Institutions matter. Alexis de Tocqueville came to the conclusion that mediating institutions (churches, lodges, clubs, caucuses) were what kept American democracy from devolving into a tyranny of the majority (well, except for slaves, Indians, women and others not considered full citizens). Institutions matter, particularly for working-class folk, because institutions are where the habits, skills and talents necessary for success as a citizen in a democracy are developed. For Rosa Parks, the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP (one of only three chapters in Alabama at the time) was the central institution in which she developed her talents as a leader and a public citizen.
Mrs. Parks went to the Montgomery NAACP’s annual meeting in December 1943 because “I saw in the Alabama Tribune a picture of Johnnie Carr, my friend and classmate at Miss White’s school” at a NAACP event. Mrs. Carr wasn’t at the annual meeting and election of officers so, “I was the only woman there, and they said they needed a secretary, and I was too timid to say no. I just started taking minutes, and that was the way I was elected secretary. There was no pay, but I enjoyed the work, and Parks was very supportive of my involvement.”
“As secretary of the NAACP, I recorded and sent membership payments to the national office, answered telephones, wrote letters, and sent out press releases to the newspapers. One of my main duties was to keep a record of cases of discrimination or unfair treatment or acts of violence against black people.”
In virtually all the stories Mrs. Parks recounts in chapter 6, “Secretary of the NAACP”, her efforts and those of the NAACP are fruitless. White men get away with raping black women and killing black men. Black men are sentenced to death when accused of rape by white women with whom they had clandestine relationships. Black men get killed by white men and the killers are acquitted in show trials—if they’re even brought to trial.
“We didn’t have too many successes in getting justice. It was more a matter of trying to challenge the powers that be, and to let it be known that we did not wish to continue being treated as second-class citizens.”
Sometimes that’s all you can do. Keep the struggle for justice alive in your own soul and your own community. Sometimes the only victory is in not giving up. And throughout much of the 1930s and 40s, that was the situation that Rosa Parks’ and other leaders of Montgomery’s small civil rights community faced.
Mrs. Parks doesn’t say so explicitly, but we can infer at least two results from her work with the NAACP in the 1940s and early 1950s: 1) she developed and sharpened the “soft skills” of democracy—how to organize and run a meeting, how to develop and advance an agenda, how to find issues and take action, how to recruit and develop new leaders; and 2) she, by her work as E. D. Nixon’s secretary (both for the NAACP and for his other work with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and other civil rights groups) gradually became know and respected as a leader herself.
