The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (22 page)

Moreover, many city and business leaders reacted with surprise at the bus protest and downplayed its impact. “It hasn’t made any difference except to the bus company. I don’t know why there has been so much hullabaloo about it. . . . Most people are not paying any attention to it.”
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Some white leaders blamed the problem on a handful of “rough” bus drivers—and wished blacks had brought grievances to their attention, since they could have been remedied. Some even claimed that Parks’s arrest was the first they had ever heard of black problems with bus segregation. Nevertheless, underneath the resistance of many whites lay a grudging surprise and admiration. Researcher Anna Holden overheard a couple of women sitting at the Kress lunch counter talking about the “niggers”: “Well you can’t help but admire them. They’ve kept it up all through all this bad weather—walking in all this cold and rain.”
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Many whites who saw themselves as moderates nonetheless chose to sit by while other white people resorted to violence and economic retaliation against the boycott.

Faced with the city’s intransigence, the resolve of the MIA grew. Part of what spurred the determination of the boycotters in the early months was the city’s absolute unwillingness to grant the MIA’s initial modest demands. Robinson recalled, “They feared that anything they gave would be viewed by us as just a start. And you know, they were probably right.”
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Nonviolent direct action was not the way most white or black Montgomerians dealt with social problems. Like most Alabama whites (even liberal middle-class families like the Durrs), most black people owned guns. When Reverend Graetz was questioned in an interview during the boycott as to whether black people were going out to buy guns because of the protest, he said no. “Most negro families have guns, have always had them. . . . [They] didn’t rush out to get them. They already had them.”
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Nixon, Raymond Parks, and Jo Ann Robinson all owned guns. Even Dr. King, whose graduate studies had pointed him toward the power of nonviolent civil disobedience, came to organized nonviolence through the Montgomery boycott. Bayard Rustin recalled getting to the King home for the first time and finding armed guards and guns tucked into some of the armchairs. As he noted, “I do not believe that one does honor to Dr. King by assuming that, somehow, he had been prepared for this job. . . . The glorious thing is that he came to a profoundly deep understanding on nonviolence through the struggle itself.”
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Though never renouncing her long-standing belief in self-defense, Rosa Parks also saw the power and efficacy of organized nonviolence through the boycott. She grew tremendously impressed with the ways King used it to draw people together, maintain unity, demonstrate the collective power of the black community, and keep public attention trained on the protest. Given the ways that boycotters and particularly those people who drove the carpools were continually verbally and physically harassed by the police and white vigilantes, there was a tremendous potential for violence. And whites in Montgomery seemed eager for violence, disbelieving that black people could remain disciplined. Some even hoped for it, because it would have provided the excuse to dramatically crush the protest. According to Rufus Lewis, unified nonviolence disrupted the expectations of most white Montgomerian: “Whites can’t help but have high regard for Negroes now, since there has been no violence. There have been a number of good articles written by whites about the unity of Negroes.”
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Though “not altogether” converted, Parks saw that this nonviolent protest “was more successful, I believe, than it would have been if violence had been used.”
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“The colored people here are still not riding the bus,” Parks wrote to a friend at Highlander right before Christmas. “Private car pools and taxi cabs are co-operating to help under very trying conditions. The police are arresting drivers on the least provocation, in some cases for nothing.” In her letter, Parks described working “very hard” at Montgomery Fair but said she would not celebrate the holiday in “the usual way.” Her extra money was going to the MIA’s transportation fund.
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To put further pressure on the city, the MIA had called for a boycott of Christmas shopping—asking people to take the money they would have spent on Christmas and donate a third to charity, put a third in savings, and give the remaining third to the MIA to sustain the boycott. It would be a “more traditional, less commercial” Christmas for Parks’s family, befitting her religious and political ideals.

Parks corresponded with a number of people during this period, trying to get support for the boycott. One letter from Diane Shapiro, whom Parks had met at Highlander, noted, “We all knew about the bus strike but none of us associated it with you.”
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And help and mail poured in, much of it addressed to Parks. The most common gift was shoes, and Parks thrilled in “passing out the bounty,” according to Brinkley.
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On Christmas day, surprised by the city’s unwillingness to meet its modest requests, the MIA published an ad in the
Montgomery Advertiser
and
Alabama Journal
laying out its grievances. “The bus protest is not merely in protest of the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks but is the culmination of a series of unpleasant incidents over a period of years. It is an upsurging of a ground swell which has been going on for a long time. Our cup of tolerance has run over.”
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One of the hardest things for Parks during the first month of the boycott was the disdainful way she was treated at work. “They’d ignore me as though I wasn’t there,” she recalled.
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Many of the women in alterations who worked in the next room to her “refused to have any conversation or to speak to me at all. Those I would meet sometime walking through the store . . . acted the same way and didn’t even seem to let the crisis we were going through matter to them.”
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Parks worked “5 long tense weeks with people who did not speak to me even once after the bus incident.” She tried to ignore this behavior, refusing to respond to her coworkers’ rudeness, but it pained her nonetheless.

On January 7, 1956, a month after her bus stand, Montgomery Fair notified Rosa Parks they were letting her go. They had decided to close the tailor shop. When she asked why, they said the tailor was leaving to start his own business and they were not replacing him.
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She was a trained seamstress and could do the work of the tailor (stitching, sewing sleeves, hemming, and so on) but as a woman worker in a men’s shop “was not required to do any fitting of men’s clothing.”
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The only other worker at the shop was a young man with no tailoring experience. She received two weeks’ severance pay. When news spread through the black community that Montgomery Fair had fired her, an informal boycott emerged against the store.
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Some black people canceled their credit accounts at the store.
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A week later, Raymond was compelled to quit his job after his employer, Maxwell Air Force Base, prohibited any discussion of the boycott or Rosa Parks in the barbershop. Raymond Parks’s barber chair had long been a place of discussion and debate. Raymond had a large white clientele, and some of his white customers had drifted away after the boycott began. Others came in making belittling remarks about “that woman” on the bus, and now Raymond Parks was being muzzled. Moreover, one day Raymond had been eating his lunch in the base’s desegregated cafeteria when two white women sat down at the end of the long table where Raymond was seated. He stayed and finished his lunch, which angered a white man working in the concession.
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Overall, this was an untenable situation for a proud, political man, so Raymond Parks left his job at the base. The Parks family was now without income.

The phone rang constantly with death threats and coarse insults. “There were people who called to say that I should be beaten or be killed,” Parks recalled, “because I was causing so much trouble. And then there were some who called to inquire whether I had lost the job and . . . finally when I was dismissed from the job, I remember one person calling and saying she was sorry and then laughing at the end of the conversation before hanging up.” Most of the time she didn’t talk with these people. “When I discovered that they were this type, divisive or abusive, I would just hang up immediately.”
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Her mother and husband ended up answering most of the calls since they were home more than she was. Parks particularly hated it when her mother answered these calls.

According to Detroit friend Mary Hays Carter, Rosa reached a point of relative peace around her own possible targeting. She quoted Parks as saying, “Well you have to die sometime. I never set out to plan to hurt anyone and if this boycott happened to be attributed to me and my activity, then if they could kill me, I would just be dead,” and laughed it off.
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Partly, Parks was able to get to this place of inner peace because of her faith. In late January, praying at St. Paul’s, Parks experienced a wash of religious conviction and a sense that all of what was happening—her arrest, the boycott—was God’s plan. All she needed to do was to “keep the faith.” An intense calm swept over her.
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Like Parks, many of the boycott organizers were receiving regular death threats and hate calls. The King household was bombarded. According to
Jet
magazine, when people called in the middle of the night to threaten “that N—— who’s running the bus boycott,” Coretta Scott King would sometimes calmly reply, “My husband is asleep. . . . He told me to write the name and number of anyone who called to threaten his life so that he could return the call and receive the threat in the morning when he wakes up and is fresh.”
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Raymond, however, found this a difficult time and began drinking a lot. “He was very shaken and very upset . . . because we had lived under this tension for so long.” This period may have been harder on Raymond Parks and Leona McCauley than on Rosa Parks because it was they who were home answering more of the incessant hate calls and death threats. Rosa was away from home making appearances for the MIA around the country, so she escaped some of the daily vitriol that her husband and mother endured. For Rosa, the period of the boycott was also easier than her previous activism because “the public knew about it,” as opposed to the previous decades, when she was “without any mass cooperation or any support from either black or whites.”
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Numerous black women stepped up to ensure the boycott’s continuance. In the early days of the boycott, Georgia Gilmore and her friends had decided they would try to raise money for the emerging bus strike. While none of them had much money, they knew how to fund-raise and began to sell sandwiches, dinners, pies, and cakes to raise money each week. They came to be called the Club from Nowhere and presented the money they raised each week in the mass meetings. Another group of women, headed by Inez Ricks and calling themselves the Friendly Club, took up the challenge and began their own bake sales. A bit of a competition developed. Every Monday both clubs would present their fund-raising efforts at the mass meeting to a standing ovation.

“I learned much myself,” Parks later reflected. For her it was a lesson in organizing, in how people had to move past fear on their own and how much power they possessed once they did.

Parks had spent more than a decade before the boycott wrestling her own fear and drawing on her own faith to make stand after stand against racial injustice. She had grown disillusioned by the ways many others seemed unwilling to do the same. The unity the community maintained for the 382-day boycott was deeply inspiring.

Women provided the backbone of the boycott as walkers, drivers, organizers, and fund-raisers. But they didn’t necessarily say they were boycotting. As Virginia Durr explained, “Often I’d stop and pick them up. Never did one of them say that they were walking on account of the boycott. ‘No, ma’am, I don’t have nothing to do with that boycott. The lady I work for, she was sick this afternoon, and couldn’t drive me home.’”
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For protection, many black women feigned indifference and let the white women they worked for assume what they wanted about the protest—and then went on to the mass meetings at night. In interviews with Fisk researchers in the first months of the boycott, numerous white women claimed their black maids were too afraid to ride the bus and just wanted the boycott to be over. But the black women interviewed by black researchers were steadfast. “I’ll crawl on my knees,” one woman told a Fisk University researcher, “’fo’ I get back on dem buses.”
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Some women were forthright with their employers about their role and opinions in the protest. Forty-five-year-old Beatrice Charles described a confrontation with her employer, who threatened to fire her because of her support of the boycott. “Well Mrs. I just won’t come at all and I sure won’t starve. You see my husband is a railroad man, my son and daughter have good jobs and my daddy keep plenty of food on his farm. So I’m not worried at all, ’cause I was eating before I started working for you.” Another domestic, Dealy Cooksey, told of arguing with her white employer, who claimed King was just swindling Montgomery blacks. “I said back to her, ‘Don’t you sey nothing bout Rev[erend] King. You kin say anything else you want to but don’t you sey nothing ’bout Reverend King. Dat’s us man and I declare he’s a fin un. He went to school and made somethin’ out of hisself and now he’s tryin’ to help us. Y’all white folks done kep’ us blind long enough. We got our eyes open and now us sho ain’t gon let you close ’em back.”
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Both Charles’s and Cooksey’s employers backed down.