Claudette Colvin

by Phillip Hoose

  The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was a passionate speaker. For Claudette, his speeches “just brought out everything you wanted to say to a white person”

  That evening, a “mass meeting” was held at the Holt Street Baptist Church, to celebrate the day’s triumph and to plan for the future. By 7:00 p.m., nearly one thousand people were wedged shoulder to shoulder inside the brightly lit church, while four thousand more gathered outside in the chilly darkness to hear songs and speeches and prayers broadcast through makeshift speakers.

  Dr. King, elected just that morning as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, was the main speaker. It was his first major public speech that wasn’t a church sermon, and he needed to inspire this crowd. When introduced, he grasped the sides of the pulpit and took a moment to collect himself. Turning to Rosa Parks, seated behind him in a special place of honor, he began, “Just last Thursday . . . one of the finest citizens in Montgomery . . . was taken from a bus—and carried to jail and arrested—because she refused to give up—to give her seat to a white person . . . And since it had to happen, I’m happy it happened to a person like Mrs. Parks, for nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. Nobody can doubt the height of her character, nobody can doubt the depth of her Christian commitment.”

  MLK’S BOYHOOD BUS EXPERIENCE

  Martin Luther King, Jr., knew firsthand about bitter times on the bus. When he was fourteen, he traveled from Atlanta to a Georgia town to take part in a speech contest. On the way home a white bus driver ordered King and his teacher to give up their seats to white riders. King refused at first, but his teacher persuaded him to give way. He had to stand for several hours. Twenty years later he called it “the angriest I have ever been in my life.”

  Toward the end of his address, Dr. King delivered lines for which he would be remembered. “And we are determined here in Montgomery,” he said, his voice rising in intensity, “to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” His passionate words rocked the church. “Standing beside love is always justice,” he continued. “Not only are we using the tools of persuasion—but we’ve got to use the tools of coercion.” When King sat down to thunderous applause, the crowd inside and outside was ready to act. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy took the pulpit and read a resolution asking that all citizens refrain from riding buses operated by Montgomery City Lines, Inc. “All in favor of the motion, stand,” Abernathy said. Everyone in the room climbed to their feet.

  It was the first of millions and millions of steps to come. The Montgomery bus boycott was born.

  CLAUDETTE: Mom and Velma went to the mass meeting, but I stayed home. I was in a different mind. I was depressed, I was pregnant, I had been expelled from school, and I was leaving home. I had already taken the NAACP records back to Rosa’s house and left them with her mother.

  Right before Christmas, Mom drove Velma and me to Birmingham. We had Christmas there with my birth mother’s family and visited some friends. Then Mom and Velma went back to Montgomery. I was on my own.

  That was an important time for me. My parents were so strict, especially Mom. She tried to make all the decisions for me. Being away from her in Birmingham gave me a chance to clear my head. I thought a lot about what was going down in Montgomery.

  A protest of some kind had been coming on for a long time. Black people weren’t going to take segregation much longer. If you were black, you experienced abuse every day of your life. Every day. You couldn’t even walk through the park without looking over your shoulder for a policeman. The bus boycott was a way of expressing anger at the system at last.

  I was thinking, Where are we going? In church the adults kept saying Reverend King would eventually be driven out of Montgomery or they’d murder him, since whites would never give in. People were saying the boycott wouldn’t succeed. But I was glad it was happening. So many black people were just struggling from day to day—most of us. We had to do it. There had been so much injustice, from Jeremiah Reeves to all the horror stories involving black women abused by white men, to my own arrest. I really wanted to be a part of the boycott.

  I also used the time to clear my head about my own life. When I left Montgomery, everyone was saying I was “mental” and “crazy.” But I wasn’t. The most horrifying part of my last year hadn’t been finding out I was pregnant, or getting kicked out of school. It was the sound of the jailer’s key in the cell door. It was my arrest. And I had gotten through that. The pregnancy was, in a way, a chance to regroup and think about my life. I was a healthy young woman and I was going to have this baby, and I would deal with motherhood when it came. I could take the G.E.D.—a high school equivalency exam—in Montgomery and get my diploma that way.

  I only stayed in Birmingham about two weeks. I missed my dad, Q.P. He was always there for me. Besides, I’d had justice on my mind for a long time. Just because I was pregnant didn’t change my mission. I had been talking about revolution ever since Jeremiah Reeves. I wanted to be part of the bus boycott even if I couldn’t be a leader. I had helped get all this started.

  So I went back home.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SECOND FRONT, SECOND CHANCE

  We are going to hold our stand. We are not going to be a part of any program that will get Negroes to ride the buses again at the price of the destruction of our heritage and way of life.

  —W. A. “Tacky” Gayle, mayor of Montgomery

  WITH THE TURN of the new year of 1956, Montgomery throbbed with excitement. Day by day, reporters and photographers poured into town to cover the Negro bus protest in the heart of Dixie. As the boycott entered its second month, black leaders continued to press for the same three modest changes that Jo Ann Robinson and others had requested two years earlier—which did not include integrated seating—but city officials wouldn’t budge. “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile,” they told one another. The City Lines bus company declared the proposed changes illegal and said that, unfortunately, their hands were tied.

  Members of Montgomery’s black community gather at the Holt Street Baptist Church in support of the boycott

  Mass meetings continued at black churches every Tuesday and Thursday night. Young, round-faced Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who urged boycotters to refrain from violence and seek charity toward whites in their hearts, inspired crowds with stirring speeches that often included ideas and philosophies from distant times and places. He talked about the power of love to change the world. “He had poetry in his voice, and he could snatch scripture outa the air and make it hum,” said E. D. Nixon, who admitted “he was saying it better ’n I ever could.” King began to emerge as a charismatic national figure.

  Determined to apply economic pressure peacefully, black protesters let the nearly empty buses rumble on by like green ghosts, ignoring the doors that snapped open invitingly at the corners, and devised their own transportation system. Coached by leaders of Baton Rouge’s bus boycott of 1953, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) designed an alternative to the buses on the scale of a wartime military transport system, moving tens of thousands of maids and yard men and clerks and students around Montgomery’s far-flung neighborhoods every day. And it was entirely voluntary—it ran on dedication, generosity, and hope.

  THE MONTGOMERY IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION

  Leaders believed that a new organization was needed to run the boycott, so they created the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). Determined to avoid friction between established black leaders, they nominated as president a newcomer, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. “Well, if you think I can render some service, I will,” he replied. A board of twenty-five directors was named.

  After thousands voted to continue the boycott beyond one day, the MIA had a lot of work to do. They had to design the car pool, put it in motion, and pay for it. Mass meetings were held twice a week to keep spirits up and collect donations. As the boycott rolled on, dona
tions poured in from all over the country—eventually enough for the MIA to buy more than thirty station wagons.

  Some teens organized their social lives around the mass meetings. Annie Larkin, then sixteen, recalls, “I’d go home from school, get my homework done, and my grandmother would have dinner ready so my aunt and I could go to mass meetings together. I went every Tuesday and Thursday night, no matter where.”

  The MIA network was unveiled in detail at a mass meeting on December 12. There would be forty-two morning pickup “stations” and forty-eight evening stations scattered throughout Montgomery. These points had been carefully plotted on maps by mail carriers, the workers who knew the city best. The central dispatch station would be a black-owned downtown parking lot, manned by an on-call transportation committee. The “buses” would be a giant car pool consisting of ordinary people’s automobiles. Car owners were asked to lend their vehicles to the MIA car pool so that other people could drive them around town. For most people, especially if they had little money, having a car was a proud symbol of status. Letting total strangers drive one’s car around all day was a hard thing to ask, but nearly two hundred people turned over their keys to the boycott.

  Here’s how it worked: a maid needing to get across town to her white employer’s home would walk to the morning station nearest her home and wait for a ride. After work she would walk to the nearest night station to be picked up and driven to a drop-off point nearer her home. Since it was against the law for private cars to charge fares like licensed taxis, the network would be paid for by donations collected at the mass meetings. Most of the rides would be free.

  Though the network was elegantly designed, there were not enough seats in the car pool to replace an entire city bus system. Thousands of black workers, including many who were elderly and some who were disabled, set out from home in the predawn darkness and walked miles each day. Some preferred to walk to show their support for the boycott rather than accept a ride even from the MIA car pool. One MIA driver told the story of having come upon an elderly woman hobbling along the road. “Jump in, grandmother,” he said to her, pushing open the door. She waved him on. “I’m not walking for myself,” she said. “I’m walking for my children and my grandchildren.”

  The third month of the boycott and another day of walking

  Family members made enormous sacrifices and sometimes hobbled home with barely enough energy to eat supper. And family chores like shopping had to continue. That meant more steps. The foot-weary warriors told their stories at the mass meetings, inspiring and encouraging one another to keep walking.

  Many were initially skeptical of the boycott. “When they first sent the leaflets saying ‘don’t ride the bus,’ I was worried about my momma,” remembers Alean Bowser. “I got angry, and I said they’d better not do anything to her. I thought she’d still go on riding the bus because she did housecleaning and she worked far away from home. But then they had worked out this whole plan of having people to drive and pick up. I got behind it. I and three other girls from my typing class at school started working at the Baptist Center, typing up and mimeographing lists of the people who were driving in the bus boycott. We had to make the list every third night in order to keep the information current. They had stations downtown. Who was driving this direction and that direction. I had to call the drivers and make sure they were still willing and available. And people in most families had walking jobs, too. I was appointed to walk downtown and pay our bills. But I could use the network for that, too.”

  Boycott supporters climb out of one of the dozens of station wagons that were purchased during the 381-day protest. Many of the vehicles were assigned to churches

  CLAUDETTE: When I got back to Montgomery, of course I stayed off the buses. Mostly I rode with my mom in a used Plymouth Dad bought for her. She needed it, because she worked way up out of town in a place the car pool didn’t go to.

  Q. P. Colvin, Claudette’s dad, bought a car for the family during the boycott

  Dad was very frugal. He saved enough to buy a TV set, too, so we could keep up with the boycott. We’d watch the news every night. The boycott was always the headline—it was the biggest story in the South. I also read Jo Ann Robinson’s editorials in a little newsletter that came every month.

  The people Mom worked for were sympathetic to the boycott. The first sign of this was they didn’t fire Mom when they found out I was arrested. They weren’t rich; they were just average people. They paid my mom three dollars a day and bus fare. The lady used to bring her home after work on the days when Mom didn’t drive.

  The boycott was relatively easy for people on King Hill because we already had our own community transportation system in place. We were isolated—just three little streets on top of a hill on the edge of town. We had no stores up there, so we had to go through white neighborhoods to shop downtown. To get off the Hill, three or four people would pitch in to pay someone a quarter to drive them to and from work. They’d drop the maids off house by house because everybody was going in the same direction.

  My family duties increased during the boycott. Mom was gone a lot, because she used her car to drive people places. We didn’t donate our Plymouth to the boycott because Mom needed it to get out of town for work, but since we had a car people were constantly coming around to say, “Mary Ann, can you take me and a couple of others to this place or that?” Dad didn’t drive and I didn’t have a license yet, so I did more cooking and cleaning and shopping and laundry while Mom drove. I had several cousins who drove taxis, and they’d come and take me to town when I wanted. A lot of people volunteered their cars for the boycott and dipped into their savings to buy gasoline during that time. Everyone pulled together.

  WHITE SUPPORT OF THE BOYCOTT

  Not all white Montgomerians opposed the boycott, and not all favored racial segregation. A small but determined minority of white citizens assisted the car pool, drove their black employees to and from work, and sometimes donated money to the boycott. Among the best known were Robert Graetz, the pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church, and Clifford Durr, a lawyer who assisted Fred Gray in his legal cases. His wife, Virginia Durr, also provided support in many ways.

  A few whites dared to express their support publicly. Juliette Morgan, a librarian, wrote in a letter to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, “It is hard . . . not to be moved with admiration at the quiet dignity, discipline, and dedication with which the Negroes have conducted their boycott.”

  The death threats began immediately, by phone and mail. They increased month by month. People hurled stones at Morgan’s picture window and sprinted up to ring her doorbell again and again in the dead of night, shattering her sleep. She lost many friends. About a year after her letter was published, Juliette Morgan took her own life.

  I went to the mass meetings when they were at churches on the other side of town, where people wouldn’t recognize me. I went to a lot of them, more than once a month. I heard Dr. King speak, and felt the people rally around him. Those speeches he made just brought out everything you wanted to say to a white person. People were kicking you when you were down every day, and his words made you feel stronger. I sat in the back, far away from the speechmakers, wearing big shirts to cover my growing stomach. The leaders sure weren’t going to invite a pregnant teenager up onstage during a mass meeting. It bothered me to be shunned, but I was an unwed pregnant girl and I knew how people were. People who recognized me would ask, “Who’s the father?” I’d answer, “None of your business.”

  BY LATE JANUARY, the City Lines bus company was losing $3,200 a day. They had been forced to lay off drivers and shut down several bus routes just to stay in business. Inspired at mass meetings by the testimony of elderly people who walked great distances and poor families who donated money for gasoline, protesters kept walking and vowed to do so until justice came. Many who owned cars continued to offer them to the car pool and volunteer as drivers. Thousands used the car pool each day, and thousands more walked
to work and school and the downtown stores.

  Montgomery motorcycle police keep a close eye on a downtown parking lot, one of the many busy transfer points for the MIA car pool

  In desperation, Mayor W. A. “Tacky” Gayle turned up the heat. Police were instructed to crack down on drivers, stopping them and questioning them at every opportunity. Dr. King was arrested on January 26 for going thirty miles per hour in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone. He spent a night in jail for the first time in his life. Three days later someone hurled a bomb through his front window, causing extensive damage but injuring no one in his family. At a mass meeting he said, “If I am stopped, this movement will not stop, because God is with this movement.”

  SEPARATE BUT EQUAL?

  In 1896, in a famous court case known as Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state of Louisiana could racially segregate its buses, streetcars, and trains without violating the U.S. Constitution as long as the separate sections of compartments were “equal.”

  Separate but equal became the legal basis for segregation throughout the South. But the idea that the schools, parks, hotels, restaurants, and sections of buses and trains were “equal” was a sham. In 1900, $15.41 was spent on each white child in the public schools versus $1.50 per black student. The ratio was the same forty years later.