The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (16 page)

Parks made an active choice in that instance. As poet Nikki Giovanni framed it, “She saw the opportunity and she took it.”
¹⁶⁹
In the midst of the fear, humiliation, and inconvenience of being asked to give up your seat on a crowded bus, with the real possibility of violence for refusing, to see an opening is testament to Parks’s vision that December evening. In a moment designed to frighten and degrade, she was able to see herself as an agent and claim a space of choice. “It’s only a few people that you can find that can get a glimpse of . . . what is going to happen,” Reverend Johns observed, “and Rosa Parks was one of those rare people who could catch a vision.”
¹⁷⁰

But that agency was also harrowing. There were other people she knew on the bus, but none came to her defense. Calling it “one of the worst days of my life,” she said, “I felt very much alone.”
¹⁷¹
She fantasized about what it would have been like if the whole bus had emptied or if the other three had stayed where they were “because if they’d had to arrest four of us instead of one, then that would have given me a little support.”
¹⁷²
Parks had not expected that others would follow her or come to her defense on the bus—“I knew the attitude of people. It was pretty rough to go against the system.”
¹⁷³
In another interview, however, she admits to wishing they had and seems frustrated, though unwilling to admit it. “I possibly would have felt better if they had taken the same stand. But since they didn’t, I understood it very well. I didn’t bear any grudge against them.”
¹⁷⁴
In a later interview, she put it more starkly, “When I was arrested, no other person stood and said, “If you put this woman in jail, I am going to . . .”
¹⁷⁵
In numerous interviews over the years, Parks came back repeatedly to how hard her arrest felt in the moment, describing her stand in less than triumphal terms: “At times I felt resigned to give what I could to protest against the way I was being treated.”
¹⁷⁶

Parks believed in the responsibility of the individual to stand against injustice. In a speech in Los Angeles a few months after her bus stand, Parks stressed the solitary nature of the protest, which she saw following from the preceding years of relatively lonely activism. “My convictions [against segregation] meant much to me—
if I had to hold on to my convictions alone, I would
. . . . [Emphasis added.] Over the years, I have been rebelling against second-class citizenship. It didn’t begin when I was arrested.”
¹⁷⁷
Parks had taken a number of personal stands against segregation before her bus stand—refusing to use the “colored” bathroom, refusing to pay her money and then reboard the bus from the back door, drinking from the “white” fountain, insisting on taking her youth group to the Freedom Train. Here again, she drew a personal line with no way of knowing that a whole community would soon follow. As she described it in 1978, “There were times when it would have been easy to fall apart or to go in the opposite direction, but somehow I felt that if I took one more step, someone would come along to join me.”
¹⁷⁸
Getting arrested was considered a mark of shame, but Parks resisted this thinking.
¹⁷⁹

In the years subsequent to her arrest, and particularly in the past few decades, Parks’s decision to remain sitting has repeatedly been called a “small act”; even Parks, on occasion, minimized it. But there was nothing small about her action. Renowned black feminist Pauli Murray, in a tribute to Mrs. Parks in 1965, observed: “Here was an individual virtually alone, challenging the very citadel of racial bigotry, the brutality of which has horrified the world over the past few years.” Murray had also been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus, in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1940.

Parks also contextualized her decision within her role as a political organizer: “an opportunity was being given to me to do what I had asked of others.”
¹⁸¹
Seeing herself as part of a fledgling movement, she felt she had a responsibility to act on behalf of this larger community. She had been pushing the young people in her Youth Council to step up and contest segregation and had grown disappointed by the ways adults in the community “had failed our young people.”
¹⁸²
NAACP field secretary Mildred Roxborough recalled Parks’s “wonderment . . . thinking I had a role, I became an example of what I preaching.”
¹⁸³
On the bus that December evening, she saw herself at a crossroads and chose to make a stand.

In part, Parks acted because she had grown disheartened by pushing other people to take action who were reluctant to do so. She was frustrated by the Colvin case, by meetings and affidavits that went nowhere, and that December evening her discouragement transformed into confrontation. Indeed, her decision to act arose as much from frustration with the lack of change than a belief that her particular action would alter anything. “I simply did it because I thought nobody else would do anything,” she would later explain.
¹⁸⁴
But she also chose a more direct form of defiance, refusing to get up rather than just exiting the bus (as she had done previously).

Rosa Parks’s protest has often been reduced to the unwitting action of a quiet seamstress with aching feet. That explanation “started . . . after I moved to Detroit. I never heard it before I left the south,” Parks observed to a reporter in 1980.
¹⁸⁵
Parks critiqued these popular mischaracterizations:

Her quietness has been misread. She may have seemed “schoolmarmish but there was a storm behind it,” observed activist-journalist Herb Boyd.
¹⁸⁷
That evening, as she waited on that bus, there was thunder in her silence. Years later, Parks clarified what motivated her stand, reframing the discussion away from its narrow idea of a seat next to a white person to the actual goal of equal treatment and full human dignity. “I have never been what you would call just an integrationist. I know I’ve been called that. . . . Integrating that bus wouldn’t mean more equality. Even when there was segregation, there was plenty of integration in the South, but it was for the benefit and convenience of the white person, not us. So it is not just integration.” Her aim was to “discontinue all forms of oppression against all those who are weak and oppressed.”
¹⁸⁸

Time and again, Parks explained her protest as an intrinsic part of the political work she already was doing, vehemently denying that her protest stemmed simply from physical fatigue. In an August 1956 speech, she explained, “It is my opinion, it has always been and I’m sure it will always be that we must abolish such evil practices.”
¹⁸⁹
In 1958, she told a full church in Norfolk, “it wasn’t a decision I made that day but the people found out that I had made it long before.”
¹⁹⁰
And she pointedly made clear that her actions stemmed directly from political commitments she had carried all her life. “As far back as I can remember I knew there was something wrong with our way of life when people could be mistreated because of the color of their skin,” she told a thousand people gathered at an NAACP meeting in Baltimore in October 1956.
¹⁹¹
In a later interview with Howell Raines, she explained how her bus resistance “was just a regular thing with me and not just that day.”
¹⁹²
Parks was not unusually tired that day. The source of her decision was a resolve that had long gestated inside her. Simply put, Parks was tired of injustice—“tired of giving in”—and in that tiredness found determination.

In his first mass movement speech, Dr. King echoed this theme of metaphysical tiredness. “There comes a time,” King told the thousands gathered at Holt Street Church on the first night of the boycott, “when people get tired.” The crowd roared.
¹⁹³
King spoke of being “tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality.” In many ways, Parks and King tapped into a collective psychic saturation. As one Montgomery domestic explained, “You know, child, you can just take so much and soon you git full. Dat’s what happen here.”
¹⁹⁴

What Parks found that Thursday evening, what King articulated the following Monday, what black people in Montgomery realized was that the accumulation of tiredness at injustice brought courage and that courage brought a resolve that could withstand whatever lay ahead. In
Stride Toward Freedom
, King wrote, “No one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over. . . . Mrs. Parks’s refusal to move back was her intrepid affirmation that she had had enough.”
¹⁹⁵

Parks’s personal act grew out of the lessons she had taken from Highlander. Esau Jenkins stressed how Highlander’s philosophy of transformative personal action had operated that December evening. Highlander taught that “if you have to sit for your rights, sit for it. If you’ve got to crawl for it or wade for it or march for it or demonstrate for it, do that. If that’s what necessary to do at that time to bring the focus, the public, on the evil that is being happening to the people,’ and she said, ‘Well, I’m not going to get up this day.’”
¹⁹⁶
Parks’s experience at Highlander the past summer had given her new vision and raised her expectations. Durr wrote the Hortons crediting Highlander for its role in Parks’s action. After Parks got back from Highlander “she was so happy and felt so liberated,” Durr wrote, then as time when on “the discrimination got worse and worse to bear after having, for the first time in her life, been free of it at Highlander. I am sure that had a lot to do with her daring to risk arrest as she is naturally a very quiet and retiring person although she has a fierce sense of pride.”
¹⁹⁷
Septima Clark expressed a similar sentiment in a letter in 1956. “Had you seen Rosa Parks (the Montgomery sparkplug) when she came to Highlander you would understand just how much
guts
she got while being there.”
¹⁹⁸
Highlander had furthered Park’s sense of outrage and widened her sense of possibility.

“It was inside you the whole time,” Studs Terkel observed in an interview with Rosa Parks in 1973.
¹⁹⁹
Parks’s stand was a deeply political, principled act by a woman who well knew the danger of bus resistance. In her bravery, other people would find theirs as well.

PARKS’S FRIEND BERTHA BUTLER HEARD
from a woman who’d been on the bus that Mrs. Parks had been arrested, and ran to Nixon’s house to get his help.
¹
Nixon’s wife phoned him to inform him of Parks’s arrest. “You won’t believe it. The police got Rosa,” Arlet told him “but nobody knows the extent of the charges or whether she’s been beaten.”
²
Nixon tried calling the jail for information, but they told him it was “none of his damn business” and would not give him any information. He then telephoned Clifford Durr, who called and was able to learn the charge. After finding out that Parks was safe, Nixon was, in a measure, delighted, observing to his wife, “I believe Jim Crow dropped in our lap just what we are looking for.”
³
Nixon saw in Parks the kind of test case they had been seeking—middle-aged, religious, of good character, known and respected in the community for her political work, and brave. He explained, “If there ever, ever was a woman who was dedicated to the cause, Rosa Parks was that woman. She had a deep conviction about what she thought was right. . . . No one, nobody could . . . touch her morally, her character or nothin’.”
⁴
He continued, “The press couldn’t go out and dig up something she did last year, or last month, or five years ago.”
⁵
Perhaps most important for Nixon, Parks was a “real fighter” and wouldn’t be scared off by white backlash.
⁶
People had to be sure that “the person could stand up under fire and remain courageous through out the pressure of a long court fight,” explained Nixon, and he trusted Mrs. Parks’s resolve.
⁷

Word began to travel. Parks’s character and political experience made her a galvanizing figure in many sections of Montgomery’s black community. Working class in income (Parks made about twenty-three dollars a week) and middle class in demeanor, she represented a sympathetic class position for a wide spectrum of black Montgomerians to identify with. This—along with her comportment and faith—gave her a wide appeal, likely broader than if she had been poor or squarely middle class.
⁸
With a barber husband, a live-in mother, and her department-store job doing alterations, she was solidly working class. A devoted churchgoer at St. Paul’s AME Church, Parks lived in a tight-knit community in a modest apartment at the Cleveland Court projects—and Montgomery’s working-class west side rallied around her. At the same time, Parks’s community activism and church work marked her as a steadfast race woman—and thus many in Montgomery’s middle class were also outraged by her treatment on the bus. She was middle-aged, trusted, and demure, and while not economically middle class or college educated (characteristics that had tended to be the requisite for Montgomery’s black middle-class organizations), she had a character that many middle-class blacks admired—a “lady,” according to A. W. West.