The school had a strong Christian sensibility. As with Parks, Horton’s revolutionary inspiration was Jesus who, Horton observed, “simply did what he believed in and paid the price.”142 This Christian view of social justice—that Christianity required activism and also buttressed it—squared with Parks’s worldview. Christian social thinker Reinhold Niebuhr, one of Martin Luther King’s theological inspirations, would be one of the school’s strongest supporters.
Johns Island organizer Esau Jenkins explained the purpose behind Highlander’s workshops. “Well, we was talking about civil rights, constitutional rights, the Bill of Rights, and anything that is your right—if you don’t fight for it, nobody going to fight for it. You going to have to let people know, I’m not going to let you do this to me or do this to my people without . . . my opinion against it.”143 Even though she didn’t speak much during the workshops, Parks took copious notes during the sessions, detailing what each speaker said. On one page, she framed the question of gradualism versus immediacy, a key issue in school desegregation implementation. “Gradualism would ease shock of white minds. Psychological effect. Disadvantage—give opposition more time to build greater resistance. Prolong the change.” She then outlined how to formulate a social action program:
1. Policy not to use persons with record of trouble with law. Give them something to do where they will not be in forefront of action.
2. So people should be, as far as possible, economically independent. Not owe too many debts or borrow money from certain places.
In another section, she described how teachers lost their jobs if they worked for school desegregation. Parks was thus more than aware of the economic ramifications of being publicly identified as an advocate for desegregation. And then with a prescience she could not have imagined, she wrote, “Desegregation proves itself by being put in action. Not changing attitudes, attitudes will change.”144 The point was to act and through that action, societal transformation would occur. Tellingly, Parks uses the term desegregation rather than integration—as many of her civil rights peers would—to signify that it was not a matter of having a bus seat or a school desk next to a white person but dismantling the apparatus of inequality.
Participants in the workshop were encouraged to contextualize the problems facing their communities within a global movement for human rights and to come up with concrete steps to create change locally. According to Horton, Parks was “the quietest participant” in the workshop. “If you judge by the conventional standards,” Horton observed, “she would have been the least promising probably. We don’t use conventional standards, so we had high hopes for her.”145 Despite her reticence, the visit to Highlander was a transformative one for Parks, who had grown increasingly weary of pressing for change with little result.
I was 42 years old, and it was one of the few times in my life up to that point when I did not feel any hostility from white people. . . . I felt that I could express myself honestly without any repercussions or antagonistic attitudes from other people . . . it was hard to leave.146
Highlander workshops always ended with a closing discussion called “Finding Your Way Back Home.” Clark asked participants what they planned to do once they returned home. “Rosa answered that question by saying that Montgomery was the cradle of the Confederacy,” Clark recalled, “that nothing would happen there because blacks wouldn’t stick together. But she promised to work with those kids, and to tell them that they had the right to belong to the NAACP . . . to do things like going through the Freedom Train.”147 Esau Jenkins recalled Parks referring to many in Montgomery as “complacent” and not likely to do anything bold. Many of the workshop participants agreed with her on the futility of trying to mount a mass movement in Montgomery.148 Parks worried about how blacks in Montgomery “wouldn’t stand together.”149 Horton could see how worn down Parks was. “We didn’t know what she would do, but we had hopes that this tired spirit of hers would get tired of being tired, that she would do something and she did.”150
Parks found it difficult to return to Montgomery, “where you had to be smiling and polite no matter how rudely you were treated.”151 Because Mrs. Parks feared white retaliation for her participation in the workshop, Clark accompanied her to Atlanta and saw her onto the bus to Montgomery.152 Parks also insisted on being reimbursed for her travel in cash, fearing that a check from Highlander would draw harassment. A black teacher from Montgomery who also attended the workshop had not even told people at home where she was going, saying she was going somewhere else in Tennessee, for fear that she would lose her job if anyone found out.
Still, a typed press release dated August 8, 1955, and addressed to the Montgomery Advertiser and Alabama Journal called attention to the Highlander workshop that had taken place from July 24 to August 8 on school desegregation. Probably written by Parks, the fifth paragraph mentions that “Mrs. Rosa L. Parks attended the workshop from Montgomery as a representative of the NAACP Youth Council” and describes how the workshop ended “with specific plans by people from each of the 20 cities and communities represented” to bring about a “prompt and orderly” plan for school desegregation.153 Upon her return, Parks also reported to the NAACP branch membership about her trip to Highlander.154
“Rosa Parks was afraid for white people to know that she was as militant as she was,” Septima Clark recalled.155 Clark’s observation in many ways summed up one of the paradoxes of Parks’s character. Parks often covered up the radicalism of her beliefs and her actions. Her reticence was evident even at a place like Highlander, where she was still reluctant to talk about the Freedom Train visit to Montgomery. Nonetheless, while she was scared of it being discovered she went to Highlander, she still was willing to be listed in a press release that highlighted her attendance at the school desegregation workshop.
Parks looked to Clark and Ella Baker as role models as she sought to figure out how to be a woman activist when much of the visible leadership was made up of men and how to continue the struggle despite the vitriol of white resistance and the glacial pace of change. In spite of many years of political organizing, Parks still felt nervous, shy, and at times pessimistic about the potential for change. This process she went through is often missed in the romanticization of her bus stand as a spontaneous action without careful calibration. When Clark heard that Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat on the bus five months after returning from the workshop, she thought to herself, “‘Rosa? Rosa?’ She was so shy when she came to Highlander, but she got enough courage to do that.”156 Indeed, the popular view of Parks as either an accidental or angelic heroine misses the years of gathering courage, fortitude, and community, which then enabled her to refuse to give up her seat. To be able to understand how Parks could have said aloud in front of other political organizers that nothing would happen in Montgomery, return to her political work in the community, and then five months later refuse to get up, demonstrates the political will at her core. She might not believe that anything would happen in Montgomery, but that didn’t mean she would not try to demonstrate her opposition to the status quo.
Returning to her job at Montgomery Fair attending to the garments of white customers, no matter how rudely she was treated, was difficult.157 With few industrial jobs available in the city, most African Americans in Montgomery found themselves sequestered in service-related labor. In 1950, more than 60 percent of black women in Montgomery worked as domestics and 75 percent of black men were trapped in menial jobs. Only one in ten in Montgomery’s black community worked in a professional field.158
Having worked a series of sewing jobs, Parks had gotten the position at Montgomery Fair around Labor Day 1954.159 As the only black woman employed in the tailor shop (the tailor, John Ball, was black), she knew she was “setting a precedent.” The situation for black employees and customers at the store was a segregated one—which bothered Parks a great deal. Montgomery Fair was the most prominent downtown department store. Blacks were employed in certain positions bu
t not as clerks. The lounge at the store was reserved for white employees, while the black women workers were confined to a small room by the toilets. Those black people who worked as cooks and dishwashers at the department store lunch counter had to buy their sandwiches and eat them elsewhere.160 Black people could shop at the store but couldn’t try items on. The store’s black workers felt this instability. “We had to just face each day not knowing what to expect; if we made any protest or even sometimes if we didn’t . . .”161
The tailor shop was in the basement of the department store. Parks worked in a small, stuffy back room, made even hotter by the large pressing irons. Because she was a woman, she was not required to fit the male customers. The tailor did that, and she completed the alterations.
“We wear the mask that grins and lies,” black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote in 1896. “With torn and bleeding hearts we smile.”162 The mask had never been easy for Rosa Parks. After Highlander it was becoming unbearable. Virginia Durr recalled in a letter to the Hortons in January 1956 that Mrs. Parks “felt so liberated [at Highlander] and then as time went on she said the discrimination got worse and worse to bear.”163 Upon returning to Montgomery, Parks informed Nixon that the Highlander workshop had strengthened her resolve around her Youth Council work. She hoped to impress upon them their worth as equal to other young people.
Just a few weeks after Parks returned from Highlander came the devastating news of the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. Till had grown up in Chicago but had gone to visit his uncle in Mississippi for a summer holiday. After making a comment to a white woman who ran a local grocery store, the young Till was kidnapped from his uncle’s house by her husband and brother-in-law, tortured, and then murdered. His body was dumped in the river. His mother fought to get his body sent back to Chicago and then had an open-casket funeral. Fifty thousand people saw his casket. Till’s mother also allowed Jet magazine’s photographers to take pictures so the nation would witness what had been done to her son. Parks wept at the photo of Till’s body published in Jet. The lynching outraged her.
Poet Nikki Giovanni connected Till’s murder and the killers’ subsequent acquittal to Parks’s decision to remain firm on the bus. Giovanni wrote, “This is about the moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that the young man in Money, Mississippi . . . would not have died in vain. . . . Mrs. Rosa Parks . . . could not stand that death. And in not being able to stand it. She sat back down.”164
Around that time, Montgomery had an incident similar to the Till murder. A young black minister Raymond Parks knew was killed for appearing to make an advance toward a white woman. “But the difference in this case from Till’s, Parks explained, was that “Emmett Till came from the North and the media picked it up. In this case, of course, it was kept very much hidden so that is why in, around Montgomery it was supposed to have been a good race relations, quote unquote.”165 The young man’s mother was “not supposed to complain. There were several cases of people that I knew personally who met the end of their lives in this manner and other manners of brutality without even a ripple being made publicly by it.”166
With Parks as secretary, the Montgomery NAACP in 1955 continued its voter registration campaign, supported Jeremiah Reeves’s legal defense, and protested Governor Folsom’s segregated inaugural ball. NAACP field secretary Mildred Roxborough, who stayed with the Parkses when she visited the branch, described her as “stalwart.” Parks “would go to meetings when other people were home lounging. . . . She wouldn’t miss meetings unless she couldn’t avoid it.” Parks didn’t talk a lot at meetings, but when she did, she “commanded by her demeanor a lot of respect.” Roxborough recalled that Parks felt the NAACP chapter “should be doing more than it was doing at that particular time.”167
While E. D. Nixon was no longer head of the Montgomery NAACP, and class tensions continued to plague black organizing in the city, Nixon’s own civil rights activism had not slowed down. A profile of Nixon in the Chicago Defender shortly after the boycott started referred to Nixon and Parks as “the two most active members in the local branch.”168 Nixon had complained to the Durrs when they first moved to town in 1951 that “the Negroes were all split up and jealous of each other and divided into cliques and you couldn’t get them together on anything.”169 In 1952, he was chosen president of the Montgomery Progressive Democratic Association. In 1954, Parks was elected secretary and Nixon chairman of the NAACP’s Alabama Coordinating Committee for Registration and Voting.
In early November 1955, Nixon invited New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell to speak to the Progressive Democratic Association. Along with black women in Harlem, Powell had organized “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns in the 1930s to target businesses that refused to hire black employees and helped lead a successful bus boycott in New York in 1941 that led to the Transit Authority hiring two hundred black workers. In his speech in Montgomery, Powell noted that the economic tactics of the White Citizens’ Council (WCC) “can be counter met with our own [black] economic pressure.”170 Powell met with Nixon, Parks, and others that night. His visit likely impacted Parks, Nixon, and many of Montgomery’s politically active black citizens, as these Southern activists drew inspiration and strategy from Northern protests.
On November 27, 1955, four days before she would make her historic bus stand, Parks attended a packed mass meeting at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The meeting called attention to a series of recent lynchings in Mississippi—the young Emmett Till’s murder as well as those of George W. Lee and Lamar Smith. Lee, a Mississippi grocer and Baptist minister, and Smith, a farmer, had both been murdered when they registered to vote and refused to back down to white pressure. Two days earlier, Lee’s friend and fellow activist Gus Courts had also been shot. Dr. T. M. Howard, who was spearheading the organizing around the Till case, gave the keynote speech that evening. After Till’s murderers were acquitted, Howard had embarked on a speaking tour across the country which included this stop in Montgomery. The meeting left a strong impression on Parks. Sickened by the detailed description of Till’s murder, she continued to think about this gruesome killing in the days after the meeting.171
Indeed, in the years preceding the boycott, Parks repeatedly struggled with the ways racial injustices were simply covered up to make it seem like all was well in Montgomery. “Everything possible that was done by way of brutality and oppression was kept well under the cover and not brought out in the open or any publicity presented.”172 Demonstrating dissent was crucial, even if it did nothing, so it would not be “taken for granted that you were satisfied.”173
Mrs. Parks steadfastly continued her work with the Youth Council “and the few young people that I could get to pay attention to what I was trying to get them to see about desegregation of the schools and other public facilities.”174 She was planning a big youth workshop for December 3 at Alabama State College.
Having been politically active now for two decades, Parks and Nixon, along with other Montgomery activists like Mary Fair Burks, Reverend Vernon Johns, Fred Gray, Jo Ann Robinson, and Alabama State professor J. E. Pierce, had tilled the ground for a movement. Yet local leaders continued to struggle with the fear and reluctance of many Montgomery blacks to unite across class lines to face the vitriol of white resistance. The small numbers of black people willing to take action weighed on Parks. Her heavy spirit, however, was about to lead her to an act of conscience and a season of courage bearing fruit few could have imagined.
CHAPTER THREE
“I Had Been Pushed As Far As I Could Stand to Be Pushed”
Rosa Parks’s Bus Stand
“WHITES WOULD ACCUSE YOU OF causing trouble when all you were doing was acting like a normal human being instead of cringing,” Rosa Parks explained.1 Such was the assumption of black deference that pervaded mid-twentieth-century Montgomery. The bus with its visible arbitrariness and expected servility stood as one
of the most visceral experiences of segregation. “You died a little each time you found yourself face to face with this kind of discrimination,” she noted.2
Blacks constituted the majority of bus riders, paid the same fare, yet received inferior and disrespectful service—often right in front of and in direct contrast to white riders. “I had so much trouble with so many bus drivers,” Parks recalled.3 That black people comprised the majority of riders made for even more galling situations on the bus. Some routes had very few white passengers, yet the first ten seats on every bus were always reserved for whites. Thus, on many bus routes, black riders would literally stand next to empty seats. Those blacks able to avoid the bus did so, and those who had the means drove cars. Black maids and nurses, however, were allowed to sit in the white section with their young or sick white charges, further underscoring the ways that bus segregation marked status and the primacy of white needs.
Because Montgomery saw itself as a more cosmopolitan city than some of its Southern neighbors, signs or screens separating the black and white sections were no longer used.4 It was a “matter of understanding [of] what seats we may use and may not use,” Parks explained, with the power and discretion, particularly over the middle seats, “left up to the driver.”5 “The bus driver could move colored people anywhere he wanted on the bus,” Nixon reiterated, “because he was within his rights under a city ordinance.”6 The arbitrariness of segregation, the power and place it granted white people, was perhaps nowhere more evident than on the bus.
Some bus drivers were kinder, remembered Rosalyn Oliver King and Doris Crenshaw, letting black passengers sit in the white seats while they drove through the black parts of town. But the minute they crossed into a white neighborhood, most drivers would tell the black passengers to get up. Some drivers didn’t make black people get up when the white seats filled. “There were times when I’d be on the bus” Parks recalled, “and if what they called ‘White section,’ or ‘White Reserved seats’ were occupied and any white people were standing, they would just stand.”7 But kindness did not undermine the force and legal basis of segregation. The majority of drivers made black passengers stand over open seats and forced them to pay and reboard through the back door so they would not even walk next to white passengers. Jo Ann Robinson recalled the demeaning terms often used in addressing African American women—“black nigger,” “black bitches,” “heifers,” and “whores.”8 Dr. King elaborated: “‘Go on round the back door, N—r.’ ‘Give up that seat, boy.’ ‘Get back, you ugly black apes.” . . . ‘I’m gonna show you niggers that we got laws in Alabama.’ ‘N—r, next time you stand up over those white people I’m gonna throw you over to the law.’ ‘I hate N—rs. . . . Y’all black cows and apes, git back.’”9 For Rosa Parks, the education young children received in the mores of segregation hurt the most, as she hated to see children take an empty seat only to have their parents snatch them up and hurry them to the back before they got in trouble.10
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Page 8