and a “spontaneous” protest sets off the modern civil rights movement—emerged in the first days of the boycott initially to protect its organization from a vicious Cold War climate and longstanding Southern fears of outside influence.
THE BOYCOTT
Parks made her first appearance in the New York Times in a small wire-service article about the protest on December 6, described as a “Negro seamstress,” and was similarly identified by the Alabama Journal as a “seamstress at a downtown store.” Her address at Cleveland Courts was printed in the Montgomery Advertiser. The FBI followed the case “discreetly” from its Mobile office and passed all sorts of information along with newspaper articles to headquarters in Washington, DC.151
Parks’ role in the protest carried on far beyond that first day. “I did as many [things for the MIA] as I could.”152 By the next week, an elaborate ride and pickup system had been set up. “The effect has been most startling,” Parks wrote a friend from Highlander.153 People were walking in the most inclement weather, even for miles. And people had banded together to provide a system of rides, formal and informal, for people who needed them. Parks and her compatriots were thrilled and heartened. “Many are still saying they will walk forever,” she wrote, “before they will go back to riding the bus under the same conditions.”154 Part of how the “tired feet” explanation gathered so much historical force stems from a conflation of Parks’s decision to remain seated with a lovely quote from an elderly boycotter describing her own actions. In the early days of the boycott, Reverend Graetz recounted a woman telling him why she preferred to walk, “Well, my body may
be a bit tired, but for many years now my soul has been tired. Now my soul is resting. So I don’t mind if my body is tired, because my soul is free.”155 King included this story in his speeches, often quoting her, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”156
The level of support across the black community was considerable. This was an all-black movement, stressed Ben Simms, a professor at Alabama State, who later became the transportation coordinator. “Of course we had white support but this was a black movement, planned and run by blacks.”157 The boycott was sustained by the development of the car pool. Organizers passed around slips of paper asking: Can you drive in a car pool? Do you own your car? Insurance? What hours? Who will drive your car? What hours will you serve? Approximately 300 people volunteered their cars. This goodwill and cross-class solidarity amazed Parks and other organizers. The car was a much-cherished possession and status symbol for the black middle class—and many had kept a studied distance from their poor compatriots. Organizers had originally feared people would be reluctant to have their cars used due to wear and tear and possible damage to their vehicles. Instead, the carpool powerfully drew together black Montgomery’s various economic and social classes.
The MIA established forty stations across the city. Drivers charged ten cents, like the bus. People would use the “V for victory” sign to identify themselves to riders and drivers, and the MIA took the “V” as its symbol on its membership cards. This solidarity was buttressed and maintained through the twice-weekly mass meetings that strengthened the collective resolve. Between 1,200 and 1,800 people packed each one, often with no standing room. Abernathy would often warm up the crowd: “Are you tired of walking?”
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Page 15
