“I don’t think any segregation law angered black people in Montgomery more than bus segregation. And that had been so since the laws about segregation on public transportation had been passed. That was back in 1900, and black people had boycotted Montgomery streetcars until the City Council changed its ordinance so that nobody would be forced to give up a seat unless there was another seat to move to. But over the years practices had changed,, although the law had not. When I was put off the bus back in 1943, the bus driver was really acting against the law. In 1945, two years after that incident, the State of Alabama passed a law requiring that all bus companies under its jurisdiction enforce segregation. But that law did not spell out what bus drivers were supposed to do in a case like mine.
Here it was, half a century after the first segregation law, and there were 50,000 African-Americans in Montgomery. More of us rode the buses than Caucasians did, because more whites could afford cars. It was very humiliating having to suffer the indignity of riding segregated buses twice a day, five days a week, to go downtown and work for white people.”
Twenty years ago, Nicholas Lemann wrote “The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America”. It’s a great book, over 400 pages long. It tells (different format, different details) the same story that Stevie Wonder told in 1973 in “Living For the City”—except you can’t dance to Lemann’s book.
I’m not knocking Lemann; I’m just pointing out that some great creations (like “Living For the City”) are so packed with meaning that whole books can be written unpacking their full implications.
The same is true for the two paragraphs quoted above, which open Chapter 8 of Rosa Parks’ story. You could teach a graduate seminar on organizing for change based on little more than those two paragraphs. Here are just three of the lessons contained in those paragraphs:
- Anger—if people won’t get angry about something, they won’t organize to change it. Mohandas Gandhi chose break the legitimacy of British rule in India by breaking the salt laws. Why? Because everyone needs and uses salt. Because everyone can participate in the campaign. Because the salt laws angered all Indians. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was the first successful mass nonviolent direct action campaign of the modern civil rights movement in part because it was an issue that angered and engaged virtually the entire black community in Montgomery.
- Historical Memory—Rosa Parks and the other Montgomery civil rights leaders knew their history. They knew that the buses hadn’t always been segregated (like the ancient Hebrews knew they hadn’t always been slaves). They knew their ancestors (in many cases their parents and grandparents) had boycotted the buses 50 years earlier and had forced the City Council to at least ameliorate the segregation laws “so that nobody would be forced to give up a seat unless there was another seat to move to.” Among other things, by deciding to launch a bus boycott, they were following in the footsteps of their ancestors.
- The Power of Numbers—“More of us rode the buses than Caucasians did….” African-Americans rode the buses because they had no other way to get to work; that was their vulnerability, and a source of daily humiliation. African-Americans were the vast majority (over 2/3) of bus riders; that was the bus company’s vulnerability.