The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (21 page)

Parks’s role as a nonthreatening mother figure stemmed from the needs of the movement, which sought to cast her as a nondisturbing symbol, and also from her relationship with many of the young leaders. As Brinkley explained, “At forty-two years old Parks was also a natural maternal figure to the young ministers and lawyers who led the boycott: Gray was twenty-five, King was twenty-six, and Abernathy was twenty-nine.”
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Parks’s role as the mother of the movement largely precluded her from having a decision-making or strategic role despite her behind-the-scenes work, the scores of appearances she would make on behalf of the boycott, and her extensive political experience. She would be held up—and paradoxically relegated—to being its symbol.

Black people in Montgomery described their decision to stop riding the bus as “spontaneous” and “undirected” in part to prevent repression of their organization. Amazed by the militant unity of the boycott and fearful of backlash, organizers like Myles Horton echoed this, describing the boycott as “a spontaneous, unplanned, un-thought-out action that no one dreamed of.”
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However, the idea of the boycott as “spontaneous” would also take on a life of its own, distancing the movement from its own roots in the earlier activism of many of its organizers and the bus incidents that preceded Parks’s arrest. The seeds of the Parks myth—a “quiet seamstress” refuses to give up her seat and a “spontaneous” protest sets off the modern civil rights movement—emerged in the first days of the boycott initially to protect its organization from a vicious Cold War climate and longstanding Southern fears of outside influence.

Parks made her first appearance in the
New York Times
in a small wire-service article about the protest on December 6, described as a “Negro seamstress,” and was similarly identified by the
Alabama Journal
as a “seamstress at a downtown store.” Her address at Cleveland Courts was printed in the
Montgomery Advertiser
. The FBI followed the case “discreetly” from its Mobile office and passed all sorts of information along with newspaper articles to headquarters in Washington, DC.
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Parks’ role in the protest carried on far beyond that first day. “I did as many [things for the MIA] as I could.”
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By the next week, an elaborate ride and pickup system had been set up. “The effect has been most startling,” Parks wrote a friend from Highlander.
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People were walking in the most inclement weather, even for miles. And people had banded together to provide a system of rides, formal and informal, for people who needed them. Parks and her compatriots were thrilled and heartened. “Many are still saying they will walk forever,” she wrote, “before they will go back to riding the bus under the same conditions.”
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Part of how the “tired feet” explanation gathered so much historical force stems from a conflation of Parks’s decision to remain seated with a lovely quote from an elderly boycotter describing her own actions. In the early days of the boycott, Reverend Graetz recounted a woman telling him why she preferred to walk, “Well, my body may be a bit tired, but for many years now my soul has been tired. Now my soul is resting. So I don’t mind if my body is tired, because my soul is free.”
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King included this story in his speeches, often quoting her, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”
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The level of support across the black community was considerable. This was an all-black movement, stressed Ben Simms, a professor at Alabama State, who later became the transportation coordinator. “Of course we had white support but this was a black movement, planned and run by blacks.”
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The boycott was sustained by the development of the car pool. Organizers passed around slips of paper asking:
Can you drive in a car pool? Do you own your car? Insurance? What hours? Who will drive your car? What hours will you serve?
Approximately 300 people volunteered their cars. This goodwill and cross-class solidarity amazed Parks and other organizers. The car was a much-cherished possession and status symbol for the black middle class—and many had kept a studied distance from their poor compatriots. Organizers had originally feared people would be reluctant to have their cars used due to wear and tear and possible damage to their vehicles. Instead, the carpool powerfully drew together black Montgomery’s various economic and social classes.

The MIA established forty stations across the city. Drivers charged ten cents, like the bus. People would use the “V for victory” sign to identify themselves to riders and drivers, and the MIA took the “V” as its symbol on its membership cards. This solidarity was buttressed and maintained through the twice-weekly mass meetings that strengthened the collective resolve. Between 1,200 and 1,800 people packed each one, often with no standing room. Abernathy would often warm up the crowd: “Are you tired of walking?”

Despite the inadvertent role the
Montgomery Advertiser
played in publicizing the first day of the boycott, their coverage was decidedly negative. The paper was closely tied to Montgomery’s City Council, which may also have contributed to its ardent opposition to the protest. In an angry interview Joe Azbell gave to a Fisk researcher in March, Azbell called the boycott “stupid” and the work of a “small proportion” of “big operators” who “have their own cars and they feel important driving a few people around in them.”
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Azbell felt that Montgomery had been one of the “most liberal cities in the South” where “the white people here did everything for the Nigras—they gave them their schools, their hospitals—everything. . . . This is a slap in the face after all they have done for them all that good feeling that was there has been destroyed.”
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Rumors and misinformation about the boycott ran rampant, more so in the white community than in the black community. Blacks had more access to what whites thought, both through their employers and also the local papers. Despite the biased coverage,
Advertiser
readership remained high among black Montgomerians, according to black schoolteacher Sarah Coleman, because it was “our only channel to what the white community is thinking.”
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About a month after the boycott began, Fisk University, under the direction of sociologist Preston Valien, sent an interracial team of researchers to Montgomery to document the emerging protest. From January to March 1956, sociologists affiliated with Fisk University’s Race Relations Department conducted over three hundred field interviews, using black and white researchers, with black and white citizens of Montgomery. They also did participant observation at MIA mass meetings, dispatch stations, City Commission hearings, and White Citizens’ Council meetings.
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Rumors snaked through white Montgomery. Most white people were convinced Parks’s protest had been cooked up by the NAACP, others claiming a Communist plot, still others believing that the NAACP and the CP were in league together. Some white residents believed Parks had only been in Montgomery for two weeks, a few going so far as to claim that Rosa Parks was not even her real name. Others suggested Parks was actually Mexican and had a car.
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All made her a pawn of larger agents—rendering her action someone else’s decision. This was the segregationists’ version of events—that individual Montgomery blacks would not act in this militant, organized way, and so this action must be coordinated and inspired by an outside organization.

Over time the MIA was spending nearly $3,000 a week on transportation. Reverend Simms, who came to head the Transportation Committee in June, estimated the organization arranged fifteen to twenty thousand rides per day.
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Ultimately, it employed fifteen dispatchers and twenty full-time drivers. The car pool required tremendous synchronization, flexibility, and fortitude—all coordinated from a building at the edge of Montgomery called the Citizens Club. The police harassment was formidable. Police would often sit at the dispatch points and pull over each car that came through, asking for license and registration, intimidating drivers, giving them tickets for real and imagined infractions.

Parks worked for a month as a dispatcher, taking calls from people needing rides and patching them through to the forty-one different stations across the city.
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Stations were located in church parking lots, street corners, and stores and changed depending on police intimidation. In meetings and discussions, Parks urged patience and strength to boycotters—“Remember how long we had to wait when the buses pass[ed] us by without stopping.”
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She instructed drivers to pick up as many people as possible and to “be careful,” given the harassment the car pools were enduring at the hands of the police. Over time, the donated cars were supplemented with fifteen new station wagons bought with church money for extra protection. Since most white churches already had cars to take their parishioners around, it was difficult to complain about black churches doing the same. Known as “rolling churches,” each car had the name of the sponsoring church painted on the front.

The Parks fable depicts the Montgomery bus boycott as the first organized boycott. However, this urban economic action stemmed from a number of antecedents. In the 1930s, blacks in cities like New York, Detroit, and Chicago had boycotted businesses that refused to hire blacks. “Don’t buy where you can’t work” campaigns sprang up, spearheaded by black women and calling on blacks to boycott businesses that refused to hire any black workers. Then in 1953, Parks had watched with keen interest as a bus boycott broke out in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which resolved a week later when the city agreed to first-come, first-served seating on the bus. What happened in Montgomery was a grander, longer, and more unified economic movement that ultimately overturned bus segregation completely. But it was not cut from whole cloth in Montgomery in 1955, and it drew on the experiences of activists in other places.

The first days and weeks of the protest were deeply moving for Rosa Parks. Asked later if she ever worried the boycott would fail, she didn’t recall “ever feeling that there would be a failure even if it had not lasted the whole year. The very fact that people demonstrated their unity on the first day was very significant and to me that was a success.” That unity and collective action had demonstrated to Parks that “whatever people decided they wanted to do could be done” and buoyed her spirits amidst of fear and uncertainty of the boycott year.
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The boycott, according to Jo Ann Robinson, had a transformative power for it “allowed them to retaliate directly for the pain, humiliation, and embarrassment they had endured over the years at the hands of drivers and policemen . . . there was no need for family fights and weekend brawls.”
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On December 8, an MIA delegation including King, Robinson, and Gray (but not Parks) met with the mayor and city commissioners. They made three modest demands as a solution to end the protest: first-come, first-served seating on the buses, courteous treatment of passengers, and the hiring of black bus drivers. Even though Nashville, Atlanta, and even Mobile, Alabama, had first-come, first-served seating on their buses, Commissioner Crenshaw rejected this proposal, claiming “it just isn’t legal.”
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In the early days of the boycott, Parks called their goals more of a “request than a demand”: “we didn’t seem to be demanding too much then.”
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The
Montgomery Advertiser
ran an editorial calling the boycott a “dangerous weapon, like a missile that returns to its launching ground.” They reminded black leaders that “the white man’s economic artillery is far superior . . . and commanded by more experienced gunners” and that the “white man holds all the offices of government machinery.” The paper’s editors saw segregation and white power as a fixed truth, pronouncing, “There will be white rule for as far as the eye can see.”
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The
Advertiser
remained fairly steadfast in its anti-boycott coverage throughout the year, often refusing to print positive letters on the boycott because the editors felt it did “more harm than good.”
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At another meeting with city officials shortly before Christmas, Luther Ingalls, a member of the White Citizens’ Council, joined the negotiating sessions. Indeed, from the outset of the boycott and the
Montgomery Advertiser
’s first article, the boycott had been compared with the actions and philosophies of the White Citizens’ Council, which publicly advocated economic retaliation to prevent desegregation. Thus, in the paper and in public discussion, the MIA and the White Citizens’ Council were often cast as equivalents. When King protested the presence of people “whose public pronouncements are anti-Negro,” he was criticized for introducing mistrust into the meeting. White members of the committee accused Reverend King of dominating the discussion and having “preconceived ideas” himself. What is interesting in this exchange is not that King sparred with many of Montgomery’s white leaders but that the terms of the exchange sound so modern. The white committee members did not defend segregation as necessary to maintain white superiority. They saw the conflict as a disagreement of interest groups. King represented one interest group; the White Citizens’ Council represented another. King found, as biographer Taylor Branch explained, “that the whites sincerely believed that morality was neutral to the issue [of segregation] . . . depriv[ing] King of the moral ground he had occupied all his life.”
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The immorality of segregation would have to be demonstrated over and over in the months and years to come. Many, even in the Deep South, would cast segregation as a matter of personal preference and predilection, not power or social necessity.