I promise I’ll eventually get to 1955 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but first it’s important to appreciate that it would not have happened without the deep, fierce and abiding commitment to the importance of education by African-Americans in central Alabama (and throughout the country).
Professor Theresa Perry has a great essay in “Young, Gifted and Black”, in which she raises up the point embedded in African-American memoirs throughout the last two centuries that “education is for freedom, and freedom is for education”. In the African-American tradition, education was not a means of economic advancement—because black people couldn’t get good jobs regardless of how well-educated they were. So the motivating force for education among African-Americans became the link to freedom: first, as in Frederick Douglass’ memoirs, legal freedom; later, after Emancipation, mental and spiritual freedom.
Reconstruction governments, controlled by ex-slaves and their white allies, embarked on massive school building drives and dramatically expanded spending on education. (It was this spending that the “Redeemer” governments called wasteful, and cut back when Reconstruction ended.)
Rosa Parks recounts every school she attended, and many of the teachers she had. First in Pine Level, then the Alabama State Lab School in Montgomery when her mother was renewing her teaching certification, then when the Pine Level school was closed, the Spring Hill school where her mother taught.
When Rosa was 11, her mother sent her to the “Miss White’s School”, the Montgomery Industrial School, because the Spring Hill school ended at 6th grade. Miss Alice L. White was from Melrose, Mass., and the school was financed, in part, by Julius Rosenwald of Sears & Roebuck. Miss White and the other teachers were all “carpetbaggers” from the North whose mission in life was to educate Negro girls in Montgomery.
After the school closed (because of Miss White’s failing health), Rosa finished junior high at the Booker T. Washington School, and then went back to the Alabama State Lab School through 11th grade, dropping out to care for her ailing grandmother, then completing her high school education after she was married.
Black schools in the South played multiple, overlapping roles in the African-American community. Outside of church, they were the one institution in which Negro children were treated with dignity and respect, and were trained and educated to have high expectations of themselves.
They provided a major portion of the middle-class (so to speak) jobs open to African-Americans in the South. What was true for elementary and secondary schools, was more crucially true for HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges & Universities) like Payne (where Rosa’s mother went to school), Tuskegee (where Rosa’s father and uncle went to school) and Alabama State. In particular, without Alabama State there may not have been a Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Fred Gray, lawyer for Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Improvement Association, grew up in Montgomery and went to Alabama State where he pledged to himself that he would become a lawyer and use the law to “destroy everything segregated that I could find”. JoAnn Robinson was a professor at Alabama State who wrote the leaflet that initiated the bus boycott (and secretly used Alabama State equipment and paper to run off 35,000 copies of the leaflet). Within the (severe) restrictions of being state employees, Alabama State’s faculty, staff, students and alumni played crucial roles in initiating, leading and sustaining the bus boycott, and the civil rights movement throughout central Alabama.
Operating within the restrictions of Jim Crow, Black schools kept alive the dream of freedom, raised up generation after generation of leaders (like Rosa Parks), and continuously pressed against the limits imposed by segregation. It’s no accident that education—in the form of the Brown v. Topeka Board of Ed decision—was the issue that initiated the civil rights revolution of the mid-20th century.