The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  Voices responded in loud and unanimous tones. “No!”

  “Feel like turning around?”

  Again, voices rang out. “No!”

  “What if no cars are available?”

  The people said, “We will walk.”158

  Despite the inadvertent role the Montgomery Advertiser played in publicizing the first day of the boycott, their coverage was decidedly negative. The paper was closely tied to Montgomery’s City Council, which may also have contributed to its ardent opposition to the protest. In an angry interview Joe Azbell gave to a Fisk researcher in March, Azbell called the boycott “stupid” and the work of a “small proportion” of “big operators” who “have their own cars and they feel important driving a few people around in them.”159 Azbell felt that Montgomery had been one of the “most liberal cities in the South” where “the white people here did everything for the Nigras—they gave them their schools, their hospitals—everything. . . . This is a slap in the face after all they have done for them all that good feeling that was there has been destroyed.”160

  Rumors and misinformation about the boycott ran rampant, more so in the white community than in the black community. Blacks had more access to what whites thought, both through their employers and also the local papers. Despite the biased coverage, Advertiser readership remained high among black Montgomerians, according to black schoolteacher Sarah Coleman, because it was “our only channel to what the white community is thinking.”161

  About a month after the boycott began, Fisk University, under the direction of sociologist Preston Valien, sent an interracial team of researchers to Montgomery to document the emerging protest. From January to March 1956, sociologists affiliated with Fisk University’s Race Relations Department conducted over three hundred field interviews, using black and white researchers, with black and white citizens of Montgomery. They also did participant observation at MIA mass meetings, dispatch stations, City Commission hearings, and White Citizens’ Council meetings.162

  Rumors snaked through white Montgomery. Most white people were convinced Parks’s protest had been cooked up by the NAACP, others claiming a Communist plot, still others believing that the NAACP and the CP were in league together. Some white residents believed Parks had only been in Montgomery for two weeks, a few going so far as to claim that Rosa Parks was not even her real name. Others suggested Parks was actually Mexican and had a car.163 All made her a pawn of larger agents—rendering her action someone else’s decision. This was the segregationists’ version of events—that individual Montgomery blacks would not act in this militant, organized way, and so this action must be coordinated and inspired by an outside organization.

  Over time the MIA was spending nearly $3,000 a week on transportation. Reverend Simms, who came to head the Transportation Committee in June, estimated the organization arranged fifteen to twenty thousand rides per day.164 Ultimately, it employed fifteen dispatchers and twenty full-time drivers. The car pool required tremendous synchronization, flexibility, and fortitude—all coordinated from a building at the edge of Montgomery called the Citizens Club. The police harassment was formidable. Police would often sit at the dispatch points and pull over each car that came through, asking for license and registration, intimidating drivers, giving them tickets for real and imagined infractions.

  Parks worked for a month as a dispatcher, taking calls from people needing rides and patching them through to the forty-one different stations across the city.165 Stations were located in church parking lots, street corners, and stores and changed depending on police intimidation. In meetings and discussions, Parks urged patience and strength to boycotters—“Remember how long we had to wait when the buses pass[ed] us by without stopping.”166 She instructed drivers to pick up as many people as possible and to “be careful,” given the harassment the car pools were enduring at the hands of the police. Over time, the donated cars were supplemented with fifteen new station wagons bought with church money for extra protection. Since most white churches already had cars to take their parishioners around, it was difficult to complain about black churches doing the same. Known as “rolling churches,” each car had the name of the sponsoring church painted on the front.

  The Parks fable depicts the Montgomery bus boycott as the first organized boycott. However, this urban economic action stemmed from a number of antecedents. In the 1930s, blacks in cities like New York, Detroit, and Chicago had boycotted businesses that refused to hire blacks. “Don’t buy where you can’t work” campaigns sprang up, spearheaded by black women and calling on blacks to boycott businesses that refused to hire any black workers. Then in 1953, Parks had watched with keen interest as a bus boycott broke out in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which resolved a week later when the city agreed to first-come, first-served seating on the bus. What happened in Montgomery was a grander, longer, and more unified economic movement that ultimately overturned bus segregation completely. But it was not cut from whole cloth in Montgomery in 1955, and it drew on the experiences of activists in other places.

  The first days and weeks of the protest were deeply moving for Rosa Parks. Asked later if she ever worried the boycott would fail, she didn’t recall “ever feeling that there would be a failure even if it had not lasted the whole year. The very fact that people demonstrated their unity on the first day was very significant and to me that was a success.” That unity and collective action had demonstrated to Parks that “whatever people decided they wanted to do could be done” and buoyed her spirits amidst of fear and uncertainty of the boycott year.167 The boycott, according to Jo Ann Robinson, had a transformative power for it “allowed them to retaliate directly for the pain, humiliation, and embarrassment they had endured over the years at the hands of drivers and policemen . . . there was no need for family fights and weekend brawls.”168

  On December 8, an MIA delegation including King, Robinson, and Gray (but not Parks) met with the mayor and city commissioners. They made three modest demands as a solution to end the protest: first-come, first-served seating on the buses, courteous treatment of passengers, and the hiring of black bus drivers. Even though Nashville, Atlanta, and even Mobile, Alabama, had first-come, first-served seating on their buses, Commissioner Crenshaw rejected this proposal, claiming “it just isn’t legal.”169 In the early days of the boycott, Parks called their goals more of a “request than a demand”: “we didn’t seem to be demanding too much then.”170

  The Montgomery Advertiser ran an editorial calling the boycott a “dangerous weapon, like a missile that returns to its launching ground.” They reminded black leaders that “the white man’s economic artillery is far superior . . . and commanded by more experienced gunners” and that the “white man holds all the offices of government machinery.” The paper’s editors saw segregation and white power as a fixed truth, pronouncing, “There will be white rule for as far as the eye can see.”171 The Advertiser remained fairly steadfast in its anti-boycott coverage throughout the year, often refusing to print positive letters on the boycott because the editors felt it did “more harm than good.”172

  At another meeting with city officials shortly before Christmas, Luther Ingalls, a member of the White Citizens’ Council, joined the negotiating sessions. Indeed, from the outset of the boycott and the Montgomery Advertiser’s first article, the boycott had been compared with the actions and philosophies of the White Citizens’ Council, which publicly advocated economic retaliation to prevent desegregation. Thus, in the paper and in public discussion, the MIA and the White Citizens’ Council were often cast as equivalents. When King protested the presence of people “whose public pronouncements are anti-Negro,” he was criticized for introducing mistrust into the meeting. White members of the committee accused Reverend King of dominating the discussion and having “preconceived ideas” himself. What is interesting in this exchange is not that King sparred with many of Montgomery’s white leaders but that the terms of the exchange sound so modern. The white committee members did not
defend segregation as necessary to maintain white superiority. They saw the conflict as a disagreement of interest groups. King represented one interest group; the White Citizens’ Council represented another. King found, as biographer Taylor Branch explained, “that the whites sincerely believed that morality was neutral to the issue [of segregation] . . . depriv[ing] King of the moral ground he had occupied all his life.”173 The immorality of segregation would have to be demonstrated over and over in the months and years to come. Many, even in the Deep South, would cast segregation as a matter of personal preference and predilection, not power or social necessity.

  Moreover, many city and business leaders reacted with surprise at the bus protest and downplayed its impact. “It hasn’t made any difference except to the bus company. I don’t know why there has been so much hullabaloo about it. . . . Most people are not paying any attention to it.”174 Some white leaders blamed the problem on a handful of “rough” bus drivers—and wished blacks had brought grievances to their attention, since they could have been remedied. Some even claimed that Parks’s arrest was the first they had ever heard of black problems with bus segregation. Nevertheless, underneath the resistance of many whites lay a grudging surprise and admiration. Researcher Anna Holden overheard a couple of women sitting at the Kress lunch counter talking about the “niggers”: “Well you can’t help but admire them. They’ve kept it up all through all this bad weather—walking in all this cold and rain.”175 Many whites who saw themselves as moderates nonetheless chose to sit by while other white people resorted to violence and economic retaliation against the boycott.

  Faced with the city’s intransigence, the resolve of the MIA grew. Part of what spurred the determination of the boycotters in the early months was the city’s absolute unwillingness to grant the MIA’s initial modest demands. Robinson recalled, “They feared that anything they gave would be viewed by us as just a start. And you know, they were probably right.”176

  Nonviolent direct action was not the way most white or black Montgomerians dealt with social problems. Like most Alabama whites (even liberal middle-class families like the Durrs), most black people owned guns. When Reverend Graetz was questioned in an interview during the boycott as to whether black people were going out to buy guns because of the protest, he said no. “Most negro families have guns, have always had them. . . . [They] didn’t rush out to get them. They already had them.”177 Nixon, Raymond Parks, and Jo Ann Robinson all owned guns. Even Dr. King, whose graduate studies had pointed him toward the power of nonviolent civil disobedience, came to organized nonviolence through the Montgomery boycott. Bayard Rustin recalled getting to the King home for the first time and finding armed guards and guns tucked into some of the armchairs. As he noted, “I do not believe that one does honor to Dr. King by assuming that, somehow, he had been prepared for this job. . . . The glorious thing is that he came to a profoundly deep understanding on nonviolence through the struggle itself.”178

  Though never renouncing her long-standing belief in self-defense, Rosa Parks also saw the power and efficacy of organized nonviolence through the boycott. She grew tremendously impressed with the ways King used it to draw people together, maintain unity, demonstrate the collective power of the black community, and keep public attention trained on the protest. Given the ways that boycotters and particularly those people who drove the carpools were continually verbally and physically harassed by the police and white vigilantes, there was a tremendous potential for violence. And whites in Montgomery seemed eager for violence, disbelieving that black people could remain disciplined. Some even hoped for it, because it would have provided the excuse to dramatically crush the protest. According to Rufus Lewis, unified nonviolence disrupted the expectations of most white Montgomerian: “Whites can’t help but have high regard for Negroes now, since there has been no violence. There have been a number of good articles written by whites about the unity of Negroes.”179 Though “not altogether” converted, Parks saw that this nonviolent protest “was more successful, I believe, than it would have been if violence had been used.”180

  THE BOYCOTT CONTINUES

  “The colored people here are still not riding the bus,” Parks wrote to a friend at Highlander right before Christmas. “Private car pools and taxi cabs are co-operating to help under very trying conditions. The police are arresting drivers on the least provocation, in some cases for nothing.” In her letter, Parks described working “very hard” at Montgomery Fair but said she would not celebrate the holiday in “the usual way.” Her extra money was going to the MIA’s transportation fund.181 To put further pressure on the city, the MIA had called for a boycott of Christmas shopping—asking people to take the money they would have spent on Christmas and donate a third to charity, put a third in savings, and give the remaining third to the MIA to sustain the boycott. It would be a “more traditional, less commercial” Christmas for Parks’s family, befitting her religious and political ideals.

  Parks corresponded with a number of people during this period, trying to get support for the boycott. One letter from Diane Shapiro, whom Parks had met at Highlander, noted, “We all knew about the bus strike but none of us associated it with you.”182 And help and mail poured in, much of it addressed to Parks. The most common gift was shoes, and Parks thrilled in “passing out the bounty,” according to Brinkley.183 On Christmas day, surprised by the city’s unwillingness to meet its modest requests, the MIA published an ad in the Montgomery Advertiser and Alabama Journal laying out its grievances. “The bus protest is not merely in protest of the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks but is the culmination of a series of unpleasant incidents over a period of years. It is an upsurging of a ground swell which has been going on for a long time. Our cup of tolerance has run over.”184

  One of the hardest things for Parks during the first month of the boycott was the disdainful way she was treated at work. “They’d ignore me as though I wasn’t there,” she recalled.185 Many of the women in alterations who worked in the next room to her “refused to have any conversation or to speak to me at all. Those I would meet sometime walking through the store . . . acted the same way and didn’t even seem to let the crisis we were going through matter to them.”186 Parks worked “5 long tense weeks with people who did not speak to me even once after the bus incident.” She tried to ignore this behavior, refusing to respond to her coworkers’ rudeness, but it pained her nonetheless.

  On January 7, 1956, a month after her bus stand, Montgomery Fair notified Rosa Parks they were letting her go. They had decided to close the tailor shop. When she asked why, they said the tailor was leaving to start his own business and they were not replacing him.187 She was a trained seamstress and could do the work of the tailor (stitching, sewing sleeves, hemming, and so on) but as a woman worker in a men’s shop “was not required to do any fitting of men’s clothing.”188 The only other worker at the shop was a young man with no tailoring experience. She received two weeks’ severance pay. When news spread through the black community that Montgomery Fair had fired her, an informal boycott emerged against the store.189 Some black people canceled their credit accounts at the store.190

  A week later, Raymond was compelled to quit his job after his employer, Maxwell Air Force Base, prohibited any discussion of the boycott or Rosa Parks in the barbershop. Raymond Parks’s barber chair had long been a place of discussion and debate. Raymond had a large white clientele, and some of his white customers had drifted away after the boycott began. Others came in making belittling remarks about “that woman” on the bus, and now Raymond Parks was being muzzled. Moreover, one day Raymond had been eating his lunch in the base’s desegregated cafeteria when two white women sat down at the end of the long table where Raymond was seated. He stayed and finished his lunch, which angered a white man working in the concession.191 Overall, this was an untenable situation for a proud, political man, so Raymond Parks left his job at the base. The Parks family was now without income.

  The phone rang constantly
with death threats and coarse insults. “There were people who called to say that I should be beaten or be killed,” Parks recalled, “because I was causing so much trouble. And then there were some who called to inquire whether I had lost the job and . . . finally when I was dismissed from the job, I remember one person calling and saying she was sorry and then laughing at the end of the conversation before hanging up.” Most of the time she didn’t talk with these people. “When I discovered that they were this type, divisive or abusive, I would just hang up immediately.”192 Her mother and husband ended up answering most of the calls since they were home more than she was. Parks particularly hated it when her mother answered these calls.

  According to Detroit friend Mary Hays Carter, Rosa reached a point of relative peace around her own possible targeting. She quoted Parks as saying, “Well you have to die sometime. I never set out to plan to hurt anyone and if this boycott happened to be attributed to me and my activity, then if they could kill me, I would just be dead,” and laughed it off.193 Partly, Parks was able to get to this place of inner peace because of her faith. In late January, praying at St. Paul’s, Parks experienced a wash of religious conviction and a sense that all of what was happening—her arrest, the boycott—was God’s plan. All she needed to do was to “keep the faith.” An intense calm swept over her.194

  Like Parks, many of the boycott organizers were receiving regular death threats and hate calls. The King household was bombarded. According to Jet magazine, when people called in the middle of the night to threaten “that N—— who’s running the bus boycott,” Coretta Scott King would sometimes calmly reply, “My husband is asleep. . . . He told me to write the name and number of anyone who called to threaten his life so that he could return the call and receive the threat in the morning when he wakes up and is fresh.”195