Remembering the Montgomery Bus Boycott 70 years ago and the life of Rosa Parks, 1913-2005

by Dianne FeeleySeventy years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Trump administration is hard at work erasing the history of the immense struggle Black America has waged for freedom. Rosa Parks is a central figure in the 20th century movement for Black lives, both before and after she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger the evening of Dec. 1, 1955. Her political activism began in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1930s and continued after her family’s move to Detroit, Michigan, in 1957.While the media often divides the civil rights movement and its figures from the Black Power movement, both assert the right of African Americans to justice. Rosa Parks’ lifelong contributions refute that dichotomy. Here is her story.Rosa Louise McCauley, civil rights organizer and activist, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on Feb. 4, 1913. Although her mother, Leona McCauley, was a strong presence in her life, she was raised by her grandparents who had previously been enslaved. She recalled that in the post-World War I period when white nationalist groups rampaged Black communities, her grandfather sat on the porch evenings with his rifle.Living in a Jim Crow world, Rosa was taught to control her anger against segregation’s intimidating practices — but she preferred to rebel. Once, taunted by a white boy, she picked up a brick and dared him to hit her. Fortunately, he walked away. She reported the incident to her grandmother, who warned her that such incidents could result in being lynched before she was 20. When she recounted this story over the course of her life, she maintained that as a child her decision had been to prefer death to humiliation.Forced to drop out of high school, Rosa worked on the family farm and held jobs as a domestic in white households. It was there that she developed her skill in resisting sexual assault.At the end of 1932 she married Raymond Parks, a longtime member of the NAACP in Montgomery. He was active in supporting and publicizing the injustice of the Scottsboro case, where nine Black teenagers had been sentenced to death for their supposed rape of two white women.Raymond was the family’s political activist for the first decade of their marriage, with Rosa helping. But in the early 1940s, Rosa was drawn to the Montgomery Voters League after its organizer, E.D. Nixon, knocked on their door.Over the next several years Nixon and Rosa Parks developed a remarkable political partnership. Nixon was a member of the militant union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Rosa’s mother and Raymond provided the support to sustain her.It was dangerous for Black men and women to aspire to vote. Further, the process involved passing an arduous test and paying a yearly poll tax. But E.D. and Rosa were a powerful team committed to organizing campaigns against injustice. Soon after Nixon knocked on the Parks’ door, the League was meeting in their apartment.By 1944 the League put together a delegation of 750 African Americans to go to the courthouse and demand to be registered. Although Rosa was working that day, her mother and cousin participated — and were certified. It took Rosa three attempts to pass the test while Raymond was never able to do so. Until they came north, he remained disenfranchised.Rosa also joined the NAACP, immediately becoming its secretary. One of her main tasks was to record the many instances of discrimination and violence against the Black community.The organization sent her 100 miles south to investigate the situation of a 24-year-old Black woman, Recy Taylor, who had been gang raped at gunpoint by six white men. Rosa was sent because she had family in the area and might slip into the town unnoticed. But as she was meeting with the young mother, the sheriff turned up and ordered her to leave.Nixon and Parks then set up a defense committee to demand that the governor convene a special grand jury to hear the evidence. They reached out to unions, churches and African American organizations and newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier. This brought national attention to the case, with support pouring in from prominent Black leaders, including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Mary Church Terrell and Adam Clayton Powell.The publicity resulted in some of the four confessing to having sex with Taylor but claiming she was a prostitute. This effectively shut down the campaign. Out of safety concerns the committee arranged for the Taylor family to relocate to Montgomery. (See the film, “The Rape of Recy Taylor.”)Nixon and Parks continued their defense work, particularly after Nixon was elected NAACP president in 1945. They pressured the governor into reprieving death sentences for three Black men, but the case of Jeremiah Reeves, arrested for rape when he was 16, ended in execution despite the Black community’s indignation at the severity of the sentence. Their most important but unsuccessful campaign was advocating passage of a federal anti-lynching bill.With the 1954 U.S. Supreme court Brown vs. the Board of Education decision that “separate but equal” schools did not result in an equal education, Rosa was preoccupied with how to implement that historic decision. The following summer she was offered a two-week scholarship to attend Highlander Folk School, an adult interracial leadership training program in Tennessee. This provided her with a unique opportunity to study and reflect in an integrated community with almost 50 others.Earlier that summer 14-year-old Emmett Till had been kidnapped, tortured and murdered in Money, Mississippi. By the fall his murderers had been acquitted. If Rosa Parks decided to stay seated on an evening bus ride that December, it wasn’t because she was physically “tired” or discouraged by the many injustices she had organized against. It was both the logic of the moment and a need to oppose the daily humiliation of segregation.Turning point: The Montgomery BoycottA majority of the Montgomery bus riders were African American while the drivers were white. If the space on the bus reserved for white riders filled, Black riders were to vacate the next row, which would allow seating for up to four white passengers. Although Montgomery drivers were not required to enforce the policy, a driver could evict those who didn’t obey or call on the police to do so.By 1955 Montgomery’s civil rights forces wanted to challenge the law. That March, when 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested and manhandled, bus riders spontaneously stopped riding the bus for a few days. At the end of October, 18-year old Mary Louise Smith was arrested for failing to give up her seat. E.D. Nixon met with each but found them too feisty to build a campaign around.On Dec. 1 the driver on the bus Rosa Parks was riding demanded a row be vacated so one white man could sit. Three Black passengers reluctantly moved but Rosa didn’t; she told the driver she wouldn’t. After calling the police to have her thrown off the bus, the driver went a step further and signed a warrant for her arrest.While the money for her bail was posted and Rosa went home to talk with her family, the Women’s Political Council moved into action. Without contacting Rosa, it planned a one-day bus boycott the following Monday, printing up a leaflet and organizing teams to distribute the flyer. It turned out that was also the day of Rosa’s trial.Meanwhile E.D. Nixon asked the newest minister in town, Martin Luther King Jr. if he could open his church for a meeting Monday evening; after a brief consultation, he agreed. Monday morning the buses ran empty, 600 people packed the courthouse where Rosa Parks was found guilty, and 15,000 people attended the evening meeting at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, filling the church and the surrounding area.After hearing from Nixon and King (but not Rosa), the community agreed to extend the boycott indefinitely. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was born and within a couple of days, MIA representatives presented the mayor with three demands: first-come, first-seating on the buses, courteous service, and hiring Black drivers.Mass meetings were held twice a week, attended by 1,200-1,800 people. Forty pick-up stations were established throughout the city with drivers charging the same fare as the buses. It was to be a long struggle. In fact, it would take the U.S. Supreme Court ruling the following year to force the Montgomery authorities to accept defeat.For the 381 days that the boycott lasted, Montgomery’s White Citizens Council worked to create a climate of fear. Black people were alternately terrorized and ridiculed; whites were coerced into silence.Both the King and Nixon homes were bombed. Rosa Parks was laid off as assistant tailor at a downtown department store, and Raymound was forced to quit his job as a barber. Hate mail and death threats added to their economic hardship. Their health suffered.The move to DetroitAlthough the boycott was successful, Raymond and Rosa Parks were unable to secure employment. With her mother, they moved to Detroit in 1957, where Rosa’s younger brother was living. Raymond lived another 20 years while Rosa lived almost another half century. They lived modestly, often participating in discussions at Ed Vaughn’s bookstore, which served as a center for the Black Power movement. Along with Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks was in the front row of Detroit’s 1963 demonstration of nearly 200,000 marchers just two months before the historic March on Washington, which she also attended.Police brutality was a major issue within the Detroit Black community. Two weeks after the Detroit march, police killed Cynthia Scott, a Black sex worker, shooting her twice in the back. Rosa joined with activists to protest Scott’s murder and the city’s unwillingness to indict a police officer.Twelve years later Parks organized a Detroit chapter of the Joan Little Defense Committee. In 1974, Little, a small Black woman, killed her jailer after she was forced to perform oral sex. During the trial the prosecutor portrayed her as the seducer but the autopsy report confirmed her account. The North Carolina jury acquitted her in less than two hours. Joan Little became the country’s first woman acquitted of murder on the basis of self-defense against sexual assault.Rosa was a member of Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After Detroit’s 1967 uprising, she served as a juror on the People’s Tribunal. Before a crowd of 2,000, the jurors heard the case of the Algiers Motel murders, where three white police officers and one Black security guard were complicit in terrorizing and executing three young Black men. The People’s Tribunal jurors found them guilty — but of course the state didn’t hold any of the officers accountable.Throughout their lives Raymond and Rosa Parks supported a united and non-exclusionary movement for social justice. They were never intimidated from working alongside socialists, communists and Black nationalists. Instead, they enjoyed their friendship and defended them and many political prisoners against government repression.Rosa met Malcolm X, visited the Black Panther Party school in Oakland and opposed the war in Vietnam. As a lifelong advocate for voting rights, she campaigned for John Conyers in his run for the U.S. House of Representatives. Once elected, he hired her as his community outreach staffer (1965-88). He claimed more people came to visit her than him, and remarked that she didn’t work for him but enlisted him to work on her community projects.In her staff position Rosa Parks aided political prisoners, including Angela Davis and members of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). When the RNA’s Mississippi farm was raided by the FBI and the Jackson police in 1971, the confrontation ended with one officer dead and two other attackers wounded. Eleven RNA members, including Imari Obadele (who had not been at the farm), were arrested, brutalized and humiliated. Rosa immediately mobilized support for them and kept in touch with Imari Obadele, who served five years in prison.Throughout her life, Rosa Parks reached out to younger people. She set up the Rosa and Raymond Parks’ Institute for Self-Development as a mechanism to continue that work. She died on Oct. 23, 2005. (See the films “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks” and “Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks.”)For further reading:Rosa Parks has written four books: “Rosa Parks: My Story” with Jim Haskins, “Quiet Strength” and “Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue With Today’s Youth” with Gregory J. Reed, and a book for preschoolers, “I AM ROSA PARKS” with Jim Haskins.“At the Dark End of the Street,” Danielle L. McGuire, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. This book tells the story of the investigation of the Recy Taylor rape, and how it prepared the cadres who would become the backbone of the Montgomery Improvement Association.“The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It,” Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, University of Tennessee Press, 1987.“Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63,” Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster, 1988.“The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” Jeanne Theoharis, Beacon Press, 2013.Dianne Feeley entered graduate school at San Francisco State University in 1968 and participated in the historic student strike in 1968-69. She is a retired autoworker active in Detroit Eviction Defense and in Autoworker Caravan, a rank-and-file caucus, and an editor of Against the Current, a bi-monthly analytical journal. This story first appeared in Solidarity, a US-based socialist organization building “socialism from below.”

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