The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (20 page)

At the hearing, the prosecutor moved to change the warrant, charging Parks with violating state law rather than city ordinance (since Montgomery ordinances did not allow people to be asked to give up their seat if another was not available). Gray objected, but the judge allowed it. Parks did not testify. Blake did, as did two white witnesses, one of whom said there was a seat in the back that Parks refused to take, directly contradicting Blake’s testimony that all the seats had been full. Parks was found guilty and fined fourteen dollars. Gray entered her appeal.

Gray and Parks stayed behind to do some paperwork, but Nixon joined the crowd on the street. “If you don’t bring her out in a few minutes,” people yelled, “we’re coming in after her.”
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Delighted by the boldness, Nixon thought to himself, “It was the first time I had seen so much courage among our people!”
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Still, he worried the police were looking for any excuse to react. After Parks came out of the building, he addressed the crowd, “’See this man out here with this sawed-off shotgun? Don’t give him a chance to use it. . . . I’m gonna ask you all to quietly move from around this police station now; Mrs. Parks has been convicted and we have appealed it, and I’ve put her in the car . . . As you move, don’t even throw a cigarette butt, or don’t spit on the sidewalk or nothing.”
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Given the surge of militancy, seasoned organizers like Nixon wanted to protect and nurture it.

Activists in Montgomery’s black community had long worried that it would be impossible to unify the community around a particular action. It was “almost unbelievable,” Parks noted, how successful the one-day protest had been.
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Parks saw one of her Youth Council members and asked why she had not attended the Saturday workshop. The young woman told her that she had been passing out leaflets about Monday’s protest. Though Parks did not frame it this way, these young people had learned her lessons well: “They were wise enough to see . . . it was more important to stand on the street corners and pass these papers out to everyone who passed then to sit in a meeting and listen to someone speak.”
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After her trial, Parks didn’t go to work but returned to Fred Gray’s law office. She wanted to be helpful. He asked her to answer the phone, something he occasionally had her do, and then left for a meeting with King, Abernathy, and Nixon.
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“The people were calling to talk to me but I never told them who I was,” Parks admitted decades later. “They didn’t know my voice so I just took the messages.”
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This moment reveals one of the paradoxes of Mrs. Parks’s own choices about her role in the movement. Parks was a shy person
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a political organizer who believed in collective action over individual celebrity. These traits combined to produce the mixture of action and reticence that would characterize her public role in the days and years to come. Over the course of the boycott, she would participate in dozens of programs when she saw it as a way to further the protest. (And over the next half century, this would grow to include thousands of appearances.) But time and again, she actively avoided the spotlight and sometimes obscured the role she was actually playing. So Parks did not sit around in Gray’s office or go home to rest or go back to work that Monday afternoon. She wanted to be useful, so she answered the phone since many people were calling with questions about the protest. But she did not tell the callers who she was. That erasure would have costs, though; Rosa Parks’s own life exemplified many of the currents of African American protest in the twentieth century, but she would come to be known for a “simple act” on a single day. She would stay back, anonymously answering phones, confined to a gender-specific role, while decisions were being made on the leadership of the protest.

The beginning of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) hails from that meeting Gray went to the first afternoon of the boycott, which neither Parks nor Robinson attended. Indeed, while WPC members, churchwomen, and domestic workers would make up the bulk of the boycott’s organizational infrastructure, the leadership (most of whom had their own cars and did not ride the bus) was overwhelmingly male. When some of the clergy at the meeting sought to conceal their identities, Nixon responded angrily that they lacked the courage of Mrs. Parks and were acting like “scared boys.” “Where are the men?” he challenged.
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Nixon took up a highly gendered language chastising the ministers and telling them they needed to catch up to the community. “We need to turn history around and stop hiding behind these women who do all the work for us. I say we stand out there in the open and hold our heads high.”
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He then threatened to take the microphone and tell their congregations that these clergy were “too cowardly to stand up on their feet and be counted.”
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King, entering late, agreed, willing to step forward publicly. King was elected to lead the new organization—his name put forward by Rufus Lewis, in part because King was his pastor and in part because he disliked Nixon and feared the militant porter would become the president of the new organization. Others supported the young minister in part because when the protest failed, they would not be blamed. The only woman elected was Erma Dungee as financial secretary.
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The group drew up three demands: first-come, first-served seating (where blacks would sit starting from the back and whites from the front but no one would be asked to move); respectful, courteous service; and the hiring of black bus drivers.

When asked a decade later whom she would have picked to be the leader, Parks explained that she did not know: “I don’t know if I would have had any particular choice. I had met [King] . . . a number of times and heard him speak. And as far as I was concerned, he was well suited for this particular role because he was, as you said, young, eloquent and, as far as I know, well liked in the community. . . . But I don’t think I would have wanted to have been the one to have selected any one person at the time.”
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Implicit in Parks’s comment (“any one person”) and her reluctance to affirm that she too would have picked King, or conversely Nixon, is her experience within an organizing tradition, exemplified by Highlander, that was wary of picking a single leader. Exemplified by her mentors Ella Baker and Septima Clark, the political community Parks came out of encouraged broad-based structures of decision making and leadership as a way to sustain a mass movement.

That evening, fifteen thousand people gathered for a mass meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church. Five thousand black Montgomerians packed the church while thousands gathered outside. The streets surrounding the church were clogged with people and traffic. The area was so congested that King had to park many blocks away. Virginia Durr never made it inside, and Reverend Graetz only got to the fellowship hall. Parks fought through the crowds to her designated seat on the platform. With more people outside than inside, the church turned on its outdoor public address system so those standing outside could hear. Relieved by the size of the crowd, Parks described the mood of the meeting as “practically jubilant,”
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though she felt “like it was a bit long in coming because there had been so many incidents when the same action could have taken place. But it seemed that they had not made up their minds until this particular incident.”
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The spirit was moving in Montgomery that December evening—“something that was just all over you,” Gilmore remembered.
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With only a handful of reporters and few other whites, the audience at Holt Street Church was almost completely filled with black people.
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The meeting opened with the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” “What a fellowship, what a joy divine . . . what have I to fear . . . leaning on the everlasting arms,” sang the thousands gathered.

Addressing the crowd, Nixon warned of the difficult fight ahead. “If anybody here is afraid, he better take his hat and go home. . . . We’ve worn aprons long enough. It’s time to take them off.”
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Nixon’s gendered language is worth considering. Nixon seemingly directs his comments to the black men in the crowd, with a call for the men to step up and not be like apron-wearing women. But given that the audience was made up of thousands of women who did domestic labor—as Nixon well knew—the exhortation to take off their aprons also served as a call for black women to recast relations with their white employers and put their own freedom ahead of the employers’ demands. The crowd roared as Nixon left the podium. The meeting, according to Nixon, was “the most amazing and the most heartening thing I have seen in my life. The leaders were led. It was a vertical thing.”
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Montgomery’s black community was on the move, and those on the podium would have to catch up to them.

Then Dr. King took the pulpit and captivated the crowd. Exceedingly nervous, he had not had time to prepare a speech. But once he started speaking, he found his stride. He spoke of a time “when people get tired. We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us so long that we are tired—tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression.” A tremendous thunder of assent rolled from the crowd. He then called on the dual traditions of Christianity and the Constitution to justify the struggle ahead. “If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. . . . If we are wrong, justice is a lie.” And then Dr. King, with prophetic determination, concluded by extolling the importance of the movement being born in Montgomery for the annals of American history. “Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’”
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Stunned, people were quiet for a moment and then rose to their feet, cheering and clapping. After he finished speaking, King hugged Mrs. Parks. Outside the crowd erupted in thunderous applause. That evening, the fifteen thousand people gathered there decided to continue the boycott indefinitely and formed a new organization called the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The collection taken that night raised $785.
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But Rosa Parks never got to speak. After King spoke, Reverend French presented Parks as “the victim of this gross injustice, almost inhumanity, and absolute undemocratic principle, Mrs. Rosa Parks.”
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French stressed Parks’s reputation as a lady “and any gentleman would allow a lady to have a seat.”
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Introduced as a churchgoer and an industrious, law-abiding citizen, Parks was to play a symbolic role. As Ralph Abernathy explained in his 1958 master’s thesis, “Mrs. Rosa Parks was presented to the mass meeting [because] we wanted her to become symbolic of our protest movement.”
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When Parks was introduced, according to Reverend Graetz, it was “almost pandemonium.”
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The crowd rose to its feet, giving her a standing ovation that lasted several minutes. “She was their heroine,” Dr. King explained. “They saw in her courageous person the symbol of their hopes and aspiration.”
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But Mrs. Parks was not invited to address the meeting. The crowd called for her to do so, but their calls were ignored. “I do recall asking someone if I should say anything,” Parks later explained, “and someone saying, ‘Why you’ve said enough.’”
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In her discussions with Jim Haskins for her autobiography in 1988, she elaborated: “Holt Street Baptist Church—you didn’t hear me make a speech—I didn’t speak—I asked did they want me to say anything—they said you have said enough—you have said enough and you don’t have to speak—the other people spoke.”
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In a conversation with Myles Horton and Eliot Wigginton, Parks noted that she just sat up there. “I think everyone spoke but me,” she said, though “it didn’t bother me at that point.”
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Indeed, while many of the ministers had been reluctant to speak, once they got to Holt Street, many clamored to say a few words.

While Parks imagined that she might speak, she was told that she had “said enough,” even though she had said very little between her Thursday arrest and the Monday meeting. Parks never desired public speaking. She may even have felt relieved not to have to address the huge crowd, but she certainly noticed that while they wanted her up on the pulpit, they didn’t think she should speak. Reverend Graetz saw the decision not to have Mrs. Parks speak as inextricably tied to gender. “Her personality was diminished,” he explained decades later. “It was a male-dominated movement.”
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As with the treatment of other women in the movement, Parks was lauded by the crowd as their heroine but not consulted for her vision of the struggle and subsequent political strategy. If she had gotten to speak, Parks might have connected the injustice on the bus to the travesties of Scottsboro, the brutal rapes of Recy Taylor and Gertrude Perkins, the murder of Emmett Till, and the impending legal lynching of Jeremiah Reeves. If she had gotten to speak, she might have linked her stand to the courageous work of the Highlander Folk School, to the actions of her own Youth Council at the downtown library, and to the successful one-week bus boycott nearby in Baton Rouge. She might have talked about the loneliness of her stand on Thursday and the power of walking together on Monday. She might have thanked them for turning her individual refusal into a collective protest. She might have said that this movement was a long time in coalescing, but what a joyful and holy day it was now that it had come. All this she knew and might have said—or much more. But she did not get to speak.