The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  Fred Gray began looking for plaintiffs to bring this federal challenge to bus segregation. They wanted a diverse group—hoping to have at least one minister as part of the suit. Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin, and Mary Louise Smith had encountered discrimination on Montgomery buses and agreed to become plaintiffs in a civil action lawsuit.230 No men stepped forward to join them. Rather than make another defensive move following from an arrest, on February 1, they took a proactive step in challenging bus segregation by filing a class-action suit in federal court. Jeanetta Reese was named as the fifth plaintiff on the original suit but pulled out a day later, claiming she had not agreed to the suit. Both Reese and her husband had been threatened. When activist Bayard Rustin visited Reese in her home, she explained to him her decision to pull out, “I had to do what I did or I wouldn’t be alive today.”231 A week after the suit was filed, Fred Gray’s draft status was reclassified as 1-A. Then, in an attempt to disbar him, he was indicted for improperly representing Jeanetta Reese.

  THE STUBBORN WOMAN WHO STARTED IT ALL: THE PRESS AND THE INDICTMENTS

  In late December, dismayed by the coverage of the Montgomery protest, Reverend Graetz wrote Time magazine a letter, criticizing as “one-sided” local coverage that “omitted pertinent facts that would have put a much more favorable light on what the Negroes are asking for.”232 Identifying himself as a white minister of a black congregation, Graetz asked the magazine to dispatch a reporter to the city to “get a good look at the way a one-way press and a one-race police force band together to discredit fifty thousand people who are tired of being treated like animals on the city buses, and who are registering their feelings by refraining from riding those buses.”233 Up to this point, the boycott had received scant attention in the national media, and the local white media, as Graetz pointed out, had sought to discredit it. The New York Times and the Washington Post initially had relied on the wire services to cover the protests. Black newspapers had been much quicker to recognize the historic significance of the boycott, sending reporters and covering it more extensively.

  White resistance gained traction in February. On February 5, a riot erupted at the University of Alabama following the admission of Autherine Lucy, the first black student. The university subsequently expelled Lucy “for her own safety.” Angered by the federal suit, the city stepped up its harassment and began to look for new tactics, since the tickets and police intimidation had not worked to dissuade the boycotters. Dredging up a 1903 law that outlawed boycotts (in response to black streetcar protests), in February, the city called more than two hundred blacks to testify before a grand jury about who was behind the boycott.234 One hundred and fifteen boycott leaders (later reduced to eighty-nine)—including more than a half dozen women, including Parks and Robinson—were indicted on February 21, 1956.

  To preclude King from being isolated and demonstrate that they had nothing to hide, the group decided to turn themselves in. “Efforts were being made to have [Martin Luther King] bear the blame for the boycott,” Reverend Solomon Seay explained. “Those poised for this important event in history did not allow him to bear the blame alone. We all decided to go to jail rather than wait for the arrests.”235 Parks, along with Nixon, were among the first to present themselves to the sheriff: “Are you looking for me? Well I am here.” As person after person was booked, the largest indictment in Alabama history, the atmosphere outside the county courthouse was proud, determined, and almost jubilant.

  This mood was very different from that of her first arrest, two and a half months earlier. “We were surrounded by crowds of people,” Parks recalled, “and reporters, and photographers all across the country were on hand and when I went in to be fingerprinted and arrested there was a photographer to take our pictures and we had such a spirit of unity that there were people who felt somewhat left out when they were not among those arrested.” The interviewer then asked if it was “more popular to be arrested the second time than the first?” “Yes,” Parks replied. “The first time I was very much alone because none on the bus who witnessed my arrest volunteered to accompany me or show sympathy in any way.”236 The mug shot of Parks taken that February day—along with a photo of her being fingerprinted by police officer Drue Lackey (who would later become Montgomery’s chief of police)—would become iconic, often misidentified as the photo from her arrest on December 1.

  While Parks and the others were inside, the crowd, many carrying shotguns, started getting restless. The police were increasingly worried.237 Reverend Simms described the scene: “Black women with bandannas on, wearing men’s hats with their dresses rolled up. From the alleys they came. This is what frightened white people. Not the collar and tie group.”

  One of the police hollered, “All right, you women get back.”

  These great big old women with their dresses rolled up told him, and I never will forget their language, “Us ain’t going nowhere. You done arrested us preachers and we ain’t moving.”

  He put his hands on his gun and his club. They said, “I don’t care what you got. If you hit one of us, you’ll not leave here alive.” That was the thing we had to work hard against, keeping these blacks from killing these whites.”238

  The arrests served to strengthen the feeling of resolve at the evening’s packed mass meeting at Abernathy’s church. Many ministers spoke—though Parks did not. Casting it as a conflict “between justice and injustice,” King called on the gathered crowd to “let nobody pull you so low as to hate them.”239 The crowd roared its approval.240 King went on, “I have done three things that are ‘wrong.’ First of all, being born a Negro. That is my first sin. Second being tired of segregation law I’ve committed the sin of being tired of segregation. I have committed the sin of being tired of the injustices and discrimination heaped upon Negroes. Third having the moral courage to sit up and express our tiredness. That is my third sin.” After King finished the speech people called out from the audience “Gone too far” and “Can’t quit now.”

  The day of the arraignment, the Montgomery Advertiser ran an ominous story on its front page.

  Federal Bureau of Investigation agents are known to have secured a complete list of Negroes indicted and arrested on charges of boycotting the Montgomery City Lines. FBI agents had no comment on the securing of the list. It was understood, however, that the list was to be sent to the Washington FBI office for informational use.

  The indictments and increasing pressure served to galvanize the community and deepen its commitment. Indeed, according to Parks, the more resistance the protest sparked, the more determined they got: “The white segregationists tried to put pressure to stop us. Instead of stopping us, they would encourage us to go on.”241 The MIA’s demands stiffened to full desegregation of the buses.

  On February 22, circuit judge Eugene Carter turned down Parks’s appeal of her December conviction and sentenced her to fourteen days in jail. Parks then appealed the decision to the state supreme court. Meanwhile, after their petition to dismiss charges against the remaining eighty-nine defendants was rejected, Gray and the other eight defense attorneys (all black, including Robert Carter of the national NAACP) asked for separate trials for each of the defendants. Determined to put the system on trial, they waived the right to a jury trial, which meant Circuit Judge Eugene Carter would decide all the cases.

  The mass indictments and subsequent trial drew the national news media. The Washington Post’s editorial page called the indictments “a monumental display of folly” while terming the boycott “impeccably lawful, orderly, dignified—and effective.”242 The New York Times weighed in a bit tongue-in-cheek on the “crime wave” in Alabama that had led to the arrest of more than one hundred citizens for their actions related to the boycott, fearing that “the Communists, who hate democracy, will have this tragically true story to add to their existing assortment of lies.”243 Still, the Times added, “The wisdom of this boycott in a city where race relations are said to have long been good cannot be
argued at this distance. . . . This newspaper has faith that the people, of Alabama, of whatever race, do in the majority believe in democracy. We have faith also that they have intelligence enough to realize that equal rights do not dictate to anybody of any race his choice of friends.” And in an article ten days later, a Times reporter described Gray and Graetz’s “drift away” from moderation as they now were calling for full desegregation of the buses.244 Moderation to the New York Times meant advocating for respectful, first-come, first-served segregation.

  Reporters swarmed into Montgomery from all over the country. The New York Times and Washington Post sent their first reporters. Journalists from India, England, and France journeyed to Alabama to cover the trial. This coverage furthered the determination of black Montgomerians—the world was now watching their actions. Black congressman Charles Diggs of Michigan came as an “interested spectator,” bringing with him $5,000 from Detroiters to aid the boycott. The New Orleans Ministerial Alliance sent $3,000.

  Many in Montgomery’s white community found this national exposure hypocritical, feeling like they (and the South more broadly) were being singled out by Northerners, even though the North had similar problems. As the boycott dragged on, newspapers like the Advertiser began publishing stories of Northern segregation. Some in Montgomery’s white community thought they should go for the “paper integration” favored by the North. John Hardt, who taught at Maxwell Air Force Base, lamented the attitudes of some white Alabamians, “Why can’t they go ahead and say ‘yes’ we’ll accept the Supreme Court decision and then do like they do in the North—manage the school districts so that there is actually little or no integration. You already have residential segregation and accepting the decision would mainly be a matter of accepting it on paper, with very little actual integration.”245 In March, when 19 senators and 892 congressmen issued the “Southern Manifesto” as a response to the Brown decision, Parks and white Fellowship of Reconciliation field secretary Glenn Smiley authored an unsigned statement from the MIA calling the manifesto “inflammatory.”246

  Hoping to discredit the minister and break the back of the protest, the city decided to try Martin Luther King first and separately. The gallery was packed with scores of people jammed in the hallways, trying to get a peek at the proceedings. Numerous people testified about their decision to stop riding the buses, not on the direction of King or the movement but based on the mistreatment they had long endured on the bus. Those called to the stand were evasive on the movement and strategic in locating the protest in their own decisions and beliefs. As Gladys Moore testified on March 22, “Wasn’t no one started it. We all started it over night.”247 Raymond Parks and Sadie Brooks (the wife of Hilliard Brooks, who had been killed for his bus protest a few years earlier) testified to their own long-standing grievances.248

  Raymond Parks spoke of two incidents on the bus that had given rise to his own decision to stop riding. One time a bus driver had refused to stop at the designated stop—and took the passengers ten to twelve blocks past the original destination. Another time a bus driver refused to pick up two women because they were black, and Raymond recalled hearing the term “nigger” being used multiple times. But Raymond refused to state directly why and when he had stopped riding the bus, frustrating the state prosecutor:

  Q: You say you are riding buses now?

  RP: No, sir, I didn’t say that.

  Q: I thought you said you were riding buses every day?

  RP: I said I wasn’t riding to Maxwell Field over here through town. And I haven’t rode this bus out this way because—

  Q: Have you been riding the City Line buses in the last two months?

  RP: No, sir.

  Raymond then testified that the morning of Rosa’s arraignment he rode the bus out to Maxwell and then came back for the trial and had not ridden the buses since. It is hard to assess the validity of that statement since nowhere else has it ever been suggested that Raymond did not boycott that first morning.249

  Much of the national press was “overwhelmingly favorable, sometimes fawning” toward the boycott, according to Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in their study of the media and the civil rights movement. “For the first time in their lives . . . [they were] covering a story that had no grays.”250 Alistair Cooke of the Manchester Guardian, however, took pity on the economic costs being born by the city’s bus company and described Parks as “the stubborn woman who started it all . . . to become the Paul Revere of the boycott.”251 Wayne Phillips of the New York Times had a different take on the boycott. He credited Parks’s reputation as one of the keys to the protest movement “which was certainly strengthened by the fact that Mrs. Parks was an intelligent, hard-working woman with a strongly developed conviction that segregation was evil, a leader in her church and one of the leaders in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.”252

  In May, Browder v. Gayle went before Judges Rives, Lynne, and Johnson. Reese testified for the prosecution, and, unlike the black people in the courtroom dressed in their Sunday best, appeared in her domestic uniform and was let in the back door by her employer, the sheriff.253 Claudette Colvin, according to historian Frank Sikora, was the “star witness.” Trying to provoke Colvin to admit to a conspiracy to boycott, the prosecutor asked who their leader was. Colvin testified, “Our leaders is just we, ourselves. . . . We all spoke for ourselves.”254 Mary Louise Smith also testified. At lunch after the testimony, Colvin met Smith for the first time. “I liked Mary Louise,” Colvin recalled, “and I was proud that two teenaged girls had stood up.”255

  Because of the Brown decision and the mounting racial tension surrounding the boycott and Autherine Lucy, Alabama authorities began to take steps against the NAACP. On June 1, 1956, state attorney general John Patterson secured a court injunction barring the NAACP from further activity in Alabama on the grounds that it was a “foreign” corporation. The injunction specifically mentioned the boycott and Autherine Lucy’s desegregation of the University of Alabama. Patterson’s attack on the organization, according to Parks, came “because the people had become so unified in this protest, and it was our only civil rights organization in the city, and people were paying memberships faster than we could actually take them in. So, in order to retard the progress that this organization was making in the state of Alabama, it was outlawed a few years. But it did not separate the people because the organization was outlawed. The MIA just became stronger.”256

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “It Is Fine to Be a Heroine but the Price Is High”

  The Suffering of Rosa Parks

  WITH THE CITY STANDING FIRM for segregation, the economic and physical harassment of boycotters intensified. Parks’s action had come at a significant sacrifice to her family’s economic stability. When Montgomery Fair discharged her a month after her bus stand, this jeopardized the family’s stability, as they relied greatly on her steady income. A week later, forbidden from discussing the protest at work, Raymond resigned his job at Maxwell Air Force Base. Shortly after, their landlord raised their rent ten dollars a month. The Parks family was now in severe economic trouble.

  While the physical violence the boycotters and leaders endured is an integral part of civil rights history, this economic catastrophe—the sacrifice Rosa’s bus stand entailed for her family and, more broadly, the economic retaliation against civil rights activists—is not as widely recognized. Indeed Parks’s sacrifice—the toll her bus stand took on her and her family—barely gathers a mention in the triumphal story of her journey from Montgomery to the Capitol rotunda. Learning to live with such economic insecurity was excruciating, particularly the paradox for Parks of being “famous” and yet having no money. Additionally, the phone rang constantly with hateful messages: “Die, nigger. Die” or “You should be killed.” Sometimes she was verbally accosted on the street.1 The fear of white violence was ever present.

  The faith and fortitude it took to stay active proved immense. To live
with death threats and witness friends’ homes bombed, to lose her job and wonder how her family would survive, to spend a decade being famous yet still without steady employment, and to have that stress significantly compromise her health and that of her husband—that was Rosa Parks’s experience during and after the boycott.

  Historian Chana Kai Lee notes the importance of examining the difficulties women activists like Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer experienced: “It seems only fair and profitable to try to talk about her pain too, but not in a way in which we emphasize only her survival of that pain and those challenges.”2 Understanding the fullness of Parks’s political life requires looking at the economic insecurity, health issues, fear, and harassment she endured the year of the boycott and for the ensuing decade. Being a heroine was difficult.

  The erasure of Parks’s hardships stems partly from the ways she was publicly cast as a tired seamstress, rather than a longtime political activist. Montgomery activists, including Parks herself, had realized the importance of a symbol to coalesce around; to do so, they separated and celebrated the courageous stand she made on the bus from her larger political and employment history. But the danger of symbols is that they get fixed in time. They require honor but not necessarily assistance, so the fact that the figure was a real woman with a real family who was suffering became difficult to see. Add Parks’s gender—and the ways that economic instability is often not understood to have the same impact on a woman as on a man of that era—and Parks’s sacrifice recedes further into the background. Moreover, symbols become the property of the whole movement. So who would claim responsibility for the quiet suffering of the “mother of the movement”?