The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (19 page)

The foregrounding of Parks’s respectability—of her being a good Christian woman and tired seamstress—proved pivotal to the success of the boycott because it helped deflect Cold War suspicions about grassroots militancy. Rumors immediately arose within white Montgomery circles that Parks was an NAACP plant. Indeed, if the myth of Parks put forth by many in the black community was that she was a simple Christian seamstress, the myth most commonly put forth by Montgomery’s white community was that the NAACP (in league with the Communist Party) had orchestrated the whole thing.

Most whites, however, did not seem to know of Parks’s actual work with the association. Curiously, the
Montgomery Advertiser
never publicized Parks’s connections to the NAACP. Strategically, then, the success of Parks as the symbol of the boycott turned, in part, on obscuring her long-standing political activity.
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Her history of activism became a secret to keep the movement safe—and she and others would dissemble by calling her a simple seamstress. It was a well-kept secret. It does not appear that state officials, during the boycott, were aware of Parks’s NAACP history or other political activities, as these facts were not mentioned when the state outlawed the NAACP in June 1956.

Parks herself would even try to deflect the significance of her action on the bus, particularly when she was interviewed by white journalists during the boycott. She would say she did not know why she kept sitting, but it had been a long day and she did not believe she should have to give up her seat. She gave a more extensive explanation of her decision to black journalists in all-black contexts, or to organizers she trusted; later, with scholars or other interviewers, she would be willing to contextualize her action in her broader history of activism. Given her reserved personality, Parks tended to downplay her own actions and as a seasoned political activist understood the importance of foregrounding the roots of this movement in the broader mistreatment of the black community.

The seeds of the “simple tired seamstress” myth were thus planted in the early days of the boycott to mitigate the repressive atmosphere of the Cold War. Parks’s militancy was played down in service of the movement, but the image of her as a tired seamstress would assume a life of its own.
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Even when black Montgomerians prepared a twenty-year anniversary commemoration of the boycott, there would be a sharp disjuncture between how Parks’s action was described in the public program (“a weary seamstress . . . refused to give up her seat to a white man”) and how it was referred to privately among the organizers (“this brave and lonely act” where Parks “refused to continue voluntarily submitting to segregated seating on public buses in Montgomery Al.”).
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Similarly, the myth of Parks as a plant and her bus stand as a preplanned, staged event has lived on, but the origins of this myth in efforts by Montgomery’s segregationist community to discredit the boycott have long been forgotten.

The myths also assumed a gendered hue—though her job title was “assistant tailor,” she would come to be referred to as a “seamstress.” This feminized and Americanized her, evoking another famous American seamstress, Betsy Ross.
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Reverend French even referred to Parks as a “typical American housewife who shared in the support of her household by working as a seamstress in a downtown department store.”
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Over time, the downplaying of Parks’s status as a skilled worker had significant consequences for her and her family. The civil rights community would have difficulty recognizing that the loss of her job and the impossibility of finding another had tremendous consequences for her family’s economic security.

Parks’s physical attractiveness and composure—her being “above all . . . a lady” as one boycotter put it—were placed front and center in the story.
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Robinson highlighted Parks’s ladylike demeanor: “She was too sweet to even say damn in anger.”
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Referring to her as an “attractive seamstress,” King noted Parks’s radiant persona, describing her as “soft spoken and calm in all situations. Her character was impeccable and her dedication deep-rooted.”
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Alabama State professor L. D. Reddick described Parks in an article for
Dissent
as “ideally fitted for the role . . . attractive and quiet, a churchgoer who looks like the symbol of Mother’s Day.”
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Originally describing her as a “civic leader” on December 11, the
Atlanta Daily World
came to prefer more gendered descriptions of her as “a fine, up-minded, meek-mannered, Christian woman” (the contortions of describing a person who willingly risked an arrest as meek-mannered notwithstanding). The
Chicago Defender
called her “the attractive little spark that ignited the now famous Montgomery, Ala. Boycott.”
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Regularly, descriptions of Parks noted her beauty and adherence to 1950s gender norms. The background material distributed about her by the NAACP described her wearing “smartly tailored suits . . . [who] likes to cook, especially roast and bake drop cookies.” As the boycott went on, the NAACP would urge Parks to “obtain 81/2 x 11 glossy prints of yourself for publicity purposes.”
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There was a fixation on how she dressed. Alma John, who interviewed Parks for her New York radio program in May 1956, gushed, “Neighbors, I wish you could all see and meet Mrs. Parks. She is one of the most serene, one of the most beautiful women we’ve had the honor to meet. . . . She has on a beautiful straw hat, black and white with a little fluted straw around the edge. And she’s wearing a very smart dressmaker suit that has a gold and black thread running through it and a white bishop’s neck blouse.”
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Youth Council member Rosalyn King remembered that Parks dressed “simply” and “very matronly” and seemed older than she was because of her mannerisms and appearance.
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Articles in the black press during and even after the boycott stressed that she “did not look like a woman that would start a revolution.”
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The fact that the middle-aged, lighter-skinned Parks did not physically resist arrest—like the young darker-skinned Colvin—furthered the construction of her as the proper kind of symbol. And her beauty became part of what made her the right kind of woman to coalesce around. Horton in 1956 directly addressed why Parks’s arrest set off the reaction it did: “Rosa is . . . not only an attractive person to look at but has a beauty of character and was recognized by the people of Montgomery as a person of real dignity and a person that whom [
sic
] everybody respected. . . . She kind of symbolized some of the finest womanhood in the South. Since she’s been active in civic affairs, church work and all, it was just too much to have a quiet, dignified, intelligent person like Mrs. Parks humiliated.”
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Acknowledging Parks’s physical beauty, Horton’s choice of phrasing—
some of the finest womanhood in the South
—strategically claimed a gendered citizenship and stature for Mrs. Parks that contrasted with the ways she and other black women were treated in Montgomery.

On Sunday, King evoked the “awful silence of God,” calling on his congregation to join the one-day boycott to challenge “the iron feet of oppression.”
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Other black ministers across the city followed suit. Not only did the ministers’ participation in the boycott provide an important mechanism for disseminating news of the protest in a space free of white control, it also provided some protection from charges of red-baiting.

One white minister also joined the call. On Friday, Parks spoke with Reverend Graetz, whose church, Trinity Lutheran, sat next door to the Cleveland Court projects. Robert Graetz had assumed the pastorship of the black Trinity Lutheran Church in 1955, and he and his wife had been viewed as racial oddities since moving to Montgomery from Ohio. The Graetzes sat in the “black” section at the movies. Local whites shunned them in stores. Graetz had heard of the arrest and plans for the boycott but as a white man (even though he ministered to a black congregation) was having trouble getting much information on the events. So he called one of his closest black acquaintances, Rosa Parks, who used his church for her Youth Council meetings. “I just heard that someone was arrested on one of the buses Thursday,” he said to her.

That Sunday, like the Reverends King and Abernathy, Reverend Graetz stood in his pulpit and gave a Christian interpretation of Parks’s arrest and the impending one-day boycott. He told his black congregation of his plans to participate in the boycott and to make his own car available to help shuttle people around town, and urged his congregation to do the same.
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On Saturday, Parks hosted the already-planned NAACP Youth Council workshop at Alabama State College. Only five young people came. Having devoted a great deal of effort to set up the workshop, she was extremely discouraged by the turnout and increasingly anxious about what Monday would bring.

That Monday, people woke up early. Martin and Coretta King were dressed by 5:30 a.m. Martin believed if 60 percent of the black community stayed off the bus, the protest would be a success. A bus rolled by nearly empty of black passengers; another bus passed empty. They were elated. Nearly every black person in Montgomery had stayed off the bus. It was a magisterial sight: the sidewalks and streets of Montgomery filled with black men, women, and children walking, waiting, offering rides to people they knew or had never met. “It was really surprising,” Georgia Gilmore, a cook and midwife who in the days to come would emerge as a key organizer and fund raiser, recalled. “We thought well maybe some of the people would continue to ride the bus. But after all, they had been mistreated and been mistreated in so many different ways until I guess they were tired and they just decided that they just wouldn’t ride.”
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“Gratifying” and “unbelievable” were the words Parks used to describe the sight that Monday morning—the way people “were willing to make the sacrifice to let it be known that they would be free from this oppression.”
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The reaction far surpassed anything she had ever seen. For Parks, this movement had been long in coming, but that December morning it had arrived. “As I look back on those days, it’s just like a dream. The only thing that bothered me was that we waited so long to make this protest.”
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In a 1966 interview, Parks asserted that her most vivid memory from the entire year of the boycott was waking up December 5, looking out, and seeing the buses “almost completely empty.”
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Robinson explained the “hopeful, even prayerful” feeling that greeted the morning. Most people had not slept well, afraid the one-day action would fail and “the proud black leaders of the boycott would be the laughingstock of the town.”
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But this was not to be. “A quality of hope and joy” marked the day, Durr wrote a friend.
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Montgomery Advertiser
reporter Azbell described the mood as “solemn” and noted no black people spoke to white people.
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Parks dressed carefully for her court hearing: “a straight, long-sleeved black dress with a white collar and cuffs, a small black velvet hat with pearls across the top, and a charcoal-gray coat.” She carried a black purse, and wore white gloves.
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Mrs. Parks well understood the importance of image to this protest, and she chose her outfit to reflect a dignified and proud citizenship, an in-your-face challenge to the degradation that segregation had long proffered. Rosa and Raymond Parks and E. D. Nixon assembled at Fred Gray’s law office at 8 a.m. to figure out the last-minute details and then walked the block and a half over to the courthouse.
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“I was not especially nervous,” Parks recalled. “I knew what I had to do.”
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Hundreds of people stood outside court and packed the corridors of the courthouse by 8:30 that morning to demonstrate their support. A number of the members of Parks’s Youth Council skipped school to attend.
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Upon hearing the news, Mary Frances, one of Parks’s Youth Council members, observed, “They’ve messed with the wrong one now,” turning it into a small chant.
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The crowd cheered when she entered the building and called out their willingness to help with whatever she needed. For Nixon, the turnout was astonishing. In the twenty-five years he had been organizing, “I never saw a black man in court unless he was being tried, or some of his close friends or relatives.”
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Up and down the street, “from sidewalk to sidewalk,” it was clear that a new spirit had been brought forth in Montgomery. “The morning of December 5, 1955,” Nixon proclaimed, “the black man was reborn.”
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Parks felt an enormous sense of relief. The assembled multitude buoyed her spirits: “Whatever my individual desires were to be free. I was not alone. There were many others who felt the same way.”
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Judge John Scott heard Parks’s case in City Recorder’s Court. The courtroom itself was segregated, with blacks on one side and whites on the other. Parks, Gray, and the city prosecutor stood. The trial lasted less than thirty minutes. “It was a very emotional experience,” Gray recalled, “because, not only was I representing Mrs. Parks as her attorney, but we were friends. In addition, this was my first case with a large audience. . . . Was I nervous? Maybe a little. Was I determined? You bet.”
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