Bus Boycott took planning, smarts
Most any sixth-grader can recite the basics of Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white man.
Every version goes something like this: She was tired, refused to move to the “colored” section, got arrested, started the Civil Rights Movement, black people have the right to vote.
Over the past 60 years, one of the greatest, most important events in American history, the Montgomery Bus Boycott — an event that will stand beside Paul Revere’s ride or the first shots at Fort Sumter — has been reduced to overhyped and embellished highlights.
“The Boycott didn’t happen by accident,” legendary civil rights attorney Fred Gray said during a recent interview. “It took meticulous planning and thought. It wasn’t something that came together overnight. It took discipline and smart people.”
Gray was one of the primary figures in that planning, and he served as Parks’ attorney after her arrest. The reality, Gray said, was that civil rights leaders, led by the local chapter of the NAACP, were looking for a place to make the most noise with a peaceful protest.
But to generate a successful stand against the Jim Crow laws that governed the deep South at the time, and to produce results when facing long odds and unrelenting intimidation, there would need to be a volatile situation. There would need to be resolution and anger.
The atmosphere surrounding Montgomery’s bus line was perfect for producing such. Black residents had complained for years about mistreatment aboard the buses — of drivers abusing them, cops intimidating them, surly passengers pushing them around.
Numerous times, black passengers who had paid to ride were forced off the buses to allow whites on, and then were never repaid. Drivers often sped away instead of waiting on black passengers to board, a practice that led to the death of one black passenger.
The situation was ripe for an effective protest. The perfect spark for such a flame didn’t come easy.
The Other Rosa
The most famous female civil rights activist was almost named Claudette Colvin, and not Rosa Parks.
A few months before Parks was arrested, a 15-year-old Colvin boarded a Montgomery bus with three friends. Following the Jim Crow laws of the time, the girls moved to the back of the bus and took a seat in the section marked for “coloreds.” As the bus filled with passengers getting off work for the day in the downtown area, it became apparent that there would not be enough seats for some white passengers.
Even under the Jim Crow laws, a black passenger was not required to relinquish his or her seat to a white passenger if there were no other seats on the bus. With no seats available and passengers standing in the aisle, the bus driver told Colvin and her three friends to give up their seats to a white passenger. Colvin’s three friends dutifully stood. Colvin stayed seated near the windows.
“I didn’t think anything of it, because I wasn’t breaking the law — even the segregation law, I wasn’t breaking that law,” Colvin said in an interview with the Advertiser for its coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Bus Boycott. (Video of that interview, along with video interviews with several icons of the Civil Rights Movement, and stories and photos can be found at www.montgomeryboycott.com).
“The bus went on through three stops and then a traffic policeman came on the bus and asked me why I was sitting there,” Colvin continued. “I told him because it was my constitutional right.”
Colvin was eventually dragged off the bus, accused of resisting arrest because she refused to stand, and booked like an adult by Montgomery police.
Local activist E.D. Nixon, who also served as the president of Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, heard of Colvin’s arrest and arranged for Gray to represent her. The initial thought was that Colvin could be used as the test case the NAACP was looking for to challenge the segregation laws governing Montgomery’s bus system.
Colvin’s arrest — a 15-year-old tossed in the city jail like an adult after being handled roughly by police — could certainly be used as a flash point to spark protests and a boycott of the bus lines. Legal action would come later.
But that plan was killed when Nixon discovered that Colvin was several months pregnant — the result, she says, of a statutory rape. Nixon and other leaders were concerned that Colvin’s pregnancy, no matter how it came about, would make it more difficult to get conservative church-goers behind the movement. And without the churches, there would be no boycott and no movement.
So, they let the idea simmer and waited on another opportunity.
The Real Rosa
School textbooks often describe Parks as simply a tired seamstress trying to make her way home from work one December afternoon.
While it’s true enough that Parks earned a living as a seamstress, she was far from simple. At the time of her arrest in 1955, Parks was serving as the secretary of the NAACP’s state and Montgomery chapters and had been a civil rights activist for years. Her husband had been a protestor at the Scottsboro Boys’ trial in the 1930s.
In addition to serving as secretary of the local NAACP chapter, Parks also was a member of the Montgomery Improvement Association, a collection of some of Montgomery’s most influential black leaders, and she headed up the NAACP’s youth leadership organization, working out of the Trinity Lutheran church.
“When we met Rosa, we just fell in love with her,” said Rev. Robert Graetz, who accepted the pastor position at Trinity in 1955 as his first assignment after seminary school. “She was such a great lady, and so brave. She could really lead those kids and they responded to her.”
In those roles, Parks had become a central figure in civil rights activities around Montgomery, and she was within the inner circle of a group that included Gray, Nixon and other prominent black leaders.
On her lunch break each day, Parks would walk to Gray’s law offices in downtown Montgomery. Over their lunches, the two would discuss civil rights issues and life in general.
“She came in just about every day and we would talk about a wide range of things,” Gray said. “Rosa was very smart and very level-headed. She and I knew we needed a spark to set off the movement and we talked about what needed to happen.”
The one thing they never discussed,
The Arrest
Parks was often quoted later in her life saying that she didn’t get on the bus that day, Dec. 1, 1955, with the intention of being arrested. “I got on it to go home,” Parks said.
That is true. But Parks also had a reason to poke the bear — to defiantly refuse a request from a white, male bus driver (bus drivers at that time were considered a sort of authority) that she knew to be outside of even the racist laws of the time.
The driver of Parks’ bus that fateful day was James Blake, one of the most notorious drivers in the city. Parks, like many of the black passengers at the time, had experienced a run-in with Blake.
Twelve years earlier, after entering the bus through the front door and paying her fare — an act that, under the Jim Crow laws of the time, was technically illegal but rarely enforced — Blake forced Parks off of his bus and told her to enter through the backdoor. When Parks stepped off, Blake sped away.
And so, that Thursday in 1955, when Blake made his way to the back to instruct Parks and three other black women out of their seats, Parks was determined she wouldn’t move.
“I wasn’t trying to do anything to that Parks woman except do my job,” Blake told TheWashington Post. “She was in violation of the city codes. What was I supposed to do? That damn bus was full and she wouldn’t move back. I had my orders. I had police powers — any driver for the city did. So the bus filled up and a white man got on, and she had his seat and I told her to move back, and she wouldn’t do it.”
Like Colvin, Parks had broken no laws — not even the Jim Crow laws of the time. It didn’t matter. Off she went to jail.
Nixon was the first one there, and he convinced Parks to let Gray represent her. He later convinced her to allow Gray to use her case as the test case and to allow Nixon to use her arrest to spark a protest. Parks eventually agreed, and the wheels of protest started to move.
The Boycott was Born
Parks’ arrest sparked outrage around Montgomery’s black community, and Nixon and the NAACP was planning to turn that outrage into a full-blown boycott. After the Colvin miss, this could be the opportunity they had waited on.
After leaving Parks’ home the night of her arrest, Nixon called Jo Ann Robinson, who was a professor at Alabama State College (now Alabama State University) and president of the Women’s Political Council. Robinson began printing fliers to alert the community of Parks’ arrest and to announce the idea of a one-day boycott.
That’s all civil rights leaders wanted at the time –— just one day of every black man and woman in the city not riding the buses. Just that one day would demonstrate the impact a long-term boycott might have, and it would aid in the pending legal action.
Robinson began writing a flier, and then convinced a friend at Alabama State College to allow her to use a mimeograph machine to make copies. With another colleague and two students, Robinson created thousands of fliers that would be dropped off at every black-owned business in the city.
Those fliers informed people that a boycott would be coming the following Monday, Dec. 5. All black passengers — a group that accounted for 75 percent of the bus system’s riders – were to stay off the buses.
Nixon, in the meantime, was generating support for the boycott through his contacts. He called a number of the more successful black business owners in town and began setting up transportation for those who planned to honor the boycott but who still needed to make it to work.
And there were plenty. Buses normally packed with blacks riding to work were all but empty. Black workers instead walked to work, grabbed reduced-fare taxi rides from black-owned taxi companies or were picked up by their white bosses who needed the domestic help.
It was obvious by early afternoon that the boycott was a huge success, and the organizers realized what could be.
The one-day boycott transformed into just the start of a much longer plan with much loftier goals. They wanted the buses desegregated at best or much better treatment of black passengers at worst.
To achieve such demands, they knew a longer, sustained boycott would need to be just as successful and encompassing. The black community in Montgomery would have to commit, and they would have to hold their ground in the face of growing unrest and intimidation.
To garner such support, civil rights leaders, led by Nixon and the NAACP, determined they would pitch the idea the night of the successful one-day protest, using it for encouragement.
And to make the pitch, they selected an unknown. A new pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Robinson’s church, who had a gift for motivational sermons. With growing cliques and dissention within the civil rights leaders’ ranks, making an outsider the face and voice of this movement was determined to be the best option and maybe its only hope.
And an American icon was born.
The King
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. needed no introductions for most of his adult life. But he did that night, as he prodded the more than a thousand gathered at Holt Street Baptist Church to join in the fight against segregation.
“But I want to tell you this evening that it is not enough for us to talk about love,” King said in his speech. “Love is one of the pivotal points of the Christian faith. There is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.”
By the end, when King asked those gathered to join him in fighting against segregation and to support a longer boycott, the church gave him a standing ovation.
“Before that, Martin was just Martin,” Gray said. “He was a very charismatic young preacher, we knew that much. After his speech that night, we knew he could move people, and that’s what we needed.”
King moved quite a few. There are estimates that nearly 20,000 passengers boycotted Montgomery’s buses regularly for the 381 days it lasted, and by the end of the boycott — after some bus lines shut down routes to black neighborhoods because they could no longer sustain the costs — more than 40,000 regular riders of the buses were no longer on them.
It was not, of course, all fun and games. The boycotters were routinely harassed by authorities and 89 of them were arrested for boycotting without just cause. And that was in addition to much more horrible violence.
King’s parsonage was bombed. Graetz’s home was bombed twice. A full year after the boycott ended, four black churches and the homes of Rev. Ralph Abernathy and Graetz, again, were bombed. King’s home was shot into and a sniper’s bullet went through the legs of a black woman, Rosa Jordan, aboard one of the city buses.
“I had some anger after 2 o’clock in the morning and holding one baby and the other baby is 11 months old and not walking, and the house is in shambles,” Rev. Graetz’s wife, Jeannie, said. “It was terrible. I had a hard time forgiving them for that. How could someone bomb a house with babies in it?”
Relying on Ignorance
So many of the great victories of the Civil Rights Movement came about because the other side — those fighting for segregation, hate and bigotry — were so reliably stupid. In many ways, that same sort of stupidity led to the success of the Boycott.
Had Montgomery leaders merely given in to the relatively modest demands of black citizens — to not force blacks to stand for whites, to hire black bus drivers and not allow blacks to be forced out of the black seats on buses — the entire boycott would have folded.
But stupidity led to defiance and a determination among white leaders to stamp out any demands by black people who they saw as inferior humans. And instead of modest changes, the city was dealing with a federal lawsuit, Browder v. Gayle, filed by Gray on behalf of four female Montgomery residents and challenging the desegregation of the city’s bus system.
“We knew that our only hope was federal court,” Gray said. “And we had no intention of asking for a few minor things. We wanted to end the segregation of the buses. If you think you’re right, make your case.”
Gray and NAACP leaders and legal counsel determined they wouldn’t use the Parks case in the federal lawsuit, because that case, since it involved local laws, would have to traverse the notoriously bigoted Alabama state courts system. Instead, Gray and the attorneys selected four women, including Colvin, who had been treated unfairly on the buses because of their races.
The case would make it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled on Nov. 13, 1956 — the same day Montgomery received an injunction from Alabama courts to stop blacks from car pooling to work — that “separate but equal” was just as illegal for busing as it was for public education.
“I don’t know that we all necessarily understood the full ramifications of what was accomplished,” Graetz said. “But there was a deep understanding, it seemed, that all of us were aware that we were a part of significant and meaningful change.”