The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (18 page)

According to WPC founder Mary Fair Burks, Rosa Parks “possessed sterling qualities” that those in the civil rights establishment “were forced to admire in spite of their usual indifference.”
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Initially Burks was surprised to hear that Parks had been arrested. Having attended Miss White’s school with Rosa, she remembered her as a “quiet, self-composed girl . . . [who] avoided confrontations and suspension.” Yet those same qualities had also enabled Parks to make this stand. After “reflect[ing] on what I knew about her,” Burks noted, “I decided it had not been out of character after all. No, Rosa as a rule did not defy authority, but once she had determined on a course of action, she would not retreat. She might ignore you, go around you, but never retreat.”
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As the community began to react following Parks’s arrest, Claudette Colvin experienced a rush of mixed feelings: “I was glad an adult had finally stood up to the system, but I felt left out. I was thinking, Hey I did that months ago and everybody dropped me. . . . They all turned their backs on me, especially after I got pregnant. It really, really hurt. But on the other hand, having been with Rosa at the NAACP meetings, I thought, Well maybe she’s the right person—she’s strong and adults won’t listen to me anyway.’”
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Decades later, Colvin reflected on the community reaction. “When I look back now, I think Rosa Parks was the right person to represent that movement at that time. She was a good and strong person, accepted by more people than were ready to accept me. . . . Mine was the first cry for justice and a loud one. I made it so that our own adult leaders couldn’t just be nice anymore.”
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Parks also reflected on why her case incited people to react more than Colvin’s had. “Now in the case of this young girl I just mentioned, the dissatisfaction and the resentment was very prevalent. But I never did know why they didn’t take the stand in her case as they did mine, unless it was because by my being a mature, middle-aged person, it probably created more sympathy. And I had been working in the community enough for people to know that I didn’t initiate this trouble that came on and that it was unjustly put on me.”
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While people proved more willing to stand by Parks than Colvin, part of what spurred that resolve was community anger at the city’s empty promises following Colvin’s arrest. As black teacher Sarah Coleman explained, “When the high school girl was arrested last spring . . . the bus company promised us they would do something and in six months they never did anything.”
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A number of people in Montgomery, including Parks, shared Burks’s criticisms about the “the usual indifference” of many blacks in Montgomery. King wrote of the “tacit acceptance of things as they were” by the black middle class and the “passivity of the majority of the uneducated.”
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This complacency was rooted largely in fear—fear of being publicly singled out, fear of economic retaliation, fear of imprisonment, fear of violence—the arsenal of weapons whites used well to maintain the racial status quo. A hard life could be made even harder, and the many small comforts of the middle class could quickly disintegrate. “I have known Negroes killed by whites without any arrests or investigation,” Parks explained. “This thing called segregation is a complete and solid . . . way of life. We are conditioned to it and make the best of a bad situation.”
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Amidst that fearsome climate, Johnnie Carr noted, “Many Negroes lost faith in themselves.”
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Indeed, Alabama State professor J. E. Pierce, a longtime NAACP member, initially opposed the one-day boycott because he did not believe the black community would stick together.
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King had also been struck by the “appalling lack of unity” among Montgomery’s many black leaders and feared the division “could be cured only by some miracle.”
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Parks thought her bus incident “would pass without too much notice as many others had.”
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Before going to bed, Nixon remembered one more person he needed to tell and telephoned Parks’s childhood friend and fellow NAACP activist Johnnie Carr, informing her “they put the wrong person in jail.” Carr was dumbfounded. “You don’t mean they’ve arrested Rosa Parks,” she asked Nixon incredulously.
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Carr was surprised. “I was noisy and talkative, but she was very quiet and stayed out of trouble. . . . She was so quiet you would never have believed she would get to the point of being arrested.”
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Explaining the plans to pursue the case, Nixon informed Carr he had to leave town on a Pullman run for the weekend, but that there was much work she and Mrs. Parks would need to attend to.
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Not everyone went to bed that evening. The boycott was actually called by the Women’s Political Council.
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While the news of Parks’s arrest spread like wildfire, “a numbing helplessness seemed to paralyze everyone,” according to Jo Ann Robinson. “There was fear, discontent, and uncertainty. Everyone seemed to wait for someone to
do
something, but nobody made a move.”
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The neighborhood was “buzzing,” according to Rosalyn Oliver King, Rosa’s neighbor at Cleveland Courts.

Gray had called Robinson to talk about Parks’s arrest. Robinson called the WPC’s leadership. Rather than risk having their efforts thwarted as they had been in Colvin’s case, they decided to call for a one-day boycott of Montgomery’s buses on Monday—the day Mrs. Parks was scheduled to appear in court.

Despite the dangers of being a black woman out in the dead of night, Robinson left home for Alabama State College. With the help of two students and a colleague who gave her access to the mimeograph machine, Robinson stayed up all night making leaflets announcing the one-day boycott. The leaflets, printed three to a page because they had thousands to make, read,

Noting the economic clout the black community had vis-à-vis the buses, the leaflet reminded readers this was the second arrest since Colvin’s and “the next time, it may be you, or your daughter, or mother.” The leaflet stressed the mistreatment of African American women—perhaps in the hope that this would gird people’s resolve to act.

Robinson called Nixon around 3 a.m. to tell him of their plans—but she didn’t inform Rosa Parks. In fact, Robinson claims that after talking to Fred Gray on the phone, she jotted down some notes on the back of an envelope which read, “The Women’s Political Council will not wait for Mrs. Parks’s consent to call for a boycott of city buses.”
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This note, and Robinson’s conviction that she didn’t need to obtain Parks’s consent or to even apprise her of the one-day boycott, likely stems in part from Robinson’s determination to act quickly and in part from the class divisions in Montgomery’s black community. Though Robinson and Parks had worked together previously, they moved in very different circles. The fact that the reserved Parks had a long history of political activity was not necessarily known to Robinson.

Between 4 and 7 a.m., Robinson and her students mapped out distribution routes for the notices.
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In the early morning, they were met by nearly twenty women who ensured that “practically every black man, woman and child in Montgomery knew the plan and was passing the word along.”
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Over the next days, the WPC distributed more than thirty-five thousand leaflets to barber shops, stores, bars, factories, and at Dexter Avenue Church, where the ministers would meet Friday night.

When Robinson arrived back on campus to teach her class that morning, there was a message for her to report to the president’s office. President Trenholm had found out about the leaflets and was furious, “so angry his cheeks just quivered.”
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Exhausted, and worried that she was going to be fired, Robinson summoned her resolve. “I described the frequent repetition of these outrages, how many children, men, and women, old and middle-aged people, had been humiliated and made to relinquish their seats to white people.” Trenholm’s mood softened. Robinson promised to keep Alabama State out of their activities and paid the college back for all the leaflets.
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Early the next morning, Nixon began calling Montgomery’s black ministers. Nixon wanted to get things in place before leaving on his Pullman run. He made his first call to the Reverend Ralph Abernathy of First Baptist Church and then around 6 a.m. called a relatively new minister in town, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.—to convince them to support the protest. Nixon saw in King the kind of mind, spirit, and oratorical ability to help galvanize the community. King was new to Montgomery and didn’t have set alliances, enemies, or much of a public reputation, making him a useful choice in trying to unify the ministers behind this bold action. And perhaps most important, Nixon wanted to use King’s church to hold the meeting because Dexter Avenue was centrally located in downtown Montgomery.

Nixon recounted his initial conversation with King. “When he heard me talk about how long it’d take and how hard the struggle would be, he wasn’t sure. He was a young man just getting started in the ministry. His family was young. His wife had given birth to their first child, a little girl, less than a month ago.” King hesitated that early December morning on what he could realistically commit to, saying to Nixon, “‘Let me think about it a while and call me back.”
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After making some more calls, Nixon called him back. Having already spoken with Abernathy, King quickly assented. Nixon, Abernathy, and King worked through the morning to get other ministers to turn out that evening. By the end of the boycott, Dr. King had gained a national profile. Nixon, however, always reminded people, “If Mrs. Parks had gotten up and given that cracker her seat, you’d never heard of Reverend King.”
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Parks, on the other hand, always stressed that she wasn’t a single actor. “Four decades later I am still uncomfortable with the credit given to me for starting the bus boycott. Many people do not know the whole truth. . . . I was just one of many who fought for freedom.”
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Before leaving on his run, Nixon had one more person to meet—a young white reporter for the
Montgomery Advertiser
named Joe Azbell. Nixon and Azbell had known each other for several years. Nixon handed Azbell a leaflet, telling him he had an important exclusive and apprising him about the plans for the boycott. Azbell ran a front-page story on Sunday reprinting the entire leaflet—thereby guaranteeing that those blacks and whites who had not heard of the boycott were now well informed.
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The two local television and four radio stations also picked up the news of a boycott. The protest was now a public event. Indeed it was “panicky white folks,” according to Nixon, who helped make the boycott an initial success and increased police presence, which further dissuaded people from riding the bus. “We couldn’t have paid for the free publicity the white folks gave our boycott,” Nixon noted.
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Parks went to work as usual on Friday but took a cab.
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The tailor was surprised to see her. “You don’t think that going to jail is going to keep me home, do you?” she quipped.
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Trying to keep a low profile, Parks maintained her composure throughout the days surrounding her arrest, never reaching “the breaking point of shedding tears.”
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The
Montgomery Advertiser
ran its first story on the bottom of page nine, headlined “Negro Jailed Here for ‘Overlooking’ Segregation.” Later that day, the supervisor came by the tailor shop, clearly displeased with the news of Parks’s bus arrest.
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During her lunch break, Parks took her lunch as usual to Fred Gray’s office. To her surprise, she found a swarm of media and learned of the plans for the Monday protest.
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Jet
magazine “started taking my picture and asking questions.”
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She was not particularly keen on all the attention and never made a statement to the
Advertiser
. Nixon called to tell her of the meeting at Dexter Avenue Church that evening.
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She asked what it was about; he replied, “You know—about your being arrested.” She agreed to come.
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That evening, Parks went to the church, slightly nervous. “At that point I didn’t know whether my getting arrested was going to set well or ill with the community—the leaders of the black community.” Nearly fifty ministers and other local leaders, including physicians, schoolteachers, lawyers, and union leaders, had gathered to discuss the plans for Monday, but the meeting began poorly. Reverend Roy Bennett, whom Nixon had put in charge, lectured at those gathered for a half hour, without a mention of Parks or the boycott. People started to leave. Even King joked with a friend about wanting to go but being unable to because it was at his church. Finally, others were allowed to speak. Parks addressed the group and, according to historian Douglas Brinkley, “explained to them her weariness with Jim Crow buses, the circumstances of her arrest, and the need for collective action in response to both. Gender was on her side with this crowd: with a touch of chauvinistic chivalry, many of the ministers did not want to be on record as abandoning a good Christian woman in need.”
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And the forty-two-year-old Parks, who had served as a deaconess and Sunday school teacher at St. Paul’s, was certainly a good Christian woman. Jo Ann Robinson also took the floor and extolled the need for action. Ultimately, the ministers decided to promote the one-day boycott.

The paradox was this: Parks’s refusal to get up from her seat and the community outrage around her arrest were rooted in her long history of political involvement and their trust in her.
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However, this same political history got pushed to the background to further the public image of the boycott. Parks had a more extensive and progressive political background than many of the boycott leaders; many people probably didn’t know she had been to Highlander, and some would have been uncomfortable with her ties to leftist organizers. Rosa Parks proved an ideal person around which a boycott could coalesce, but it demanded publicizing a strategic image of her. Describing Parks as “not a disturbing factor,” Dr. King would note her stellar character at the first mass meeting in Montgomery, referring to “the boundless outreach of her integrity, the height of her character.”
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