Despite the toll on her personally, Parks publicly urged perseverance. At a talk to the National Council of Negro Women in June in Washington, DC, she promised to “continue in every way I can” and urged people not to “give up faith, and one day we will have the Democracy we are hoping for.”86 Here and in other speeches that year Parks made clear the boycott was aimed at something much bigger than a seat on the bus—the promise of full citizenship. At an NAACP mass meeting in Baltimore in September, Parks told the crowd it might “take plenty of sacrifice” but she felt “sure that we will win in the end.”87 In interviews, Parks often contextualized her own stamina as having grown within the years of difficult organizing before there was a mass movement. For Parks, despite the tremendous hardship the boycott imposed, this was, in some ways, an easier period for her given the solidarity within Montgomery’s black community. “Because there were so many people involved . . . it was not discouraging as it had been before the incidents and before others joined in.”
In August, Parks accompanied the Graetz family to Highlander to mark the one-year anniversary of her visit, which Graetz described as “a badly needed vacation.”88 Highlander sought to broaden its civil rights workshops that summer beyond school desegregation to voter registration and nonviolent resistance to segregation. At one of the workshops, Parks again recounted the events of December 1 and the larger philosophy behind her action. “It is unfair, unjust and un-Christian and as long as we continued to be pushed around, we were getting treated much worse.” She told the group, “There had to be a stopping point so this seemed to have been the place for me to . . . find out what human rights that we had, if any.” Like King, Parks called upon Christianity and the Constitution in her speeches as to why segregation was wrong and had to be ended. Her firm tone here—“what human rights we had if any”—was echoed in her other public speeches that year.89 On the panel were fellow Montgomerians Graetz and Alabama State professor J. E. Pierce; during the question-and-answer session, no one asked Parks any questions, furthering the misimpression that her role in the boycott was confined to the first day.
But the vacation was short-lived. Midway through the week at Highlander, a call came in to the school: Reverend Graetz’s house, which was a half block from the Parks residence, had been bombed. The Graetzes had also been subject to an unending stream of threats (hate-filled callers day and night) and various acts of sabotage (including excrement being strewn in their house). With Parks in tow, the Graetzes left Highlander early—a much more somber drive than the trip up to Monteagle. “We were all tense, not knowing what we would find when we arrived home,” Graetz recalled.90 No one had been hurt in the bombing, but the blast was so powerful it shattered the windows of several nearby houses.
The house was not as badly damaged as they had feared. “Unknown to Jeannie and me, Mrs. Parks quietly began sweeping the kitchen and picking up broken dishes.”91 In describing this bombing of Graetz’s house, Taylor Branch wrote that “an intrepid neighbor snipped the smoldering end off a fuse leading to eleven sticks of dynamite.”92 This may have been Raymond Parks. Raymond also came over to help clean up the Graetz home.
Mayor Gayle accused the movement of staging the bombing.93 A week later, Graetz wrote the attorney general to criticize police malingering around the violence taking place in Montgomery and request that the Justice Department intervene.
THE BOYCOTT ENDS: A HEROINE BETWIXT AND BETWEEN
On June 19, 1956, the U.S. Court for the Middle District of Alabama ruled for the plaintiffs in the Browder case, declaring that the “separate but equal” doctrine set forth by the Supreme Court in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “can no longer be applied.” Mass excitement rippled through Montgomery’s black community. But the city appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. Then on November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the district court decision, nullifying Alabama’s state and local laws requiring segregation on buses. Parks called it a “triumph for justice.”94
Mrs. Parks was serving on the MIA’s publicity committee at this point. During the fall she journeyed to Baltimore, Cleveland, Columbus, and Savannah, helping build membership for the NAACP while bringing the news of the inspiring boycott to black communities across the country. She went to Memphis for a Women’s Day program and to Birmingham for the Alabama State Coordinating Association for Registration and Voting.95 Then, in November, she embarked on another fund-raising tour for the NAACP to raise money for the national office and local branches, with a $25 stipend for her per branch.96
A punishing ten-day schedule with ten separate speaking engagements, dinners, and other informal meetings began in Boston on November 10. Then she went to Springfield, Massachusetts; Albany, New York; Main Line, Pennsylvania; Corona-East Elmhurst, New York; Atlantic City and Trenton, New Jersey; and Brooklyn, the concluding stop, on November 20. Much of her travel was done by train—Boston to Springfield, November 12, Springfield to Albany, November 13. On November 14, she went from Albany to New York City, then later that day from New York to Philadelphia, and then late that evening from Philadelphia to Newark, arriving at 12:39 a.m. For the shorter distances, she took the bus. It was an enormously tiring agenda.97 Her speeches drew sizable crowds: 225 people turned out for the Corona Queens meeting, while in Springfield, nearly 400 people gathered to hear her speak. Durr wrote Horton that she wished he could join Parks in New York, “as she needs direction . . . yet she has the courage of a lion.”98 By this point, Parks had raised thousands of dollars for the boycott and also for the NAACP. The travel had been heady; still, she told a Jet reporter in 1960 that it wasn’t “as glamorous as it seems” and noted that none of it had netted her more than $100 beyond expenses.
The Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle against Montgomery’s bus segregation on November 13, 1956, and its order mandating integration was received by city leadership on December 20. The 382-day boycott drew to an end. For Rosa “it didn’t feel like a victory, actually.” Despite the momentousness, Parks knew there was still a great deal to do on the road to freedom. Jo Ann Robinson echoed this feeling:
It was terrible to watch women and children weep, hearing the news, and even more awful to see grown black men stand and cry until their whole bodies shook with bitter memories of the past. . . . The victory, however, brought no open festivities, no public rejoicing in the streets. . . . Too many people had suffered too much to rejoice. . . . The time was too sacred, the need prayerful, the masses tearful and filled with thanksgiving.”99
For Parks, Robinson, and many others in the city, the boycott and resistance that ensued had taken a toll. The unity had been even more wondrous—sacred—and thus a certain solemnity greeted the end of the protest.
On December 20, 1956, a community that had walked and carpooled for more than a year stepped aboard the bus and sat where they pleased. Much of the media that day ignored Parks in favor of King and the other ministers. With the country transfixed by King’s leadership, reporters and photographers descended on Montgomery in droves to capture his reaction to bus desegregation, photographing him and other boycott leaders dozens of times early that December morning sitting in the front of the bus. “Some of the books say I was with them but I was not,” Parks clarified.100 She was home looking after her mother, who was not feeling well.
It was Look magazine that found her at Cleveland Courts and staged the photo of her that would later become iconic. In it, Parks sits in a front seat looking out the window with a stone-faced white man sitting behind her. That man was not some Montgomery rider, however, but UPI reporter Nicholas Chriss. The photo was staged with Chriss posing as a fellow passenger. “A great scoop for me,” Chriss wrote later, “but Mrs. Parks had little to say. She seemed to want to savor the event alone.”101 In the midst of the photo shoot, they boarded a bus being driven by none other than James Blake. The reporter seemed oblivious to the historical irony. “We ignored each other,” explained Parks.102 “Clearly he was not interested in being photographed
with me, or any other black person for that matter.” Despite being “apprehensive” and not “too happy about being there myself,” Parks later described being “glad I let them take [the picture].”103
Blake, who worked for the bus company until his retirement in 1974, never claimed his role in the drama and avoided most interviewers. Reached in his home on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the boycott, Blake responded, “I am tired of being haunted by Rosa Parks.”104 Blake’s wife felt he had been unfairly maligned by the events. “None of that mess is true. Everybody loved him.”105 Blake died in 2002, seemingly still bitter and unchanged. At a commemoration honoring the first black bus drivers a couple of years after Blake’s death, however, some black drivers spoke about how they had worked closely in the union with Blake. They considered him an ally and spoke of how he had changed and did not want to be remembered only for the events of 1955.106
E. D. Nixon later described the power of that December morning when Montgomery’s buses were desegregated. “It’s hard on me remembering that morning. . . . It was like it wasn’t happening. Then it hit me . . . I cried like a baby.” Nixon claims that he rode with Parks that day, though no other accounts have Nixon with her during the photo shoot. “And when I saw Rosa climb aboard and look around, her eyes glistening like I knew she, too, had been crying, I thought it was gonna come on me again, but it didn’t. Her eyes caught mine, and we knew what we’d done, and we both grinned real big and didn’t say nothing. . . . It was the best ride I ever had in my life, just riding through downtown and out to the west and back again, going nowhere but feeling like we was heading to heaven.”107 Whether this ride actually took place that day or another, the successful end of the boycott was not only the culmination of a year of work by Montgomery’s black community, but for Nixon and Parks more than a decade of painstaking struggle. Nixon’s characterization of a ride that felt like it was “heading to heaven” was testament to the near-religious experience of this victory.
Bus desegregation was met with a flurry of violence in Montgomery. King’s door was destroyed by a shotgun blast on December 23.108 On January 9, 1957, four Baptist churches were bombed. Ralph Abernathy and Robert Graetz’s homes were bombed and virtually destroyed. The Graetz family, including their new four-day-old baby, was asleep when the bomb was thrown. Luckily, no one was hurt, though the damage to the house was extensive. Mrs. Parks rushed over to help. A second attempt was also made on the King home. Virginia Durr wrote a friend about how “frightening” this new surge of violence was: “so complete, vicious . . . a real collapse of law and you know that you have no protection against people that hate you.” And then a gas station was destroyed after one of the employees offered a description of the bombers.
Seven men were arrested for these bombings; because some of the bombs had not gone off, the grand jury only indicted four. Two were tried but “even with signed confessions,” according to Parks, were acquitted.109 The other two were given amnesty. The boycott might be over but the violence and fear remained.
A New Voter Registration Campaign?
Like many activists across the South, Nixon and Parks remained committed to the power of the black vote to break the back of white supremacy, seeing a statewide voter registration campaign as the next logical campaign after the boycott. Despite their earlier efforts, most black Alabamians were not registered to vote. Their idea was to base the project in Montgomery with an office in Fred Gray’s law practice—and employ Parks full-time to coordinate it. The whole plan required about $3,000 a year—$25 for rent and $35 a month to pay Parks (considerably less than what she had earned at Montgomery Fair) plus expenses for phone and mailing—and had the added benefit of giving Parks steady work.110 With considerable organizational skills, Parks was already secretary for the district coordinating council and had long worked alongside Nixon on issues of black voter registration.111
Virginia Durr also saw black voting power as imperative for changing the political landscape of Alabama—and believed Nixon and Parks had a political savvy that the MIA’s leadership, including King, lacked. Durr regarded King’s embrace of nonviolent direct action and desire to avoid partisan politics as somewhat naive. “While I think [King] is terrific as a spiritual leader,” she wrote a friend, “he knows absolutely nothing about politics. . . . Mr. Nixon wants to play politics in the American tradition. . . . He thinks the Negroes should make it clear that they are going to depend on the Courts and on political action to back them as well as God.”112
Durr solicited her white colleagues on the Left at Highlander, SCEF, Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC), and other organizations to raise money for this voter registration program. She asked for Highlander’s help in creating this program with a paid position for Parks. Horton wrote back that the plan was an “excellent” one but he could not commit to funding such a voter project in Montgomery (though Highlander would later help sponsor the citizenship schools). Apologizing for the mistaken belief that Highlander would have to provide all the money, Durr reminded Horton that “the South will not be safe until at least the elementary rights of free citizens are enjoyed here” and extolled Parks’s virtues as a seasoned political organizer to push for Highlander’s assistance.113 Durr wrote letter after letter seeking support for this project. Receiving a rejection from another colleague, she was livid, writing a friend, “So Rosa is left with nothing to do and no office and Mr Glen Smiley [of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who was working closely with King] has the floor with LOVE LOVE LOVE.”114 As 1957 began, Durr remained convinced that the next needed step was a mass voter-registration campaign. “Speeches, prayers, exhortations etc. do not take the place of block by block canvassing and having a central place and a voter’s list and someone to keep after people all the time,” Durr explained in an appeal to another political associate—and the person with the skills to coordinate it was Rosa Parks. Durr worried that if this voter registration program was taken up by the MIA, “Mrs Parks won’t have a job there (the jobs all go to college people).”115
Horton did invite Parks back to Highlander in December to meet with a group of black students from Clinton, Tennessee to discuss their recent experience with school desegregation. The students were in need of support—and Horton thought Parks was a good adult to provide such counsel. Nixon drove Rosa and her mother to Tennessee. “It was a rather unpleasant ride,” Parks remembered, as Nixon was down on King and the MIA. Once they arrived at Highlander, according to Brinkley, “Everybody at the school, including Septima Clark, turned out to greet Parks like a conquering heroine, teasing her about her world fame and later reading Psalms 27 and 33 in her honor.” Later in the week, Horton offered Parks a full-time job at Highlander. But Parks’s mother said no. “She didn’t want to be ‘nowhere I don’t see nothing but white folks,’ so that ended that,” Parks explained. “Anyway, I was in no position to take off from Montgomery and stay somewhere else at that time.”116 Septima Clark also maintained that Highlander wanted Parks to speak in parts of Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana “but she didn’t feel as if she could do it. She felt . . . that the hostility was so great. She didn’t think that she could do that.”117
Bus desegregation did not improve the Parks family’s personal situation. Both Rosa and Raymond still found white establishments unwilling to hire them, and the hate calls had not subsided. She took in sewing (and Raymond did some barbering), but this did not bring in much money because white people would not hire her. Though economic retribution imperiled many civil rights activists in Montgomery and elsewhere, the troubled economic situation the Parkses faced was distinct from that of most boycott leaders. King, Abernathy, Nixon, Robinson, Gray, Graetz, Pierce, and Simms all had jobs that continued through and after the boycott. Parks did not, but she largely shielded her need from public view. As Virginia Durr wrote a friend, “I cannot understand why the Negro community has not taken better care of her but it hasn’t. She is a proud and reticent woman and that might be the reason. She
does not mind receiving any money I get for her but cannot seem to get it for herself.”118
The plan of action Nixon and Parks put forward differed from the approach advocated by King and the ministers who in January 1957 formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King and Abernathy thought their next target should be the airport, which Parks, along with Gray and Graetz, thought was foolish given how few blacks actually used the airport. But, the MIA’s leadership was also wary of Nixon and Parks’s voter registration project, fearing this new project sought to take the MIA’s place.119 By late 1957, the SCLC would focus its energies on a Crusade for Citizenship, a Southern education, action, and mobilization campaign to encourage black voter registration—not completely dissimilar from Nixon and Parks’s original plan.
Divisions between King and Nixon that had simmered during the boycott heated up in the MIA.120 And Parks sided with Nixon. Durr described the schisms as “the old class split” that had previously plagued Montgomery’s NAACP, where some of the ministers treated Nixon and Parks with condescension. These class divides also had ideological components—the MIA leadership was wary of Nixon’s militancy (connected as he was to A. Phillip Randolph), and perhaps Parks’s as well. Moreover, Nixon resented the ways the young King received all the credit and adulation for the movement at the expense of other leaders.121
Parks’s troubled economic situation became grist for the widening feud within the MIA. In a February 15, 1957, letter, Virginia Durr wrote a friend of the “blazing row” taking place within the organization; Parks has “been a heroine everywhere else, [but] they have not given her a job here although she has needed one desperately . . . She is very, very disgruntled with MLK and really quite bitter which is not like her at all.”122 To another friend, Durr explained that while the MIA had $50,000 in reserve and a payroll of $500 a week, they refused to hire Parks. “They know she cannot get a job, they know she has suffered and is suffering and they blandly do nothing about it at all and this drives me nearly nuts and makes me distrust them very much indeed.”123 In its surveillance of the Durrs, the FBI took notice of Durr’s belief that the MIA “was controlled by a small clique” and her concern over Parks’s situation.124
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Page 21