Montgomery Bus Boycott
Rosa Parks
There had been
numerous instances of Blacks refusing to obey the segregation laws on public
transportation [in Montgomery ,
Alabama Montgomery
You have read about Claudette Colvin’s experience March 2,
1955.
On October 21, 1955, 18 year-old Mary Louise Smith, another member
of Rosa Parks’s Youth Council, refused to move to the back of the bus and was
arrested. Like Claudette Colvin, she, too, was considered by the WPC too poor
and too young to be presented as a responsible, mature, sympathetic victim.
Then came Rosa Parks.
Before we read an account of her experience, we need to know the
following:
Though Parks later
wrote an autobiography, her notes from decades earlier give a more personal
sense of her thoughts. In numerous accounts, she highlighted the difficulty of
navigating a segregated society and the immense pressure put on black people
not to dissent. She wrote that it took a “major mental acrobatic feat” to
survive as a black person in the United States
For her, the
frustration began in childhood, when even her beloved grandmother worried about
her “talking biggety to white folks.” She recounts how her grandmother grew
angry when a young Rosa recounted picking up a
brick to challenge a white bully. Rosa told
her grandmother: “I would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated and not
be allowed to say ‘I don’t like it.’ ”
Parks viewed the power
of speaking back in the face of racism and oppression as fundamental — and saw
that denying that right was key to the functioning of white power. Parks’s
“determination never to accept it, even if it must be endured,” led her to
“search for a way of working for freedom and first class citizenship.”
Parks carried that
determination into adulthood, though she made clear the impossible mental state
it required. She lyrically described the difficulty of being a rebel, the ways
black children were “conditioned early to learn their places,” and the toll it
took on her personally: “There is just so much hurt, disappointment and
oppression one can take…. The line between reason and madness grows thinner.”
In the longest piece
of the collection, an 11-page document describing a near-rape incident, Parks
decisively uses the power of speaking back. When the document became public in
2011, there was controversy around its release and questions about whether it
was a work of fiction. But it does not appear that Parks wrote fiction, and
details of the story correspond to Parks’s life. Like the narrator of the
story, Parks was doing domestic work during the Scottsboro trial, during her
late teens in 1931. It’s written in the first person, though the narrator is
unnamed.
In the account, a
young Rosa is threatened with assault by a
white neighbor of her employer, who was let into the house by a black worker,
“Sam.” The heavy-set white man she aptly called “Mr. Charlie” (a term black
people of the era used for white people and their arbitrary power) gets a
drink, puts his hand on her waist, and attempts to make a move on her.
Furious and terrified,
she resolved to resist: “I was ready and willing to die, but give any consent,
never, never, never.” When Mr. Charlie said he’d gotten permission from Sam to
be with her, she replied that Sam didn’t own her, that she hated the both of
them, and that nothing Mr. Charlie could do would get her consent. “If he
wanted to kill me and rape a dead body,” Parks wrote, “he was welcome but he
would have to kill me first.”
…
After years of
activism, Parks had reached her breaking point on the bus that December
evening: “I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I
couldn’t take it any more.” Her writings reveal the burden that this decade of
political activism — which, with a small cadre of other Montgomery
Repeatedly in her
writings, Parks underscored the difficulties in mobilizing in the years before
her bus protest: “People blamed [the] NAACP for not winning cases when they did
not support it and give strength enough.” She found it demoralizing, if
understandable, that in the decade before the boycott, “the masses seemed not
to put forth too much effort to struggle against the status quo,” noting how
those who challenged the racial order like she did were labeled “radicals, sore
heads, agitators, trouble makers” (Theoharris 2-4).
The account.
Shortly after 5 p.m.,
on a cool Alabama
Encountering a
standing-room-only bus and having been on her feet all day operating a huge
steam press, Parks decided to cross the street and do some Christmas shopping
at Lee’s Cut Rate Drug while waiting for a less crowded bus. Around 6 p.m., as
she boarded bus number 2857 at the corner of Montgomery and Moulton streets,
Parks was about to change the course of the 20th century.
Parks was sitting in
an aisle seat on the front row of this middle section. To her left, across the
aisle, were two black women. To her right, in the window seat, was a black man.
A few minutes later,
when the bus reached the third stop in front of the Empire Theater, several
white passengers boarded, and driver James E. Blake (1912–2002) noticed a white
man standing near the front. He called out for the four black passengers in
Parks’s row to move to the back, where they would have to stand, as all of the
seats were now taken.
They did not respond.
Blake got out of his seat and instructed the four to move, saying, “Y’all
better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.” Three of the
black passengers reluctantly proceeded to go and stand in the back of the bus.
Parks, however, refused to get up, sliding from the aisle seat to the window
seat, which would have allowed for the white passenger to sit in any of the
three seats in her row.
The bus driver asked:
“Are you going to stand up?” Parks looked him in the eye and responded with a
quiet but resolute, “No.” She explained that she had gotten on board first,
that she paid the same fare and that she wasn’t sitting in the white section.
She didn’t think it
was fair that she had to stand for someone else to sit who arrived after her
and that she was not violating the city ordinance. (She didn’t complain how
nonchivalrous it was that a supposed gentleman would make a woman stand so he
could sit, or how irrational it was that he wouldn’t even want to sit in the
same row with her.)
“Well,” Blake
responded, “I’m going to have you arrested.” Parks gave him the permission he
did not request: “You may do that.”
Blake called his
supervisor, who advised him that after warning the passenger he had to exercise
his power and put Parks off the bus. He then radioed the police, who sent
officers F.B. Day and D.W. Mixon.
As they boarded the
bus while several passengers exited through the rear, the officers debriefed
Blake and then peacefully arrested Parks. “Why do you all push us around?” she
asked the tired beat cops. Officer Day responded, “I don’t know, but the law is
the law and you’re under arrest.” They drove her in their squad car to the city
jail, booked her and held her in a dank and musty cell.
Parks’s boss and
friend, NAACP president E.D. Nixon, bailed her out that evening. …
If Rosa Parks had been
paying attention, she never would have gotten on the bus driven by the tall,
blond, 43-year-old Blake. He had a reputation for spitting his tobacco juice,
using derogatory language toward blacks (and black women in particular) and
making black passengers pay their fare in the front of the bus but reenter in
the rear, only to pull away before they could get back on.
A dozen years earlier
— in November 1943 — Blake had tried to make Parks exit and reenter his bus
through the crowded rear entrance after she had already boarded his bus in the
front. Parks refused, so Blake grabbed her sleeve to push her off the bus. She
intentionally dropped her purse and sat down in the white section to retrieve
it. As she looked at Blake, she warned him: “I will get off…. You better not
hit me.”
For the next 12 years,
Parks intentionally avoided riding on Blake’s bus, walking whenever she could,
despite her chronic bursitis. But on Dec. 1, 1955, she absentmindedly boarded
without noting that she was once again entering a bus driven by Blake. It
proved to be a serendipitous mistake.
Parks sought to set
the record straight: “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I
was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired
than I was at the end of a working day…. No, the only tired I was, was tired of
giving in.” She later said she couldn’t have lived with herself if she had
given in and stood up (Taylor
Works cited:
“Rosa Parks and The Montgomery Wesleyan University
Taylor,
Justin. “5 Myths about Rosa Parks, the
woman who had almost a ‘biblical quality’.”
The Washington
Theoharis, Jeanne. “How history
got the Rosa Parks story wrong.” The Washington
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