The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (9 page)

The Montgomery NAACP worked for years to free Reeves. Parks personally corresponded with him and helped get Reeves’s poetry published in the
Birmingham World
and the
Montgomery Advertiser
. Buried in the papers that Parks donated to Wayne State University are clippings from the
Montgomery Advertiser
of March 27, 1958 (the day before Reeves was executed), which ran two of Reeves’s poems, “Don’t Forget About Me” and “God Calls a Little Boy.”
⁸⁹
The poems had stayed with her.

Parks strove to find evidence to prove the white woman was lying and even thought about going out to talk to the woman herself. Her friend Bertha warned, “‘Girl you know your mother and husband aren’t going to let you go out there.’ But I was ready to risk it if I could have found someone else to go along with me.”
⁹⁰
On March 28, 1958, Reeves was executed. “Sometimes it was very difficult to keep going,” Parks admitted, “when all our work seemed to be in vain.”
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Under Parks’s leadership, the Youth Council was rejuvenated in 1954.
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Many parents were reluctant to have their children involved. “At that time,” according to Parks, “the NAACP was considered far too militant or too radical, or too dangerous.”
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Zynobia Butler Tatum, an eighth grader and the daughter of Parks’s friend Bertha Butler, who was also active in the NAACP, became the secretary of the Youth Council.

Butler and Parks both lived in the Cleveland Courts projects, the Parkses in apartment 634. Opened in 1937 for blacks (while Jefferson Courts opened across town for whites), the Cleveland Courts projects represented decent, if cramped, segregated housing for poor and working-class African Americans, with modern cooking facilities and indoor plumbing. The sense of community was palpable, made richer for the Parkses by Rosa’s Aunt Fannie’s family also residing there. After spending some time in Detroit, Rosa’s mother had also come back to live with them. Rosa and Raymond did not have children. In a 1981 interview, Parks noted, “That was one thing missed.”
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The property was maintained by the government, which in these early years proved to be more reliable than many white landlords.
⁹⁵
Montgomery’s housing segregation was fierce. Decent homes or rentals for black people were exceedingly scarce, even at premium price. For working-class blacks, the problem was even worse. Most properties lacked proper sanitary facilities: 82 percent of blacks lacked hot water in their homes, and nearly 70 percent used chamber pots and outhouses (compared to 6 percent of whites).
⁹⁶
Indeed, by the mid-1950s the inadequate quality and shortage of housing for blacks had reached crisis proportions, according to Reverend Robert Hughes, a white minister who was executive director of the Alabama Council for Human Rights.
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Reverend Palmer, a black pastor, noted the city’s failure to repair and maintain the sewers and streets in black neighborhoods only to declare certain black areas “slums” in order to take over the land, a tactic Northern municipalities like Detroit were also using.
⁹⁸
There were almost no park facilities available for black people, as most of the city’s parks were white-only (black people weren’t even allowed to cut through them).

The Youth Council met most Sundays at the Parkses’ apartment, except for special occasions when they had speakers and would meet across the street at Trinity Lutheran Church. It was a small group, Doris Crenshaw recalled, and many parents wouldn’t allow their children to join. “Our meetings were to be serious,” recalled Zynobia Butler. Parks stressed “listening skills, taking notes, and neatness. . . . I didn’t appreciate having to redo things so often.”
⁹⁹
Indeed Mrs. Parks highlighted comportment and respectability to the Youth Council and taught her young charges the importance of being active.
¹⁰⁰
She taught them what had been instilled in her: respectability meant maintaining your own self-worth, comporting yourself properly, and expecting respect from those around you. When Parks took Youth Council members to downtown Montgomery they “always drank from the white water fountain without incident.” According to member Claudette Colvin, most of the young people in the group, unlike her, were the children of professionals. Some went to private schools, “Whenever they said they planned to go North for an education after they graduated, Rosa would scold them, ‘Why should your families have to send you North? Our colleges right here could offer a good education, too—but they’re segregated.’”
¹⁰¹

Odaliah Vaughn Garnier joined the Youth Council and appreciated how political Mrs. Parks was compared to her own mother.
¹⁰²
She registered to vote as soon as she turned eighteen, following Parks’s instructions at their NAACP meetings. Mrs. Parks encouraged the young people to take more direct action. Doris Crenshaw was eleven when she joined the Youth Council, along with her sister. She became vice president of the Youth Council at twelve and president as a college freshman, and recalled Parks stressing their rights and the power of the vote. They traveled the state attending meetings, doing citizenship education, and urging adults to register to vote, helping prepare them for the questions on the test, and meeting other active young people. According to Crenshaw, “They had this long, thick voter registration questionnaire that people had to answer to vote. We would go over the questionnaire with them and encourage them to go down and vote . . . people were very fearful of registering to vote. So we encouraged them to go down, to not be afraid.”
¹⁰³
In these trips, the young people met various NAACP activists across the state. Parks also made connections and tried to find funds to enable these young people to attend college.
¹⁰⁴

Parks also helped organize the Youth Council to challenge segregation directly, including protests at the main library, which did not allow blacks to check out books, requesting to be served. “They did this again and again” but were unsuccessful in changing the practice. Parks drew solace from the action-oriented nature of the young people she worked with: “One of things I did like about the youth . . . [is] they started right in to write letters to Washington [about anti-lynching legislation] . . . they didn’t spend a lot of time arguing over motions and there was a difference in their way of conducting their meetings . . . from the senior branch.”
¹⁰⁵
Many young people were warned by their parents and teachers not to get involved in civil rights. “There was this very popular phrase saying in order to stay out of trouble you have to stay in your place,” Parks recalled. But then, she added, “when you stayed in your place, you were still insulted and mistreated if they saw fit to do so.”
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In the years before the boycott, the network of personal and political ties that would form the initial infrastructure of the boycott took shape in Montgomery. Parks became friends with Fred Gray, a young black lawyer who had moved back to Montgomery and begun attending NAACP meetings. Gray had attended Alabama State for college but went to Western Reserve University Law School in Ohio to attain his law degree, taking advantage of Alabama’s willingness to pay out-of-state tuition for black students so the state didn’t have to desegregate the law school. Gray became the twelfth black lawyer in Alabama and the second in Montgomery.
¹⁰⁷

Parks saw his potential as a civil rights advocate and for nearly a year regularly walked to Gray’s office from her department-store job to have lunch and discuss Montgomery’s problems. “We became very good friends,” Gray explained. In these regular conversations, Parks helped Gray “get on his feet” and encouraged his law practice to pursue issues of racial justice. “She gave me the feeling that I was the Moses that God had sent Pharaoh and commanded him to ‘Let My People Go.’”
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Like many in Montgomery’s black community and across the country, Parks, Gray, and Nixon were heartened by the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in
Brown v. Board of Education
. Excited about the prospect for real change, Parks saw “more possibility of not having to continue as we had.”
¹⁰⁹
Nixon and several others escorted twenty-three black school children to the newly built all-white William Harrison School. “They wouldn’t let them stay there,” Nixon recalled. “They run them out, and they run me out too.”
¹¹⁰
At an NAACP meeting, the group decided to approach the school board directly to press for a desegregation plan. The branch also began to solicit signatures from parents to push for the implementation of
Brown
in Montgomery. A few parents signed, and the NAACP chapter presented the plan to the Board of Education at the opening of school in 1954.
¹¹¹
In response, Parks noted, the Board of Education published names and addresses of those signatories, opening them to “any type of harassment that might be inflicted . . . and to intimidate us as a people.” Faced with this hostility, black parents were unwilling to pursue the case further and take the city to court. While in the minority, Nixon felt the branch hadn’t done enough and continued to press the chapter—along with the national organization—to do more about implementing the decision.
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The Board of Education continued to stonewall; Parks thought the situation was “hopeless.” She grew discouraged in the wake of
Brown
by the “apathy on the part of our people.”
¹¹³
Expanding the vote continued to be a pressing issue for both Nixon and Parks. In the summer of 1954, Nixon was named chair of a voter-registration effort for the Second Congressional District in Alabama and Parks the corresponding secretary.
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Working for the NAACP was unpopular and dangerous in the mid-1950s. At a meeting in September 1955, the branch leadership discussed fears that their mail was being tampered with.
¹¹⁵
Hostility to the organization grew precipitously in the wake of the
Brown
decision. “Today the NAACP sounds like an easy kind of phrase,” Studs Terkel observed in 1973 in an interview with Parks, “a fashionable kind of word to say, safe, but in Montgomery, back in ’55 . . .”
¹¹⁶
Parks, in an interview in 1967, was hard-pressed to account for “what we actually accomplished” in Montgomery.
¹¹⁷
There were “almost no ways” to see any discernible progress around segregation, despite the various activities of the organization.
¹¹⁸
Nixon too lamented to a reporter that “these crackers have did a good job of keeping the Negro afraid and also keeping him unlearned.”
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At the urging of both E. D. Nixon and Virginia Durr, in the summer of 1955, Parks decided to attend a two-week workshop at the Highlander Folk School entitled “Racial Desegregation: Implementing the Supreme Court Decision.” The Durrs had worked with Nixon on various civil rights cases, and on Nixon’s recommendation, Parks had started sewing for the Durr family, one of Montgomery’s most liberal white families. Due to their politics, the Durrs had been ostracized by many white friends and colleagues, Clifford giving up a position at the Federal Communications Commission in Washington because he refused to sign a loyalty oath. Virginia was even more of a firebrand, chairing Henry Wallace’s 1948 Virginia campaign (Wallace was the Progressive Party’s candidate for president), running for Senate herself on the Progressive ticket, and going head-to-head with Senator James Eastland when he called her in front of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee on charges of having Communist ties. The Durrs moved back to Montgomery in 1951 (both Virginia and Clifford had grown up in Alabama). Most white Montgomerians wanted nothing to do with them, making Clifford’s law practice in these years somewhat precarious and Virginia quite isolated. The Durrs had three daughters and not a lot of money, in part stemming from this red-baiting, and their relatives would send them old clothes to help out. Needing more income for her family, Parks began sewing for them in 1954, altering the clothes to fit the three girls and fashioning some of the garments for the Durrs’ daughter Lucy’s wedding trousseau. Durr and Parks spent a lot of time sitting and talking. Despite and alongside the gulf between white and black women in 1950s Alabama, the two grew friendly, though Parks maintained a certain formality with her employer.
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A member of Highlander’s board of directors, Durr had seen the work Parks was doing with the NAACP Youth Council and knew how discouraged Parks had grown. As Parks recalled, “After that, I began getting obscene phone calls from people because I was president of the youth group. That’s why Mrs. Durr wanted me to come up here and see what I could do with this same youth group when I went back home.”
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Myles Horton had cofounded the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, in 1932 as a grassroots, interracial leadership training school for adults. The school held workshops to help local people develop strategies for pursuing social change and cultivate their own leadership skills. In the mid-1950s, Highlander, which had been integrated from its beginnings in the 1930s, had started to turn its attention to civil rights, having previously concentrated on labor and anti-poverty organizing, largely with white Appalachians.

The Supreme Court had issued its historic ruling in
Brown
in 1954 but put off the implementation order of the decision for another year, often referred to as
Brown II
. While
Brown
declared school segregation unconstitutional,
Brown II
in 1955 called for a “prompt and reasonable start to full compliance” and returned oversight for the implementation of desegregation to the states, which needed to proceed “with all deliberate speed.” Without a specific timetable and with white resistance to desegregation mounting, this second decision allowed for delay and malfeasance. Civil rights activists and community leaders realized that they would have to press to ensure the decision was actually enforced. Myles Horton saw the need for a workshop focused explicitly on these questions of school desegregation implementation. Though blacks had previously numbered about 10 to 15 percent of Highlander’s participants and had not spoken much at the meetings, the workshop Parks attended signaled a change. About half the participants at that workshop were black, and people participated avidly.