But in practice, whenever a white person needed a seat, the driver would look in the rearview mirror and yell at the “nigras” to move to the back of the bus. Crowded blacks would often have to stand behind empty seats.
Jo Ann Robinson was an English professor at all-black Alabama State College. At Christmas time, 1949, her arms loaded with gifts, Robinson was rushing to Dannelly Field airport for a trip home to Cleveland. Absentmindedly, she sat in the front section of a nearly empty bus. The driver walked over to Robinson, drew back his hand as if to strike her, and barked, “Get up from there! Get up from there!” Sobbing, she bolted past the driver and off the bus, packages falling from her arms.
“I felt like a dog,” she said later. “And I got mad, after this was over. I realized that I was a human being and just as intelligent and far more [educationally] trained than that bus driver … I cried all the way to Cleveland.”
Robinson returned to Montgomery intent on stirring a major protest aimed at the bus company and city officials. But when she related the humiliating incident to members of the Women’s Political Council, an organization of black professional women, she was disappointed at their response. Such rudeness, they told her, was simply a fact of life in Montgomery. They had fought against it before, but to no avail. Every day, 40,000 blacks put their dimes in the collection boxes of the Montgomery City Lines along with 12,000 whites. But as the whites took their seats, black riders had to get off the bus and re-enter through the back door.
In 1953 Montgomery was run by three commissioners: the mayor, a commissioner of public affairs, and a commissioner of public works. Jo Ann Robinson and other blacks in the city demanded to meet with the commissioners. The black leaders, including Edgar Daniel (E. D.) Nixon, former head of the local NAACP, once again decried the segregated seating and complained that bus stops were farther apart in black neighborhoods than in white areas. They also wanted to know why the city refused to hire black bus drivers. The commissioners listened but took no action. Then Robinson and others in the Women’s Political Council met with bus company officials. The white men told the black women that city and state laws required segregation on the buses. They did, however, make a single concession to the thirty-seven percent of the city’s residents who were black: the buses would stop at every corner in black neighborhoods, just as they did in the white sections of town.
On May 17 of that year, the Montgomery Advertiser carried a headline announcing the Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation in public schools. Inspired anew, Jo Ann Robinson wrote to Montgomery’s mayor, W. A. Gayle. “Mayor Gayle, three quarters of the riders of these public conveyances are Negroes,” Robinson argued, now as president of the Women’s Political Council. “If Negroes did not patronize them they could not possible operate … there has been talk from 25 or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of buses.”
It was a bold letter, but no one in Montgomery knew if black riders could actually be united to stage a boycott. A few years earlier, the minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church had tried to prompt a group of blacks to walk off a bus in protest. The driver had ordered Rev. Vernon Johns to get up and let a white man sit down. Johns stood up and challenged the other blacks to march off the bus with him. They told him they weren’t moving. “You ought to knowed better,” said one.
Asking blacks to protest for their rights in Montgomery was asking a lot. They could expect to be fired from their jobs and harassed on the streets, and could possibly become the victims of an economic boycott on the part of white segregationists. A successful bus boycott would need to be mapped out carefully and executed with discipline. Rev. Johns’ niece, Barbara Johns, had successfully launched a school boycott back in Virginia in 1951. In 1955, the Women’s Political Council had worked out plans for a bus boycott in Montgomery.
All they needed was the right moment. Their hope was that soon the right person—someone who could not only withstand the scrutiny and anger of whites but who could inspire black Montgomery to take action—would be arrested. The organizers would then spread the news throughout the black community in hopes that enough people would respond to muster a boycott.
Early in 1955, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin was dragged from a bus by police and arrested after she and an elderly woman refused to give up their seats in the middle section of the bus. The old woman left when the driver went to fetch the police, but Colvin stayed in her seat. “I done paid my dime, I ain’t got no reason to move,” she said repeatedly.
E. D. Nixon and the NAACP came to the girl’s defense, and the association’s Youth Council adviser, Rosa Parks, took a particular interest. She herself had been thrown off a Montgomery bus eleven years earlier for refusing to enter through the back door. The driver of that bus, James F. Blake, had kept her money, told her to step outside, and driven away. Now Parks and Nixon, along with Jo Ann Robinson, wanted to take Colvin’s case to federal court to demonstrate that segregated buses were illegal under the United States Constitution. They began to raise money for Colvin’s defense and to arrange speaking engagements throughout the town to garner support.
Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama.
But just before the court date, Nixon discovered that Colvin had “taken a tumble,” as they said in Montgomery—she was pregnant. Fearing the white press would portray her as a “bad girl” just trying to cause trouble, he decided it would be foolhardy to appeal Colvin’s case to a higher court. She was not the “right person” in whom to invest money, time, and the great hope of ending segregation. That person would have to be above reproach.
Nixon would reach the same decision twice that year about other women who had refused to be humiliated on the bus and gotten themselves arrested. “I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with … to ask people to give us half a million dollars to fight discrimination on a bus line, I [had to be] able to say, ‘We got a good leg in,’” he later explained.
The Highlander Folk School
Rosa Parks at the Highlander Folk School.
During the Great Depression, Myles Horton, a teacher and community activist, developed a simple philosophy: people are not powerless. With guidance, they can solve their own problems.
Horton put his philosophy into practice in 1932 when he founded the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. The problems of oppressed workers in the Appalachian Mountains were the initial items on Highlander’s agenda. The school offered workshops on labor unions, workers’ rights, and race relations.
During the 1950s and ‘60s, the center evolved into a training ground for civil rights activists. Because the school’s resources were limited, Horton concentrated on identifying new leaders, training them, and sending them back home to work for change. Rosa Parks attended a workshop at Highlander the summer before the Montgomery bus boycott. “At Highlander,” Parks recalled, “I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society, that there was such a thing as people of differing races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops and living together in peace and harmony. It was a place I was very reluctant to leave. I gained there strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks but all oppressed people.” Other civil rights leaders who attended Highlander workshops include James Bevel, John Lewis, Diane Nash, and Marion Barry.
With its emphasis on practical training for daily life, Horton’s novel approach to education paid off. In 1955, Highlander began a remarkably successful program in which black adults learned to read and write—and thereby qualified to vote. A black hairdresser, Bernice Robinson, taught the first class, which was held two nights a week in the back of a small store. Horton chose a nonprofessional teacher so that the sessions would not be dominated by old-fashioned pedagogical methods. Robinson taught the fourteen students what they wanted to learn: how to write their names, how to write letters to their sons in the army, how to write a check. “We decided we’d pitch it on a basis of them becoming full citizens and taking their
place in society and demanding their rights, and being real men and women in their own right,” Horton said. When the first class ended, eight students passed the voting test. Soon, other “citizenship schools” opened across the South.
Not surprisingly, Highlander faced stiff opposition from segregationist whites. In 1957, the IRS revoked the school’s tax-exempt status. In 1959, Arkansas attorney general Bruce Bennett led a hearing to determine whether Highlander was part of a communist conspiracy. And in 1960, the school’s charter was revoked. Horton was found guilty of selling beer without a license and of violating a Tennessee law that forbade blacks and whites from attending school together.
But Highlander withstood the attack. Horton re-opened his center in Knoxville; later he moved it to New Market, Tennessee. Though the school has turned its attention to new issues—among them nuclear waste and strip mining—the Highlander approach remains the same: education of the people, for the people, by the people.
Since Claudette Colvin’s arrest and conviction, Rosa Parks had attended a workshop on race relations at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. The school was established during the depression to train poor people in the South to help themselves and their community. Virginia Durr, wife of a progressive white attorney, Clifford Durr, knew Rosa Parks well. She followed Parks’ activities in the NAACP and put up the money to send her to Highlander. Parks said later of her Highlander experience, “That was the first time in my life I had lived in an atmosphere of complete equality with the members of the other race … I did enjoy going up there. I felt it could be done without the signs that said ‘White’ and ‘Colored’—without any artificial barriers of racial segregation.”
In 1955, Rosa Parks was a quiet but strong-willed woman of forty-three. She had worked for several years as the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, and continued to work with the association’s Youth Council. When Parks was a student, Montgomery had no high school for black children. Her family sent her to the laboratory school at Alabama State College. Unable to find work commensurate with her education, Parks became a seamstress. She did some part-time tailoring for Clifford and Virginia Durr, and, in the winter of 1955, was working as a tailor’s assistant at a department store.
On Thursday, December 1, amid blinking Christmas lights in the downtown shopping district, Rosa Parks boarded a Cleveland Avenue bus at Court Square. She sat down in the first row of the middle section of seats, an area open to blacks as long as no whites were left standing. At the next stop—the Empire Theatre—some whites got on, filling all the whites-only seats. One white man was left standing.
The bus driver was James Blake, the same man who had evicted Parks from a bus in 1943 for refusing to use the back door. He told Parks and the other three blacks in the fifth row to get up so that the white man could sit down. Nobody moved.
“Y’all better make it light on yourself and let me have those seats,” said Blake. Three of the people rose, but Parks, though she shifted to allow the man next to her to get up, didn’t move from her seat.
“When he saw me still sitting,” Parks recalls, “he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.’ I said, ‘You may do that.’”
Parks was taken in a police car to the city jail, where she was booked for violating the law banning integration. She longed for a drink of water to soothe her dry throat. “But they wouldn’t permit me to drink out of the water fountain,” she recalls. “It was for whites only.”
She used her one phone call to telephone her mother, who was living with Rosa and her husband. Could she tell Rosa’s husband and ask him to come get her out of jail? News of Parks’ arrest soon reached E. D. Nixon, the man who had headed the NAACP when Rosa Parks was its secretary. Nixon in turn tried to reach Fred Gray, one of the city’s two black lawyers. Gray wasn’t home, so Nixon called Clifford Durr, a former member of the Federal Communications Commission who had recently returned to Montgomery from Washington.
“About six o’clock that night the telephone rang,” Virginia Durr remembers, “and Mr. Nixon said he understood that Mrs. Parks had been arrested, and he [had] called the jail, but they wouldn’t tell him why she was arrested. So they thought if Cliff called, a white lawyer, they might tell him. Cliff called, and they said she’d been arrested under the segregation laws … so Mr. Nixon raised the bond and signed the paper and got Mrs. Parks out.”
Nixon had a proposition for her. “Mrs. Parks,” he said, “with your permission we can break down segregation on the bus with your case.” Parks consulted with her husband and mother, who had long told her that she was going to get herself lynched by working with Nixon and the NAACP. Parks decided to let Nixon make her case into a cause. “I’ll go along with you, Mr. Nixon,” she said.
At home, Nixon made a list of black ministers in Montgomery. Lacking influence with the current leaders of the NAACP, some of whom snubbed him because he had only a sixth-grade education and worked on a train as a sleeping-car porter, Nixon decided that clergymen, important leaders in the black community, could do as much if not more to mobilize people. Of these ministers, he was best acquainted with the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, whom he knew through past work with the NAACP.
At 5 A.M. Friday, the morning after the arrest, Nixon called Abernathy, the twenty-nine-year-old minister of the First Baptist Church. Abernathy knew most of the other ministers and black civic leaders in Montgomery. After discussing the situation, Nixon called eighteen other ministers and arranged a meeting for Friday evening to discuss Parks’ arrest and figure out what they might do about it.
Meanwhile, Fred Gray had called Jo Ann Robinson Thursday night and told her of Parks’ arrest. Robinson knew Parks from the Colvin case and believed she would be the ideal person to sustain a test case against segregation. Robinson called the leaders of the Women’s Political Council. They urged her to initiate a boycott in support of Parks, starting the following Monday, Parks’ trial date.
One of the 35,000 handbills Jo Ann Robinson stayed up all night mimeographing. The next morning, she called on her students at Alabama State College to help distribute the anonymous handbills throughout Montgomery.
Jo Ann Robinson in the 1950’s.
Robinson went to Alabama State College, cut stencils, and mimeographed 35,000 handbills. It took all night. In the morning she asked a few of her students to help load the handbills into her car. She drove to elementary and high schools where students she had telephoned earlier were waiting. The students distributed the handbills in school to be taken home to parents.
Robinson did not put her name or that of the Women’s Political Council on the handbills. She feared city and state officials would realize she had used the mimeograph machine at Alabama State and, in revenge, cut off funds for the all-black school. The flier read, “This is for Monday, Dec, 5, 1955 — Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus and give it to a white person. It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped …
“The woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are therefore asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday …”
Thousands of the anonymous leaflets passed secretly through Montgomery’s black neighborhoods—in stores, schools, bars, and churches.
By the time the ministers and civil rights leaders met on Friday evening, word of the boycott had spread throughout the city. The Reverend L. Roy Bennett, president of the Interdenominational Ministers Alliance, headed the meeting. He concluded that there was no time for debate—the boycott was on for the following Monday. He wanted the ministers to begin organizing committees to orchestrate the action. Some in attendance objected, calling for debate on the pros and
cons of a boycott. Almost half of them left the meeting in frustration before any decisions could be reached. But those remaining eventually agreed to spread word of the one-day boycott in their Sunday sermons and to hold a mass meeting Monday night to decide if the boycott should continue.
E. D. Nixon was not at this meeting he had arranged—he was at work as a Pullman-car porter on the Montgomery-Chicago route. But before leaving for work, Nixon had taken one of the handbills mimeographed by Jo Ann Robinson and called a white reporter, Joe Azbell, at the Montgomery Advertiser.
“He said, ‘I’ve got a big story for you and I want you to meet me,’” recalls Azbell. “Now, E. D. doesn’t talk in long sentences, he’s very short and brusque … He said, ‘Can you meet me?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I can meet you.’ So we met down at Union Station and he showed me one of these leaflets … And he said, [ministers] agreed to meet that night to decide what should be done about the boycott after the first day. You see, the Women’s Council planned it only for Monday, and it was left up to the men to take over after we had forced them really to decide whether or not it had been successful enough to continue, and how long it was to be continued.
Organizing Before the Boycott: An Interview with Jo Ann Robinson
Many people think the Montgomery bus boycott was a spontaneous act, sparked in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. In truth, the boycott was anything but spontaneous. Here, Jo Ann Robinson, a prime mover of the boycott, reflects on her role and gives an indication of just how well black people had prepared themselves to fight segregation.
Eyes on the Prize Page 9
