Author: MassCommons

Once Rosa Parks was arrested, things happened fast that Thursday evening.  Her neighbor, Bertha Butler, had seen Parks being arrested, and called Mrs. E. D. Nixon, who notified her husband.  Nixon called the jail, but couldn’t get any information.  He then called, but could not reach, attorney Fred Gray.  Nixon then called attorney Clifford Durr (whose wife Virginia had arranged the scholarship that allowed Rosa Parks to attend the Highlander Center), and the two of them, along with Mrs. Durr went to the jail and got Mrs. Parks released.  Because Nixon was a Pullman porter and was heading out of town for work, he requested and received a court date of Monday, December 5 for Mrs. Parks.

When Rosa Parks was finally allowed a phone call, she called home and spoke with her husband.  A friend then drove Raymond Parks to the jail (the Parks’ didn’t own a car), where she was being released, and then all of them went back to the Parks’ house, arriving around 9:30 pm, where they were greeted by Mrs. Parks’ mother, and by Bertha Butler.

After some discussion (Raymond Parks initially opposed the idea), Mrs. Parks agreed to serve as a test case for challenging the Montgomery bus system.  

By now, Fred Gray had heard what had happened.  Both he and E. D. Nixon spoke by phone that night with Jo Ann Robinson.  Professor Robinson called the other key leaders of the Women’s Political Council and they decided to call a one-day bus boycott for Monday, December 5, the day of Mrs. Parks’ court appearance.

Robinson and another professor met at Alabama State at midnight, drafted a half-page flyer, ran off 35,000 mimeographed copies, then swore each other to silence.  If word got out they had used state property to call the boycott, they would lose their jobs immediately.  

Friday morning Robinson and some of her students drove around distributing the handbills to all the black elementary and high schools—so that students would take them home to their families.  (Notice that because the schools were completely segregated—no white students, teachers, aides or janitors on campus—this was, in effect, a “secure” communication system.)

Just as Robinson’s May 21, 1954 letter to the mayor (advising him that over 25 organizations had already held discussions about a possible bus boycott) is one of the great American public letters of the 20th century, so too is her flyer initiating what became the Montgomery Bus Boycott one of the most significant political handbills of the 20th century.  Here it is in its entirety:

           This is for Monday, December 5, 1955.

Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus and give it to a white person.

It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing.  This has to be stopped.

Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate.  Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats.  If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue.  The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother.

This woman’s case will come up on Monday.  We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial.  Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday.  

You can afford to stay out of school for one day.  If you work, take a cab, or walk.  But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday.  Please stay off all buses on Monday.

We come now to the evening of Thursday, December 1, 1955.  Rosa Parks flatly states, “I did not intend to get arrested.  If I had been paying attention, I wouldn’t even have gotten on that bus.”  She goes on to say, basically, that she was too busy to plan to get arrested and create a test case for a federal lawsuit.  She had NAACP workshops to organize and mailings about election of NAACP officers to mail.

When she got on the Cleveland Avenue bus to go home, she reports that, “I didn’t look to see who was driving when I got on, and by the time I recognized him, I had already paid my fare.  It was the same driver who had put me off the bus back in 1943, twelve years earlier.”

At the next stop, some white passengers got on and filled up the remaining seats.  One white man remained standing, and the bus driver demanded that Mrs. Parks and the other three Negroes in her row give up their seats.

“I thought back to the time when I used to sit up all night and didn’t sleep, and my grandfather would have his gun right by the fireplace, or if he had his one-horse wagon going anywhere, he always had his gun in the back of the wagon.  People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true.  I was not tired physically,, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day.  I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then.  I was forty-two.  No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Because we sometimes tend to focus on human weakness more than human strength, we have a definition for the trauma response called PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.  We don’t have in common usage PTSO, post-traumatic stress order.  I would argue that Mrs. Parks, sitting on the Cleveland Avenue bus at the Empire Theater stop in the city and county of Montgomery Alabama on Dec. 1, 1955, flashing back to childhood memories of her beloved grandfather, exhibited something like PTSO.  She was in her right mind.  When the driver, James Blake, said he would have her arrested, Mrs. Parks replied simply, “You may do that.”

“As I sat there I tried not to think about what might happen.  I knew that anything was possible.  I could be manhandled or beaten.  I could be arrested.  People have asked me if it occurred to me then that I could be the test case the NAACP had been looking for.  I did not think about that at all.  In fact if I had let myself think too deeply about what might happen to me, I might have gotten off the bus.  But I chose to remain.”

Of such moments of decision are revolutions (sometimes) made.  

You’ll note of course that it did not occur to Mrs. Parks “then” that she could be “the test case the NAACP had been looking for”.  Given all the discussions and meetings she had been part of over the previous two years—with the Women’s Political Council, with the Montgomery NAACP, with the Montgomery NAACP Youth Council (of which she was the adviser), with the training at Highlander, with the conversations with Claudette Colvin and E. D. Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson and others—she had certainly thought about it before the evening of December 1.  Within a few hours after her arrest she would be engaged in deep discussions about being a test case for the NAACP.  But at the moment of her arrest, she was it seems (and is often common) focused on the moment itself, trying not to panic at the possibilities of what might happen, and striving (with great success) to maintain her dignity.

On May 21, 1954, Jo Ann Robinson wrote to Montgomery Mayor W. A. Gayle on behalf of the Women’s Political Council.  Professor Robinson, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, taught at Alabama State, and was president of the WPC, one of Montgomery’s largest and most active civil rights organizations.

After thanking the mayor for listening to the WPC and its concerns about Montgomery’s buses, and reviewing the WPC’s requests for changes in the treatment of Negroes by the bus company and its drivers, and restating both the importance of Negro riders for the bus system and the ongoing anger at the city’s refusal to adopt policies similar to other Southern cities, Professor Robinson wrote:

“There has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of busses.”

Or put another way, over 18 months before Rosa Parks’ arrest on December 1, 1955, over two dozen organizations within Montgomery’s African-American community had already talked about and begun imagining what it would require of themselves to organize and sustain a bus boycott.

When Claudette Colvin was arrested on March 2, 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on the bus,  Mrs. Parks was part of a delegation—along with Professor Robinson, Mr. E. D. Nixon, Rev. King and others—who met with city officials to try to negotiate changes in the bus company’s policies.

Mrs. Parks notes that “her name was familiar to me, and it turned out that Claudette Colvin was the great-granddaughter of Mr. Gus Vaughn, the unmixed black man with all the children back in Pine Level who refused to work for the white man.  His great-granddaughter must have inherited his sense of pride.  I took a particular interest in the girl and her case.”

Mrs. Parks chose not to be part of a later delegation that delivered a petition about bus company policies to city officials.  “I had decided that I would not go anywhere with a piece of paper in my hand asking white folks for any favors.”

Mrs. Parks was also part of talks with Miss Colvin, Mr. Nixon and Professor Robinson about taking Colvin’s case to the federal courts—talks that ended when Nixon found out that the unmarried Colvin was pregnant.

There were other bus “incidents” throughout 1955.  By the afternoon of December 1, 1955, all the ingredients necessary for an organized assault—not against segregation, but for an end to the bus company’s existing hiring and seating policies—by the African-American community were in place in Montgomery.  All that was needed was, as Mrs. Parks wrote, “the right plaintiff and a strong case”.  

She added, “The best plaintiff would be a woman, because a woman would get more sympathy than a man.  And the woman would have to be above reproach, have a good reputation, and have done nothing wrong but refuse to give up her seat.”

“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:

1.  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.
2.  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.

3.  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.

One lesson I take from Rosa Parks’ telling of her story is the importance of not retelling one’s oppressor’s story.

There’s a great example of this in the first chapter of the Book of Exodus.

“Then Pharaoh said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, ‘When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him; but if it is a daughter, she shall live.’  But the midwives feared God, and did not do as Pharaoh commanded them, but let the male children live.” (v. 15-16)

In the court histories of Egypt at that time, that pharaoh’s name would be important, and would be repeated throughout the text.  It is never written in the Book of Exodus.  The Hebrew people were so unimportant—let alone a couple of lowly midwives!—that they are not mentioned at all in the surviving Egyptian records.

This would be like writing a history of, say, mid-20th century China and never mentioning Mao’s name…but prominently mentioning (and praising!) the names of two peasant women from a western province.

Rosa Parks tells her story in a similar fashion.  Presidents and generals and captains of industry generally are mentioned in passing if at all.  

But she stops her narrative to make sure we know who Fred Gray is, and why his returning to Montgomery to open a law practice was a sign of hope.  “He could have stayed in the North and had an easier time, but he chose to come back to help in the fight for the rights of African Americans.”

Fred Gray would be Mrs. Parks’ lawyer when she was arrested in December 1955; and he would become a towering figure in the legal struggle to end segregation.  As he identified himself in the subtitle to his memoir, “Bus Ride To Justice”, he was “lawyer for Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Desegregation of Alabama Schools, and the 1965 Selma March”.

Mrs. Parks names more names.  “Now we had a second black attorney to advise us on legal matters. Charles Langford was the other black attorney.  Before Fred Gray opened his office, a black woman named Mahalia Ashley Dickerson, who had been a good friend of mine for years, had opened a law practice.  But she had to leave Montgomery because she did not receive the support she needed….”

Why are Charles Landford and  Mahalia Ashley Dickerson important for us to read about?  Because Rosa Parks says so, and it’s her story not the president’s (whoever he happened to be at that time).

Pharaoh will always have scribes to tell his story.  But it’s not enough for us to critique the story Pharaoh tells.  We need to create and tell our own stories—as Mrs. Parks did, as the ancient Hebrews did—so that Pharaoh’s story can be put into its proper context.

Shiphrah and Puah, they’re heroines.  They listened to God and are worthy to have their names recorded and passed down for as long as the descendants of the ancient Hebrews survive.  Whatever Pharaoh’s name was, it just wasn’t that important for the Hebrews.

Among Virginia Durr’s many contributions to the civil rights movement, arguably the most consequential was persuading Rosa Parks to attend a workshop at the Highlander School in the summer of 1955, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Topeka Board of Education ruling.

“Mrs. Durr told me about a workshop that was going to be held called ‘Racial Desegregation:  Implementing the Supreme Court Decision.’  It was going to be at a place called the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee.  She said that she thought I should go and that there was a scholarship available and she would get together the money to pay my expenses to go up there for this ten-day workshop.  Mr. Nixon was all for my going too and so I went.”

It’s relatively common for middle-class and affluent people to leave their hometown for new educational experiences that broaden their horizons, expose them to new ideas and people, and let them test out their own talents and abilities to act as leaders.  Summer camp, family vacations to another state or country, college, graduate school, management training seminars all perform this function.

It’s not so common for working-class and poor folk to have have those experiences.  That’s why labor unions, churches, and community organizations all devote a significant portion of their institutional resources to creating experiences like the one Rosa Parks had at Highlander for their members and prospective leaders.  It’s why, if you study the history of any social movement, you’ll find stories similar to Mrs. Parks’ story about Highlander.  

Want to create social change?  Build an institution like the Highlander School the way Myles Horton did.  If you can’t build one, do what Virginia Durr did:  help persuade (and provide scholarships for) existing and potential leaders in your community to go away for a workshop like the one Mrs. Parks attended at Highlander.  Or go to a workshop yourself.

“It was quite enjoyable to be with the people at Highlander.  We forgot about what color anybody was.  I was forty-two years old, and it was one of the few times in my life up to that point when I did not feel any hostility from white people.  I experienced people of different races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops and living together in peace and harmony.  I felt that I could express myself honestly without any repercussions or antagonistic attitudes from other people.”

Rosa Parks didn’t say anything at the end of her time at Highlander about what she might do with the knowledge and experience she had gained from the workshop.  She ends this chapter in her life (and book) by writing, “So I went back to Montgomery and back to my job as an assistant tailor at Montgomery Fair department store, where you had to be smiling and polite no matter how rudely you were treated.  And back to the city buses, with their segregation rules.”

Chapter 7 of Rosa Parks’ story is titled “White Violence Gets Worse”.  Among other things it’s a reminder of how ugly the aftermath of wars can be.  Mrs. Parks recounts story after story of white brutality and sums it up by writing, “At times I felt overwhelmed by all the violence and hatred, but there was nothing to do but keep on going.”

By this time (late 1940s, early 1950s), Mrs. Parks was both secretary for the Montgomery NAACP chapter, and adviser to the (newly formed) NAACP Youth Council.  She mentored young Montgomerians in a campaign to integrate the public libraries.  The campaign failed, but helped to develop a new generation of civil rights activists.

Progressives sometimes bemoan the lack of solidarity on the left.  It seems there’s always someone who will “betray” their race, class, gender, etc. and side with the powers that be.  It’s worth remembering that lack of solidarity is a two-way street.  Franklin Roosevelt was called a traitor to his class (and publicly reveled in it).  Clifford and Virginia Durr, both native Southerners, were proud traitors to their race.

E.D. Nixon introduced Mrs. Parks and Mrs. Durr to each other.  Here’s how Rosa Parks describes it:

“I met her in 1954, and when she found out that I could sew, she hired me to do some work for her…. After that, I sewed anything she needed done.  She had an integrated prayer group that I was part of.  African-American and Caucasian women would pray together mornings at her house.  After a while that was broken up by the husbands and fathers and brothers of the white women.  They took out ads in the papers repudiating their women.”

“…When (Clifford and Virginia Durr) talked about returning to Alabama, she had to decide if she wanted to, because she knew she and her husband didn’t have the same attitude about segregation as most white people in Alabama did.  In coming back to Alabama after being away for twenty years, she wanted to be part of our efforts to end segregation, even though that meant being ostracized and made to suffer.”

The number of white people in places like Montgomery, Alabama who supported the civil rights movement was vanishingly small in the mid-1950s.  It is to the everlasting credit of leaders like Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon that they did not let the institutionalized hatred with which 90+% of Caucasian people treated African-American Montgomerians stop them from seeking out, finding and using the relationships they built with people like the Durrs who played key roles in the success of the Montgomery bus boycott and other civil rights campaigns.

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.

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.

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.