The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  Raymond, however, found this a difficult time and began drinking a lot. “He was very shaken and very upset . . . because we had lived under this tension for so long.” This period may have been harder on Raymond Parks and Leona McCauley than on Rosa Parks because it was they who were home answering more of the incessant hate calls and death threats. Rosa was away from home making appearances for the MIA around the country, so she escaped some of the daily vitriol that her husband and mother endured. For Rosa, the period of the boycott was also easier than her previous activism because “the public knew about it,” as opposed to the previous decades, when she was “without any mass cooperation or any support from either black or whites.”196

  Numerous black women stepped up to ensure the boycott’s continuance. In the early days of the boycott, Georgia Gilmore and her friends had decided they would try to raise money for the emerging bus strike. While none of them had much money, they knew how to fund-raise and began to sell sandwiches, dinners, pies, and cakes to raise money each week. They came to be called the Club from Nowhere and presented the money they raised each week in the mass meetings. Another group of women, headed by Inez Ricks and calling themselves the Friendly Club, took up the challenge and began their own bake sales. A bit of a competition developed. Every Monday both clubs would present their fund-raising efforts at the mass meeting to a standing ovation.

  “I learned much myself,” Parks later reflected. For her it was a lesson in organizing, in how people had to move past fear on their own and how much power they possessed once they did.

  I learned that no matter how much you try, how hard you work to give people an incentive it is something you yourself cannot give to another person. It has to be in the person to make the step, to have the belief and faith that they should be a free people. The complacency, the fear and oppression that people had suffered so long after the Emancipation of Chattel Slavery. The replacement of Chattel Slavery with mental slavery so people believed, actually believed that they were inferior to others because of the positions that they had to hold. When the oppression they had to endure was thrown off and they began to stand up, to be vocal, be heard, to make known their dissatisfaction against being treated as inferior beings, it is my belief now . . . that we will never go back to that time again.”197

  Parks had spent more than a decade before the boycott wrestling her own fear and drawing on her own faith to make stand after stand against racial injustice. She had grown disillusioned by the ways many others seemed unwilling to do the same. The unity the community maintained for the 382-day boycott was deeply inspiring.

  Women provided the backbone of the boycott as walkers, drivers, organizers, and fund-raisers. But they didn’t necessarily say they were boycotting. As Virginia Durr explained, “Often I’d stop and pick them up. Never did one of them say that they were walking on account of the boycott. ‘No, ma’am, I don’t have nothing to do with that boycott. The lady I work for, she was sick this afternoon, and couldn’t drive me home.’”198 For protection, many black women feigned indifference and let the white women they worked for assume what they wanted about the protest—and then went on to the mass meetings at night. In interviews with Fisk researchers in the first months of the boycott, numerous white women claimed their black maids were too afraid to ride the bus and just wanted the boycott to be over. But the black women interviewed by black researchers were steadfast. “I’ll crawl on my knees,” one woman told a Fisk University researcher, “’fo’ I get back on dem buses.”199

  Some women were forthright with their employers about their role and opinions in the protest. Forty-five-year-old Beatrice Charles described a confrontation with her employer, who threatened to fire her because of her support of the boycott. “Well Mrs. I just won’t come at all and I sure won’t starve. You see my husband is a railroad man, my son and daughter have good jobs and my daddy keep plenty of food on his farm. So I’m not worried at all, ’cause I was eating before I started working for you.” Another domestic, Dealy Cooksey, told of arguing with her white employer, who claimed King was just swindling Montgomery blacks. “I said back to her, ‘Don’t you sey nothing bout Rev[erend] King. You kin say anything else you want to but don’t you sey nothing ’bout Reverend King. Dat’s us man and I declare he’s a fin un. He went to school and made somethin’ out of hisself and now he’s tryin’ to help us. Y’all white folks done kep’ us blind long enough. We got our eyes open and now us sho ain’t gon let you close ’em back.”200 Both Charles’s and Cooksey’s employers backed down.

  The level of fear that black people felt about the boycott being brought down by the city was enormous, and the discipline people kept in terms of protecting the organization of the boycott and its leaders was considerable. That fear certainly heightened the belief that Parks’s long-standing political commitments were nobody’s business and needed to be kept out of public view. Dissembling provided protection.

  The mass meetings continued to be packed. People got to the meetings hours ahead of time to get a seat. Many women who did domestic work would get off work, bring their lunch, and settle into the pews to wait, often singing to pass the time. A number of the older women soon had their own customary seats. Some took charge of prayers or song. Professor Lawrence Reddick observed, “The really stirring songs are the lined, camp-meeting tunes, of low pitch and long meter. They seem to recapture the long history of the Negro’s suffering and struggle.”201

  Parks would come to the meetings, but after the first one she didn’t sit on the dais. She was never asked to speak, which, according to an interview she gave in early February, she “appreciate[d] . . . for other people have suffered indignities, and it is really our fight rather than mine.”202 According to Reverend Graetz, Parks attended mass meetings but “was treated like she didn’t have anything to say.”203 By the spring she was making speeches and doing fund raising across the country on behalf of the boycott, but those appearances were rarely announced in the mass meetings back in Montgomery, unlike those of the ministers, whose work on behalf of the boycott was often proclaimed from the pulpit. Parks’s symbolic status was crucial to MIA, but the work she was doing on behalf of the protest was less visible. This may have contributed to the jealousy some felt toward her.

  Reverend King, who had just turned twenty-seven on January 15, was a sensation at the mass meetings, particularly among many of the older women. Exceedingly proud, they thrilled that this extraordinary gifted young man, attractive and well-spoken, had arisen in their midst. Some dressed in their Sunday best, hoping the reverend would be pleased with them and acknowledge their service. Most treasured him and defended him to the hilt, even when it meant challenging their white employers. The impact that King’s emerging leadership had on Montgomery’s black community in those first months is hard to capture. Nearly everyone—Parks especially—thrilled to the amazing good fortune at having this bold young minister who was making the community proud. For Parks, the way that this had become everyone’s fight and produced new leadership was especially cherished. It made it easy to background her role and that of other longtime activists like Nixon.

  The boycott crippled the bus company, and a month after Parks’s arrest, they raised fares, laid off dozens of drivers, and curtailed service by cutting off many bus routes. Adult fares jumped from ten to fifteen cents and student fares from five to eight cents.204 Rumors circulated that the city might even lose the bus franchise.

  Attempts to break the boycott were legion. Walkers—and those driving the carpools—were often pelted with food, stones, urine, and other things. Police continually pulled over car poolers on real and often imaginary violations, and drivers received dozens of tickets. Within the space of a few months, Jo Ann Robinson had racked up seventeen tickets. A police officer in a squad car threw a rock through the front window of her home, and two men in police uniforms threw acid all over her car. Many drivers found their vehicles vandalized. People had their gas tanks filled with sugar and their brakes
tampered with. According to Robinson, police officers (or men dressed as police officers) were responsible for a great deal of the violence—paint and manure thrown on homes, bricks thrown through their windows, yards and automobiles destroyed, nails scattered on streets to puncture tires.205 Crosses were burned on the campus of Alabama State. Martin Luther King was arrested for “speeding,” though city officials claimed that the officers did not know it was King when they pulled him over.206

  Still people were determined to keep going. As one elderly boycotter explained, “We have fooled the (White) people and ourselves too. Neither one of us recognized our (Negroes) power—now that we see what we can do—we are going to do it until we get what we want.” Parks herself saw the ways that the increasing pressure and resistance to the boycott bespoke the power of it. “If you are mistreated when you ride and intimidated when you walk,” she pointedly observed in February, “why not do what hurt them most—walk and let them find $3000 per day to pay for it . . . until they better learn to treat us.”207

  In the fall of 1955, a local group of the White Citizens’ Council was established in Montgomery to provide organized economic, political, and, at times, physical resistance to impending desegregation. Under the leadership of a group of white lawyers, the Council initially did not attract very many members—“less than 100 low-status members,” according to the Southern Patriot. With the start of the boycott, the membership of the White Citizens’ Council skyrocketed to fourteen thousand members within three months.208 Even Mayor Gayle joined the organization and, according to Parks, “was proud to announce it in public.”209 Then came the news that Police Commissioner Clyde Sellers had joined the WCC, which increased black people’s fear that the police would simply become an arm of the Council. Still, some white businessmen kept their distance from the Council, particularly as black Montgomerians boycotted businesses associated with the WCC.

  Many whites, including many political leaders, professed surprise at black grievances, claiming black people hadn’t brought these problems forward previously. Some claimed that a handful of mean bus drivers who were too “rough” with black passengers had been dealt with. As one leading businessman involved in some of the initial negotiations explained, “We admitted there had been injustices. We investigated charges against the drivers and found that the company had some rough necks who were rough with everybody. We were in touch with the bus company and they discharged five of the troublemakers during the session.”210 Framing it as a discrete issue caused by a handful of bad apples employed by the bus company who were subsequently disciplined, they avoided the question of a systemic practice—or even the idea that bus segregation was systematically inequitable and disrespectful.

  The bus company conversely sought to shift the blame to the city. As bus company president J. H. Bagley explained:

  We don’t have anything to do with making the laws—you see we operate under the city commission and they regulate the seating and what they asked for is against the law. We do what the law says and if they change the law, we will change—this is between them and the city commission and the laws of Ala, the bus company has nothing to do with it.211

  However, the bus company was never willing to side with the black community in any of its legal challenges, sticking with the status quo.

  Right before Christmas, the Central White Citizens’ Committee ran ads in the Advertiser and Observer calling on “citizens of Montgomery” to ride the bus. Flyers also circulated through Montgomery’s white community urging people to ride the bus. On February 10, more than ten thousand white people from Alabama and Mississippi converged on the Montgomery Agricultural Coliseum to hold a White Citizens Convocation with featured speaker Mississippi senator James Eastland. Waving Confederate flags and singing “Dixie,” they spoke of “states’ rights” and the “mulatto decision” of the Supreme Court and giving “the niggers a whipping”212—with a particularly “harsh lesson” for Rosa Parks.213 With their “way of life” believed to be under siege, the White Citizens Council came to play a decisive role in the public life in Montgomery. Virginia Durr wrote a friend in February about the expanding power of the WCC, which “grow[s] apace day by day and there is real black mail going on. They work the blocks and the buildings and ask each one to join and if they don’t—Well there is no doubt you get on a blacklist.”214

  It became increasingly dangerous for white Montgomerians to criticize the Council or to have any association with blacks. Those whites who did associate with the protest came under attack; verbally harassed and ostracized, they often lost their jobs and sometimes were physically targeted. The few whites who supported the boycott were endlessly red-baited, threatened, and physically targeted. White Northern liberals grew increasingly self-righteous in their attacks on white Southerners yet many lent little tangible support to visible white and black civil rights activists.215

  On January 30, white vigilantes threw a bomb into the King home with Coretta and baby Yolanda inside. King, who was at a meeting, was quickly summoned home. No one was hurt, but hundreds of black people gathered in anger. Frightened, angry, but able to draw on a reserve of courage and conviction, King came out and quieted the crowd. “Brothers and sisters, we believe in law and order. Don’t get panicky. . . . Don’t get your weapons. . . . I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped, this movement will not stop.”216 According to observers, Commissioner Sellers and Mayor Gayle (who curiously were some of the first people on the scene) seemed disappointed by King’s reaction.217 The next day, Nixon’s house was also bombed. Nixon was away on a Pullman run but Parks rushed over to help clean up.

  The violence had heightened the climate of fear. “We do not know what else is to follow these previous events,” Parks wrote a friend, but we are “praying for courage and determination to withstand all attempts of intimidation.”218 She asked the MIA for night watchmen at her apartment. “Some strange men have been coming into my neighborhood inquiring about this woman who caused all this trouble. I’m not worried about myself but it does upset my mother quite a bit.”219 The MIA took responsibility for providing Parks with protection. Likely, Parks’s neighbors at Cleveland Courts also played a significant role in saving the Parks’s apartment from attack—the sense of community and the presence of people around at all times of the day and night provided an important buffer that King, Abernathy, Nixon, and Graetz, who all lived in houses, did not enjoy.220

  Still, the Parks family was not deterred. Parks wrote a friend that they were “more determined than ever to stand up till the end.”221 When Nixon’s house was bombed, Rosa and Raymond together helped to clean up the debris and rubble and get things back in order. According to a friend, the couple was “part of a clean up crew of people that would essentially help people whose homes had been bombed.” Mr. and Mrs. Parks “when they would hear the bombs go off, would run toward them and Mr. Parks in doing this once, stepped on 11 sticks of dynamite with everyone screaming for him not to go in the direction that he had gone.”222 The FBI took notice of the violence but saw no need to investigate and expressed no problem with the Montgomery police department’s inability or unwillingness to identify suspects. BOYCOTT STILL CONTINUING, they cabled national headquarters.223

  According to Martin Luther King, “so persistent and persuasive” was the argument among Montgomery whites that Parks was an NAACP plant that “it convinced many reporters from all across the country.”224 Still, the dozens and dozens of stories run in both the Montgomery Advertiser and the Alabama Journal never mentioned Parks’s actual work with the NAACP over the preceding decade—despite on occasion mentioning E. D. Nixon’s ties to the organization. (In 1955, Nixon no longer served as branch president, but Parks was the organization’s secretary, a position she gave up shortly after the boycott began.) According to WCC leader Luther Ingalls, “The Parks woman tried five or six times to create an incident before they finally arrested her—I got that from the drivers. You know she
used the white toilet at Montgomery Fair. . . . You can see what she is after.”225 Though these charges were off base, segregationists were often quite accurate, perhaps inadvertently, in terms of Parks’s larger goals.

  BROWDER V. GAYLE

  Meanwhile, lawyer Fred Gray and other activists had taken up a “second front.” Montgomery’s civil rights leaders had learned from the case of Viola White how city officials would try to hold Parks’s case up in circuit court. Moreover, given Parks’s connections to the NAACP and the red-baiting of the organization in Alabama in 1956, they believed a federal case with different plaintiffs might be better.226 So they decided to file suit directly in federal court, bypassing the state court. As E. D. Nixon explained, “They . . . wanted to wear us out, wear us out and never move that case up the Circuit Court, and they was dumbfounded when they found out that we done decided to go into federal court.”227 Clifford Durr feared that because Parks had refused to give up her seat when there were no other seats available, her case could be decided in her favor (vis-à-vis Montgomery city law) without resolving the larger issue of the constitutionality of bus segregation.

  The first draft of this federal case included Parks as the first plaintiff; however, the final one filed in federal court did not.228 Gray worried that having Parks on the suit would muddy the complaint because her criminal case was on appeal in state court. He did not want to give any grounds for the federal case to be dismissed because the issue was already being heard in Alabama state court. Moreover, given the red-baiting of the NAACP, Parks’s long-standing ties to the organization made her less than ideal for the suit. Indeed, Parks had resigned her position as secretary of the branch after the boycott got under way in order to “not have it said that the bus protest was organized by ‘outside agitators,’ and organizations from the North.”229