Nixon’s and Parks’s commitment to grassroots organizing and connections to the black poor and working class represented a minority position within Montgomery’s NAACP, which was largely dominated by the black professional class. Indeed class differences formed a fissure through Montgomery’s black community and made broad-based organizing nearly impossible. The chapter during this period was marked by tension.
In fall 1946, controversy erupted around Nixon’s reelection and his management of the branch. Both the vice president and treasurer—whom Nixon characterized as “insurance men”—favored a less confrontational organization and opposed his “dictatorship,” complaining to the national office of his misuse of branch funds and “politicking.”54 This power struggle revolved around the intertwined issues of class and militancy. Describing the “superior attitudes” of those opposing the current leadership, Johnnie Carr explained that Nixon’s rivals sought to “use the organization for a nice place to sit for one hour, and preside over a meeting, after which no special effort is made to put the organization to work for the masses.”55 Hoping to consolidate his power and encourage a more political membership, Nixon attempted to institute a requirement that all branch leadership be registered voters (a rarity in Montgomery at the time), which the national office rejected. But Nixon also got increasingly defensive and secretive in branch dealings.
The criticisms of Nixon’s leadership largely did not extend to Parks, though one letter did mention Mrs. Parks being “too kind” and extolled the need for the branch to have a “man secretary to handle things with a firm hand.”56 The opposing faction did run its own candidate against Parks for the position of secretary—Robert Matthews, who had previously served as both the president and secretary of branch.
The status divide that ran through the branch separated Nixon and Parks from the Alabama State professors and black businessmen who dominated the active membership. This educational divide would also shape the iconography of Parks after the boycott and the way some members of Montgomery’s black middle class viewed her. She would be held up as a simple heroine, not as a thoughtful and seasoned political strategist in her own right, in part because she lacked the social status, education, and gender that some people believed necessary to be a strategist.
Still, Nixon and Parks were reelected. Parks’s work with the branch often consumed her nights and weekends. She typed dozens of letters on an old Underwood in the office, called members and nonmembers to gain support for the NAACP’s work, and went door-to-door soliciting volunteers and informing people about the work of the organization.57 NAACP records suggest that Nixon and Parks attended the NAACP’s annual meeting in Washington, DC, in 1947; for the 1948 meeting in Kansas City, Parks was not listed as attending.58
By 1947, Parks’s stature in civil rights circles had grown. She was selected to serve on the three-person executive committee of the state conference of the NAACP, which recommended that Emory Jackson (of the Birmingham NAACP) step down and E. D. Nixon become state conference head.59 Nixon ran and was elected president of the Alabama state conference from 1947 to 1949. Though she was shy and generally not one for public speaking, in 1948 Rosa Parks delivered a powerful address at the state convention in Mobile decrying the mistreatment of African American women in the South and criticizing those “feeling proud of their home or the South when Negroes every day are being molested and maltreated. No one should feel proud of a place where Negroes are intimidated.”60 Finishing to thunderous applause, she was then elected the first secretary of the state conference.61 According to NAACP historian Dorothy Autrey, “Even more than the work of any one branch, the activists of the statewide organization of NAACP branches represented a threat to the Southern society’s oppression of blacks.”62
Nixon and Parks were a powerful team. After Alabama’s attorney general publicly claimed federal anti-lynching legislation would only increase lynchings in the state, Nixon went into the office to issue a response—only to find Parks already at work on one.63 Every year, they wrote letters to Washington to ask for a federal anti-lynching bill.64 They persisted, but federal anti-lynching legislation never passed Congress. Traveling throughout the state, Rosa Parks sought to document instances of white-on-black brutality in hopes of pursuing legal justice. “Rosa will talk with you” became the understanding throughout Alabama’s black communities. This work was tiring, and at times demoralizing because most of the cases Parks documented went nowhere. She issued press releases to the Montgomery Advertiser and Alabama Journal. She forwarded dozens of reports to the NAACP national office documenting suspicious deaths, rapes of black women by white men, instances of voter intimidation, and other incidents of racial injustice. “It was more a matter of trying to challenge the powers that be,” Parks would later write in her autobiography, “and let it be known that we did not wish to continue being treated as second class citizens.”65 She probably also found discouraging the national NAACP’s unwillingness to pursue most of these cases.
There were numerous cases of sexual violence against black women. In 1949, Gertrude Perkins was raped by two police officers and forced to commit “unnatural acts.” The case drew outrage from Nixon, Parks, Reverend Solomon Seay, and the newly formed Women’s Political Council. The police chief initially pursued prosecutions of the officers, but the city commission and mayor did not stand behind him. The mayor blamed the incident on the NAACP, the grand jury dismissed the charges against the officers, and police records were changed to protect the officers who had raped Perkins.66 Thirteen-year-old Amanda Baker was raped and murdered. Nixon got the governor to agree to an unprecedented $250 reward to find the killer, which the NAACP agreed to match. But Baker’s murderer was never apprehended.67 Faced with these repeated miscarriages of justice, Parks, according to historian Steven Millner, “became quietly embittered by such repeated exposure to the sordid underside of Montgomery’s race relations. Mrs. Parks’s feelings were seldom shared with others, but with her mother she was able to discuss them in detail.”68 At times, people who came forward with cases would get nervous and refuse to give a written affidavit or testify, fearing for their own lives and jobs. Raymond “got upset” with one minister who had seen a white man shoot a black man but was unwilling to testify to it, but Rosa told him not to be “too hard on him,” recognizing the difficulty people had in standing up publicly. “People didn’t have any inclination to give up their lives just to try to bring a charge against somebody else.”69
Nixon found Parks an invaluable grassroots organizer and office manager. Nonetheless, his descriptions of Parks were quite gendered. “She keeps a pencil in her hair all the time,” according to Nixon, “every once in a while you see her take it out and mark the old misspelled word. When you get the paper behind her, you know she had it. Because every misspelled word, she’d mark it . . . me and her worked together, traveled over this state together, and I knew that, that she was clean as a pin.”70 Nixon’s notions about the proper roles for women did not include them being visible leaders. Parks, at times, confronted him on this. “Women don’t need to be nowhere but in the kitchen,” he once told Parks. When she challenged him, asking, “Well what about me?” He lamely replied, “I need a secretary and you are a good one.”71 Nixon would laugh when Parks protested these comments. Other times, when Nixon made such disparaging remarks, Parks “wouldn’t do anything but just laugh.”72 Nixon praised Parks for being “faithful as a good hound dog, and I mean that in the best way you can imagine. I never doubted her one minute. She was true as a compass.”73 Though Nixon was one of Parks’s greatest champions over the next decades, he did not fully acknowledge Parks’s intellectual talents and political acumen, which shaped how he envisioned the roles she should play. Parks was a voracious reader, keeping up with a number of black newspapers and the issues of the day, which gave the branch’s work a broader scope.
In 1947, when the Freedom Train was scheduled to come to Montgomery, Parks published a report in the Memphis World about t
he local NAACP’s chapter’s objections to Montgomery’s all-white Freedom Train committee. The especially painted red-white-and-blue train was set to visit all forty-eight states, carrying original copies of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. The national requirement that the exhibit be integrated—black and white viewers mingling freely—was highly controversial. Southern cities like Birmingham and Memphis refused to agree to these stipulations, and the Train bypassed these cities. That the Freedom Train included a stop in Montgomery was due in part to the work of Parks and her colleagues, who pressured city officials to appoint blacks to the Freedom Train committee and federal officials to ensure all children would actually enter on a first-come, first-served basis.74
Parks took a group of black young people to visit the integrated exhibition in December 1947—which resulted in numerous hate calls to Parks’s home. Septima Clark recalled Parks’s fear of even discussing the Freedom Train visit during her visit to Highlander years later. “I asked Rosa, ‘Would she would tell the people in the workshop about the coming of the Freedom Train to Montgomery,’ which she hated very much, because she was afraid that some of the Southern whites would go back and say what she had said [to other white people in their communities] and then she would be in for harassment. Nevertheless, she ventured to tell it.”75 Eight years later, in the backwoods of Tennessee, the difficulty and attendant fear of the Freedom Train organizing still haunted her.
Parks also engaged in her own personal forms of protest, avoiding segregated drinking fountains and elevators. “I tried to use them as little as possible. There were white and colored fountains, so you just didn’t drink.”76 Besides her role as secretary of the chapter where she did much of the behind-the-scenes work of the organization, in 1949 she and Johnnie Carr founded and led the NAACP Youth Council, which was initially active but then died out because of lack of membership.
The revival of the Klan and increased white resistance to black voter registration made this a difficult time for Montgomery’s NAACP. Membership in the organization fell in 1949 from 1,600 to 148.77 It was also a difficult time for the Parks family. When her mother got sick, Parks scaled back her NAACP involvement, resigning her secretary position in both the Montgomery branch and Alabama conference in 1949. Unfortunately, perhaps because of the loss of Parks’s able and systematic stewardship, Nixon’s leadership was increasingly questioned by the national office, and they quietly sought to bring in a more traditional middle-class leader. Nixon lost the state conference presidency in November 1949 to Birmingham insurance agent W. C. Patton and the next year was defeated for Montgomery branch president by Robert Matthews.78
Parks continued to help Nixon with his work with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. When her mother’s health improved, Parks returned to the position of branch secretary in 1952. This caused a slight rift with Nixon, according to Brinkley, because Nixon wanted Parks working for him and distrusted the current branch president Robert Matthews.79 Most Alabama blacks in the early 1950s, according to NAACP historian Dorothy Autrey, saw the NAACP as “a futile undertaking. . . . Only a few individuals possessed the vision and the patience required for active participation.”80
Still Parks kept on. Indeed, in interviews in the years and decades after the boycott, Parks would stress how long they had been working on these issues and how they “didn’t seem to have too many successes.”81 Part of what sustained her during these years was an abiding faith in God’s vision of justice on earth. A devoted member of St. Paul’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, Parks knew a God who sided with the oppressed and drew sustenance from prayer and worship for her continued community work. She loved the Book of Psalms, and the hymns buoyed her, particularly “Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Freedom.”
Activists like Parks and Nixon labored in relative loneliness. The national NAACP, exceedingly careful about the cases it would support, kept a distance from many of their cases—and legal cases that involved sex (real, imagined, or coerced) were often kept at arm’s length. Local people who sought to engage the branch in more activism received little direct support from the national office, even as they dutifully sought to expand the organization’s membership. At the same time, despite the number of issues that angered Montgomery’s black community, “there wasn’t really a movement,” Parks noted, and most eschewed any form of public opposition.82
One of Parks’s former classmates, Mahalia Dickerson, came back to Montgomery to set up her law practice. Parks and Dickerson went out to Kilby Prison to work on the cases of blacks imprisoned there, but Dickerson “did not receive the support she needed from the African American community” and left town.83 Parks also took a particular interest in the case of Jeremiah Reeves. Jeremiah Reeves was a popular senior at Booker T. Washington High School. According to Parks, the sixteen-year-old Reeves was having a consensual relationship with a young white woman from the neighborhood.84 After many months, and increasingly fearful of being found out, she cried rape. Reeves was arrested for rape, beaten by police, and subsequently confessed after officers taunted him and forced him to sit in an electric chair.85 Reeves later retracted his admission of guilt and denied ever having had sexual relations under any circumstances with the woman.86 He was tried and sentenced to death.
“The things that young black men suffered because of white women!” Parks observed in her autobiography.87 Appeals and organizing led the Supreme Court in 1954 to throw out his conviction based on biased jury composition. At his new trial in May 1955, his defense argued that the trial was unfair and the case should be dismissed in part because of the “systematic exclusion of Negroes from jury duty in Montgomery County.” After two days of testimony, the new all-white jury took only thirty-four minutes to restore Reeves’s death sentence. The case had an impact on many of Reeves’s fellow students. According to Claudette Colvin, a classmate of Reeves,
Jeremiah Reeves’s arrest was the turning point of my life. That was when I and a lot of other students really started thinking about prejudice and racism. . . . When a white man raped a black girl—something that happened all the time—it was just his word against hers, and no one would ever believe her. The white man always got off. But now they were going to hold Jeremiah for years as a minor just so they could legally execute him when he came of age. That changed me. . . . I stayed angry for a long time.88
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.”91
Under Parks’s leadership, the Youth Council was rejuvenated in 1954.92 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.”93 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 plum
bing. 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.”94
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.97 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 Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Page 6