And there was one story developing next door in Alabama that terrified them.
On December 1, 1955, at 5:00 p.m., Mrs. Rosa Parks left her job as assistant tailor at a downtown Montgomery department store. She had a lot on her mind. It was Thursday, and on Saturday she was presenting an NAACP workshop for college girls. Would anyone come? Montgomery’s black community was not known for its activism and especially not for its unity. Getting them to make a concerted stand was nearly impossible. Earlier that summer a daughter of an old friend had been manhandled by a bus driver and then beaten and arrested by the police. And Claudette was only fifteen. For a while there was talk of a boycott, but the community could not come together even to protest on behalf of one of their most vulnerable. So much more groundwork needed to be laid.
Of course, Mrs. Parks had had her own experiences with Montgomery city buses. Twelve years earlier, she had paid her fare at the front of the bus and was expected to get off and reenter through the back door so as not to pass through the white section. That winter’s day was rainy and cold, and she refused. The burly, red-faced bus driver lunged at her and threw her from his bus. Humiliated, she walked home five miles in the rain. She memorized his face and swore never to get on his bus again.
That driver could have done worse. There were plenty of instances of white drivers slapping, beating, and purposely catching black women in the doors and dragging them along the pavement. It could have been much worse if the driver had called the police, as one had with Claudette. Officers were known not only to brutally beat black riders with billy clubs but also to shoot them right there on the sidewalk for showing the least resistance. If a woman was put into a patrol car, sexual assault was a real possibility before she even got to the jail.
But that day, Mrs. Parks didn’t expect any trouble. It was only a fifteen-minute ride home to where her husband, Raymond, was preparing dinner. To be extra cautious, she waited for a less crowded bus so there would not be as much potential for confrontation. Absorbed in thought, she paid her ten-cent fare and took a seat in the middle of the bus, where the colored section began. Her seatmate was a black man. Two black women sat across the aisle. As the bus rattled along the avenue, Mrs. Parks could see the stores lit up with holiday decorations. Christmas was coming up fast. She began thinking about how she and Raymond were going to make this holiday special.
At the third stop, the white section of the bus filled. One white man was left standing. The driver shouted out, “Let me have those front seats.” He wanted not only Rosa’s seat but the entire row. She, the man next to her, and the women across the aisle would need to go to the back of the bus and stand, so one white man could sit down.
With a shock Rosa recognized the driver. He was the same one who had humiliated her twelve years before. She had sworn she would never allow another white man to belittle her like that again.
Rosa watched as the man next to her and the women across the aisle relinquished their seats.
In this moment, it all came down to Rosa Parks.
She had no way of knowing that this was not simply any moment, but the moment so many like her had worked for, the moment so many had planned for, prayed for. So many had died for. She had no way of knowing that her decision would determine whether there would be a boycott; whether the world would ever hear of Martin Luther King Jr.; whether for the first time in history a black community as large as Montgomery’s could stay unified for even one day, not to mention the 382 days the black community eventually boycotted the bus system, crippling a major city’s bus company. Indeed, she did not know whether a flame would be ignited that would inspire countless activists to launch their own Civil Rights campaigns, transforming the South and the nation forever.
What she did know was that only a few months before, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy, had been brutally tortured and killed in Mississippi, only to have his confessed murderers congratulated and acquitted. She thought of her proud grandfather, who protected his family from whites by keeping a loaded shotgun in the house. And how as a child, she had learned to sleep with her clothes on in case the Klan came during the night.
The driver now hovered over her, threatening. Not only did he have a gun, he had the police authority to use it. There was no end to the trouble he could cause her.
And Rosa Parks knew what trouble could look like. She had spent the past eleven years documenting racial brutality and sexual violence against blacks for the NAACP. She knew what whites were capable of. Yet now, in this moment, she wasn’t a passive interviewer or note taker. She was the potential victim.
“Are you going to stand up?” the driver asked Rosa Parks.
Rosa looked him in the eye and gave the answer that changed everything. “No,” she said.
“Well, I’m going to have you arrested.”
“You may do that,” she replied evenly.
She watched as black men on the bus found reasons to flee. She knew some of the women on the bus. No one spoke up for her, even though she prayed they would. No one said, “If you arrest her, then you’ll have to take me, too.”
She was alone now. She later said it was one of the worst days of her life.
Before I began researching Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League, I was certain that black ministers and other men led the Civil Rights Movement. I was taught that the successes resulted from black male leaders negotiating with white male leaders. Yes, there was Rosa Parks, a silent symbol of black victimhood, a potent reminder of the endurance of the meek and downtrodden. But she was more of a symbol than a flesh-and-blood person.
Then I began interviewing African American women in Mississippi who had worked in the movement. They told stories of escaping the Klan in hearses, hiding in caskets; of facing down armed whites when trying to get their children through the door of a whites-only school; of being beaten when trying to register to vote. Many of the ministers I thought of as movement leaders had actually been shamed into taking stands by these fearless women. Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi fieldworker and Civil Rights force of nature, referred to those timid reverends as “chicken eatin’ preachers,” and did so to their faces! Even worse, some of the most respected black preachers were actually on the payroll of the Sovereignty Commission, turning members of their own congregations over to the Klan. And last but not least, the publisher of the state’s only black newspaper was also an informant for the Commission.
I found that often the heroes and leaders were black women. And not just any black women, but usually domestics and fieldworkers, as opposed to middle-class blacks. And I learned that these heroes’ heroes, those on whose shoulders they stood, were not necessarily men but other women. People like Ella Baker and Septima Clark, like Jo Anne Robinson and, yes, Rosa Parks.
So it was no surprise, as I dug deeper into the history of the Montgomery bus boycott, that the same pattern emerged. Men at the podium, women on their feet.
Mrs. Parks said that when she was arrested and taken to jail, she didn’t believe anything would come of it. Three other black women had been jailed that year for challenging bus operators. Why should this time be any different?
But on the street, the rest of black Montgomery was learning that this time it was going to be different. An African American women’s group that had been pushing black leaders for years to do something about the shameful city bus situation decided to act unilaterally. They were not going to wait to get permission from Mrs. Parks or the ministers. By the next day, they had printed and delivered 52,500 handbills.
“Another Negro Woman has been arrested….Next time it could be your daughter or mother!” the flyer threatened. A one-day boycott was announced for the following Monday. The message was clear. Black domestic workers, who made up most of the ridership, were getting the brunt of the abuse. Black men could not defend them, and whites were unwilling to. Black women had to do it for themselves.
By Friday night, the day after Mrs. Parks’s arrest, every black woman, man, and child knew the
plan for the boycott. It set off a firestorm among the 70 percent of black women who worked as domestics. Mrs. Parks was the straw that broke the camel’s back. As one maid explained, “Miss Rosie Parks, one of our nice respectable ladies was put in jail, and folks got full and jest wouldn’t take no more…” Another witness said, “Not only was Mrs. Parks arrested, but every Negro in Montgomery felt arrested.”
The day was rainy and bone-cold, not good weather for staying off a bus. Mrs. Parks remembered looking out her window to see the sidewalks choked with maids, cooks, and washerwomen walking to work under a cloud of black umbrellas. All the buses passed empty.
Later that day, when she left the court building after her trial, Mrs. Parks found five hundred supporters, mostly women, chanting from the steps, “They’ve messed with the wrong one now!”
A mass rally was planned that night to cap off the one-day boycott, and the preachers had to get their act together and select a leader to press on with the boycott. It was obvious that these women were of no mind to stop now. No one really wanted the job. It looked too doubtful and, considering the past, was bound to be short-lived, a humiliation for those out front. The new preacher in town, Martin Luther King Jr., surprised everyone and took up the challenge.
When the ministers arrived at the rally that evening, they found no timid souls. Five thousand people, mostly female domestic workers, had filled the sanctuary of the Holt Street Baptist Church to capacity. Outside, another ten thousand crammed the steps, packed the sidewalks, and stopped traffic for six blocks. No one had ever seen this many Montgomery blacks in one place. The police were helpless to contain it.
Emboldened, the ministers gave their fiery speeches. People sat, stood, clapped, and held hands while tears streamed down their faces. The crowd called out for Mrs. Parks. When she asked if she should speak, she was told by one of the ministers, “No. You have said enough.”
The powers that be decided that Mrs. Parks would be more useful as a public symbol. The spotlight belonged to the men, but it was left to Mrs. Parks and the other women to do everything else: strategize, organize, administer car pools, raise money, do the walking, and absorb the brunt of the retaliation. They didn’t complain. The movement was more important than anything else.
But the presence of these women could not be denied, and it relentlessly drove the movement and its leaders forward. When one woman was asked in court who the movement’s leaders were, she replied, “Our leaders is just we ourself.”
In their solidarity, black domestics had discovered what King called their “somebodyness.” They stood up to their white employers and were fired from their jobs. As they walked, white segregationists threw balloons filled with urine from passing cars, hit them with rocks, and pelted them with rotten vegetables. When they had to pass by armed and jeering whites stationed on the street, they would not be cowed. One maid said, “Look at them red bastards over there watching us. They got them guns, but us ain’t skeered.” Another said, “When they find out you ain’t scared of ’em, they leave you alone. The son of bitches.”
In March, Mrs. Parks was arrested once more, along with 181 others, on a charge of conspiracy. This time, scores of female domestics descended on the courthouse. They wore bandannas and men’s hats and had their dresses rolled up. The police tried to restore order, but the women responded by surging forward. When a policeman reached for his gun, one domestic shouted, “If you hit one of us, you’ll not leave here alive!”
That defiance didn’t stop with Montgomery.
Despite the national media being slow to catch on to the momentousness of the boycott and the local press deliberately downplaying the significance or censoring it outright, word got out. News of the heroic boycotters even into trickled into Mississippi, where racism was even more virulent, organized, and institutionalized.
In Alabama, law enforcement was known to cooperate with the Klan; in Mississippi, law enforcement was the Klan. County sheriffs were seen as complicit either in carrying out or covering up three murders in 1955 alone. One of course was Emmett Till, killed for “whistling at a white woman.” Lamar Smith was shot in broad daylight on the courthouse lawn for trying to register to vote. George W. Lee, a preacher, businessman, and outspoken Civil Rights activist, was killed by a shotgun blast from a passing car just before midnight.
In spite of state censorship laws banning the transportation of antisegregationist literature across state lines, random issues of African American newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the New York Amsterdam News found their way into the state. A single tattered copy was often passed from hand to hand, discussed in black churches, pool halls, barbershops, juke joints, and all other gathering places outside the white man’s line of vision. Yes, they knew about Rosa Parks in Mississippi.
And then there were the maids.
The maids of Mississippi, like the ones in Alabama, saw themselves reflected in Mrs. Parks’s experience. If the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission had a surveillance counterpart in the black community, it would have been the network of domestic help who spent their days cooking, washing, tending children, and cleaning their white employers’ homes, all the while listening to the most intimate details of their lives.
Ostensibly, the work of maids was to perform the physical tasks involved in taking care of the white home and its inhabitants. Yet a critical, never mentioned, part of the job description was tending to the emotional needs of the family. Domestic help was there to shepherd white folks through their most private moments. They were also expected to affirm the opinions white folks had of themselves of being benevolent, fair, wise, and, of course, socially, intellectually, and morally superior.
When I look back at this era, the best analogy I can offer to describe the black presence in the white home is this: the maid turned herself into a one-way mirror. She became adept at hiding her true self while at the same time reflecting an image of her white employers that pleased, flattered, cajoled, and never threatened.
We white Southerners loved how we looked in the eyes of our maids and never doubted their loyalty. We talked as openly in their presence as if they were merely furniture.
Yet that one-way mirror of Jim Crow allowed domestic servants to pool privileged information in order to better resist oppression. One woman I interviewed had been the maid to a prominent white preacher in my hometown of Laurel. He also happened to be an active member of the local Klan, which had been terrorizing the county’s freedom workers. Like most white employers he talked freely in front of his maid, putting his trust in that mirrored reflection. All the while she ran information back to Civil Rights activists, warning them where and when the Klan would strike next. And in 1956, one of the topics at every white dinner table in Mississippi was that “uppity colored girl” over in Alabama.
Many black domestic workers, inspired by the likes of Rosa Parks, became invaluable in the fight for the rights of their people. Rosa Parks taught them that when they, the least of the least, came together, nothing could stop them.
The editor of the Christian Century saw that as well. This is what he wrote about that evening in March when the unruly mob of domestic workers in Montgomery stood down the police at the court building: “That night black women served notice that they were no longer going to be violated by or pushed around by white police officers. They put their bodies on the line in defense of their humanity, something anyone watching could see. The standoff marked the first fateful assertion of their full dignity as human beings.” The day the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision declaring segregation on the buses unconstitutional, after 382 consecutive days of solidarity, the Klan decided to remind working-class blacks that things would never really change. Over forty cars of white-hooded goons drove slowly through the quarters to invoke the old terror. The inhabitants hooted and shook their fists. Deflated, the Klan retreated.
A domestic worker put it more succinctly. “They bit the lump off and us making ’em chew it. Colored folks ain’t like t
hey used to be. They ain’t scared no more.”
Given all the mass demonstrations and organized marches that followed, it’s sobering to remember how alone Mrs. Parks was that day on the bus when she had to make her decision. To take that first step to a place no one has ever gone is perhaps the most courageous thing a person can do. It’s certainly got to be loneliest. But once taken, it can’t be reversed. It’s out there for everyone to see. That one step of courage sent ripples through the universe, and emboldened the unlikeliest of heroes to take their own next steps. It still does, sixty years later.
After the boycott, Mrs. Parks was asked if it were true that she didn’t move that day on the bus because she was tired. She replied, “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day…no, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
That is what her simple “No” meant to millions of black women, who existed on the bottom rung of the ladder of power. These people knew about giving in. Black working women saw themselves and their lives in Mrs. Parks’s action.
As Nikki Giovanni said in her poem “Harvest”:
…Something needs to be said…about Rosa Parks… other than her feet…were tired…
…Lots of people…on that bus…and many before… and since…had tired feet…lots of people…still do… they just don’t know…where to plant them…
Mrs. Parks’s “No” showed a million women where to plant their feet.
A DISCUSSION GUIDE
1. Both Floyd and Hazel are driven to leave their homes in the hills. What is it they are in such a rush to escape? How realistic are their dreams?
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League Page 40
