Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

We have all heard the saying, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” And if there is one woman in history who embodied that sentiment, it was Mrs Rosa Parks, a woman who lived through unjust segregation and took a stand, by taking a seat.

The actions of Rosa Parks in 1955 (yes, the same year that Marty McFly travelled to in Back to the Future) were a catalyst for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and it would be easy to say she was a tired old lady who just needed to sit down whilst riding a bus and that sparked the chain of civil rights events. But there are a few things wrong with that narrative. Firstly, she was not old, I mean at the time of her arrest, she was three years younger than I currently am. I will begrudgingly accept the expression middle aged.

The other misconception is that this was a seemingly spontaneous event, but the real story is much richer. Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist and the Montgomery Bus Boycott had been proposed for a long time before the actions of Rosa Parks kick-started the plan into action. Also, there was an entire civil rights movement bubbling under the surface, training, organising and planning this non-violent mass protest.

But before we get into that pivotal day, it is important to understand the unjust segregated conditions that black Americans were forced to endure. Segregation is the official practice keeping different races apart. Montgomery, where Rosa Parks lived, is in the state of Alabama, which is the south of America and there were a set of rules – called the Jim Crow Laws – that were put into place after slavery was abolished. These laws kept black and white people socially separated. There were laws about black people living in white neighbourhoods, having separate restaurants, toilets and theatres just to name a few.

I want to circle back to Jim Crow, the person for whom these segregation laws were named. Jim Crow was a fictional character. He was invented by a white man who dressed up as a minstrel in black face. If you were wondering why black face was and still is so bad, is because these historical origins. The purpose of black face comedy was to dehumanise, mock and portray African Americans as inferior. Black face has its roots in systemic racism and comes from a time where lynching was commonplace in the south. Lynching is where a mob of people come together to murder someone publicly without a trial in a court of law. Just to give you some context, the bus boycott happened in 1955 and there was a lynching as late as 1953. The thought of standing up for your rights, or in this case sitting down for your rights, would have been an incredibly daunting idea in that climate of systemic racism and fear.

The Jim Crow laws varied in different states, but some of the laws specific to Alabama included whites and blacks could not eat in the same room, unless there was a partition, employers who hired black employees had to provide a separate toilet for them, a white nurse was not allowed to attend to a black man in a hospital, and in terms of transport, bus stations had to have a separate waiting room for black customers and on buses there was a partition that black customers had to sit behind, but not before they had to pay the fare to the driver at the front of the bus, then get off and re-enter the bus from the back door. They were not even allowed to walk through the white section.

Additionally, even though the buses had a majority of black customers, the buses stopped on every corner for white communities, but not in black communities, so black people had to walk several blocks to get home.

And that is why the president of the Women’s Political Council sent a letter to the Mayor about the unfair conditions on the buses. So, this boycott was definitely not an afterthought, this had been in the making for a long time, they just needed the right injustice to occur. And that injustice came in the shape of a cruel bus driver insisting on the arrest of a 42 year old woman. Rosa Parks.

Going back a bit further than the boycott, in 1943- 12 years before the arrest on the bus, Rosa joined the NAACP. The NAACP was, and still is, a civil rights organisation that began in 1909 and whose mission it is to eliminate discrimination based on race. So, at the age of 30, she joined the Montgomery branch of the NAACP and became the secretary. As part of her role she investigated cases of police brutality, rape, murder and discrimination. She tried to get justice for black women who had been raped by white men and to protect black men who had been falsely accused of crimes and were in danger of lynching.

At this time, Rosa was also attempting to register to vote. African American people in Montgomery could not just enrol to vote, they were forced to undertake a literacy test before they were granted the right. You can find examples of these tests online and they are crazy confusing and almost impossible to complete in the timeframe given.

The first time Rosa Parks attempted the test, she was told she passed, but was never sent her voting card, the second time she was told she failed, but they refused to show her the results, and the third time she passed again and this time copied out her answers as proof and was finally sent her voting card. But when she went to vote, the poll workers forced her to pay a poll tax, for not only that year but for every year since she had reached legal voting age. For a young, black seamstress, that was an exorbitant amount of money, but she paid and voted in every election thereafter.

In 1953- two years before the boycott, the Women’s Political Council of Montgomery, had enough of the bus segregation, and they approached the city commissioners about the situation on the buses, in particular having to pay at the front, alight the bus and then get back on the bus through the back door. Then in May 1954, 18 months before the boycott, the WPC, wrote a letter outlining the inequalities on the buses, including not stopping frequently enough in black neighbourhoods, and they warned of a bus boycott. The President of the WPC Jo Robinson forewarned the  commission, that 3/4s of the bus patrons were African American and that without their patronage the buses could not operate, she goes on to say, “There has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of busses.”

This is clear evidence that the boycott was not a spontaneous event, but came about after great deliberation and forethought.

In mid 1955, four months before the bus arrest, Rosa Parks received a scholarship to attend a leadership training course for civil rights activists at the Highlander Folk School. The school was in Tennessee and was about a 6-hour bus ride from Montgomery- for which she also received a reimbursement as part of the scholarship. While there Rosa was mentored by civil rights educator Septima Clarke who encouraged empowerment in black communities.

It was not long after this training that the bus incident took place. But this wasn’t her first run in with this particular driver. She had an encounter with him, 12 years before. She had gotten on the front to pay, then she refused to get off the bus to get on again from the back. The bus driver kicked her off the bus, and she vowed not to ride on his bus again. But on December 1^st, 1955, she was on the way home from work and not paying 100% attention to the bus driver and she did happen to get on his bus. She was not sitting in the white’s only section, but the middle section of the bus, and when the “whites only” section was filled, black customers were expected to get up from the middle section and move back.

“I was not tired physically,” she later wrote “or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

She was not even the first woman to be arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, in March of that same year a 15 Year old Claudette Colvin, who had just been studying Harriette Tubman and Sojourner Truth for Black History Month at her school, was inspired to fight for her rights and she refused to give up her seat on a bus. She was arrested and put in jail. I have heard several reasons as to why she wasn’t chosen to be a face of the boycott. One source said she was pregnant, but she didn’t have her baby until March 1956, 12 months after her arrest, so that math doesn’t really add up. Colvin herself said she thought that Rosa Parks had a more acceptable look and skin colour to be the face of the boycott. However, the arrest report of Colvin says that, “she struggled to get off the bus all the way to the police car… and she kicked and scratched me on the hand, also kicked me in the stomach.” In contrast to this, the arresting officer said of Rosa Parks that she “acted like a lady during that time, and she didn’t give us no problems.”

I would suggest that Rosa was chosen as the face of the boycott, because of both her non-violent civil disobedience, that she would have been trained to do in her years at the NAACP and at the Highlander Folk School, and also because of the societal expectations of how a woman in society should behave and kicking and scratching was not acceptable, especially when they wanted a pillar of society to be the face of a movement. In fact, in Martin Luther King’s memoir of the event he wrote, “Mrs. Parks was ideal for the role assigned to her by history…her character was impeccable and her dedication deep-rooted” and she was one of the most respected people in the community.

Four days after Rosa Parks’ arrest, the bus boycott began in earnest and lasted 1 year and 15 days. Ministers announced the boycott in churches, a newspaper published an article announcing the action and African American people began to find alternate means of transportation. Walking, carpooling, hitch-hiking, and the police began penalising black taxi drivers who were aiding the boycott and Martin Luther King Jr and another prominent leader E.D Nixon had their houses bombed by segregationists.

In mid- 1956 the federal court ruled that segregation was a violation of the constitution, the city of course didn’t want this to be true and appealed to the supreme court who agreed that bus segregation was unconstitutional, and buses became officially integrated, but it wasn’t that clear cut. Bus stops remained segregated and some people were not happy about desegregation, one evening, 9 days after the buses were officially integrated, a sniper fired shots into a bus injuring a black woman who was 8 months pregnant. This shooting into the buses happened a few more times before the city suspended all bus services after 5pm for another year.

Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks did have something else in common, they both were forced to move away from Montgomery because of their civil rights actions. Colvin was branded a trouble-maker and had difficulty finding a job, I imagine in the 1950s, being an unwed 16 year old mother may have also tarnished her reputation. She moved to New York.

Rosa Parks also struggled to find employment as did her husband, because of her prominence in the boycott she received hate mail and death threats. They ended up moving to Detroit and struggled with health issues and financially for about a decade before she secured employment as a secretary for a member of Congress.

Now, if you look up Rosa Parks, you will find phrases such as, civil rights activist, pivotal, and the “mother of the modern Civil rights movement” but on that day on the way home from work, there was one thing she was not…and that was tired.

This is Kelly Chase, on the case