The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (14 page)
Read The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Online
Authors: Jeanne Theoharis
Parks never said explicitly that she disagreed with Nixon’s assessment, although her growing impatience by the end of the summer suggests that this may have been the case. When Parks attended the two-week workshop at Highlander in August, Colvin’s arrest—and the community’s reaction—was still on her mind. Longing for a stiffening of resolve among Montgomerians to confront the issue of segregation, Mrs. Parks hoped that Highlander would help her find a way to accomplish that. “I wanted our leaders there to organize and be strong enough to back up and support any young person who would be a litigant, if there should be some action in protest to segregation and mistreatment.”
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According to Colvin, Parks was the only adult leader who kept up with her that summer.
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Colvin had become a member of Parks’s Youth Council before the arrest and continued to attend NAACP Youth Council meetings. Parks made Colvin secretary of the council, trying to nurture the young woman’s spirit and budding leadership.
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Claudette Colvin recalled that she only went to Youth Council meetings “if I could get a ride, because I didn’t want to ride the bus anymore. If I couldn’t get a ride back, I’d stay overnight at Rosa’s—she lived in the projects across the street. Rosa was hard to get to know, but her mom was just the opposite—warm and talkative and funny . . . There was nothing we couldn’t talk about.”
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Parks exhibited a certain forcefulness and strictness with the young people. According to Colvin, Mrs. Parks had a different personality inside and outside of the meetings. “She was very kind and thoughtful; she knew exactly how I liked my coffee and fixed me peanut butter and Ritz crackers, but she didn’t say much at all. Then when the meeting started, I’d think, Is that the same lady? She would come across very strong about rights. She would pass out leaflets saying things like ‘We are going to break down the walls of segregation.’”
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Parks would make Colvin tell the story of her bus arrest over and over. “After a while they had all heard it a million times. They seemed bored with it.”
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Late in the summer, Colvin realized she was pregnant by an older man who had befriended the young and vulnerable teenager. According to Durr, Colvin’s pregnancy bothered Parks, who regarded it as “a kind of burden that Negro women had to bear for so many generations, you know, of being used . . . and not having their person’s [
sic
] used.”
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Montgomery’s civil rights leaders had decided
before
learning of Colvin’s pregnancy that they wouldn’t actively pursue her case, but now they increased their distance from her, eventually asserting her pregnancy
was
the reason for their decision.
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Indeed, Nixon would claim that when he went to visit the family in May, Colvin’s mother told him of her pregnancy. Other accounts would have Nixon see a pregnant Colvin when he got there. Virginia Durr would claim that Colvin’s brother called up to say that Claudette would not be able to come to court because she had taken a tumble.
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(This would have been impossible, since Colvin’s son Raymond wasn’t born until March 29, 1956.)
Parks encouraged the young people of her NAACP Youth Council to challenge segregation. In the wake of Colvin’s arrest, she instructed her young charges on how to proceed if they were arrested to “make certain that they knew how to conduct themselves in a way that they couldn’t be accused of disorderly conduct or resisting arrest.”
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Some of these young people took action, occasionally by taking the front seats. A couple of young men reported back to her that they’d sat in the front “and the driver didn’t say anything.” Parks figured the reason the driver didn’t do anything was “he didn’t know what these youngsters would do. I always asked them if they . . . [wanted] to do what we could to break down racial segregation.”
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On October 21, eighteen-year-old Mary Louise Smith (who was not a member of Parks’s Youth Council) was arrested. Smith had attended St. Jude’s School, where the nuns taught that all people were equal and deserved respect—which fueled Smith’s stand on the bus.
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That day, she had trekked across town to collect twelve dollars owed to her by the white family she worked for, but they hadn’t been home. So she had spent twenty cents on bus fare and was returning home empty-handed. The driver told her twice to move. She refused and was briskly arrested. Her father came down and paid the fine. Smith’s family was poor and her father rumored to be an alcoholic. Nixon also paid this family a visit, describing the Smith home as “low type.” He claimed that if “the press had gone out there” they would become a “laughingstock to try to build a case around her.”
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Smith later challenged these characterizations, saying her father worked two jobs to support her and her five siblings and did not have time for drinking.
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Nixon claimed that both Colvin and Smith were “vulnerable to exploitation by a white lawyer or a white-controlled media,” explaining that “white people have used the media to destroy things they dislike.” He worried that neither young woman was strong enough to withstand the attacks a case would engender.
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Some in the WPC disagreed with Nixon, believing that the principles of the case were more important than the plaintiff and that it was time to take a stand. But Nixon was a force to be reckoned with. One of the few activist community leaders, Nixon’s backing was necessary for any successful black mobilization in Montgomery. People faced with a legal injustice would telephone him, and he would come to their assistance. He knew many people in the police and sheriff’s department, at city hall and at the jail, along with most lawyers, white or black. Thus Nixon’s endorsement was seen as crucial. But his leadership, according to Robinson, had its limits. “People respected Mr. Nixon for his bravery. But he wasn’t always able to follow up. . . . He was willing, I’ve never seen anyone more willing, but I think his leadership stopped where he couldn’t go anywhere further.”
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While worrying about finding a plaintiff who could withstand the press, Rosa Parks grew frustrated with the lack of any forward movement. Parks recalled having discussions with Robinson “about how a boycott of the city buses would really hurt the bus company in its pocketbook” but she didn’t sense much public support for a boycott.
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Civil rights leaders had been engaged in a long-standing negotiation with the city with little result. The city’s tactics, nuanced and belabored, dragged Montgomery’s black citizens along in a byzantine process of blame shifting where the city and the bus company attempted to foist responsibility for bus segregation onto each other. Moreover, Montgomery’s buses were operated by a northern company—National City Lines—so Montgomery’s segregation was not simply parochial, and its economic ramifications extended well beyond the Cradle of the Confederacy. Like their counterparts across the South and the North, Montgomery’s officials offered meetings and professed concern about race problems yet did nothing. Shortly after the boycott had started, Parks told a journalist of her growing outrage at the “run-around” the city had given Montgomery’s activists.
In Montgomery long before our protest began, on some occasions I had been on committees to appear before the city officials and bus company officials with requests that they improve our conditions that existed that were so humiliating and degrading to our spirit as well as sometimes physical discomfort in riding the bus. We would have some vague promises and be given the run-around and nothing was ever done about it.
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By the time of Colvin’s arrest, she had come to feel that “we had wasted a lot of time and effort” with the petitions and meetings with Montgomery officials.
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Mrs. Parks was looking for more concrete action.
1, 1955
“It was a strange feeling because . . . even before the incident of my arrest, I could leave home feeling that anything could happen at any time.”
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On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks finished work at Montgomery Fair. That Thursday had been a busy day for the forty-two-year-old Parks. During her coffee break, she had talked with Alabama State College president H. Councill Trenholm to finalize plans for her NAACP workshop on campus that weekend. As usual, she had lunch at Fred Gray’s office and then spent the afternoon hemming and pressing pants. Her shoulder was bothering her.
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She was looking forward to a relaxing evening at home and had some NAACP work to do.
She left work. Deciding to wait for a less crowded bus, Parks picked up a few things at Lee’s Cut-Rate Drug. She contemplated buying a heating pad but decided they were too expensive. In short, “this day was just like any other day.”
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The downtown Court Square near Montgomery Fair was decorated with Christmas lights. A banner over one store read “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” This festive atmosphere masked the fearsome race relations that had defined the place for its 150 years of existence. This was the Cradle of the Confederacy. Slaves had been auctioned from that square. Across the street was the Exchange Hotel, which had served as the first headquarters of the Confederacy. Rosa Parks well understood that history of Southern white power and black resistance.
Around 5:30, Mrs. Parks distractedly boarded the yellow-and-olive bus and paid her ten cents. Had she been paying attention, she probably “wouldn’t even have gotten on that bus” because the driver, James Fred Blake, had given her trouble before.
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Back in 1943, Parks had paid her fare, and this very same bus driver insisted that Parks had to exit and reboard through the back door. She felt this practice constituted a humiliation too great to bear. When Parks did not move, Blake grabbed her sleeve, attempting to push her off the bus. She purposely dropped her purse and sat down in a seat in the whites-only section to pick it up. Blake seemed poised to hit her. “I will get off. . . . You better not hit me,” she told him and exited the bus and did not reboard. For the next twelve years, she avoided Blake’s bus.
As with other segregated situations, like drinking fountains and elevators, Parks avoided the bus and walked when she could. But not owning a car, and given her job and community commitments, sometimes she had no choice. Parks refused to pay her money in front and then go around to the back to board. Some drivers told her not to ride if she “was too important . . . to go to the back and get on.”
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According to Parks, some motormen had even come to recognize her because of this. “It seemed to annoy and sometimes anger the bus drivers.”
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One particular driver, if he saw Parks alone, would shut the bus door very quickly and drive on.
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Overall, Parks had long attempted to maintain her dignity on the bus, and there were “almost countless times when things happened. . . . But I always indicated that even if I was forced to comply with these rules that it was very distasteful to me.”
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In an interview in 1956 with white liberal Alabamian Aubrey Williams, Parks said that she had never before that evening been directly asked to give up her seat for a white person.
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Comfortably setting her parcels down, Rosa took a seat next to a black man in the middle section of the bus. The bus was not crowded, with many seats still open in the front. As she admired the sights and sounds of Christmas, her mind turned to her husband and “how we were going to have a good time this Christmas.”
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Raymond was making dinner, and in fifteen short minutes she would be home.
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There were two black women sitting across the aisle from her. They were all seated in a row toward the middle of the bus. As she would clarify repeatedly in the years to come, she was
not
sitting in the white section but in the middle section of the bus. The middle was liminal space; it allowed space for paying black customers to sit, but that could be trumped on the discretion of the driver by the wants of a white rider. At the third stop, the white section of the bus filled up. The bus had thirty-six seats. Fourteen whites occupied the front section; twenty-two black people were sitting in the back seats.
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A white man proceeded to stand behind the driver.
When Blake noticed, he called back, “Let me have those front seats”—meaning the first row of seats in the middle section where Mrs. Parks and three others were sitting.
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By the terms of Alabama segregation, because there were no seats remaining in the white section, all four passengers would have to get up so one white man could sit down. In Montgomery, technically, black passengers were not supposed to be asked to give up their seat if there was not another one available—but on the “whim” of the driver could be asked to stand for another passenger.
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When the driver ordered them to give up their seats, no one moved. Getting agitated, the bus driver said, “You all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.”
Parks reflected to herself on how giving up her seat “wasn’t making it light on ourselves as a people.”
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She thought about her grandfather keeping his gun to protect their family. She thought about Emmett Till.
119
And she decided to stand fast. “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.”
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Blake told the four black passengers to move. The white passenger never said anything to Parks. When asked by an interviewer in 1967 if the man seemed embarrassed, Parks replied, “I don’t remember paying him any attention.”
121
What she was about to do was much bigger than him.
