Fifties (88 page)

Three other blacks boarded the bus and sat next to Mrs. Parks in the same row. Parks had already recognized the driver as one of the meaner-spirited white men who worked for the bus line. He had once evicted her from his bus because she had refused, on paying her fare, to leave the bus and reenter the black section from the rear door—another quaint custom inflicted on black Montgomery bus riders. Gradually, as the bus continued on its rounds more whites got on. Finally, with the white section filled, a white man boarded. The driver, J. F. Blake, turned to look behind him at the first row of blacks and said, “You let him have those front seats.” That was not a suggestion, it was an order. It meant that not only did one seat have to be freed, but the other three blacks would have to move as well, lest the white man have to sit next to a black. All four blacks knew what Blake meant, but no one moved. Blake looked behind him again and added, “You all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.” The three other blacks reluctantly got up and moved toward the back. Rosa Parks did not. She was frightened, but she was tired. She did not want to give up her seat, and she most certainly did not want to stand up the rest of the way. She had just spent her entire day working in a department store tailoring and pressing clothes for white people and now she was being told that she had no rights.

“Look, woman, I told you I wanted the seat. Are you going to stand up?” Blake said. Finally, Rosa Parks spoke. “No,” she said. “If you don’t stand up, I’m going to have you arrested,” Blake warned her. She told him to go right ahead, but she was not going to move.

Blake got off the bus and went to phone the police, thereby involuntarily entering the nation’s history books; his was the most
ordinary example of a Southern white man fending off any threat to the system of segregation. If it had not been Blake, it would have been someone else. Some of the black riders, sensing trouble, or possibly irritated by the delay, started getting off the bus.

Parks continued to sit. In so doing she became the first prominent figure of what became the Movement. Perhaps the most interesting thing about her was how ordinary she was, at least on the surface, almost the prototype of the black women who toiled so hard and had so little to show for it. She had not, she later explained, thought about getting arrested that day. Later, the stunned white leaders of Montgomery repeatedly charged that Parks’s refusal was part of a carefully orchestrated plan on the part of the local NAACP, of which she was an officer. But that was not true; what she did represented one person’s exhaustion with a system that dehumanized all black people. Something inside her finally snapped. But if she had not planned to resist on that particular day, then it was also true that Rosa Parks had decided some time earlier that if she was ever asked to give up her seat for a white person, she would refuse to do so.

Rosa Parks was often described in newspaper reports as merely a seamstress, but she was more than that; she was a person of unusual dignity and uncommon strength of character. She was born in rural Alabama in 1913 (she was forty-two at the time of her famed ride). Her father was a carpenter, and her mother taught school for a time. The family moved to Montgomery county when she was a girl, and while educational opportunities for young black girls in those years in Alabama were virtually nonexistent, she had the good luck to go to a special school for black girls, called the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls (also known as Miss White’s). There, New England schoolmarms, not unlike missionaries to foreign countries, taught young black girls who were barely literate the fundamentals of a primary education, as well as how to cook, sew, and run a home. Rosa was a serious reader, a quiet, strong woman much admired in the local community. She was an early member of the local chapter of the NAACP, eventually becoming secretary. She went to work for Clifford and Virginia Durr, a liberal couple in Montgomery (he was a former FCC commissioner in the Truman administration who left because he disagreed with its security process; Mrs. Durr was a formidable activist who frequently defied local racial mores).

Rosa Parks’s relationship with the Durrs showed the complexity of human relationships in the South, for she was both employee and friend. The Durrs were friends of Ed Nixon, one of the most militant
blacks of his generation, and Virginia Durr once asked Nixon, the head of the local NAACP, if he knew of anyone who “did good sewing.” (She had three daughters, so a good deal of raising and lowering of hems went on in her home.) Yes, he said, and mentioned his fellow officer in the NAACP chapter. Soon Rosa Parks started to sew for the Durrs. The two women became good friends, and their friendship defied Southern custom. There was a certain formality to the way they addressed each other; they could not, after all, be Virginia and Rosa—since Rosa Parks was not allowed to call Mrs. Durr Virginia, then Virginia Durr could not in turn call her Rosa. That meant the seamstress was always Mrs. Parks and the employer was always Mrs. Durr. (Once, Virginia Durr turned to her friend Ed Nixon and casually called him Ed, but he cautioned her: Since he could not yet call her Virginia, she would have to call him Mr. Nixon.) But Virginia Durr helped Parks attend the integrated Highlander Folk School, in Monteagle, Tennessee, a school loathed by segregationists because it held workshops on how to promote integration. At Highlander she not only studied the techniques of passive resistance employed by Gandhi against the British, she also met whites who treated her with respect. The experience reinforced her sense of self-esteem, and set the stage for the bus confrontation.

As the bus driver continued to shout at her, Parks thought to herself, how odd it was that you go through life making things comfortable for white people yet they don’t even treat you like a human being. There was something inevitable about this confrontation—a collision of rising black expectations with growing white resistance. At that moment in Montgomery, as in most deep South cities, school integration was still an abstract concept, something that had not yet happened and was not near happening. By contrast, riding a bus was the flashpoint, the center of daily, bitterly resented abuse.

Soon two Montgomery policemen arrived. Was it true that the driver had asked her to get up? they asked. Yes, she said. Why hadn’t she obeyed? She felt she shouldn’t have to. “Why do you push us around?” she asked. “I don’t know, but the law is the law, and you’re under arrest,” one of the policemen said. Only then did she get up. The police escorted her to the patrol car. The police went back to talk to Blake. Did he want to press charges? Yes, he answered. The police took Parks to jail, where she was fingerprinted and charged with violating the city’s segregation laws. She was allowed one phone call, and she called her home. Her mother answered and asked instinctively, “Did they beat you?” No, she said, she was physically all
right. She was the first person ever so charged—the first of many tactical mistakes on the part of city officials, for it gave the local black community what it had been seeking: the case on which to hang a lawsuit.

After her phone call home, the news of her arrest spread quickly through the black community. E. D. Nixon, Parks’s friend, called the police station to find out what had happened. Nixon was a Pullman car porter, a union man, and a powerful presence in the black community. For some twenty years he had been a black leader and activist in a town that despised the idea of racial change, and he became, in the process, absolutely fearless. There might be some blacks who did not like him, but everyone respected him, including some of the white leadership. For more than a decade, he had engaged in one of the most dangerous tasks of all—trying to register blacks to vote. On occasion, he did it carrying a shotgun under his coat. When Nixon called the police station to inquire about Rosa Parks, he was told it was none of his business. So he telephoned Clifford Durr, who said he would post bond. Nixon was not displeased by what had happened: This was the case he had been looking for. Mrs. Parks was the perfect defendant: She had worked with him in the NAACP for twelve years, and he knew she was a strong, confident person. If she said she was going to do something, she did it, and no amount of pressure from the white community would deter her. Her example would most likely give strength to others nervous about challenging the white establishment.

That night Parks, her family, the Durrs, and Ed Nixon sat around to discuss the details of her case. Nixon badly wanted to use it to test the constitutionality of the bus law. Would she agree, he asked, to be a test case? The idea frightened Raymond Parks, her husband, a local barber who knew the violence that traditionally awaited those blacks foolhardy enough to challenge the system. He warned her, “Oh, the white folks will kill you, Rosa. Don’t do anything to make trouble, Rosa. Don’t bring a suit. The whites will kill you.” She was torn. She did not want to put her family at risk, but neither did she want herself or the younger black people who came after her to face such indignities. Nor did she want to face them anymore herself. “If you think we can get anywhere with it, I’ll go along with it,” she told Nixon.

Nixon went home and sketched a map of Montgomery—where blacks lived and where they worked. The distances were not, he decided, insurmountable. “You know what?” he told his wife.

“What?” she asked.

“We’re going to boycott the buses,” he said.

“Cold as it is?” she answered skeptically.

“Yes,” he said.

“I doubt it,” she said.

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing: If you keep ’em off when it’s cold, you won’t have no trouble keeping ’em off when it gets hot,” he said.

In Montgomery the majority of bus riders were black, particularly black women who went across town, from a world of black poverty to white affluence, to work as domestics. Nevertheless, a black challenge to the bus company was a formidable undertaking. Despite the earlier ruling of the Supreme Court, the deep South remained totally segregated. Whites held complete political, judicial, and psychological power. In a city like Montgomery it was as if the Court had not ruled on Brown.

Before the whites would take the blacks seriously, the blacks had to take themselves seriously—that was the task facing the black leadership of Montgomery in December 1955. The previous minister at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church (a church that would be made famous by its young minister, Martin Luther King, Jr.) had been a forceful, articulate man named Vernon Johns. Some five years earlier, the Rev. Johns had endured a similar incident on a bus: He had misplaced his dime while trying to put it in the fare box, and the coin had dropped to the floor. Though it was an easy matter for the driver to retrieve it himself, he had ordered Johns to pick it up, in language that smacked of the plantation: “Uncle, get down and pick up that dime and put it in the box.” Johns refused and asked the driver to do it. The driver again ordered him to pick it up, or he would be put off the bus. Johns turned to the other passengers, all of whom were black, and said he was leaving and asked them all to join him. No one moved. A week later he saw one of his parishioners, who had witnessed the incident and done nothing. Before he could reproach her, she told him, “You ought to knowed better.” When he told the story to his close friend and fellow minister, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Johns had shaken his head, more, Abernathy thought, in sorrow than anger. “Even God can’t free people who behave like that,” the Rev. Johns had said. With that the Rev. Johns vowed never to ride the bus again and he bought a car.

For many blacks, the bus line symbolized their powerlessness: Men were powerless to protect their wives and mothers from its indignities; women were powerless to protect their children. The Montgomery bus system, with its flexible segregation line, vested all authority in the bus driver himself, which, depending on his personality
and mood, allowed humiliation to be heaped upon humiliation. There were, for instance, bus drivers who took a black customer’s money and then, while the customer was walking around to enter through the back door, would roar off.

The white officials of Montgomery had decided not only to resist integration in the years after the war but not even to listen to legitimate grievances from the black community. With every challenge to white authority, the city officials simply hunkered down and blamed outside agitators. Attempts on the part of black leaders to register more voters had failed, and there were estimates by the Justice Department after an investigation of Montgomery county’s voting procedures that as many as ten thousand blacks had been denied their political rights over a period of years. In the summer of 1954, a few months after the
Brown
decision, an older activist black minister named Solomon Seay took a group of black children to Lee High School to register them in the all-white school and was turned away. He subsequently went before the all-white Alabama board of education and, in words that had a biblical ring to them, protested that changes were surely coming. “There is going to be a second day of judgment,” the Rev. Seay warned, “and a worst day of judgment, if we don’t all do what we can peacefully.... There are ways in which integration can be worked out in a peaceful process, and if we don’t find these ways, then we will be punished. Let me emphasize I am not threatening you, just prophesizing.”

Yet the most visceral anger of Montgomery blacks was reserved for the bus system. Four days after the Supreme Court had ruled on
Brown,
a black leader named Jo Ann Robinson wrote a letter to Montgomery’s mayor telling him of the growing resentment blacks felt about their treatment on the buses, reminding him that more than three quarters of the system’s riders were blacks and mentioning the possibility of a boycott. For Mrs. Robinson, a professor at Alabama State, a black college in Montgomery, the issue was particularly emotional. In 1949 she had boarded a bus to take her to the airport. It was near Christmas, and her arms were filled with the packages from holiday shopping. She was on her way home to Cleveland. She had gotten on the nearly empty bus, and, without thinking, sat down in the white section. Suddenly, the white bus driver appeared, his arm drawn back as if to hit her, and shouted, “Get up from there! Get up from there!” “I felt,” she later said, “like a dog.” She stumbled off the bus, and, in her own words, completed the trip to Cleveland largely in tears. But later, as she replayed the events in her mind, she became angrier and angrier; she was a human
being too and, if anything, a better educated one than the driver. What right did any human have to treat another this way? When she returned to Montgomery after her vacation, she mentioned the incident to some of her friends, hoping to start some kind of protest. She was surprised by their lack of response: They assured her that this was life in Montgomery, Alabama. Not forever, she thought. Six years later, at the time of Rosa Parks’s protest, Mrs. Robinson had become president of the Women’s Political Council, an organization of black professional women. Her group had only recently won a major victory, entitling black customers to have the titles Mr., Mrs., or Miss used with their names when they received their bills from downtown white merchants.