The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (11 page)

Parks looked to Clark and Ella Baker as role models as she sought to figure out how to be a woman activist when much of the visible leadership was made up of men and how to continue the struggle despite the vitriol of white resistance and the glacial pace of change. In spite of many years of political organizing, Parks still felt nervous, shy, and at times pessimistic about the potential for change. This process she went through is often missed in the romanticization of her bus stand as a spontaneous action without careful calibration. When Clark heard that Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat on the bus five months after returning from the workshop, she thought to herself, “‘Rosa? Rosa?’ She was so shy when she came to Highlander, but she got enough courage to do that.”
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Indeed, the popular view of Parks as either an accidental or angelic heroine misses the years of gathering courage, fortitude, and community, which then enabled her to refuse to give up her seat. To be able to understand how Parks could have said aloud in front of other political organizers that nothing would happen in Montgomery, return to her political work in the community, and then five months later refuse to get up, demonstrates the political will at her core. She might not believe that anything would happen in Montgomery, but that didn’t mean she would not try to demonstrate her opposition to the status quo.

Returning to her job at Montgomery Fair attending to the garments of white customers, no matter how rudely she was treated, was difficult.
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With few industrial jobs available in the city, most African Americans in Montgomery found themselves sequestered in service-related labor. In 1950, more than 60 percent of black women in Montgomery worked as domestics and 75 percent of black men were trapped in menial jobs. Only one in ten in Montgomery’s black community worked in a professional field.
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Having worked a series of sewing jobs, Parks had gotten the position at Montgomery Fair around Labor Day 1954.
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As the only black woman employed in the tailor shop (the tailor, John Ball, was black), she knew she was “setting a precedent.” The situation for black employees and customers at the store was a segregated one—which bothered Parks a great deal. Montgomery Fair was the most prominent downtown department store. Blacks were employed in certain positions but not as clerks. The lounge at the store was reserved for white employees, while the black women workers were confined to a small room by the toilets. Those black people who worked as cooks and dishwashers at the department store lunch counter had to buy their sandwiches and eat them elsewhere.
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Black people could shop at the store but couldn’t try items on. The store’s black workers felt this instability. “We had to just face each day not knowing what to expect; if we made any protest or even sometimes if we didn’t . . .”
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The tailor shop was in the basement of the department store. Parks worked in a small, stuffy back room, made even hotter by the large pressing irons. Because she was a woman, she was not required to fit the male customers. The tailor did that, and she completed the alterations.

“We wear the mask that grins and lies,” black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote in 1896. “With torn and bleeding hearts we smile.”
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The mask had never been easy for Rosa Parks. After Highlander it was becoming unbearable. Virginia Durr recalled in a letter to the Hortons in January 1956 that Mrs. Parks “felt so liberated [at Highlander] and then as time went on she said the discrimination got worse and worse to bear.”
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Upon returning to Montgomery, Parks informed Nixon that the Highlander workshop had strengthened her resolve around her Youth Council work. She hoped to impress upon them their worth as equal to other young people.

Just a few weeks after Parks returned from Highlander came the devastating news of the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. Till had grown up in Chicago but had gone to visit his uncle in Mississippi for a summer holiday. After making a comment to a white woman who ran a local grocery store, the young Till was kidnapped from his uncle’s house by her husband and brother-in-law, tortured, and then murdered. His body was dumped in the river. His mother fought to get his body sent back to Chicago and then had an open-casket funeral. Fifty thousand people saw his casket. Till’s mother also allowed
Jet
magazine’s photographers to take pictures so the nation would witness what had been done to her son. Parks wept at the photo of Till’s body published in
Jet
. The lynching outraged her.

Poet Nikki Giovanni connected Till’s murder and the killers’ subsequent acquittal to Parks’s decision to remain firm on the bus. Giovanni wrote, “This is about the moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that the young man in Money, Mississippi . . . would not have died in vain. . . . Mrs. Rosa Parks . . . could not stand that death. And in not being able to stand it. She sat back down.”
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Around that time, Montgomery had an incident similar to the Till murder. A young black minister Raymond Parks knew was killed for appearing to make an advance toward a white woman. “But the difference in this case from Till’s, Parks explained, was that “Emmett Till came from the North and the media picked it up. In this case, of course, it was kept very much hidden so that is why in, around Montgomery it was supposed to have been a good race relations, quote unquote.”
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The young man’s mother was “not supposed to complain. There were several cases of people that I knew personally who met the end of their lives in this manner and other manners of brutality without even a ripple being made publicly by it.”
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With Parks as secretary, the Montgomery NAACP in 1955 continued its voter registration campaign, supported Jeremiah Reeves’s legal defense, and protested Governor Folsom’s segregated inaugural ball. NAACP field secretary Mildred Roxborough, who stayed with the Parkses when she visited the branch, described her as “stalwart.” Parks “would go to meetings when other people were home lounging. . . . She wouldn’t miss meetings unless she couldn’t avoid it.” Parks didn’t talk a lot at meetings, but when she did, she “commanded by her demeanor a lot of respect.” Roxborough recalled that Parks felt the NAACP chapter “should be doing more than it was doing at that particular time.”
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While E. D. Nixon was no longer head of the Montgomery NAACP, and class tensions continued to plague black organizing in the city, Nixon’s own civil rights activism had not slowed down. A profile of Nixon in the
Chicago Defender
shortly after the boycott started referred to Nixon and Parks as “the two most active members in the local branch.”
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Nixon had complained to the Durrs when they first moved to town in 1951 that “the Negroes were all split up and jealous of each other and divided into cliques and you couldn’t get them together on anything.”
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In 1952, he was chosen president of the Montgomery Progressive Democratic Association. In 1954, Parks was elected secretary and Nixon chairman of the NAACP’s Alabama Coordinating Committee for Registration and Voting.

In early November 1955, Nixon invited New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell to speak to the Progressive Democratic Association. Along with black women in Harlem, Powell had organized “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns in the 1930s to target businesses that refused to hire black employees and helped lead a successful bus boycott in New York in 1941 that led to the Transit Authority hiring two hundred black workers. In his speech in Montgomery, Powell noted that the economic tactics of the White Citizens’ Council (WCC) “can be counter met with our own [black] economic pressure.”
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Powell met with Nixon, Parks, and others that night. His visit likely impacted Parks, Nixon, and many of Montgomery’s politically active black citizens, as these Southern activists drew inspiration and strategy from Northern protests.

On November 27, 1955, four days before she would make her historic bus stand, Parks attended a packed mass meeting at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The meeting called attention to a series of recent lynchings in Mississippi—the young Emmett Till’s murder as well as those of George W. Lee and Lamar Smith. Lee, a Mississippi grocer and Baptist minister, and Smith, a farmer, had both been murdered when they registered to vote and refused to back down to white pressure. Two days earlier, Lee’s friend and fellow activist Gus Courts had also been shot. Dr. T. M. Howard, who was spearheading the organizing around the Till case, gave the keynote speech that evening. After Till’s murderers were acquitted, Howard had embarked on a speaking tour across the country which included this stop in Montgomery. The meeting left a strong impression on Parks. Sickened by the detailed description of Till’s murder, she continued to think about this gruesome killing in the days after the meeting.
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Indeed, in the years preceding the boycott, Parks repeatedly struggled with the ways racial injustices were simply covered up to make it seem like all was well in Montgomery. “Everything possible that was done by way of brutality and oppression was kept well under the cover and not brought out in the open or any publicity presented.”
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Demonstrating dissent was crucial, even if it did nothing, so it would not be “taken for granted that you were satisfied.”
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Mrs. Parks steadfastly continued her work with the Youth Council “and the few young people that I could get to pay attention to what I was trying to get them to see about desegregation of the schools and other public facilities.”
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She was planning a big youth workshop for December 3 at Alabama State College.

Having been politically active now for two decades, Parks and Nixon, along with other Montgomery activists like Mary Fair Burks, Reverend Vernon Johns, Fred Gray, Jo Ann Robinson, and Alabama State professor J. E. Pierce, had tilled the ground for a movement. Yet local leaders continued to struggle with the fear and reluctance of many Montgomery blacks to unite across class lines to face the vitriol of white resistance. The small numbers of black people willing to take action weighed on Parks. Her heavy spirit, however, was about to lead her to an act of conscience and a season of courage bearing fruit few could have imagined.

“WHITES WOULD ACCUSE YOU OF
causing trouble when all you were doing was acting like a normal human being instead of cringing,” Rosa Parks explained.
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Such was the assumption of black deference that pervaded mid-twentieth-century Montgomery. The bus with its visible arbitrariness and expected servility stood as one of the most visceral experiences of segregation. “You died a little each time you found yourself face to face with this kind of discrimination,” she noted.
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Blacks constituted the majority of bus riders, paid the same fare, yet received inferior and disrespectful service—often right in front of and in direct contrast to white riders. “I had so much trouble with so many bus drivers,” Parks recalled.
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That black people comprised the majority of riders made for even more galling situations on the bus. Some routes had very few white passengers, yet the first ten seats on every bus were always reserved for whites. Thus, on many bus routes, black riders would literally stand next to empty seats. Those blacks able to avoid the bus did so, and those who had the means drove cars. Black maids and nurses, however, were allowed to sit in the white section with their young or sick white charges, further underscoring the ways that bus segregation marked status and the primacy of white needs.

Because Montgomery saw itself as a more cosmopolitan city than some of its Southern neighbors, signs or screens separating the black and white sections were no longer used.
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It was a “matter of understanding [of] what seats we may use and may not use,” Parks explained, with the power and discretion, particularly over the middle seats, “left up to the driver.”
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“The bus driver could move colored people anywhere he wanted on the bus,” Nixon reiterated, “because he was within his rights under a city ordinance.”
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The arbitrariness of segregation, the power and place it granted white people, was perhaps nowhere more evident than on the bus.

Some bus drivers were kinder, remembered Rosalyn Oliver King and Doris Crenshaw, letting black passengers sit in the white seats while they drove through the black parts of town. But the minute they crossed into a white neighborhood, most drivers would tell the black passengers to get up. Some drivers didn’t make black people get up when the white seats filled. “There were times when I’d be on the bus” Parks recalled, “and if what they called ‘White section,’ or ‘White Reserved seats’ were occupied and any white people were standing, they would just stand.”
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But kindness did not undermine the force and legal basis of segregation. The majority of drivers made black passengers stand over open seats and forced them to pay and reboard through the back door so they would not even walk next to white passengers. Jo Ann Robinson recalled the demeaning terms often used in addressing African American women—“black nigger,” “black bitches,” “heifers,” and “whores.”
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Dr. King elaborated: “‘Go on round the back door, N—r.’ ‘Give up that seat, boy.’ ‘Get back, you ugly black apes.” . . . ‘I’m gonna show you niggers that we got laws in Alabama.’ ‘N—r, next time you stand up over those white people I’m gonna throw you over to the law.’ ‘I hate N—rs. . . . Y’all black cows and apes, git back.’”
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For Rosa Parks, the education young children received in the mores of segregation hurt the most, as she hated to see children take an empty seat only to have their parents snatch them up and hurry them to the back before they got in trouble.
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