At least there was still church. On Sundays after services at Hutchinson Street Baptist, she would go across town to Rosa Parks’s NAACP youth meetings. Mrs. Parks had appointed Claudette youth secretary, which meant keeping attendance and membership records and putting out notices. The meetings were held at the redbrick Trinity Lutheran Church, pastored by the Reverend Robert S. Graetz. He was the only white minister in Montgomery with an all-black congregation.
CLAUDETTE: I only went if I could get a ride, because I didn’t want to ride the bus anymore. If I couldn’t get a ride back, I’d stay overnight at Rosa’s—she lived in the projects across the street. Rosa was hard to get to know, but her mom was just the opposite—warm and talkative and funny. We would stay up all night gabbing, sometimes while Rosa pinned wedding dresses on me that she was altering for work. Rosa’s mother knew all sorts of horror stories about black girls getting mistreated. There was nothing we couldn’t talk about.
Rosa Parks was like two different people inside and out of the meetings. She was very kind and thoughtful; she knew exactly how I liked my coffee and fixed me peanut butter and Ritz crackers, but she didn’t say much at all. Then, when the meetings started, I’d think, Is that the same lady? She would come across very strong about rights. She would pass out leaflets saying things like “We are going to break down the walls of segregation.”
I might have had more fun if the meetings had been in my neighborhood. The children in the NAACP youth group weren’t like the students I went to school with. Their parents were professionals; these children went to private schools. Whenever they said they planned to go North for an education after they graduated, Rosa would scold them. “Why should your families have to send you North? Our colleges right here could offer a good education, too—but they’re segregated.” Rosa kept inviting me to tell my bus arrest story to the kids there, but after a while they had all heard it a million times. They seemed bored with it.
IT WAS DURING ONE OF THOSE SUMMER VISITS across town that Claudette met someone who actually listened—or seemed to. While watching a baseball game in a park, Claudette was joined by a light-skinned black man. She judged him to be maybe ten years older than she was, married, he said, but separated from his wife and living with his mother. He said he was a Korean War veteran, and backed up his claim with lively stories from places in distant parts of the world.
EMMETT TILL
What happened to Emmett Till in the summer of 1955 was a horrible reminder of how much resistance there would be to racial integration in the South. Till was a fourteen-year-old Negro boy from Chicago who had gone to Mississippi to visit relatives in a small town. In August 1955, he allegedly whistled at a white store clerk and said “Bye, baby” to her as he left the store. Three nights later he was kidnapped. Three days after that, his body was found floating in a river, wrapped in barbed wire and grotesquely mutilated. Two white men were arrested but acquitted by an all-white jury.
The savagery of the crime sent a chilling message. “We talked about it a lot that summer and in school the next fall,” remembers Claudette. “There had been lynchings and cross burnings before, but this was a much stronger warning. Emmett Till was our age.”
CLAUDETTE: I liked talking to him. He was the first person to understand my hair. Everyone else kept saying I was crazy, or “mental,” but he got it. He said it was impossible for black people to have really straight hair anyway; he had seen Asian women with straight hair all the way down to their feet. No black woman could ever grow hair like that no matter how she tried. He kept telling me to ignore what people were saying about me. I really needed to hear that. He was easy to talk to. I could relate to him. I would say things like “The revolution is here—we need to stand up!” and he would agree. But all the time I knew that I was getting in over my head. He was so much older than me, and had so much more experience. I knew I was getting into a situation I couldn’t handle, but it was hard to stop.
THE SLOW, SULTRY SUMMER finally came to an end when, just after Labor Day, Claudette celebrated her sixteenth birthday and returned to Booker T. Washington High for her senior year. Her legal case had died with the appeal decision, and Claudette had lost contact with all the adult black leaders except Rosa Parks. Still, riding the bus continued to anger and humiliate blacks throughout Montgomery, and impatience was mounting. Leaders such as E. D. Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson kept looking for the catalyst—the “right” person or event—that would spark citywide action.
Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Bradley
On October 21, a second teenager, eighteen-year-old Mary Louise Smith, defied a Montgomery bus driver’s command. She had left home early that morning to collect the twelve dollars owed her by the white family for whom she had worked the week before. But when she finally reached their house on the other side of town, they weren’t home. Now she was out not only her wage, which her family needed, but also the twenty cents for round-trip bus fare. A week of work and a trip across town for nothing: that’s what she was thinking on the bus ride home when a redhaired woman appeared in the aisle by her seat and ordered her to get up and move back.
Mary Louise Smith, graduation photo, 1955
At St. Jude School, the nuns had taught Mary Louise and her siblings to respect all people regardless of their skin color, and she did. But she was angry that day. She was thinking, It’s the bus driver’s job to ask, and to ask politely. Muttering a rare profanity, she crossed her legs, squirmed down in her seat, and made herself very still. She heard the bus driver’s command to move, but she refused. And refused again. Next came the driver’s radio call, and within minutes, a policeman entered the bus and arrested her.
Mary Louise was taken downtown, booked, and jailed. She was released two hours later, when her father arrived and paid the fourteen-dollar fine. It happened so quickly and quietly that there was no newspaper publicity. By the time E. D. Nixon and other black leaders heard about Mary Louise Smith, her fine had already been paid and it was too late to mount a legal challenge.
But that didn’t stop people from talking. Another teenage girl had been arrested on the bus. Who was she? Where was she from? What church did her family go to? Who were her parents? Where did they live? Soon the rumor mill was spinning out gossip that the Smith girl’s father was a drunk and the family lived in a squalid shack.
The truth was much different. Mary Louise later said she never in her life saw her father drunk. For one thing, he was too busy working to drink much. After Mary Louise’s mother died, in 1952, Frank Smith took a second job to support his six children. Hardly a shack, the Smith home was a two-story, three-bedroom frame house in a working-class neighborhood. But Mary Louise Smith, the second teenager with the nerve to face down Jim Crow on a city bus, was, like Claudette, branded “unfit” to serve as the public face of a mass bus protest.
During the summer and fall of 1955, Montgomery’s adult black activists thought hard about the buses—which looked increasingly like Jim Crow’s Achilles’ heel. Each considered what to do in his or her own way. Jo Ann Robinson, E. D. Nixon, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others continued to meet with city and bus officials, consistently pressing for black drivers, courteous treatment, and a revised seating plan. Every polite refusal increased their resolve. Dr. King thought the officials were digging their own grave. “The inaction of the city and bus officials after the Colvin case would make it necessary for them . . . to meet another committee, infinitely more determined,” he later wrote.
Rosa Parks and Fred Gray met for lunch nearly every day, often talking about what could be learned from Claudette’s case that could end segregation on the buses. In July, Mrs. Parks slipped away for a two-week workshop on interracial relations at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Here, for the first time, she saw blacks and whites treated as equals. She returned saying it had changed her life.
The time was ripe for change. There was a growing impatience with segregation. Claudette had crossed a line, proclaiming that at least
one young Alabaman would not share her future with Jim Crow. Seven months later, Mary Louise Smith had joined her. Now, a year and a half after Brown v. Board of Education, a few brave young people were demanding a different future. Education may have been the way up, but transportation was the way out. If they were branded “uncontrollable” or “emotional” or even “profane,” so be it. Claudette and now Mary Louise Smith had shown through their courage that at least some young people were ready to act.
Rosa Parks with E. D. Nixon (at left). At last the African-American community of Montgomery was united and ready for action
CHAPTER SEVEN
“ANOTHER NEGRO WOMAN HAS BEEN ARRESTED”
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
—Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise”
ON DECEMBER 2, 1955, tens of thousands of black Montgomery residents studied an unsigned leaflet bearing a brief typewritten message. It began: “Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the Claudette Colbert [sic] case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped.” It concluded:
We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday.
The author was Jo Ann Robinson, who had been up all night with two student assistants at Alabama State, feverishly running the flyers off on the college’s mimeograph machine and bundling them into packages. When they finished, she placed a phone call to activate a network of distributors already in place. Soon twenty or so allies were stationed at their posts throughout the city, craning their necks watching for Robinson’s car to come into view so they could receive their bundles of flyers and start passing them out in schools, offices, factories, stores, restaurants, and beauty parlors. “Read it and pass it on!” the distributors instructed and sped off. Two of Robinson’s most trusted lieutenants were Claudette’s favorite teachers, Miss Nesbitt and Miss Lawrence. By nightfall most blacks in Montgomery knew what was up. Those who didn’t know about the one-day bus boycott read about it in the next morning’s Montgomery Advertiser, in a story leaked by E. D. Nixon to a trusted reporter.
The “other Negro woman” arrested was Rosa Parks. Just the afternoon before, Mrs. Parks had refused a driver’s command to give up her seat to a white passenger on a crowded bus. Then, as had been the case with Claudette, the driver called the police, officers boarded, and one asked her, “Why don’t you stand up?” She replied, “Why do you push us around?” He answered, “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you are under arrest.”
There the similarity to Claudette’s arrest ended. Rather than being grabbed by the wrists and jerked up from her seat with belongings flying everywhere, Rosa Parks stood up. One officer took her shopping bag, the other picked up her purse, and they escorted her off the bus and into a patrol car. She sat in the backseat alone, her hands uncuffed, as they drove to police headquarters and then to city hall. After her fingerprints were taken and the paperwork completed, she was allowed to telephone her family.
She was charged only with disorderly conduct, not with breaking the segregation law. She was not jailed. Soon E. D. Nixon and two white activists, Clifford and Virginia Durr, hurried downtown, paid her bond, and took her home, where Fred Gray later met her and agreed to be her lawyer. The next Monday morning, Mrs. Parks was found guilty in a brief court hearing. She paid a ten-dollar fine and was released. Gray told the judge to expect an appeal. When Mrs. Parks walked out of the dim courthouse and into the cool, bright morning, she was surprised to find several hundred cheering supporters waiting for her.
Claudette had lit the fuse to a powder keg of protest, but her rebellion had caught black Montgomery by surprise. Now, nine months later, Rosa Parks was embraced by a community ready for action. Claudette had given them the time to prepare. As Fred Gray later said, “I don’t mean to take anything away from Mrs. Parks, but Claudette gave all of us the moral courage to do what we did.”
Married and in her early forties, Rosa Parks was widely known as an activist through her work with the Montgomery NAACP. As a seamstress at a downtown department store, she repaired, altered, and steam-pressed clothing—work known and respected by both the black professional class and ordinary workers. She was light-skinned but not white. She may not have gone to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—she was a Methodist—but she would have been accepted in any congregation. She bridged classes.
What she wasn’t may have been just as important to Montgomery’s black leadership, the preachers and teachers and ASC women and E. D. Nixon. She wasn’t a teenager. Hardly “feisty” or “emotional,” as Claudette was rumored to be, Rosa Parks struck almost everyone she met as a contained, pleasant, committed, and levelheaded individual. She was safe.
And she wasn’t pregnant. Neither was Claudette when she had been arrested and people started talking about her, but now she was, and she would have to deal with it.
CLAUDETTE: The first few months I hoped and prayed and pretended it wasn’t true, but it was. I had so little information about sex. I wasn’t sexually active at all. I had never gone very far with my boyfriend, and my parents had never talked to me about sex. I would hear other girls say, “Well, I didn’t get pregnant my first time, or the second.” It had only happened once with this man, and I was so uninformed that I wasn’t even sure that what we had done could get me pregnant.
But it had, and I thought my mom was going to have a heart attack when I told her. We thought about an abortion, but it was illegal, and the only woman we had heard of who did abortions was supposedly connected with the police department. Besides, my mother was convinced God wouldn’t forgive you for an abortion. My dad threatened to kill the father—he was so much older than I was. Then my dad got worried that the father’s wife’s family was going to accuse me of breaking up their marriage and come after us. My parents insisted that I not tell anyone who the father was. I wanted to tell, to explain what had happened to me so that people would understand, but I gave in and kept quiet.
My mom just took over my life at that point. Usually I was stronger, but right then I was easy to control. Of course I couldn’t marry the father; I didn’t love him and he was already married. My boyfriend, Fred Harvey, came to our house and asked to marry me, but my mother said he would just be doing it out of pity. I wanted to say yes, but I backed down.
We decided I’d keep my pregnancy a secret as long as I could so I wouldn’t get kicked out of school. The rule at Booker T. Washington was “If you’re pregnant, you’re out.” Then, when Christmas break came, I would tell the school I was sick and go to Birmingham and live with my birth mother and have the baby there. After that I would leave the baby with her for a while and come back to Montgomery and finish high school. I would only have one semester left.
But I started showing too early. Late in the fall a few girls caught on. They’d say, “I thought you had more sense.” I didn’t have any answer to that. The teachers always had an eye out for pregnant girls—it was very common. They knew the signs. So one day I got called down to the office. I went in to see the principal, Mr. Smiley. I said, “I know why I’m here; you don’t have to bother saying it,” but he did anyway. And he added, “Don’t come back after Christmas break.”
So we had to change strategies. Our new plan was for me to have the baby in Birmingham and finish school there. I had never officially changed my last name on my birth certificate to Colvin—it still said I was Claud
ette Austin. So I could enroll as Claudette Austin and finish high school in Birmingham.
One day a few weeks before Christmas, I was at home, trying to get ready in my mind for all the changes to come—changes in my body, becoming a mother, not going to Booker T. Washington, moving away from my Montgomery family—when a neighbor girl walked over from across the street carrying a piece of paper. She handed it to me and said, “You gotta read this.” The three of us—her, me, and Mom—stood out in the front yard reading it. It was the boycott leaflet: “Don’t ride the bus on Monday.” Right away I saw my name—misspelled: “Claudette Colbert.” My first thought was, If they had just called me, I could have at least reminded them how to spell my name.
But it didn’t say who the Negro woman was who got arrested. When I heard on the news that it was Rosa Parks, I had several feelings: I was glad an adult had finally stood up to the system, but I felt left out. I was thinking, Hey, I did that months ago and everybody dropped me. There was a time when I thought I would be the centerpiece of the bus case. I was eager to keep going in court. I had wanted them to keep appealing my case. I had enough self-confidence to keep going. Maybe adults thought a teenager’s testimony wouldn’t hold up in the legal system. But what I did know is they all turned their backs on me, especially after I got pregnant. It really, really hurt. But on the other hand, having been with Rosa at the NAACP meetings, I thought, Well, maybe she’s the right person—she’s strong and adults won’t listen to me anyway. One thing was for sure: no matter how I felt or what I thought, I wasn’t going to get my chance.
DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., rose early the morning of Monday, December 5, rushed to his picture window, and peered out at the first buses as they moved past his house. They were nearly empty. Usually they were filled with maids and black schoolchildren. Excited, he jumped in his car and drove around Montgomery to inspect other buses during the morning commute. In an hour of driving, he saw a total of only eight black passengers on the buses. Clearly the message “please . . . don’t ride the bus at all on Monday” had reached almost everyone.
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