The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (15 page)

Her seatmate and the other two women got up “reluctantly,” according to Parks, but she refused.
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She moved her legs so the man sitting in the window seat could get out and then slid into the seat next to the window. She continued to sit, firm in her decision but unsure what would next ensue.

The tall, blond forty-three-year-old driver got up and walked back to where she was seated. City code gave the “powers of the police officer” to bus drivers.
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Blake, like all of Montgomery’s bus drivers, was white and carried a gun. When the boycott began, there were no black drivers on the city’s lines.
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Born nine months before Rosa Parks in the town of Seman, Alabama, Blake had left school after the ninth grade and been hired by the bus company in 1942. Drafted into the army in 1944–45 and seeing active duty as a truck driver in the European theater, he returned to his job in late 1945 and had been driving the city’s buses ever since.

Parks had not planned the protest but “had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed.”
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She “couldn’t take it anymore. . . . It is such a long and lonely feeling. The line between reason and madness grows thinner [due to the] horrible restrictiveness of Jim Crow laws.”
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And so she decided to withdraw her participation in a system of degradation. Parks felt she was being asked to consent to her own humiliation: “I felt that, if I did stand up, it meant that I approved of the way I was being treated, and I did not approve.”
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“Tired of giving in,” Mrs. Parks had reached her stopping point.
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“Besides,” noted Jo Ann Robinson, “she was a woman, and the person waiting was a man.”
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The fact that she was being asked to stand for a man was significant. In a 1964
Esquire
article she noted, “It didn’t seem logical, particularly for a woman to give way to a man.”
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This carried another cost—that of marking herself as not a lady since etiquette dictated a man would never take a seat from a woman; indeed, he should offer his seat to her.

There were no other seats on the bus so, according to city code, Parks was entitled to keep hers. But as she told an interviewer in February, she had “made up my mind that I was not going to move even if there were seats in back.”
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She also mentioned this to A. W. West, a prominent black woman in the community, who recalled: “When I asked her what happened, she said that she did not move. There were no other seats, however, she stated that if there had been, she had made up her mind never to move again.”
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Blake wanted the seat. “I had police powers—any driver for the city did.”
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The bus was crowded, and the tension heightened as Blake walked back to her. Refusing to assume a deferential position, Parks looked him straight in the eye.

Blake asked, “Are you going to stand up?”

Parks replied, “No.” She then told him she was not going to move “because I got on first and paid the same fare, and I didn’t think it was right for me to have to stand so someone else who got on later could sit down.”
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“Well I’m going to have you arrested.”

“You may do that,” Parks replied.

Given her NAACP organizing experience, Parks was exceedingly cognizant of the dangers a black woman faced in getting arrested. “I didn’t even know if I would get off the bus alive.”
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She knew that Claudette Colvin had been manhandled by police and others had been beaten or shot for their resistance. In her words, “As I sat there, I tried not think about what might happen. I knew that anything was possible.”
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Stories circulated through the black community, according to Doris Crenshaw, of “women being pulled off the bus and raped and not arrested.”
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Parks knew what could happen “but I was resigned to the fact that I had to express my unwillingness to be humiliated in this manner.”
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Parks thought about the possibility of resisting but decided not to put up any physical fight, even if Blake or the police got rough with her. “I didn’t have any way of fighting back. I didn’t have any type of weapon. And I would have been too physically weak to try to have done anything to protect myself against any of these policemen, you know, if they had decided to use violence in handling me.”
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Years earlier, in the bus incident with her mother, Parks had imagined using her hands if her mother was manhandled. But here she did not. Parks was a seasoned activist at this point and understood the value in not resisting arrest—the police had charged Colvin not just with a violation of the segregation laws but also with resisting arrest and assault. Still, faced with the possibility that she might be assaulted, she “wasn’t frightened at all,” she recalled in a 1956 interview.
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Rather, she was somewhat distracted, thinking about all she had to do for the upcoming Youth Council workshop and the December NAACP elections.
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Parks looked to her faith in this moment: “God has always given me the strength to say what is right.”
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She also attributed her courage to the history of the black freedom fighters who had come before her. “I had the strength of God and my ancestors with me.”
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Black women had a long history of bus, train, and streetcar protest, exposing the “irrationality of segregation,” according to historian Blair Kelley, and that evening Mrs. Parks extended the tradition.
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“I could not have faced myself or my people if I had moved,” Parks told a reporter in 1957.
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Framing her decision as a morally important one, Parks described it in terms similar to Gandhi’s ideas about the moral obligation of civil disobedience: “If I did not resist being mistreated, that I would spend the rest of my life being mistreated.”
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She highlighted the “artificial, legal” nature of segregation; to move from her seat legitimated the logic of it.
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Parks refused.

Parks’s frustration came also from how she was expected to act at work, tailoring clothes in the men’s department at Montgomery Fair, and how she was treated in public life. “You spend your whole lifetime in your occupation, actually making life clever, easy and convenient for white people. But when you have to get transportation home, you are denied an equal accommodation. Our existence was for the white man’s comfort and well-being; we had to accept being deprived of just being human.”
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Having spent the day altering and pressing white men’s suits, Parks again was being asked to lower herself so a white man could be convenienced. She refused. As she had learned from her mother and grandparents, part of being respectable was not consenting to the disrespect of her person.

Blake left the bus to call the supervisor from the pay phone on the corner. “I was under orders to call them first.” His supervisor told Blake to put the woman off the bus. “‘Did you warn her Jim?’ I said ‘I warned her.’ And he said . . . ‘Well, then, Jim you do it. You got to exercise your power and put her off, hear?’”
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Blake then called the police. Meanwhile, the tension on the bus grew. Most on the bus, black and white, feared what might happen. They did not want trouble, and many wished she would just stand up. Parks heard grumblings of conversation though she could not make out what they were saying.
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Some black people exited the bus. “I supposed they didn’t want to be inconvenienced while I was being arrested,” she surmised.
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Police officers Day and Mixon boarded the bus. The police were “the front line of the white segregationist army,” according to white Montgomery minister Robert Graetz. While the Klan had for many decades been the central force to keep black people in line, “that kind of illegal [activity] was no longer tolerated, at least officially. Nowadays the task of controlling Negroes was entrusted to the legally constituted constabulary.”
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Montgomery whites saw themselves as sophisticated. They did not have to resort to common vigilantism—at least publicly—and had entrusted the police with maintaining a severely segregated and unequal city. The law was up to the task.

Blake explained to the officers that he had asked for the seats and the “other three stood, but that one wouldn’t.” This phrasing angered Parks. “He didn’t say three what, men or women, didn’t refer to anything, just, ‘that one,’ pointing to me, ‘wouldn’t stand up.’”
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Blake addressed nothing further to Parks after he called in the officers.
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The first officer addressed Parks and asked her why she did not stand up when instructed to. Parks coolly asked back, “Why do you all push us around?”

He replied, “I don’t know but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.”
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Parks thought to herself, “Let us look at Jim Crow for the criminal he is and what he had done to one life multiplied millions of times over these United States.”
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As she exited the bus, one officer picked up her purse and the other her shopping bag. The police officers talked to the driver “secretly, however I did hear one say, ‘NAACP,’ and ‘Are you sure you want to press charges.’” The driver said that he did, and that he would come down after his next trip. The policemen were reluctant, but they had no choice.”
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Blake wanted to swear out a warrant and after he finished his run would come by to finish the paperwork.

In contrast to other troubles Parks had previously had on the bus, Blake
chose
to have her arrested, rather than simply evicting her from the bus.
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In an interview on February 5, 1956, Parks put the agency on Blake rather than on the officers, who were willing to just put her off the bus.
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That decision, according to E. D. Nixon, “was the worst thing ever happened to him.”
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There is no indication from this interview or others that the officers knew Parks, but they seemed to fear the NAACP and what it might do. At 6:06 p.m., the officers signed warrant 14256 charging Rosa Parks with violating
chapter 6
, section 100, of the Montgomery city code.

In an interview years later, Blake explained, “I wasn’t trying to do anything to that Parks woman except do my job. She was in violation of the city codes, so what was I supposed to do? That damn bus was full and she wouldn’t move back. I had my orders.”
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But in fact, she wasn’t in violation of the city code, and his orders from the supervisor had just been to have Parks removed from the bus—not specifically to have her arrested. That extra step, Blake’s vociferous defense of segregation and desire to see Parks punished, proved historic. As Parks observed, the first time she had trouble with Blake he had evicted her from his bus but hadn’t called the police. But this evening “he just felt like he wanted to throw his weight around or exercise his power beyond just enforcing segregation law.”
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This was how segregation worked more broadly, endowing a broad cross-section of white people with authority that could be wielded or not wielded at their discretion.

David Levering Lewis, in his 1970 biography of Martin Luther King, claims that Blake recognized Parks’s character, which prompted his decision to call the police rather than physically remove her from the bus.

Parks made the decision to remain in her seat through her own political will and long history of bus resistance. She did not make it because of E. D. Nixon or Myles Horton, though they had certainly been instrumental in her political development. She was not a Freedom Rider boarding the bus to engage in an act of intentional desegregation. If that had been the case, if Parks had been acting on behalf of the NAACP, her former classmate Mary Fair Burks explained, “she would have done so openly and demanded a group action on the part of the organization, since duplicity is not part of her nature.”
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Still, Rosa Parks was an experienced political organizer. She had been galled by bus segregation for years. So that evening as she waited the minutes for the police to board the bus, she thought about what Mr. Nixon would say and perhaps even how they might use this in their organizing.
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In the hundreds of interviews she gave around her bus stand, however, Parks rarely acknowledged thinking of Nixon during her arrest and what they might do. Because segregationists were so quick to call her an “NAACP plant,” she likely felt that any admission risked giving their slander credence. There is no evidence of any sort of plan, no indication till the moment presented itself that Parks knew she could summon the courage to refuse to move from her seat. It is likely that she, like many black Montgomerians, particularly after Colvin’s arrest, had thought and talked about what she would do if she were asked to give up her seat to a white person. But thinking or even talking about it and actually being able to act in the moment are vastly different.

But Parks was well aware of the political situation and the resources she would call on. “I told myself I wouldn’t put up no fuss against them arresting me. . . . As soon as they arrested me, I knew, I’d call Mr. Nixon and let him know what had happened. Then we’d see.”
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In another interview, she also mentions thinking about Nixon in that moment. “It was the only way I knew to let him [Nixon] and the, all the world, know that I wanted to be a respectable and respected citizen in the community.”
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And in a 1967 interview, she explained, “I had felt for a long time, that if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so.”
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