Rosa Parks Initiation
Rosa Parks Initiation
Rosa Parks Initiation
One can never understand the action of Mrs. Parks until one realizes
that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human
personality cries out, "I can't take it no longer." Mrs. Parks's refusal
to move back was her intrepid and courageous affirmation to the
world that she had had enough. (No, she was not planted there by the
NAACP or any other organization; she was planted there by her sense
of dignity and self-respect.) She was a victim of both the forces of
history and the forces of destiny. Mrs. Parks was ideal for the role
assigned to her by history. Her character was impeccable and her
dedication deep-rooted. All of these traits made her one of the most
respected people in the Negro community.
The bus situation was one of the sore spots of Montgomery. If a visitor had come to Montgomery
before the bus boycott, he would have heard bus operators referring to Negro passengers as
"niggers," "black apes," and "black cows." He would have frequently noticed Negro passengers
getting on at the front door and paying their fares, and then being forced to get off and go to the
back doors to board the bus, and often he would have noticed that before the Negro passenger
could get to the back door, the bus rode off with his fare in the box. But even more, that visitor
would have noticed Negro passengers
standing over empty seats. No matter if
a white person never got on the bus
and the bus was filled up with Negro
passengers, these Negro passengers
were prohibited from sitting in the first
four seats because they were only for
white passengers. It even went beyond
this. If the reserved section for whites
was filled up with white persons, and
additional white persons boarded the
bus, then Negro passengers sitting in
the unreserved section were often
asked to stand up and give their seats
to white persons. If they refused to do
this, they were arrested.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/autobiography/chp_7.htm
We know the story. One December evening, a woman left work and boarded a bus for home. She
was tired; her feet ached. But this was Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, and as the bus became
crowded, the woman, a black woman, was ordered to give up her seat to a white passenger.
When she remained seated, that simple decision eventually led to the disintegration of
institutionalized segregation in the South, ushering in a new era of the civil rights movement.
This, anyway, was the story I had heard from the time I was curious enough to eavesdrop on
adult conversations. I was three years old when a white bus driver warned Rosa Parks, "Well,
I'm going to have you arrested," and she replied, "You may go on and do so." As a child, I didn't
understand how doing nothing had caused so much activity, but I recognized the template:
David slaying the giant Goliath, or the boy who saved his village by sticking his finger in the
dike. And perhaps it is precisely the lure of fairy-tale retribution that colors the lens we look
back through. Parks was 42 years old when she refused to give up her seat. She has insisted that
her feet were not aching; she was, by her own testimony, no more tired than usual. And she did
not plan her fateful act: "I did not get on the bus to get arrested," she has said. "I got on the bus
to go home."
Parks was not the first to be detained for this offence. Eight months earlier, Claudette Colvin, 15,
refused to give up her seat and was arrested. Black activists met with this girl to determine if she
would make a good test case — as secretary of the local N.A.A.C.P., Parks attended the meeting
— but it was decided that a more "upstanding" candidate was necessary to withstand the
scrutiny of the courts and the press. And then in October, a young woman named Mary Louise
Smith was arrested; N.A.A.C.P. leaders rejected her too as their vehicle, looking for someone
more able to withstand media scrutiny. Smith paid the fine and was released.
Six weeks later, the time was ripe. The facts, rubbed shiny for retelling, are
these: On Dec. 1, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks, seamstress for the Montgomery
Fair department store, boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus. She took a seat
in the fifth row — the first row of the "Colored Section." The driver was the
same one who had put her off a bus 12 years earlier for refusing to get off
and reboard through the back door. ("He was still mean-looking," she has
said.) Did that make her stubborn? Or had her work in the N.A.A.C.P.
sharpened her sensibilities so that she knew what to do — or more
precisely, what not to do: Don't frown, don't struggle, don't shout, don't
pay the fine?
At the news of the arrest, local civil rights leader E.D. Nixon exclaimed, "My God, look what
segregation has put in my hands!" Parks was not only above moral reproach (securely married,
reasonably employed) but possessed a quiet fortitude as well as political savvy — in short, she
was the ideal plaintiff for a test case.
She was arrested on a Thursday; bail was posted by Clifford Durr, the white lawyer whose wife
had employed Parks as a seamstress. That evening, after talking it over with her mother and
husband, Rosa Parks agreed to challenge the constitutionality of Montgomery's segregation
laws. During a midnight meeting of the Women's Political Council, 35,000 handbills were
mimeographed for distribution to all black schools the next morning. The message was simple:
"We are...asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in
protest of the arrest and trial... You can afford to stay out of school
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."
Monday came. Rain threatened, yet the black population of
Montgomery stayed off the buses, either walking or catching one of
the black cabs stopping at every municipal bus stop for 10 cents per
customer — standard bus fare. Meanwhile, Parks was scheduled to
appear in court. As she made her way through the throngs at the
courthouse, a demure figure in a long-sleeved black dress with
white collar and cuffs, a trim black velvet hat, gray coat and white gloves, a girl in the crowd
caught sight of her and cried out, "Oh, she's so sweet. They've messed with the wrong one now!"
Yes, indeed. The trial lasted 30 min., with the expected
conviction and penalty. That afternoon, the
Montgomery Improvement Association was formed.
So as not to ruffle any local activists' feathers, the
members elected as their president a relative
newcomer to Montgomery, the young minister of
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church: the Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr. That evening, addressing a crowd gathered at
the Holt Street Baptist Church, King declared in that
sonorous, ringing voice millions the world over would
soon thrill to: "There comes a time that people get
tired." When he was finished, Parks stood up so the audience could see her. She did not speak;
there was no need to. Here I am, her silence said, among you.
And she has been with us ever since as a persistent symbol of human dignity in the face of brutal
authority. The famous U.P.I. photo (actually taken more than a year later, on Dec. 21, 1956, the
day Montgomery's public transportation system was legally integrated) is a study of calm
strength. She is looking out the bus window, her hands resting in the folds of her checked dress,
while a white man sits, unperturbed, in the row behind her. That clear profile, the neat cloche
and eyeglasses and sensible coat — she could have been my mother, anybody's favorite aunt.
History is often portrayed as a string of arias in a grand
opera, all baritone intrigues and tenor heroics. Some of
the most tumultuous events, however, have been
provoked by serendipity — the assassination of an
inconsequential archduke spawned World War I, a
kicked-over lantern may have sparked the Great Chicago
Fire. One cannot help wondering what role Martin
Luther King Jr. would have played in the civil rights
movement if the opportunity had not presented itself
that first evening of the boycott — if Rosa Parks had
chosen a row farther back from the outset, or if she had
missed the bus altogether.
At the end of this millennium (and a particularly noisy century), it is the modesty of Rosa Parks'
example that sustains us. It is no less than the belief in the power of the individual, that
cornerstone of the American Dream, that she inspires, along with the hope that all of us — even
the least of us — could be that brave, that serenely human, when crunch time comes.
Rita Dove, former U.S. poet laureate, won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (This was an article
in Heroes and Icons, TIME 100, TIME Magazine.)