The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (24 page)

Fred Gray began looking for plaintiffs to bring this federal challenge to bus segregation. They wanted a diverse group—hoping to have at least one minister as part of the suit. Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin, and Mary Louise Smith had encountered discrimination on Montgomery buses and agreed to become plaintiffs in a civil action lawsuit.
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No men stepped forward to join them. Rather than make another defensive move following from an arrest, on February 1, they took a proactive step in challenging bus segregation by filing a class-action suit in federal court. Jeanetta Reese was named as the fifth plaintiff on the original suit but pulled out a day later, claiming she had not agreed to the suit. Both Reese and her husband had been threatened. When activist Bayard Rustin visited Reese in her home, she explained to him her decision to pull out, “I had to do what I did or I wouldn’t be alive today.”
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A week after the suit was filed, Fred Gray’s draft status was reclassified as 1-A. Then, in an attempt to disbar him, he was indicted for improperly representing Jeanetta Reese.

In late December, dismayed by the coverage of the Montgomery protest, Reverend Graetz wrote
Time
magazine a letter, criticizing as “one-sided” local coverage that “omitted pertinent facts that would have put a much more favorable light on what the Negroes are asking for.”
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Identifying himself as a white minister of a black congregation, Graetz asked the magazine to dispatch a reporter to the city to “get a good look at the way a one-way press and a one-race police force band together to discredit fifty thousand people who are tired of being treated like animals on the city buses, and who are registering their feelings by refraining from riding those buses.”
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Up to this point, the boycott had received scant attention in the national media, and the local white media, as Graetz pointed out, had sought to discredit it. The
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
initially had relied on the wire services to cover the protests. Black newspapers had been much quicker to recognize the historic significance of the boycott, sending reporters and covering it more extensively.

White resistance gained traction in February. On February 5, a riot erupted at the University of Alabama following the admission of Autherine Lucy, the first black student. The university subsequently expelled Lucy “for her own safety.” Angered by the federal suit, the city stepped up its harassment and began to look for new tactics, since the tickets and police intimidation had not worked to dissuade the boycotters. Dredging up a 1903 law that outlawed boycotts (in response to black streetcar protests), in February, the city called more than two hundred blacks to testify before a grand jury about who was behind the boycott.
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One hundred and fifteen boycott leaders (later reduced to eighty-nine)—including more than a half dozen women, including Parks and Robinson—were indicted on February 21, 1956.

To preclude King from being isolated and demonstrate that they had nothing to hide, the group decided to turn themselves in. “Efforts were being made to have [Martin Luther King] bear the blame for the boycott,” Reverend Solomon Seay explained. “Those poised for this important event in history did not allow him to bear the blame alone. We all decided to go to jail rather than wait for the arrests.”
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Parks, along with Nixon, were among the first to present themselves to the sheriff: “Are you looking for me? Well I am here.” As person after person was booked, the largest indictment in Alabama history, the atmosphere outside the county courthouse was proud, determined, and almost jubilant.

This mood was very different from that of her first arrest, two and a half months earlier. “We were surrounded by crowds of people,” Parks recalled, “and reporters, and photographers all across the country were on hand and when I went in to be fingerprinted and arrested there was a photographer to take our pictures and we had such a spirit of unity that there were people who felt somewhat left out when they were not among those arrested.” The interviewer then asked if it was “more popular to be arrested the second time than the first?” “Yes,” Parks replied. “The first time I was very much alone because none on the bus who witnessed my arrest volunteered to accompany me or show sympathy in any way.”
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The mug shot of Parks taken that February day—along with a photo of her being fingerprinted by police officer Drue Lackey (who would later become Montgomery’s chief of police)—would become iconic, often misidentified as the photo from her arrest on December 1.

While Parks and the others were inside, the crowd, many carrying shotguns, started getting restless. The police were increasingly worried.
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Reverend Simms described the scene: “Black women with bandannas on, wearing men’s hats with their dresses rolled up. From the alleys they came. This is what frightened white people. Not the collar and tie group.”

The arrests served to strengthen the feeling of resolve at the evening’s packed mass meeting at Abernathy’s church. Many ministers spoke—though Parks did not. Casting it as a conflict “between justice and injustice,” King called on the gathered crowd to “let nobody pull you so low as to hate them.”
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The crowd roared its approval.
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King went on, “I have done three things that are ‘wrong.’ First of all, being born a Negro. That is my first sin. Second being tired of segregation law I’ve committed the sin of being tired of segregation. I have committed the sin of being tired of the injustices and discrimination heaped upon Negroes. Third having the moral courage to sit up and express our tiredness. That is my third sin.” After King finished the speech people called out from the audience “Gone too far” and “Can’t quit now.”

The day of the arraignment, the
Montgomery Advertiser
ran an ominous story on its front page.

The indictments and increasing pressure served to galvanize the community and deepen its commitment. Indeed, according to Parks, the more resistance the protest sparked, the more determined they got: “The white segregationists tried to put pressure to stop us. Instead of stopping us, they would encourage us to go on.”
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The MIA’s demands stiffened to full desegregation of the buses.

On February 22, circuit judge Eugene Carter turned down Parks’s appeal of her December conviction and sentenced her to fourteen days in jail. Parks then appealed the decision to the state supreme court. Meanwhile, after their petition to dismiss charges against the remaining eighty-nine defendants was rejected, Gray and the other eight defense attorneys (all black, including Robert Carter of the national NAACP) asked for separate trials for each of the defendants. Determined to put the system on trial, they waived the right to a jury trial, which meant Circuit Judge Eugene Carter would decide all the cases.

The mass indictments and subsequent trial drew the national news media. The
Washington Post
’s editorial page called the indictments “a monumental display of folly” while terming the boycott “impeccably lawful, orderly, dignified—and effective.”
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The
New York Times
weighed in a bit tongue-in-cheek on the “crime wave” in Alabama that had led to the arrest of more than one hundred citizens for their actions related to the boycott, fearing that “the Communists, who hate democracy, will have this tragically true story to add to their existing assortment of lies.”
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Still, the
Times
added, “The wisdom of this boycott in a city where race relations are said to have long been good cannot be argued at this distance. . . . This newspaper has faith that the people, of Alabama, of whatever race, do in the majority believe in democracy. We have faith also that they have intelligence enough to realize that equal rights do not dictate to anybody of any race his choice of friends.” And in an article ten days later, a
Times
reporter described Gray and Graetz’s “drift away” from moderation as they now were calling for full desegregation of the buses.
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Moderation to the
New York Times
meant advocating for respectful, first-come, first-served segregation.

Reporters swarmed into Montgomery from all over the country. The
New York
Times
and
Washington
Post
sent their first reporters. Journalists from India, England, and France journeyed to Alabama to cover the trial. This coverage furthered the determination of black Montgomerians—the world was now watching their actions. Black congressman Charles Diggs of Michigan came as an “interested spectator,” bringing with him $5,000 from Detroiters to aid the boycott. The New Orleans Ministerial Alliance sent $3,000.

Many in Montgomery’s white community found this national exposure hypocritical, feeling like they (and the South more broadly) were being singled out by Northerners, even though the North had similar problems. As the boycott dragged on, newspapers like the
Advertiser
began publishing stories of Northern segregation. Some in Montgomery’s white community thought they should go for the “paper integration” favored by the North. John Hardt, who taught at Maxwell Air Force Base, lamented the attitudes of some white Alabamians, “Why can’t they go ahead and say ‘yes’ we’ll accept the Supreme Court decision and then do like they do in the North—manage the school districts so that there is actually little or no integration. You already have residential segregation and accepting the decision would mainly be a matter of accepting it on paper, with very little actual integration.”
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In March, when 19 senators and 892 congressmen issued the “Southern Manifesto” as a response to the
Brown
decision, Parks and white Fellowship of Reconciliation field secretary Glenn Smiley authored an unsigned statement from the MIA calling the manifesto “inflammatory.”
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Hoping to discredit the minister and break the back of the protest, the city decided to try Martin Luther King first and separately. The gallery was packed with scores of people jammed in the hallways, trying to get a peek at the proceedings. Numerous people testified about their decision to stop riding the buses, not on the direction of King or the movement but based on the mistreatment they had long endured on the bus. Those called to the stand were evasive on the movement and strategic in locating the protest in their own decisions and beliefs. As Gladys Moore testified on March 22, “Wasn’t no one started it. We all started it over night.”
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Raymond Parks and Sadie Brooks (the wife of Hilliard Brooks, who had been killed for his bus protest a few years earlier) testified to their own long-standing grievances.
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Raymond Parks spoke of two incidents on the bus that had given rise to his own decision to stop riding. One time a bus driver had refused to stop at the designated stop—and took the passengers ten to twelve blocks past the original destination. Another time a bus driver refused to pick up two women because they were black, and Raymond recalled hearing the term “nigger” being used multiple times. But Raymond refused to state directly why and when he had stopped riding the bus, frustrating the state prosecutor:

Raymond then testified that the morning of Rosa’s arraignment he rode the bus out to Maxwell and then came back for the trial and had not ridden the buses since. It is hard to assess the validity of that statement since nowhere else has it ever been suggested that Raymond did not boycott that first morning.
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Much of the national press was “overwhelmingly favorable, sometimes fawning” toward the boycott, according to Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in their study of the media and the civil rights movement. “For the first time in their lives . . . [they were] covering a story that had no grays.”
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Alistair Cooke of the
Manchester Guardian
, however, took pity on the economic costs being born by the city’s bus company and described Parks as “the stubborn woman who started it all . . . to become the Paul Revere of the boycott.”
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Wayne Phillips of the
New York Times
had a different take on the boycott. He credited Parks’s reputation as one of the keys to the protest movement “which was certainly strengthened by the fact that Mrs. Parks was an intelligent, hard-working woman with a strongly developed conviction that segregation was evil, a leader in her church and one of the leaders in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.”
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In May,
Browder v. Gayle
went before Judges Rives, Lynne, and Johnson. Reese testified for the prosecution, and, unlike the black people in the courtroom dressed in their Sunday best, appeared in her domestic uniform and was let in the back door by her employer, the sheriff.
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Claudette Colvin, according to historian Frank Sikora, was the “star witness.” Trying to provoke Colvin to admit to a conspiracy to boycott, the prosecutor asked who their leader was. Colvin testified, “Our leaders is just we, ourselves. . . . We all spoke for ourselves.”
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Mary Louise Smith also testified. At lunch after the testimony, Colvin met Smith for the first time. “I liked Mary Louise,” Colvin recalled, “and I was proud that two teenaged girls had stood up.”
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