The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (13 page)

Nixon’s entreaties to the city had also been met with stonewalling, blame shifting, and claims that black people voluntarily chose these practices. Indeed the defense of segregation in a Southern citadel like Montgomery was not univocal. At times its white citizens invoked the political and moral necessity of segregation, while at other times, like their counterparts in the North, they denied that there was a problem or that the city was responsible for it. And like their Northern brothers, Southerners claimed that segregation was not institutional but a matter of personal predilection, that black people preferred it this way too. According to Parks, when Nixon complained to the bus company about black people being told to go around to the back door after paying their money, “they told him your folks started it—they go because they want to do it.”
⁴⁶

By 1955, frustration was hitting new levels. Early that year, the daughter of a minister was arrested, but, according to Nixon, “her father didn’t want her to be part of a movement like that.”
⁴⁷
So nothing further was pursued.

Then on March 2, 1955, Claudette Colvin boarded a bus home from school and refused to budge when the driver ordered her to move. Fifteen years old, the tiny Colvin—who Virginia Durr described as a “little gosling”—attended Booker T. Washington High School. Politicized by the legal mistreatment of her classmate Jeremiah Reeves, Colvin had just written a paper on the problems of downtown segregation. “We had been studying the Constitution in Miss Nesbitt’s class. I knew I had rights.”
⁴⁸
On the bus home that day, the white section filled up. A white woman was left standing. The driver called out, and the three students sitting in Colvin’s row got up. She did not. The standing white woman refused to sit across the aisle from her. “If she sat down in the same row as me, it meant I was as good as her,” Colvin noted.
⁴⁹
The driver yelled out again, “Why are you still sittin’ there?” Colvin recalled. “A white rider yelled from the front, ‘You got to get up!’” A girl named Margaret Johnson answered from the back, “She ain’t got to do nothin’ but stay black and die.”
⁵⁰
There were thirteen students on the bus that day, most of them her classmates.

The driver, Robert Cleere, then called the transit police. In the midst of this, a pregnant neighbor of Colvin’s, Mrs. Ruth Hamilton, got on the bus and, unaware of what was taking place, sat down next to her. When the policeman arrived on the bus, there were now two black people in the row. Initially, Hamilton also refused to get up. But upon the scolding of the police, a man in the back got up and gave Hamilton his seat. Colvin held fast, saying that she was tired of standing for white people every day. “If it had been for an old lady, I would have got up, but it wasn’t.” Colvin refused to surrender her seat because “I didn’t feel like I was breaking the law.”
⁵¹
And indeed, in Montgomery, city code asserted that black people should not have to get up if there wasn’t an open seat. Because the transit policeman could not make an arrest, at the next stop the bus was met by a squad car.

The two cops boarded the bus. The driver, according to Colvin, told the cops, “‘I’ve had trouble with that ‘thing’ before.’ He called me a thing.”
⁵²
She was roughly handcuffed by the two officers. One WPC member, A. W. West, described the scene when the police boarded the bus: “Bless her heart, she fought like a little tigress. The policeman had scars all over his face and hands.”
⁵³
But Colvin maintained that she went limp, “They started dragging me backwards off the bus. One of them kicked me. I might have scratched one of them but I sure didn’t fight back.”
⁵⁴
In the patrol car, the officers mocked her and made comments about parts of her body. Colvin worried that they might try to rape her and tried to cover her crotch. She tried to put her mind on other things. “I recited Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee, the characters in Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm.”
⁵⁵

Colvin’s arrest had a profound impact on Montgomery’s black community. “I don’t mean to take anything away from Mrs. Parks,” lawyer Fred Gray later observed, “but Claudette gave all of us the moral courage to do what we did.”
⁵⁶
Durr also underscored the impact Colvin’s arrest had in Montgomery. “I mean this is just like genius, it just strikes; just like God strikes in a way because this child just wouldn’t move.”
⁵⁷
Many black people were awed by Colvin’s actions. “That little teenage girl must have had a steel testicle,” Andrew Young pointedly observed.
⁵⁸
The arrest angered Rosa Parks—all the committees, meetings, petitions to address bus segregation without “any results . . . just a brush-off.”
⁵⁹

Bailed out by her minister and mother, Colvin returned home proud but extremely fearful. “I had challenged the bus law. There had been lynchings and cross burnings for that kind of thing. . . . Dad sat up all night long with his shotgun. We all stayed up. The neighbors facing the highway kept watch.”
⁶⁰
Montgomery’s black leaders were outraged by Colvin’s arrest and some in the Women’s Political Council called for a boycott of the buses.
⁶¹
Faced with Colvin’s arrest, according to WPC president Jo Ann Robinson, some “could not take anymore. They were ready to boycott. . . . But some members were doubtful; some wanted to wait. The women wanted to be certain the entire city was behind them, and opinions differed where Claudette was concerned. Some felt she was too young to be the trigger that precipitated the movement . . . Not everybody was ready.”
⁶²
Robinson, Rufus Lewis, and a new minister in town, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., met with the city to discuss a plan where blacks would not be forced to move once they had taken a seat—and they were given assurances that city policy would be investigated and that Colvin’s case would receive a fair trial.
⁶³

Martin Luther King Jr. had moved to Montgomery in 1954 to succeed the militant Vernon Johns as pastor of the downtown Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The church had sought a minister more erudite, middle-class, and less confrontational than Reverend Johns, who had long chastised his congregation for their complacency. After Montgomery authorities had beaten a black man to death for a speeding violation following another act of police brutality, Johns posted the title of his forthcoming sermon, “It’s Safe to Murder Negroes in Montgomery,” outside the church. As Dexter Avenue’s billboard faced the Alabama state capitol building, this landed him before a grand jury, who sought to prevent him from preaching the sermon. He preached it that Sunday, anyway:

Unlike many in the congregation who considered spirituals low-class, Johns occasionally added them to the church service. Committed to independent black economic development, he established an African American food cooperative and often sold vegetables, fruits, and hams in the basement after church on Sundays. The final straw for his parishioners came when he took to selling watermelons on the campus of Alabama State.
⁶⁵
While many did not appreciate Johns’s political sermons, they shook up the congregation, instigating conversations about Christian social action, which laid the groundwork for Dr. King’s leadership.

The first time Rosa Parks met the reverend who succeeded Johns was at an NAACP meeting in 1954. “I had arrived early, before the people started to come in. I saw this young person sitting there and nodded hello to him. I had no idea at the time who he was. He looked so young, just like a college student.”
⁶⁶
Parks was thus surprised to find out that this young man was the evening’s speaker. Most of the thirty people gathered to hear the twenty-five-year-old Martin Luther King speak on the
Brown
decision were women. When he began speaking, according to Carr, their “jaws dropped.” Parks was “amazed that one so young could speak with so much eloquence and to the point.”
⁶⁷
After this meeting, King joined the NAACP’s executive committee; he also considered running for president of the organization but decided not to. Parks sent him his letter of appointment to the executive committee.
⁶⁸
And in January 1955, King addressed the new officers, stating that “we have come a long way but have a long way to go.”
⁶⁹

Rosa Parks and Virginia Durr began fund raising for young Colvin’s case, and more than one hundred letters and a stack of donations streamed in to Parks’s apartment. Parks was hopeful that the young woman’s arrest would embolden other young people and spark interest in the NAACP youth meetings.
⁷⁰
She encouraged Colvin to get active in the youth chapter. Colvin recalled her first conversation with Rosa Parks. “She said ‘You’re Claudette Colvin? Oh my God, I was lookin’ for some big old burly overgrown teenager who sassed white people out. . . . But no, they pulled a little girl off the bus.’ I said, ‘They pulled me off because I refused to walk off.’”
⁷¹

At an NAACP branch meeting on March 27, Rosa Parks highlighted the importance of Colvin’s case, noting it could act “as a stimulus in getting members especially in her neighborhood.”
⁷²
J. E. Pierce worried about the publicity and the pressure that might “be exerted on the family in some way.” They stepped up the fund-raising for the case. Leona McCauley baked cookies; Colvin recalled Mrs. Parks scolding her for eating a bunch—“we won’t have any to sell.”
⁷³
Parks also encouraged Colvin to run in the NAACP popularity contest that the branch sponsored to raise money for the case, which she did, though she didn’t win. Parks made the crown for the winner.
⁷⁴

At a second meeting with city officials, a group of black community leaders took a petition to the bus company and city officials asking for more courteous treatment and no visible signs of segregation on the bus. Tired of the city’s obfuscation, Parks refused to join them: “I had decided I would not go anywhere with a piece of paper in my hand asking white folks for any favors.”
⁷⁵

Then in April, a young black veteran celebrating his release from the hospital was acting silly on the street and got in the way of a bus. The driver swerved around him but then came back and proceeded to beat the man with his transfer punch, turning his face to a bloody pulp. Mrs. Parks attended the driver’s trial and was sickened when he was only fined twenty-five dollars for the assault and allowed to keep his job.
⁷⁶

Colvin’s case went to court on May 6, 1955. The Judge dropped two of the charges (for disturbing the peace and breaking the segregation law) but found her guilty on the third for assaulting the officers who arrested her. The decision revealed the “extreme limits of stupidity and absurdity and horror,” Durr wrote a friend, and how authorities were “so scared that the appeal on the constitutionality might be sustained that they dropped all the charges on the segregation issues.”
⁷⁷
Since Colvin had strategically only been convicted of assault, appealing her case could not directly challenge the segregation law. “The thing that is so awful,” Durr continued, “is that no one sees how absurd the system makes them appear—how brutal and cowardly—THREE HUGE BIG POLICEMEN against one little scrawny, fifteen year old colored girl.”

Following the judge’s decision, most black people in Montgomery were outraged. According to Robinson, “Blacks were as near a breaking point as they had ever been. Resentment, rebellion, and unrest were in evidence in all Negro circles. For a few days, large numbers of people refused to use the buses, but as they cooled off somewhat, they gradually drifted back.”
⁷⁸
For the young Colvin, the experience was transformative. After appearing in court, Colvin decided to stop straightening her hair. “By wearing it natural, I was saying, ‘I think I’m as pretty as you are.’ . . . I told everybody, ‘I won’t straighten my hair until they straighten out this mess.’ And that meant until we got some justice.”
⁷⁹
But many of her classmates didn’t react well to her. “Kids were saying she should have known what would happen,” one classmate recalled. “Everything was reversed, everyone blamed her rather than the people who did those things to her. . . . We should have been rallying around her and being proud of what she had done, but instead we ridiculed her.”
⁸⁰

Colvin was seen as “feisty,” “uncontrollable,” “profane,” and “emotional” by some community leaders who worried that she was too young and not of the right social standing to organize a broader campaign around. The Colvin family was poor and lived on the north side of town. After paying the family a visit, Nixon decided Colvin was not the kind of plaintiff they wanted and pulled back from pursuing her case.
⁸¹
He also claimed that Colvin’s mother didn’t want her involved.
⁸²
Jo Ann Robinson vehemently disagreed with Nixon’s assessment of Colvin’s unsuitability and told him so, though the WPC did fear that the witnesses to the case might get frightened and recant.
⁸³

Worrying that the press “would have a field day” with Colvin, Parks raised money for Colvin’s case. According to black lawyer Fred Gray, who thought the Colvin arrest would make a good test case, Parks “shared my feelings that something had to be done to end segregation on the buses.”
⁸⁴
Ultimately Colvin was deemed an unsuitable plaintiff for a legal case or mass action—which took a toll on the young Colvin.