ROSA PARKS DECEMBER 1, 1955

 ROSA PARKS DECEMBER 1, 1955 

 

Murphy Browne © December 1, 2020 

 "The Women’s Political Council will not wait for Mrs Parks’s consent to call for a boycott of city buses. On Friday December, 2, 1955, the women of Montgomery will call for a boycott to take place on Monday, December 5.  

On December 5, 1955, fifty thousand people – the generally estimated black population – walked off public city buses in defiance of existing conditions which were demeaning, humiliating and too intolerable to endure.” 

 

From “The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson” by Jo Ann Gibson Robinson published 1987 

 

On the evening that Rosa Parks was arrested, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson began making plans for a boycott. She would become one of the most prominent leaders of the boycott. In her 1987 book "The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It" she writes about the daily humiliations African Americans encountered as they travelled on the buses. "Intermittently, twenty to twenty-five thousand black people in Montgomery rode city buses, and I would estimate that up until the boycott of December 5, 1955, about 3 out of 5 had suffered some unhappy experience on the public transit lines." 

 

On Monday, December 5, 1955 Rosa Parks an African American woman who had been arrested on Thursday, December 1, 1955 was put on trial for refusing to give up her seat in the “Colored” section of a Montgomery City bus to a White man. The White supremacist Jim Crow law demanded that African Americans give up their seats in the “Colored” section of buses to White passengers if there were no vacant seats in the “White” section of buses. When a White man could not find a seat in the “White” section of the bus the driver insisted that Parks and the other 3 African American passengers give up their seats for the White man. The others gave up their seats (at that point the White man had his choice of 3 seats) and Parks refused. The police were called and Parks was arrested. The arrest of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) secretary Rosa Parks was the "last straw" and time for African Americans to demand better treatment from bus drivers in Montgomery, Alabama. 

 

Parks was the third African American woman arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on the Montgomery City bus. On March 2, 1955 Claudette Colvin a 15 year old African American was dragged out of a Montgomery city bus and arrested for refusing to give up her seat in the "Colored" section of the bus to a White man who could not find a seat in the crowded "White" section of the bus. On October 21, 1955, Louise Smith, an 18-year-old African American woman suffered a similar fate. Concerns were expressed by some of the religious and respectable members of the African American leadership about supporting the 2 young African American women. The teenage Colvin was pregnant and not married and it was mentioned by one of the fine upstanding religious African American leaders that Smith’s father had been seen in a drunken state in his front yard. Respectability politics in the African American community delayed the boycott by several years; there was abuse of African Americans before December 1955.  

 

On August 12, 1950 Hilliard Brooks a 23-year-old African American who had served in the US army during WWII boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, paid at the front of the bus. Instead of disembarking and entering through the back-door Brooks bravely walked through the "whites only" section of the bus to the "colored" section of the bus. The bus driver demanded that Brooks get off the bus for breaking the law which demanded that African Americans enter through the back door. Brooks refused to leave the bus unless the bus driver returned his fare. The bus driver refused to return Brooks’ bus fare and instead called the police who kicked Brooks off the bus and when Brooks did not stay down, the police, M.E. Mills shot him dead on the spot. 

 In 1953, Mrs. Epsie Worthy got on a bus at a transfer point from another bus and the driver refused to take the transfer, demanding an additional fare. Mrs. Worthy decided to walk the rest of the way instead of paying an additional fare. The driver was determined that Mrs. Worthy would pay that additional fare even if she did not ride on his bus. The driver jumped off the bus and began physically assaulting Mrs. Worthy, who fought back “with all her might.” Jo Ann Gibson Robinson wrote that: “For a few minutes there was a ‘free-for-all’ and she gave as much as she took.” The police broke up the fight but only Mrs. Worthy was charged with disorderly conduct, jailed and fined fifty-two dollars. The driver was not sanctioned.  

HILLIARD BROOKS

 

A quote from chapter 3 of the 1999 published “Gender in the Civil Rights Movement” addressing “Respectability, class and gender in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Early Civil Rights Movement” explains the decision not to support 18 year old Louise Smith: “When E.D. Nixon went to her house he reputedly ‘found her daddy in front of his shack barefoot and drunk.’ Nixon duly rejected Smith, not simply for her actual lower-class background, but because of her links, in Nixon’s view, with all manner of dissolute lower-class black stereotypes - a drunken father, an unkempt house.” E.D. Nixon was the President of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and Rosa Parks was the secretary. When Parks was arrested the leaders of the African American community decided she was the ideal person to support in their fight to demand better treatment on the Montgomery City buses. Parks was middle aged, educated, employed and married, there were no skeletons in her closet that the White media could use to criticize/denigrate the campaign. 

 

Thankfully, in 2020 with the rise of “Black Lives Matter,” respectability politics is mostly a thing of the past. White media cannot dictate who is supported by our community, even when they go to great lengths to denigrate/vilify the victims of police brutality. 

 

Murphy Browne © December 1, 2020