Pay attention all you:
*progressives who are thoroughly disgusted with Obama, Reid, and Pelosi, et al, for their endless compromises the past two years;
*liberals who are disheartened at the current state of national politics and are ready to throw in the towel;
*leftists who think letting things get worse is the only way to awaken the masses to bring about the change we need.
Remember the Voting Act of 1945 that transformed post-World War II politics across the South as millions of African-Americans brought about a peaceful revolution through the ballot box?
Yeah. Neither does Rosa Parks.
What she does remember in Chapter 5 of “Rosa Parks: My Story” is “We Fight For the Right to Vote”.
She remembers her husband, Raymond, shifting the focus of his activism—after the Scottsboro Boys’ lives had been saved—to voting, and that she followed his lead.
She remembers there were 31 African-Americans registered to vote in Montgomery in the early 1940s (out of a population of over 30,000), “and some of them were in the cemetery”.
She remembers that you had to have a white sponsor to register to vote.
And she remembers that it was under E.D. Nixon’s leadership in the 1940s that Montgomery African-Americans began to break down the barriers to the vote by:
*bringing lawyers into town (there were no black lawyers in Montgomery at the time) to educate potential voters about their legal and constitutional rights;
*preparing potential voters to pass the test used to keep African-Americans from registering;
*organizing African-Americans to find out when the test was being given—because the registrar’s office would only open at certain (unpublicized) times.
And she remembers “I got registered in 1945 when I was 32 years old, so I had to pay $1.50 (poll tax) for each of the eleven years between the time I was 21 and the time I was 32. At that time $16.50 was a considerable amount of money.”
Rosa & Raymond Parks, and people like them, were chipping away at segregated voting for decades before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. And for Mrs. Parks, her voting activism was intimately connected with the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
“The second time I tried to register to vote, I was put off a Montgomery city bus for the first time. I didn’t follow the rules.”
The bus driver (“a mean one”) took Mrs. Parks by the coat sleeve to escort her off the bus for breaking the rules.
“So after he took my coat sleeve, I went up to the front, and I dropped my purse. Rather than stoop or bend over to get it, I sat right down in the front seat and from a sitting position I picked up my purse.
He was standing over me and he said, ‘Get off my bus.’ I said, ‘I will get off.’ He looked like he was ready to hit me. I said, ‘ I know one thing. You better not hit me.’ He didn’t strike me.”
By the way, the driver was armed.
“After that, I made a point of looking at who was driving the bus before I got on. I didn’t want any more run-ins with that mean one.” She did not ride on that driver’s bus again for over a decade.
By the mid-1940s (her early 30s), Rosa Parks was already an experienced civil rights activist in Montgomery: a veteran of the Scottsboro Boys’ case, a registered voter, someone willing to challenge the segregated public transportation system.
She was not (yet) a leader—in large part because people were not ready to follow. This is the final point she makes in this chapter. As the driver was putting her off the bus:
“I heard someone mumble from the back, ‘How come she don’t go around and get in the back?’
I guess the black people were getting tired because they wanted to get home and they were standing in the back and were tired of standing up. I do know they were mumbling and grumbling as I went up there to get myself off the bus. ‘She ought to go around the back and get on.’ They always wondered why you didn’t want to be like the rest of the black people. That was the 1940s, when people took a lot without fighting back.”
I once knew a preacher who said, “A leader without followers is just someone out for a walk”. That was the position in which the Parks’, E.D. Nixon and a handful of other African-Americans found themselves as World War II was ending. They needed more followers. To get those followers, they would have to commit themselves for the long haul in struggle for justice.
