[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 176 (Wednesday, November 8, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2135-E2140]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
FREEDOM'S DRUMMER: ROSA PARKS
______
HON. JOHN CONYERS, JR.
of michigan
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, November 8, 1995
Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, for several decades now, I have had the
privilege of knowing a woman who set great wheels of social change in
motion. Forty years ago this year, she gave birth not to one life but
to many lives by igniting the energies of the civil rights movement.
From a single, simple act of courage, she showed those suffering in the
Nation how to move from hope to determination. That woman was Rosa
Parks, and she accomplished all this by refusing to sit in the back of
the bus. The article I am entering into the Record today from the
Washington Post Magazine tells her story, and I believe it will move
you the way it did me:
[From the Washington Post Magazine Oct. 8, 1995]
A Person Who Wanted To Be Free
(By Walt Harrington)
Bus No. 5726: A shell, really, a decaying hulk with its
glass eyes missing from their windshield sockets, red rust
marching like a conquering fungus from its roof, down and
around bullet-pocket windows to its faded green and yellow
sides. An era's relic, stored in the wind, rain and
stultifying summer sun on the vo-tech school's back lot,
stored on the chance that the people of Montgomery, Alabama,
will someday reach a place in mind and heart where they will
find, who knows, $100,000 to refurbish it as a lesson from
that night 40 years ago, December 1, 1955, when a city bus
driver asked a prim black woman to leave her window seat so
that a white man could sit, and she uttered an almost
inaudible, ``No.'' It was an ordinary evening, Christmas
lights flickering, people hurrying home past the banner
``Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.'' Even Rosa Parks, 42
then, was thinking about all she had to do in the next few
days. But at the instant she refused to move, as Eldridge
Cleaver once said, ``Somewhere in the universe, a gear in the
machinery shifted.'' The wonder of it: Imagine the chances
that so precise a moment of reckoning would be encoded in our
collective consciousness. Stop time: Look back, look ahead,
jot a note, nothing will ever be the same. The stopwatch of
history has been pressed now, at this instant of resonance,
this flash of leavening light.
Bus No. 5726: It is not the bus--the bus is long lost.
After all, that December 1 trip seemed like just another run
on the Cleveland Avenue line. Business as usual, but this
artifact from that time, most of its seats now gone, is still
a narrow passageway from then to now, a time-tunnel. Scores
of wasps inhabit the place, a few flying in and out of the
missing windows, most huddling and pulsing en masse on their
nests. A headlight that will never again illuminate
languishes on a mantel behind the long rear seat, which was
always occupied by ``coloreds.'' The dust on that seat and
others, that dust on the floor, is so thick that the interior
is like a sidewalk caked with dry, powdery dirt after a
flood. On the filthy floor is a red plastic bucket marked by
the moment the white paint was last poured from it. Small
hinges and a batch of tiny screws are strewn haphazardly
about, as if a conjurer had, with the flick of a wrist,
tossed them there like metal bones in an effort to read some
meaning into it all, discern the mystery.
The smells are of age and dust and raging summer heat, the
lessons are of change and intransigence so great it is hard
now even to comprehend. The dirty air tightens the lungs,
like breathing gravel. A seat is torn in a cut-away display;
old wood, followed by coarse dark fiber, followed by soft
white stuffing--the hidden layers, like those of America,
finally laid bare.
``A gear in the machinery shifted.''
Yes, but why?
Why Montgomery? Why 1955?
Most of all, why Rosa Parks?
``Yeah, I know'd her,'' says A.T. Boswell, an erect 79-
year-old man poised in front of his house, a hardscrabble
house with a tin roof and tilting chimney that sits beneath a
huge sheltering water oak in Pine Level, Ala., precisely 20
miles southeast of Montgomery on Route 231. It was a long
distance for Rosa Parks and America to travel. In bib
overalls, Mr. Boswell stands with his giant hands planted
powerfully on his hips, his eyes clear, his long face narrow
at the chin and wide at the forehead a triangle standing on
its tip. A thin scar, evidence of a bout with a barbed wire
fence decades ago, runs the length of his left forearm. His
voice, from deep in his chest, seems to roil his words before
they arrive, creating a dialect almost too foreign for a
stranger.
She's related to my people,'' he says of Rosa Parks.
``Who was her mama?'' asks Julia Boswell, Mr. Boswell's
wife of 52 years. she has joined him in the sunny yard, her
hands clasped casually behind her back. At 69, she is short,
round and relaxed to Mr. Boswell's tall, gaunt and formal.
She wears a denim hat with a round brim that casts a shadow
over her face, a blue-and-white house dress and a white
apron. Beyond the house, her laundry is drying on the line.
Mr. Boswell rumbles a response.
``Oh, Leona!'' Mrs. Boswell interprets. ``Leona and cousin
Fannie were sisters. Well, his grandmother was they aunt. She
was Leona Edwards' aunt. That was Rosa Parks' mother.''
``She was raised on the farm,'' says Mr. Boswell.
Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee, Ala., in 1913. By the time
she was a toddler, the marriage of her mother and father was
pretty much over and Leona had moved back to Pine Level to
live with her parents. Leona wasn't your average country
woman. She was a schoolteacher who had attended the
private Payne University in Selma at a time when public
education for most of Alabama's black children ended in
the sixth grade. Unlike nearly all black families near
Pine Level, Leona's family didn't crop for shares. The
family owned 12 acres of land that one of Rosa's great-
grandfathers, a Scotch-Irish indentured servant, had
bought after the Civil War and another six acres one of
her grandmothers had inherited from the family of a
[[Page E 2136]]
white girl she'd once cared for. In that time and place, the family of
Rosa Parks was comfortable.
While many blacks then felt compelled to smile and shuffle
around whites, such behavior was banned in her home. Rosa's
maternal grandfather, the son of a white plantation owner and
a seamstress house slave, had been mistreated terribly as a
boy by a plantation overseer and he hated whites. He wouldn't
let Rosa and her brother, Sylvester, play with them. Rosa
once stayed up late with him as he sat resolutely, shotgun at
the ready, while the Ku Klux Klan rode the countryside. He
told her he's shoot the first Klansman through the door. Her
grandfather was so light-skinned that he could easily pass
for white, and he took joy in reaching out and shaking the
hands of white strangers, calling them by their first names
and introducing himself by his last name, dangerous
violations of racist protocol at the time.
Young Rosa took her cues from her grandfather and stood up
to white children who tried to bully her, although her
grandmother warned that she'd get herself lynched someday.
That Rosa had white ancestors on her mother's side and her
father's side made the hard line between black and white seem
even more ludicrous. As a girl, she secretly admired a dark-
skinned Pine Level man who always refused to work for whites.
Years later, one of the traits that attracted her to her
future husband, Raymond, was that he had faced down white
bullies and even helped raise money for the defense of the
Scottsboro Boys, nine black Alabama youths convicted in 1931
on flimsy evidence for supposedly raping two white woman.
Rosa was a quiet, polite girl, petite and delicate. She
played tag, hide-and-seek and Rise Sally Rise with the other
kids but wasn't much of a rough-houser, played a lousy game
of baseball. She had a sweet voice, loved to sing gospel in
church, read the Bible to her grandmother after her eyes
failed. Rosa's mother expected her children to excel in
school. Rotha Boswell, a cousin of Rosa's who is now 81, even
remembers a time Leona spanked Rosa's brother for getting
lower marks than Rotha, who always thought Leona believed her
children were better than everybody else's.
The strength and confidence of Rosa Parks and her family
don't exactly jibe with the Rosa Parks myth--the myth that
emerged from her refusal to move to the back of the bus in
1955, the myth that served the needs of the emergent civil
rights movement and the myth that spoke so eloquently to
black and white America: She was a poor, simple seamstress,
Rosa Parks, humble and gentle, no rabble-rouser, a meek Negro
woman, exhausted from a hard day's work, a woman who had been
abused and humiliated by segregation one time too many, who
without forethought chose to sit her ground. In truth, Rosa
Parks was far more and far less than the mythology that
engulfed her and that became the mobilizing metaphor of the
Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted 381 days, raised the
unknown Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to international
prominence and helped launch the modern civil rights
movement.
Rosa Parks was not a simple woman. She wasn't meek. She was
no more tired that day than usual. She had forethought
aplenty. She didn't start the Montgomery bus boycott or the
civil rights movement, neither of which burst forth from any
single symbolic act. Forty years later, the defiance of Rosa
Parks and the success of the boycott are enshrined in mystery
and myth that obscure a deeper truth that is even richer,
grander and more heroic. ``I know you won't write this,''
says Aldon Morris, sociologist and author of Origins of the
Civil Rights Movement, ``but what Rosa Parks did is really
the least significant part of the story. She refused to give
up her seat and was arrested. I'm not even completely
comfortable with deflating the myth. What I'm trying to say
is we take that action, elevate it to epic proportions, but
all the things that happened so she could become epic, we
drop by the wayside * * * That she was just a sweet lady who
was tired is the myth * * * The real story of Montgomery is
that real people with frailties made change.
``That's what the magic is.''
Back in her front yard, Mrs. Boswell waves her hand in the
air to stop the conversation, walks toward the porch to fetch
her purse and says, ``I'm gonna take you to someone else's
house.'' No place is more than a few minutes away in Pine
Level, but the trip detours to the Mount Zion African
Methodist Episcopal Church on old Route 231, where the
Boswells, Rosa Parks and just about every black resident of
Pine Level have always gone to church. The original frame
church, where Rosa Parks's uncle was the pastor, is gone,
replaced with a utilitarian cinder block church, stark white.
The church is locked and she and her husband walk through
the shady graveyard north of the church. They look for stone
markers with the names of Mrs. Park's forebears, but find
none. ``We didn't have markers then,'' says Mrs. Boswell, her
purse slung over her left shoulder and tucked neatly under
her arm. ``A lot ain't got no markers now. They just buried
in the dirt. Then forgot 'em and buried somebody else on top
of 'em. That's the way it be . . . I got a grandmother and
grandfather out here and I don't know where they at. Since my
mother passed, I don't know where they at.'' If Mrs.
Boswell's mother, who died in 1958, were alive today, she'd
think the change in race relations since 1955 was a miracle.
``She wouldn't a believed it,'' Mrs. Boswell says with
finality. After a pause, she says, ``I wouldn't a believed it
either.'' She, too, believes it was a miracle.
``White men here,'' Mrs. Boswell says, as she walks from
grave to grave, ``they kilt an innocent bystander boy, buried
right down there.'' She points to a corner of the graveyard.
She figures it was in the '30s. ``His last name was Palmer,
Otis Palmer, or something. He's probably in one a them that
ain't got no stone.'' A white gang was searching for a black
they believed had killed a white man. ``And this boy was out
there some kinda way and got kilt. I imagine they mighta
thought he was the black man did it, you know? They just shot
'im . . . I know the day. I was a kid then myself.''
At the nearby home of their friends, Mr. Boswell walks past
the little trailer where they live, past Black Boy, the frail
old dog sleeping at the steps, and out to the place where
Eugene Percival is sitting in a rusty metal chair on pale
dirt that is packed as hard as concrete. He, too, wears bib
overalls. He is 85 years old: ``I tell ya when I was born,
ought 9.'' For a moment, the old men talk to each other in a
dialect almost too foreign for a stranger.
``Rosa Parks, my dad's her uncle.'' Mr. Percival finally
says, bobbing his head, his right leg crossed at the knee
over his left, his posture that of a much younger man. ``Oh,
she was mean, mean as could be.'' He leans forward, laughs at
his own teasing, and says seriously. ``She was a good
woman. And still good, ain't she?''
From the trailer, Mr. Percival's sister-in-law, Ina Mae
Gray, 92 years old, is making her way slowly and painfully
across the pale dirt. She's a large woman with a bandanna
wrapped around her head and another bandanna tied western-
style around her neck. She, too, sits in a metal chair.
``Arthritis,'' she says, pulling up her long dress to her
knees, running her hands gently down over her calves and then
stopping to massage the bridges of her feet. She glances up
askance at the white stranger and flashes a wary smile:
``You're not gonna put me in jail, are ya? I don't wanta see
the jail, noooo!'' Mrs. Gray, too, remembers Rosa Parks.
``She was a good child, go to the field and hoe and plow.
Pickin' cotton . . . And anything else you could raise to eat
. . . I know'd her mama. What's her mama's name?''
``Leona,'' says Mr. Boswell.
``I heared that 'bout the bus,'' says Mrs. Gray. ``She was
tryin' to get us a livin', I reckon.'' And suddenly, Mrs.
Gray is angry, her voice rising. ``Let us have som'in' like
them . . . Wooo, man, man! I had a hard time, hell, try to
eat and couldn't eat. Had to eat water and bread and all
kinda mess.'' Her face is contorted now and she is fighting
back tears, her voice trembling. ``They was over us, they
might beat our ass and go to cussin'.'' How is she supposed
to love white people? Mrs. Gray asks. ``Man, I could cry!
Right now! The way they done us. Let's call it. Us didn't
have nothin'.''
``Hard times!'' Mr. Percival says.
Mrs. Gray gets wary again: ``Don't put me in jail,
mister.''
From the trailer, Mrs. Boswell and Mr. Percival's wife,
Nettie Mae, who is 81, come out to join the conservation.
Mrs. Percival says she wasn't surprised when Rosa Parks got
arrested. On any given day, because of the way it was, any
black person could've snapped, met their limit and gone off,
boom!
``They treated ya like slaves!'' says Mrs. Boswell.
``I coulda did it,'' Mrs. Percival says, her eyes wide and
intense.
Everyone nods in agreement.
Mrs. Boswell: ``It's over with now.''
Mr. Boswell: ``Time and God changed that.''
Cloverdale is a beautiful Montgomery neighborhood of
landscaped yards, mature trees, flowering bushes, old,
elegant homes. Cloverdale, which is integrated today, speaks
to the incongruence that is the life of Virginia Durr, a 92-
year-old white woman and daughter of Montgomery's gentry who,
with her husband, Clifford, was one of the few whites brave
or committed or foolish enough to support Rosa Parks and the
bus boycott. Her husband's law practice was nearly ruined,
two of her daughters had to be sent to school up North, her
yard was littered with obsence leaflets.
Mrs. Durr, a widow for 20 years, has been helped into the
car from her small, white-clapboard retirement home. Her
wheelchair is packed in the trunk. She is waiting for her
friend and paid helper, Zecozy Williams, a 77-year-old black
woman, to close up the house and climb in the car. Rather
than talk in the house, Mrs. Durr prefers to go out for
dinner. She has a huddled, little-old-lady look about her as
she sits, her snowy hair swept up nicely, her hands smoothing
the lap of her flowered skirt. But as she explains her choice
of restaurant, her sing-song Southern voice carrying a
pleasant archness, she doesn't sound like a little old lady.
``It's just that at certain restaurants you're more welcome
than at others,'' she says, referring to Mrs. Williams.
``Certain places are white places and certain places are
black places. And so when you find one that will welcome
both, you're lucky.'' Mrs. Durr has selected the Sahara.
``They have black waiters . . . If they have black waiters,
she's more comfortable than if they have white waiters.''
Has Mrs. Williams actually told her this?
Mr. Durr smiles benevolently. ``No, honey, I know it.''
[[Page E 2137]]
On the night Rosa Parks was arrested, Eddie Mae Pratt, now
79 and a friend of a friend of Mrs. Parks, happened to be on
the crowded bus. She was standing in the rear and couldn't
see the commotion up front. Word filtered back that a black
woman wouldn't give up her seat to a white. Mrs. Pratt, who
knew Mrs. Parks from evenings she spent sewing clothing with
Bertha T. Butler, Mrs. Pratt's neighbor, finally caught a
glimpse of Mrs. Parks as she was led off the bus. Suddenly,
she felt weak. She wrapped her arms around her chest and when
the bus lurched forward, she slipped hard enough that a black
man offered her his seat and she sat down.
``Do you feel all right?'' he asked.
``That's Mrs. Parks,'' she said, stunned.
At her stop, Mrs. Pratt ran to the nearby house of Bertha
Bulter, who said, ``Oh, my goodness!'' She called the home of
E.D. Nixon, the founder and former president of the
Montgomery NAACP, where Mrs. Parks had been the volunteer
secretary for 12 years. Nixon called Clifford Durr, who knew
Mrs. Parks because, upon Nixon's recommendation, she had been
doing seamstress work for Mrs. Durr. When Nixon drove by to
pick up Clifford Durr, Mrs. Durr was with him and they went
and bailed out Mrs. Parks.
Forty years later, at the Sahara, where Mrs. Durr is seated
in her wheelchair at the table and Mrs. Williams is helping
cut her entree, an old black waiter whispers to a young black
waiter: ``That's Mrs. Durr, who went and got Rosa Parks out
of jail.''
Mrs. Durr smiles. ``My claim to fame.''
That's not exactly true. Clifford Durr, who grew up in
Montgomery, was a Rhodes scholar with a degree from Oxford
University and a New Dealer whom Franklin Roosevelt had
appointed to the Federal Communications Commission. After
Clifford resigned to represent people charged as subversives
in the communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the Durrs returned
to their home town, where his family was the founder and
owner of the prosperous Durr drugstore chain. Although
politically conservative, the family supported Clifford and
Virginia financially and gave him legal business. Then
Virginia and Clifford were tarred as alleged communist
sympathizers by U.S. Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi, whom
an outraged Clifford publicly challenged to a fistfight. The
Durrs were ostracized in elite Montgomery society, especially
after it became known that Mrs. Durr was holding interracial
women's prayer gatherings in their home. She once called to
confirm a birthday party invitation sent to one of their
daughters.
``Are you Clifford Durr's wife?'' a man asked.
``Yes.''
``Well, Mrs. Durr, no child of yours can enter this
house.''
Through a New Deal acquaintance, Clifford met E.D. Nixon,
who is perhaps the most unsung of Montgomery's civil rights
heroes. He was a Pullman porter and the local head of A.
Philip Randolph's powerful Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters. Nixon was close to Randolph, who in the `40s was
already calling for massive grass-roots, demonstrations
against Southern Jim Crow laws. Nixon himself had opened the
local NAACP chapter in the 1920s. In Montgomery, Nixon was
``Mr. Civil Rights.'' He was rough-edged and poorly spoken,
but he was an indefatigable man bravely willing to call
public attention to the constant abuse of black people.
In those days, there was only one black lawyer in
Montgomery. So when Nixon learned that Clifford Durr would
take black clients, he sent them to him--no doubt also hoping
to create a powerful white friend and ally. When Clifford
mentioned that his wife needed a seamstress to alter the
clothing their daughters received as hand-me-downs from rich
relations--including Virginia's sister, the wife of former
U.S. senator and then-Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black--
Nixon sent Mrs. Parks, who had become a woman in the mold of
the girl she had been.
Rosa Parks was pretty, with supple, tan skin and brown hair
that ran to near her waist when it was down, but which in
public was always braided and rolled in the fashion of
Scarlett O'Hara in ``Gone With the Wind.'' She wore little
makeup. She had a lovely smile and a gentle laugh, although
folks can't remember her ever telling a joke or talking about
a favorite movie. They can't remember her ever dancing or
playing cards. She never gossiped, never seemed to get angry
or even exasperated. She had flawless diction and elegant
penmanship. Although she spoke little, she was gently
assertive when she did, with a touch of music in her voice.
He long silences weren't uncomfortable. She was a serene,
placid woman whose quietness was easily mistaken for
timidity.
``She was very much a lady,'' says Mrs. Durr, who has only
nibbled at her dinner. ``The thing that makes it so
interesting is that a lot of white women, they came down here
after the Civil War and started a school, and she had gone to
that school . . . staffed by white women, high-class women
who came down to the South to be missionaries to the
blacks.'' It was the Montgomery Industrial School for girls--
dubbed Miss White's school after its headmistress, Alice L.
White. Rosa's mother had sent her to live with Montgomery
relatives so she could attend. Rosa cleaned classrooms to
help pay her way. It's believed that Miss White's school got
money from Sears, Roebuck & Co. chairman Julius Rosenwald,
who funded schools for blacks all across the South. ``She
came from good people and she had all the elements of a
lady,'' Mrs. Durr says of Mrs. Parks. ``Neatness and order--
just a lovely person.''
After dinner, Zecozy Williams packs Mrs. Durr's meal into a
doggie box. Back at home, before she sits down to talk about
Rosa Parks and the boycott, Mrs. Williams helps Mrs. Durr get
comfortably situated in her living room on the couch beneath
an oil painting of herself. While Mrs. Durr reads Wallis and
Edward, the story of the prince of Wales and Wallis Warfield
Simpson, Mrs. Williams goes to the dining room, sits in a
large rose-colored wing chair and mends one of Mrs. Durr's
bathrobes. She's getting Mrs. Durr ready for her summer trip
to Martha's Vineyard. ``This is what Rosa did,'' Mrs.
Williams says, laughing, her voice rich and deep and liquid.
``I'm doin' the same thing.''
Mrs. Williams didn't know Rosa Parks well. She, too, had
moved to Montgomery from a country town, Hope Hull, Ala., but
she was from a dirt-poor cropping family. As a teenager, she
kept house for a white doctor in the country--cooked three
meals a day, cleaned the house and did the laundry for $5 a
week. She also carried eggs, 15 to 20 dozen, into Montgomery
on horseback to sell. Then she started taking a bus into the
city to do domestic work for $3 a day. It was hard for her to
catch the bus on time, because her family didn't own a clock.
In 1950, she and her husband moved to Montgomery.
One day, the woman doing her hair, Bertha Smith, asked if
Mrs. Williams was a registered voter. ``I didn't know what
that was. Really, I didn't.'' But soon she was attending
voting clinics run by Rufus Lewis, a former teacher and
football coach at what is today Alabama State University,
Montgomery's historically black college. As the NAACP was
E.D. Nixon's mission, voter registration was the mission of
Rufus Lewis. The men were rival leaders, Lewis said to
represent blacks teaching or educated at Alabama State and
Nixon said to represent working people like himself. The
saying was: Nixon had the ``masses'' and Lewis had the
``classes.'' Through Nixon, Zecozy Williams met Rosa Parks,
who in 1943 had become the NAACP secretary in the footsteps
of Johnnie Carr, a friend and fellow classmate from Miss
White's school whose son would later become the test case
that desegregated Montgomery's public schools. Before long,
Mrs. Williams was helping Nixon and Lewis teach black folks
how to pass the dreaded Alabama literacy test.
``I never did get afraid,'' Mrs. Williams says, even when
she returned to Hope Hull and began registering blacks. Why?
She doesn't know. She just put fear out of her mind, flicked
a switch. After a while, she went to a white county
politician and told him a new road was needed running out to
the black schoolhouse.
``How many people you got registered?'' he asked.
``Well, we got quite a few.''
``Name some of 'em.''
She did.
Mrs. Williams stops sewing. ``And he made a road, ditched
it on both sides.''She is still incredulous. ``And that was
because of me. That was the first time I saw the power.''
In the early '50s, Mrs. Williams occasionally served at
Mrs. Durr's parties. She was already the full-time domestic
for Mr. Durr's sister and her husband, Stanhope Elmore. She
liked the Elmores, but it was Mrs. Durr she admired. ``Mr.
Elmore and them would talk about her,'' she says. ``She was
an outcast. They never invited them over.'' But black people,
whether or not they knew her personally, understood that
Virginia Durr was putting her life and the lives of her
family on the line. Mrs. Williams nods toward the old woman
reading in the living room: ``Mrs. Durr is a brave woman.''
The East side of old black Montgomery isn't what it used to
be. Alabama State still anchors the neighborhood, but many
affluent blacks have migrated to the suburbs, where they now
live among whites. Many doctors and lawyers, even public
school teachers with two modest incomes have abandoned
Montgomery's old black neighborhoods. But Rufus Lewis, 88
years old, a giant in the Montgomery civil rights
movement, a man barely known outside his circle of aged
contemporaries, still lives on the old black east side. He
looks remarkably like the young, imperious Rufus Lewis,
his head still kingly and dignified, with the bearing of
an old, unbowed lion. But his mind is cloudy. He can't
recall his past. He can't recall Rosa Parks.
Back in the '40s, Lewis became obsessed with black voting
rights. Night after night, he traveled the countryside
teaching blacks how to register. In Montgomery, he founded
the Citizens Club, a private nightclub blacks could join only
if they were registered voters. An entire generation of
Montgomery blacks say Rufus Lewis is the reason they first
voted. Lewis was the first to ramrod the Montgomery bus
boycott's labyrinthine automobile transport system that
helped get black boycotters back and forth every day for 13
months. Lewis, with Nixon's concurrence, nominated Martin
Luther King Jr. to head the organization leading the boycott.
``Tell him as much as you remember, Daddy,'' says his 56-
year-old daughter, Eleanor Dawkins. She sits in her father's
knotty pine study with his old friend, a former mailman and
present Montgomery City Council president, 73-year-old Joseph
Dickerson. ``I thought that with Joe here,'' his daughter
says, ``maybe there will be something that will come up.''
``Maybe,'' Mr. Lewis says tentatively.
``He believed,'' says Mr. Dickerson, who took part in five
major European operations
[[Page E 2138]]
in World War II, ``that if you go off to fight for your country, you
oughta be able to vote in your country.''
Something stirs in Mr. Lewis. ``We got a lotta folks
registered,'' he says, smiling. They mimeographed the
literacy test, taught folks the answers, traveled by cover of
night through the backwoods Jim Crow landscape, sent light-
skinned blacks to the Montgomery registrar's office to learn
if it was open that day, drove folks to the courthouse. When
people failed the test--as they usually did the first time or
two--Lewis and his workers did it all again, and then again.
He stops talking, leans across the desk where he is sitting,
fingers steepled, eyes blank, lost again.
Does Mr. Lewis know that history records his achievements?
``Well, that's fine to be remembered in the books,'' he
says, suddenly firm and lucid, ``but the best part of it was
being there to help the people who needed help . . . That was
our job.''
The night Rosa Parks was arrested, E.D. Nixon and Clifford
Durr recognized instinctively that Mrs. Parks was the vessel
they'd been seeking to challenge the segregated bus laws.
Other blacks had been arrested for defying those laws. Only
months before, a 15-year-old girl, Claudette Colvin--inspired
by a high school teacher's lectures on the need for equal
rights, angered by the conviction of a black high school
student for allegedly raping a white woman--had refused to
give up her seat to a white, then resisted arrest when the
police came. She kept hollering, ``It's my constitutional
right!'' Nixon had decided against contesting her case: She
had fought with police, she came from the poorer side of
black Montgomery and, it was later learned, she was pregnant.
He had also rejected the cases of several other women
recently arrested, waiting for just the right vessel to
arrive.
Then came Mrs. Parks. ``We got a lady can't nobody touch,''
Nixon said. There were other advantages. Rosa Parks, because
of her well-mannered, serene demeanor, her proper speech, her
humble, saintly way, her ascetic lifestyle--she didn't drink,
smoke or curse--carried not only the image but the reality of
the deserving Negro. Mrs. Parks had the qualities middle-
class whites claimed in themselves and denied in blacks.
Nothing about her supported the white contention that she
deserved to be treated as inferior.
She had another advantage: Although whites may have viewed
blacks as a single entity, the social class fissures within
the black community--between educated and uneducated,
affluent and poor--ran deep. Mrs. Parks bridged that gap: She
was of ``working-class station and middle-class demeanor,''
as Taylor Branch wrote in Parting the Waters. She came from a
good family, her relatives were prominent in Montgomery's St.
Paul AME Church, she was educated at Miss White's and later
Alabama State's lab school, and she had the manners--as
Virginia Durr said--of a ``lady.'' In her role as NAACP
secretary, she was respected by the city's educated activist
community. But she was also a seamstress who earned $23 a
week, whose fingers and feet were tired from honest work. She
was a PR bonanza--with a bonus.
She was velvet hiding steel.
That night, after hushed conversations, Nixon and Clifford
Durr asked if she would plead not guilty and fight her arrest
in court. Nixon said they could take the case to the Supreme
Court. Her husband, Raymond, a barber, was terrified, and
Mrs. Durr later recalled in her memoir, Outside the Magic
Circle, that he kept saying, ``Rosa, the white folks will
kill you! Rosa, the white folks will kill you!'' Like a
chant. Mrs. Parks was perfectly calm.
``I'll go along with you, Mr. Nixon.''
Her decision wasn't as simple as it seems, wasn't made in
that one instant, but was a long time coming. In her 1992
autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story, the source for many of
the details about her life and attitudes, Mrs. Parks writes
that as she sat on the bus, waiting for the police to arrive,
she was thinking about the night as a girl when she sat with
her grandfather, shotgun at the ready, while the KKK rode the
countryside. The humiliating segregation of Montgomery's
buses was much on her mind. Not only had Claudette Colvin's
arrest occurred last spring, but just a month earlier, a bus
driver had ordered Mrs. Parks's dear friend, Bertha Butler,
to move back to make room for a white man: ``You sit back
there with the niggers.'' Mrs. Butler was a woman raising two
children on her own, who also worked as a seamstress, who
sometimes sewed until 5 a.m. for extra income and who still
found time to run voter clinics in her home two nights a
week. She had befriended Mrs. Parks because she so admired
her civil rights work. Mrs. Butler didn't move at the order,
and the standing white man, in soldier's uniform, had
intervened: ``That's your seat and you sit there.'' Mrs.
Butler, now retired at age 76 and living near Philadelphia,
was glad she wasn't the one to get arrested. ``God looked at
me and said I wasn't strong enough,'' he says. ``Mrs.
Parks was the person.''
At the time Mrs. Parks was arrested, she was in the process
of rejuvenating the NAACP's youth organization, getting ready
for a conference in a few days. Only the summer before, at
the behest of Virginia Durr, Mrs. Parks had spent 10 days at
the interracial Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a labor
organizing camp that had turned its radical eye on civil
rights. Mrs. Parks loved waking up in the morning at
Highlander, smelling the bacon and eggs cooking--and knowing
it was white people fixing breakfast for her. She returned
home, Mrs. Durr later said, inspired at realizing that whites
and blacks could live as equals and even more disgusted with
segregation. One of Highlander's most famous black teachers,
Septima Clark, said later, ``Rosa Parks was afraid for white
people to know that she was as militant as she was.''
Mrs. Parks had been training her high school charges in the
ways of civil disobedience. Mrs. Butler's 58-year-old
daughter, Zynobia Tatum, remembers saying to Mrs. Parks,
``They are going to hit me, spit on me and call me names, and
I can't fight back? I cannot promise you.'' Mrs. Parks told
Zynobia she needed more training. Already, Mrs. Parks had
sent her youth group members into the whites-only public
library to order books. Zynobia Tatum recalls that she and
Mrs. Parks had often taken drinks from whites-only water
fountains downtown--``to show our disapproval.'' After
Claudette Colvin's arrest for refusing to give up her seat,
Claudette joined Mrs. Parks' group--and Mrs. Parks discovered
she was the great-granddaughter of the dark-skinned black man
in Pine Level who had refused to work for whites, the man
young Rosa had secretly admired. It was almost prophetic.
Despite her genuine gentleness and pragmatic faith in the
tactic of civil disobedience, Rosa Parks was never entirely
comfortable with the philosophy of nonviolence and the idea
that if black people were attacked, they shouldn't fight
back. In an obscure 1967 interview on file at Howard
University she said bluntly, ``I don't believe in gradualism
or that whatever is to be done for the better should take
forever to do.''
For more than a decade as NAACP secretary, she had watched
case after case of injustice against blacks come through the
NAACP office, almost all of which she was powerless to
change. She'd worked with a group trying to save the life of
the young Montgomery man convicted of raping a white woman--
the case that had so outraged Claudette Colvin--only to see
him executed. She knew the widow and three small children of
a black man who, in his U.S. military uniform, was shot dead
by police after he supposedly caused a scene on a Montgomery
bus. She had told local NAACP board member Frank Bray, now
75, that someone needed to do something to break the fist of
segregation, even if it meant a sacrifice.
``I had no idea,'' he says, ``that she would be the
sacrificial lamb . . . She'd say. These folks have all these
beautiful churches and they profess to be Christians and yet
they have businesses where the clerks are not courteous and
where you cannot use a restroom and if you drink water you
have to drink out of the little spigot that was added to
the main fountain' . . . Most blacks resented the
conditions and many of them adjusted to it and many did
not adjust. She did not adjust.'' After her arrest, Mrs.
Parks revealed to fellow boycott worker Hazel Gregory, now
75, that she had thought about refusing to give up her
seat in the past.
Montgomery whites claimed that her arrest was part of a
plot, that Nixon had put his longtime secretary up to it. No
evidence supports that claim. On the night of her arrest,
Nixon was shocked and confused, flailing about in his effort
to get her released. It is embedded in the American psyche
that Rosa Parks acted on the spur of the moment, and her
arrest is often called the ``spark'' that ignited the modern
civil rights movement. In fact, Rosa Park's act and the
firestorm that followed were more like spontaneous
combustion--a fire ignited by the buildup of heat over time
in material ripe for explosion. Mrs. Parks, who wasn't afraid
as she waited for her arrest, who felt oddly serene, revealed
the lifetime thread of experiences that had led to her action
when the police arrived and asked once more if she would
move. In the way of the Bible, she answered with a question:
``Why do you all push us around?''
No moral philosopher, the cop said, ``I don't know.''
Then she was led away.
Years later, Edward Warren Boswell, now 41, the son of a
cousin Mrs. Parks grew up with in Pine Level, asked her why
she refused to move that particular day. ``She said she had
no idea,'' he recalls. His 44-year-old sister, Betty Boswell,
says, ``She said she was just tired from working, and they
had always been harassing black people about not sitting to
the front and she said that particular day she just wasn't in
the mood . . . Her feet were hurting.'' Mrs. Parks told
Edward: ``It was just set in motion by God.''
Back in the study of Rufus Lewis, City Council President
Joe Dickerson agrees. But he, like Mrs. Parks and almost
everybody else who was involved in the boycott, was of the
praise-the-Lord-and-pass-the-ammunition school of religion.
Every inch of progress was a battle. White politicians tried
to break the boycott in court, and the boycott leaders fought
back in court. The white thugs bombed four churches and the
homes of King, Nixon and Ralph Abernathy, a young minister in
Montgomery at the time. As Zecozy William said, people risked
their lives.
Theirs was an eerie determination. King later wrote that he
was increasingly afraid until late one night when he felt the
presence and the resoluteness of God descend upon him. Mrs.
Williams said she flicked a mental switch to turn off her
fear. Mrs. Parks described her serenity as she waited to be
arrested. And now, Mr. Dickerson compares his state of mind
during the dangerous
[[Page E 2139]]
days of the boycott to the way he felt the night before a military
operation in World War II: ``Gotta go.''
Mr. Dickerson: ``It's a miracle.''
Mr. Lewis: ``I just feel grateful that we came through.''
The room is like Inez Baskin's private museum. The large
portrait of her grandfather stands on an easel. In his bow
tie and vest, with his mustache and slicked-back hair, he
looks every bit an Irishman. The photo of her mother and
father, so fair-skinned, sits on the piano encased in plastic
wrap for protection. ``My husband's father was white, too,''
she says. And of course, on the wall, is the famous photo of
Mrs. Baskin, now 79 years old, on the day that bus
segregation ended in Montgomery: Mrs. Baskin, Abernathy, King
and two others riding a bus. The photo ran worldwide and Inez
Baskin, a reporter for the ``colored page'' of the Montgomery
Advertiser and a correspondent for Jet magazine and the
Pittsburgh Courier, was mistaken by many for Rosa Parks,
still is today.
``In the '50s, I didn't have any sense,'' she says, sitting
in a large, comfortable chair amid her memorabilia. She
softly rubs her face, plays with the ring on her left hand.
Her long gray hair sweeps over from the right, dangling in a
single braid to her left. She speaks softly and deliberately.
``I thought I could walk on water in those days.'' With a
black photographer, she once raced out to Prattville, Ala.,
after a report that the Klan was burning a cross. The crowd
was gone, but the cross was still burning. She laughs and
shakes her head at the memory. A photo ran in Jet.
Did she know Rosa Parks?
She smiles faintly. ``An angel walking.''
``I wonder sometimes what it would have taken just to make
her act like the rest of us . . . She would smile, very
demure, and never raise her voice. She was just different in
a very angelic way . . . `If you can walk with kings and not
lose the common touch.' Those are the kind of expressions
that come to mind when you think about Rosa Parks. My great-
grandmother had an expression for it: `living on earth and
boarding in Glory.' ''
Mrs. Baskin believes Mrs. Parks was heaven-sent?
``She had to be.''
On the night Rosa Parks was arrested, after she had agreed
to become bus segregation's test case, 24-year-old Fred Gray,
one of Montgomery's two black attorneys then, arrived home
late from out of town and got the word. Gray has grown up in
Montgomery, attended Alabama State and gone to Ohio for law
school because Alabama didn't have a law school for blacks.
When the state required five attorneys to sign character
affidavits before he could practice, Gray had gone to E.D.
Nixon, who helped him find the lawyers. One of them was
Clifford Durr. Gray had returned home with one goal--to
``destroy everything segregated.'' Mrs. Parks immediately
offered her services. Every day, she came to his downtown
office at lunch, answered his mail for free, encouraged his
idealism. They talked not only about the buses, but inferior
black schools, segregated parks, swimming pools and toilets.
In his memoir, Bus Ride to Justice, Gray, now 64, later
wrote, ``She gave me the feeling that I was the Moses that
God had sent to Pharaoh.''
Fred Gray upped the ante. Late on the night Mrs. Parks was
arrested, he visited Jo Ann Robinson, an Alabama State
professor and president of the Women's Political Council, a
group composed of female university professors, public school
teachers, nurses, social workers and the wives of
Montgomery's black professional men. For months, Robinson had
been laying plans for a bus boycott. Although she and most
of Montgomery's affluent blacks owned cars and didn't ride
the buses often, she had taken a bus to the airport in
1949 and mistakenly sat in a white seat. The driver went
wild, screamed, threatened. ``I felt like a dog,'' she
later said.
Every black person who rode a bus had a tale to tell: the
man who paid his last coin in fare only to have the bus drive
off before he could return and enter through the back door,
the woman who was attacked when she stepped onto a bus to pay
ahead of a white man, the pregnant woman who fell when a bus
pulled away as she stepped off. In 1953 alone, the Women's
Council had received 30 complaints from black bus riders.
It was a unifying indignity.
Inspired by the Supreme Court ruling that had banned
``separate but equal'' schools in 1954, Robinson had even
written the mayor and warned that if black riders weren't
treated more courteously ``twenty-five or more local
organizations'' were planning a bus boycott. It was a hopeful
time. Already, a boycott in Baton Rouge, La., organized by
the Rev. T.J. Jemison, had won concessions for black riders
in that city. And in Little Rock, Ark., officials had devised
a plan to integrate its schools. But nothing had come of
Robinson's demands. Then Fred Gray dropped by.
At midnight, Robinson went to Alabama State and furtively
used its government-owned paper and mimeograph machines to
run off 52,500 leaflets announcing a boycott of Montgomery's
buses on the day of Mrs. Parks's trial. The next morning,
Robinson and her Women's Council cohorts and students
distributed the leaflets to black schools, stores, taverns,
beauty parlors and barber shops. When Alabama State's black
president, H. Councill Trenholm, who served at the pleasure
of the Alabama governor, learned of her action, he called her
into his office and demanded an explanation. She told him
another black woman had been humiliated on a bus; she
promised to pay for the mimeograph paper. He calmed down,
warned her to work behind the scenes. Trenholm's wife, too,
was a Women's Council member.
The rest is history. Rosa Parks was found guilty and fined
$10, plus $4 in court costs. To keep the followers of Rufus
Lewis and E.D. Nixon from squabbling, King became the
compromise choice to lead the boycott. When black preachers
cozy with Montgomery's powerful whites balked at the idea,
Nixon, in his rugged way, questioned their manhood: ``You
ministers have lived off these wash-women for the last
hundred years and ain't never done nothing for them.'' After
Nixon's taunt, King himself said, ``Brother Nixon, I'm not a
coward.'' Nixon planted the story of the boycott with a
friendly white reporter at the Montgomery Advertiser. It
became front-page news and announced the boycott to every
black in Montgomery.
There were bombings, threats, lawsuits, harassing phone
calls. Victory was not preordained; it came a day at a time.
The city's stubborn refusal to compromise on bus seating--
other segregated Southern cities didn't have specific seats
reserved only for whites--probably hardened the resolve of
the boycotters. The bombings certainly turned national public
opinion against the segregationists. In 1956, young Fred Gray
successfully took his argument against Montgomery's bus
segregation to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although many people
believe it was Rosa Parks's case that went before the high
court, Gray actually didn't use her as a plaintiff because of
technicalities in her case that might have undermined his
federal lawsuit. Instead, five women whose names are
mostly lost to history filed suit; Aurelia Browder,
Claudette Colvin, Susie McDonald, Jeanetta Reese and Mary
Louise Smith.
Victory had a price; Jo Ann Robinson and about a dozen
other activist ASU employees lost their jobs. Monroe J.
Gardner, whose granddaughter is now a federal magistrate in
Montgomery, used his car to transport people during the
boycott. He was beaten. Samuel Patton Sr., a boycott
supporter and prominent builder, lost his line of bank
credit. E.L. and Dorothy Posey, who ran the only black-owned
parking lot in downtown Montgomery, let their lot be used as
a transit staging point. After the boycott, they lost their
business. Anne Smith Pratt volunteered dispatching cars to
pick up waiting riders. Her marriage ended when her husband
was sent overseas and she refused to leave her post. Not to
mention the hardships endured by thousands of working class
blacks who walked miles to work every day in the heat, the
cold, the rain. Says sociologist Aldon Morris, ``People made
this happen.''
During the boycott, Rosa Parks helped run the auto dispatch
system. She wasn't a leader of the movement, and didn't try
to be. She traveled the country raising money. Already, she
was a symbol. When she, King and nearly 100 others were
charged with conspiracy during the boycott, a photo of her
being fingerprinted ran on the front page of the New York
Times--perhaps because King was out of town and not available
to be photographed. That picture, mistakenly believed by many
to have been taken the night she was first arrested, became a
piece of movement iconography.
As the historic significance of the boycott became clearer,
as journalists poured in from all over the world, bickering
began over the credit. Nixon became jealous of not only King
but Rosa Parks. ``If it hadn't been for me . . .'' he told
Mrs. Park's friend Hazel Gregory. In one of the final
recorded interviews of his life in 1988, Nixon told local
amateur historian Riley Lewis Jr., ``We had court cases that
had been filed 10 years `fore Mrs. Parks was arrested . . .
King didn't make the Montgomery bus boycott--me, the peoples
and our protest made him!''
He was right. He was wrong.
Everybody made everybody.
Inez Baskin still marvels about those days. ``It was as if
I was out of myself doing these things.'' she says, sitting
forward in her chair, holding her arms before her and gently
swaying, eyes closed. ``Not myself, but more myself than
ever. It didn't seem as if it was me doing it . . . It was as
if we were out of ourselves, watching ourselves . . . Not in
our bodies.
``Does that make any sense?''
IT IS THE HANDS of Rosa Parks that you notice. They are
always folded somehow, plaited together so naturally, the
left hand lying open on her lap, the right hand's palm lying
open over it, her thumb softly massaging her wrist. Or the
fingers gently intertwined, her thumbs methodically
crossing and recrossing. Or the left palm held open and
facing up, the right palm grazing lightly back and forth
over its surface. Hands always at rest, always at work.
Rosa Parks is visiting Montgomery today, traveling with a
bus tour of youngsters retracing the path of the underground
railroad from the South to Canada, stopping at important
civil rights sites along the way. The Rosa and Raymond Parks
Institute for Self-Development sponsors the tour, which is
filled mostly with youths from the Washington and Detroit
areas. Mrs. Parks has returned to Montgomery only
occasionally since 1957 when she, her husband and her mother
moved to Detroit, where her brother lived. She and her
husband had lost their jobs and the phone jangled constantly
with vicious threats: ``You should be killed.'' Her
[[Page E 2140]]
brother was afraid for them and insisted they move to Detroit, where
Mrs. Parks eventually worked for Democratic Rep. John Conyers
Jr. as a receptionist and caseworker. She retired in 1988.
Her husband, mother and brother are all dead. She is 82.
In cities where she was once despised, she is now treated
like royalty--or more. Yesterday in Birmingham, siren-blaring
motorcycle cops stopped traffic for her and the mayor
proclaimed it ``Rosa Parks Day.'' At the Birmingham Civil
Rights Institute, Mrs. Parks stood quietly looking at a life-
sized sculpture of herself sitting on the bus, purse in her
lap, staring out the window, waiting to be arrested. Watching
her watch herself was an army of TV crews and cameras. In
Selma, a woman reached out, took hold of her challis dress
and said, ``I want to touch the hem of your garment.''
Unchanged in manner since 1955, Mrs. Parks said, ``That's
very nice.'' Today in Montgomery, she is given the key to the
city and a speaker introduces her by saying, ``Why don't we
just get on our feet and greet our mother, Rosa Parks!''
The mother of the civil rights movement.
``A saint of American history,'' a TV reporter calls her.
``I don't consider myself a saint,'' says Mrs. Parks, who
still wears her hair braided and rolled behind her head,
still speaks so softly her voice is nearly inaudible, still
is velvet hiding steel. ``I'm just a person who wanted to be
seated on the bus.''
But again and again, Rosa Parks tells audiences she didn't
remain in her seat because she was physically weary. No, she
was weary of the injustice. Again and again, she mentions
that she was working at the NAACP before her arrest. No, she
didn't plan her arrest, but her whole life from childhood was
leading up to it. Without being asked, she is responding to
the mythic tale that, ironically, holds her up to worship and
diminishes her: the simple seamstress, the meek Negro woman,
exhausted from a day's work, who without forethought chose to
sit her ground.
Rosa Parks doesn't really answer questions put to her
later, questions about why she is often seen as a simple
seamstress rather than as an assertive activist, questions
about whether her sainthood status diminishes her status as a
strong, committed woman. ``I was always glad that the people
did have the determination to make the sacrifices and take
that action,'' she says in her soft, slow voice. ``I just
felt that as a person I didn't want to be treated like a
second-class citizen. I didn't want to mistreated under the
guise of legally enforced racial segregation and that the
more we endured that kind of treatment, the worse we were
being treated . . . I consider myself a symbol of freedom
and equality, and I wanted to let it be known that that
was what I believed in.''
It is as simple--and complex--as that.
``She remains a pure symbol,'' says University of Georgia
sociologist Gary Fine, an expert in political symbolism.
``For everyone today and in the '50s, it was a text story
with only one possible reading--this poor woman who refused
to move to the back of the bus. What possible explanation
could you possibly have for making her move? It was so
transparently egregious.'' But for a symbol to have 40 years
of staying power, Fine says, it must carry a deeper cultural
resonance about ``our own self-image.''
``By protecting this image we are celebrating core values
for ourselves as Americans,'' he says. ``There is a universal
consensus now that integration is good. She symbolizes this
now. Everybody on all sides can use her.'' For blacks, she is
evidence that they forced change. For whites, she is evidence
that they were willing to change.
Rosa Parks as proof: America is good.
``The beauty was that she disappeared from the scene,''
says Fine, meaning that her later behavior or opinions didn't
muddy the purity of her symbolism, as happened with King
after allegations of plagiarism and marital infidelity. ``She
did her duty as a symbol and then disappeared except for
ceremonial events.''
Back in Montgomery, Mrs. Parks is standing amid the
adoration, her hands plaited naturally on the lectern, giving
a short tale: She's glad for all the change but more change
is needed, the struggle for justice must go on, the greatest
power is God. Then, so softly that people must strain to
hear, she recites a hymn her mother sang to her as a child in
Pine Level:
``O freedom,
O freedom,
O freedom over me.
And before I'd be a slave,
I'd be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord and be free.''
``I'd like for everybody to remember me as a person who
wanted to be free.''
It is night and Joe Dickerson, the city council president,
is standing before bus No. 5726, lit by the headlights of his
car. Mr. Dickerson helped get the bus hauled here in hopes
that the committee set up to honor the 40th anniversary of
the boycott can eventually collect enough private donations
to restore it. The Montgomery City Council, with four blacks
and five whites, isn't yet ready to foot the whole bill or to
finance the civil rights museum Mr. Dickerson would like to
see built inside the old Empire Theater, outside of which
Rosa Parks was arrested.
But someday . . .
``If you rode the bus, you were mistreated,'' Mr. Dickerson
says, the light making him look washed and vague and
mysterious in his little hat with the brim rolled up all the
way around. And so the time was right. It could have been
anybody . . . I guess when the time is right, it's just like
Nelson Mandela. If anybody had told Mandela, `You're gonna be
free and you're gonna rule South Africa, man,' you talked
like a fool. `I'm not gonna get outta jail!' So there is a
time for everything. And you have to play your role.''
Rosa Parks's grandfather who refused to shuffle for whites
played his role. So did the dark-skinned man in Pine Level
who wouldn't work for whites. Rosa's mother, who sacrificed
so Rosa could go to Miss White's school. Miss White. Julius
Rosenwald. A. Philip Randolph. The NAACP lawyers who laid
decades of groundwork for the 1954 Supreme Court schools
decision. The Rev. T.J. Jemison, who organized the earlier
Baton Rouge bus boycott. Those who took the literacy test
again and again. Raymond Parks. H. Councill Trenholm, Ralph
Abernathy, Eddie Mae Pratt, Anne Smith Pratt, E.L. and
Dorothy Posey, Zecozy Williams, Bertha Smith, Monroe J.
Gardner, Samuel Patton Sr., Johnnie Carr, Bertha T. Butler,
Zynobia Tatum, Aurelia Browder, Claudette Colvin, Susie
McDonald, Jeanetta Reese, Mary Louise Smith. And, of course,
E.D. Nixon, Rufus Lewis, Jo Ann Robinson, Fred Gray, Clifford
and Virginia Durr and Martin Luther King Jr., who transformed
a demand for seats into a mission for God. And the 40,000 who
refused to ride.
Strands in a thread.
Rosa Parks, too, played her role.
She still does.
``The message is ordinary people doing extraordinary
things,'' says sociologist Aldon Morris, who fears that the
simplified mythology that enshrouds Rosa Parks and the
Montgomery bus boycott, the belief that it was all God-
ordained, can obscure the determination, fearlessness and
skilled organization of the people who made the movement.
``To believe that King or Rosa Parks are heroes, it creates
passivity . . . Young people then ask, ``Where's the new
Martin Luther King?' . . . People don't understand that power
exists within the collectivity.''
``The peoples,'' as E.D. Nixon said.
Back at the bus, bathed in the vague and mysterious light,
Joe Dickerson says, ``Things are changing.''
Someday they'll have that museum.
``When the time is right.''
And bus No. 5726 will be waiting.
____________________