The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (6 page)

Raymond was a longtime member of the Montgomery branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Begun in 1909 after a vicious lynching in Springfield, Illinois, the NAACP sought to realize the rights guaranteed to black people in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments. By the 1930s, and in particular in the wake of local organizing around the Scottsboro case, the organization started to build a grassroots base. Raymond attended branch meetings but in time grew disillusioned with the organization’s cautiousness and elitism. According to historian Dorothy Autrey, the Montgomery branch was middle-class dominated and lacked effective leadership in the 1930s.
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Black left activist Esther Cooper Jackson recalls meeting Raymond in the early 1940s. Esther Cooper Jackson and her husband, the American Communist Party leader James Jackson, had just moved to Birmingham and Esther began working with the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Her impression was that Raymond Parks was one of the “more advanced political activists in the union movement.” Decades later, after Rosa Parks became famous, Cooper Jackson would tell friends of meeting Raymond and describe his activism. They would be surprised, some remarking that they “didn’t even know she had a husband.”
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Raymond Parks’s politics helped provide fertile soil over the years for Rosa’s to grow. According to scholar and former SNCC activist Gwen Patton, he was a “revolutionary in his own right,” who decisively impacted Rosa’s political development.
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On Raymond’s urging, Rosa followed her desire to return to school and earned her high school degree in 1933. In 1940, according to Parks, “only 7 of every 100 black people had a high school diploma,” and she was extremely proud of the accomplishment.
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She never attended college, even though it was one of her “greatest desires.”
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Parks struggled to find work commensurate with her skills and education. Office work and secretarial jobs were almost nonexistent for black women in the South. While 8,491 whites were employed in 1940 as typists or stenographers in Alabama, only 140 black people had these jobs.
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Rosa thus scrounged to find employment—as a nurse’s assistant at Saint Margaret’s Hospital, as a presser at a tailor shop, and, during World War II, at Maxwell Air Force Base.

Rosa hated the ways some black people kowtowed to white authority. One time, while seeing some friends off at the train station, she was threatened and pushed by a white policeman. Another black woman was also treated rudely by the same officer but responded by flirting with him. “To me she showed a lack of respect for herself as a woman, and especially as a black woman.”
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Parks hated the ways black women had to use their sexuality to protect themselves from white power. She increasingly looked for outlets to contest that disrespect and to encourage others to do the same. Her own activist sensibility was growing.

IN DECEMBER 1943, ROSA PARKS
decided to go to a meeting of the Montgomery NAACP. Raymond had been an active member of the branch in the 1930s but had grown disenchanted with its cautiousness and elitism, which led some to look down on working-class men like himself, and had long since stopped going. Rosa initially had thought the NAACP was an organization open only to men. She had wanted to attend meetings with Raymond but he had initially discouraged her participation, saying it was too dangerous, particularly in the years around the Scottsboro case.
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But in 1943, she saw a picture in a black newspaper of Mrs. Johnnie Carr, her former classmate from Miss White’s School, attending an NAACP meeting. Parks had grown increasingly frustrated with the paradoxes of American democracy, further highlighted by U.S. participation in World War II. Black people like her brother were serving in the army to defend the United States and its freedoms but not granted that equality and freedom at home. “I had always been taught that this was America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. . . . I felt that it should be actual, in action rather than just something we hear and talk about.”
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Carr had also been active in the Scottsboro case, raising money for the young men’s defense and then joining the NAACP. Parks attended the December meeting, but Carr had not come that day. As the only woman there among a dozen men, Mrs. Parks was asked to take notes and then, because it was election day, to serve as branch secretary.
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“Too timid to say no,” she was then elected secretary of the chapter.
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She and Carr were typically the only women at the meetings.
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Her mother would follow her lead, becoming one of just a few women to actively join the local branch, though many Montgomery women were members of the national NAACP. Parks shortly met E. D. Nixon, a Pullman porter active in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the NAACP who was spearheading a campaign to get blacks in Montgomery to attempt to register to vote. Nixon’s wife, Arlet, sometimes came to meetings as well.

Working with a handful of committed local leaders in Montgomery, Rosa Parks joined the cadre of Montgomery activists that would lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement in the decade before the
Brown
decision. This decade of activism is often glossed over in standard accounts of the civil rights movement because it stands at odds with a more triumphalist narrative of civil rights. This was a difficult, dangerous, and ultimately demoralizing period for civil rights activists, as a growing black militancy stemming in part from the experiences of World War II met unyielding and increasingly aggressive white resistance and violence. Civil rights activism was often a lonely venture for people like Parks who toiled in relative obscurity because most of their fellow citizens, white and black, steered clear of the dangers of civil rights advocacy. The fortitude and faith it took to be an activist in Alabama in this decade is too often overshadowed by the events of the late 1950s and 1960s.

Popular narratives of the civil rights era often move briskly through the 1940s and early 1950s. The power and drama of the mass movement that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s—the boycotts and sit-ins, Freedom Rides and voter registration campaigns—are more alluring, the legislative and community successes more clear. And so it becomes all too easy not to linger in this earlier decade and rush ahead to the good parts. But there was nothing inevitable about the mass movement of the mid-1950s and early 1960s, which would not have been possible without this arduous spadework.

To be an activist for racial justice in the 1940s meant working without any indication that your efforts would be realized in your lifetime. It meant struggling against the fear and nihilism that white supremacy produced in order to continue tilling the soil for a mass movement to be able to flower. For a person like Rosa Parks, whose stand on the bus would come to be seen as ushering in a glorious new chapter of civil rights history, it first meant imagining that there could be a story, finding others who agreed, and then painstakingly writing it, word by word, for more than a decade to get to the good part.

The first real meeting between Rosa Parks and E. D. Nixon—a partnership that would change the course of American history—took place at Parks’s apartment. Nixon came to her home to speak to her about registering to vote and, seeing her interest, left a book on the subject for her to read.
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So began a working collaboration that would span more than a decade.

Born July 12, 1899, Edgar Daniel Nixon grew up just outside Montgomery in a family of eight kids. Nixon’s father was an itinerant preacher, and his mother died when he was a boy. Leaving home at the age of fourteen and largely self-taught, Nixon went to school for “only about 18 months in my entire life.” He worked a variety of hard physical jobs till he landed a job working in baggage for the Pullman Company, eventually earning a promotion to Pullman porter.
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Reminiscent of the antebellum South, the Pullman Company only hired black men to serve customers on overnight trains. Because the work was steady and the pay regular, the job was a sought-after position within the black community, though it required porters to attend meticulously to passenger needs, plumping pillows, taking orders, making the ride comfortable for white—and only white—passengers. For Nixon, at this juncture in his life, it was “the best thing in the world that ever happened to me.”
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A fiercely determined man, Nixon used the job to improve his reading and writing skills, partly by reading the newspapers and books people left on the train. He wrote down all the words he did not know in a small notebook and looked them up when he got back to his room.

His first trip to St. Louis as a Pullman porter was transformative. He explained,

In 1928, Nixon went to a meeting with labor leader A. Phillip Randolph, who was helping the porters organize a union. Randolph’s speech had a decisive impact on him. “It was like a light. Most eloquent man I ever heard. He done more to bring me in the fight than anybody.” Nixon joined the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a militant group of porters trying to organize and get recognized as the union. When he returned to Montgomery, his boss told him he’d heard that Nixon had attended a Brotherhood meeting and that was not allowed. Nixon had prepared his reply: “Before I joined it I thought about what lawyer I was gonna get to handle my case. Anybody mess with my job, I’m gonna drag ’em into court.”
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Nixon was bluffing but his boss backed down.

Nixon’s courage and political sensibility—a “Gandhi with guns,” according to Harrison Wofford, special assistant for civil rights to President John F. Kennedy—informed his lifelong conviction that racial inequality should be challenged directly.
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And with Rosa Parks at his side, he would confront the old leadership of Montgomery’s NAACP chapter, running for and winning the position of Montgomery branch president in 1945. Nixon, according to Parks, was “the first person beside my husband and my immediate family and my mother to really impress upon me the freedom that was ours and [that] we had to take a stand to at least let it be known that we want to be free regardless of the conditions under which we were living.”
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Like her accounts of getting to know Raymond, Rosa’s descriptions of the bold Mr. Nixon reflected how liberating she found meeting other race activists. Some people dismissed Nixon because he lacked formal education and class respectability. But Rosa Parks saw his substance. “In ways that matter . . . he was truly sophisticated.”
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After a period of renewed activism in the late 1930s that stemmed in part from the organizing around the Scottsboro case, the Montgomery NAACP had seen a precipitous drop in membership in 1940, losing 90 percent of its members.
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Through the work of local activists like Nixon and Parks and outside support from NAACP visionaries like Ella Baker, the membership rolls picked back up over the course of the 1940s. The branch primarily focused on legal cases, in an effort to challenge white brutality and legal lynching in the state. The chapter had also begun a campaign for voter registration. Only thirty-one black people were registered to vote in Montgomery out of several thousand. The application for voter registration required potential voters to identify their employer, their business and educational background, and any drug and alcohol use and pledge not to “give aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States Government or the government of the State of Alabama.”
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This exposed potential black registrants to direct retribution from that employer.

It also required a person to state whether she had “previously applied for and been denied registration as a voter,” providing another mechanism for denial. In order to register, potential voters, if they did not own property, were required to take a test. The registrar determined the questions on the tests, and often black people would be given more difficult tests than whites. Even people with PhDs and other advanced degrees had difficulty because the questions asked of black would-be registrants were obscure and nitpicking. People were “real discouraged,” according to Parks, because the voter registration board was “so hostile.” “If they didn’t come right out and be abusive,” Parks observed, “they would act as if you just weren’t supposed to be there even talking about registering to vote.” Customarily, a white person would have to vouch for each black person who wanted to register to vote. Even when black people succeeded in registering, their names would be printed in the newspaper (inviting possible retaliation). In addition, a successful registrant would be forced to pay poll taxes for each of the past years they had been eligible to register—a hefty sum for working-class families.
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Nixon had organized the Montgomery Voters’ League in 1940. In 1944, he assembled a group of 750 black people to go down to the courthouse and ask to register to vote.
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Rosa had to work, but her mother and cousin joined the group—and did succeed in getting registered. Nixon had called on the help of Arthur Madison, a Harlem lawyer who had grown up in Alabama. Viewed as a troublemaker by police, Madison was jailed for his attempts to register black voters and ultimately disbarred in Alabama. Parks was appalled by the ways the Montgomery NAACP did not stand up for Madison.