Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "claudette-colvin"

Let’s begin with Rosa McCauley Parks, born in 1913. She was the granddaughter of slaves, whose grandfather taught her courage during a wave of racial violence in 1919. He sat on his porch with a shotgun telling young Rosa that he dared the “Ku-Kluxers” to come. She was soft-spoken but strong-willed and a great student. When a white boy on roller skates tried to push her off the sidewalk, she pushed back. His mother threatened to have her arrested. Another time she threatened a white boy who taunted her on the way to school with a brick. Mrs. Parks reflected later, “I’d rather be lynched than run over by them.”

In 1931, she met Raymond Parks, a self-taught, politically active barber, and she married him in 1932. He was known for his willingness to stand up to racism, and was the first man she deemed radical enough to marry. He was active in the Scottsboro Nine case, in which nine young men had been falsely accused of rape and eight were sentenced to death. The Communist Party of America financed their defense and Mr. Parks became an activist in the effort, delivering food to the young men in prison and organizing protests.

She and Raymond had thought the NAACP was too elitist and cautious, but after learning a friend was involved she went to her first meeting in December, 1943. She was the only woman there, was asked to take notes, and was elected group Secretary that day, a position she’d hold for the next 12 years. As secretary, she recorded countless cases of unfair treatment, brutality, sexual violence, and lynchings, absorbing the pain of her community.

In 1942, E.D. Nixon came to the Parks home to register them to vote. A member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union, he had led a voter registration drive in 1940 when he increased the rolls of African American voters from 31 to more than 700. In 1945, he ran for President of the NAACP, the first working class man to do so. Mrs. Parks said that while he was not formally educated, he was sophisticated in ways that matter. She considered him the first person beside her family and Raymond who was truly committed to freedom.

Through the NAACP, Mrs. Parks attended NAACP events in Jacksonville, Atlanta, and Washington D.C. where she received leadership training from legendary organizer Ella Baker, the NAACP’s Director of Branches. Ms. Baker became a role model and mentor to her, and encouraged her to create an NAACP Youth Council in Montgomery.

She did, engaging teens to directly challenge segregation in the libraries and write letters to elected officials. And she also took on a larger role in the NAACP. In 1947, she joined the executive committee of the state NAACP, in 1948 spoke at the state convention, and she was elected State Secretary. In 1949 with her support, E.D. Nixon was elected President of the State NAACP. When the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling came down in 1954, Mr. Nixon and Mrs. Parks marched 23 African American students to the white school in town. They also took the lead on a Voter Registration drive in the 2nd Congressional District in 1954.

… Claudette Colvin, the 15 year-old secretary of her [Rosa’s] Youth Council, was on her [Rosa’s] mind. On March 2, 1955, Ms. Colvin refused to move to the back of the bus and was arrested. Her arrest outraged the community. While Mrs. Parks and Mrs. Durr raised money for her case, the male leaders in town were concerned that she was too dark skinned, poor, and young to be a sympathetic plaintiff to challenge segregation. The police also charged her with assaulting officers rather than with violating segregation laws, which limited their ability to appeal (Schmitz 2-4).

Few Americans who know that Rosa Parks’s refusal in 1955 to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus know that there were a number of women who refused to give up their seats on the same bus system. Most of the women were quietly fined, and no one heard much more.

[Claudette] Colvin was the first to really challenge the law. … She remembers taking the bus home from high school on March 2, 1955, as clear as if it were yesterday.

It was Negro history month, and at her segregated school they had been studying black leaders like Harriet Tubman, the runaway slave who led more than 70 slaves to freedom through the network of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. They were also studying about Sojourner Truth, a former slave who became an abolitionist and women's rights activist.

The class had also been talking about the injustices they were experiencing daily under the Jim Crow segregation laws, like not being able to eat at a lunch counter.

"We couldn't try on clothes," Colvin says. "You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot ... and take it to the store. Can you imagine all of that in my mind? My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through. It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn't get up" (Alder 2).

Here is Claudette Colvin’s account of her terrifying experience, as told by Phillip Hoose.

CLAUDETTE: One of them said to the driver in a very angry tone, "Who is it?" The motorman pointed at me. I heard him say, "That's nothing new . . . I've had trouble with that 'thing' before." He called me a "thing." They came to me and stood over me and one said, "Aren't you going to get up?" I said, "No, sir." He shouted "Get up" again. I started crying, but I felt even more defiant. I kept saying over and over, in my high-pitched voice, "It's my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my fare, it's my constitutional right!" I knew I was talking back to a white policeman, but I had had enough.

One cop grabbed one of my hands and his partner grabbed the other and they pulled me straight up out of my seat. My books went flying everywhere. I went limp as a baby—I was too smart to fight back. They started dragging me backwards off the bus. One of them kicked me. I might have scratched one of them because I had long nails, but I sure didn't fight back. I kept screaming over and over, "It's my constitutional right!" I wasn't shouting anything profane—I never swore, not then, not ever. I was shouting out my rights.

It just killed me to leave the bus. I hated to give that white woman my seat when so many black people were standing. I was crying hard. The cops put me in the back of a police car and shut the door. They stood outside and talked to each other for a minute, and then one came back and told me to stick my hands out the open window. He handcuffed me and then pulled the door open and jumped in the backseat with me. I put my knees together and crossed my hands over my lap and started praying.

All ride long they swore at me and ridiculed me. They took turns trying to guess my bra size. They called me "nigger bitch" and cracked jokes about parts of my body. I recited the Lord's Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm over and over in my head, trying to push back the fear. I assumed they were taking me to juvenile court because I was only fifteen. I was thinking, Now I'm gonna be picking cotton, since that's how they punished juveniles—they put you in a school out in the country where they made you do field work during the day.

But we were going in the wrong direction. They kept telling me I was going to Atmore, the women's penitentiary. Instead, we pulled up to the police station and they led me inside. More cops looked up when we came in and started calling me "Thing" and "Whore." They booked me and took my fingerprints.

Then they put me back in the car and drove me to the city jail—the adult jail. Someone led me straight to a cell without giving me any chance to make a phone call. He opened the door and told me to get inside. He shut it hard behind me and turned the key. The lock fell into place with a heavy sound. It was the worst sound I ever heard. It sounded final. It said I was trapped.

When he went away, I looked around me: three bare walls, a toilet, and a cot. Then I fell down on my knees in the middle of the cell and started crying again. I didn't know if anyone knew where I was or what had happened to me. I had no idea how long I would be there. I cried and I put my hands together and prayed like I had never prayed before.

…

MEANWHILE, schoolmates who had been on the bus had run home and telephoned Claudette's mother at the house where she worked as a maid. Girls went over and took care of the lady's three small children so that Claudette's mother could leave. Mary Ann Colvin called Claudette's pastor, the Reverend H.H. Johnson. He had a car, and together they sped to the police station.

…

CLAUDETTE: When they led Mom back, there I was in a cell. I was cryin' hard, and then Mom got upset, too. When she saw me, she didn't bawl me out, she just asked, "Are you all right, Claudette?"

Reverend Johnson bailed me out and we drove home. By the time we got to King Hill, word had spread everywhere. All our neighbors came around, and they were just squeezing me to death. I felt happy and proud. I had been talking about getting our rights ever since Jeremiah Reeves was arrested, and now they knew I was serious. Velma, Q.P. and Mary Ann's daughter, who was living with us at the time, kept saying it was my squeaky little voice that had saved me from getting beat up or raped by the cops.

But I was afraid that night, too. I had stood up to a white bus driver and two white cops. I had challenged the bus law. There had been lynchings and cross burnings for that kind of thing. Wetumpka Highway that led out of Montgomery ran right past our house. It would have been easy for the Klan to come up the hill in the night. Dad sat up all night long with his shotgun. We all stayed up. The neighbors facing the highway kept watch. Probably nobody on King Hill slept that night.

But worried or not, I felt proud. I had stood up for our rights. I had done something a lot of adults hadn't done. On the ride home from jail, coming over the viaduct, Reverend Johnson had said something to me I'll never forget. He was an adult who everyone respected and his opinion meant a lot to me. "Claudette," he said, "I'm so proud of you. Everyone prays for freedom. We've all been praying and praying. But you're different—you want your answer the next morning. And I think you just brought the revolution to Montgomery" (Hoose 1-3).


Works cited:

Adler, Margot. “Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin.” NPR. March 15, 2009. Web. < https://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719...

Hoose, Phillip. “Excerpt: 'Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice'.” NPR. March 15, 2009. Web. https://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719....

Schmitz, Paul. “How Change Happens: The Real Story of Mrs. Rosa Parks & The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” HUFFPOST. Web. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-s....

There had been numerous instances of Blacks refusing to obey the segregation laws on public transportation [in Montgomery, Alabama] throughout the 1940s. The Women’s Political Council (WPC) was formed in 1949, after Jo Ann Gibson was made to leave an almost empty bus for refusing to move to the back . By 1955, the WPC had members in every school, and in federal, state and local jobs, and according to Gibson, its President, “we knew that in a matter of hours, we could corral the whole city”. The WPC had met with the mayor of Montgomery in May of 1954, and followed it up in writing, asking for changes to the bus segregation practices and informing him that if conditions on the busses did not change, citizens would stage a boycott. She stated that with three-fourths of the riders being African American, the busses would not be able to function without their patronage. When conditions did not change, the WPC waited for the right event to serve as the catalyst for the boycott. Three opportunities arose in 1955 when, at different times, a woman was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white person (Rosa 1).

You have read about Claudette Colvin’s experience March 2, 1955.

On October 21, 1955, 18 year-old Mary Louise Smith, another member of Rosa Parks’s Youth Council, refused to move to the back of the bus and was arrested. Like Claudette Colvin, she, too, was considered by the WPC too poor and too young to be presented as a responsible, mature, sympathetic victim.

Then came Rosa Parks. Before we read an account of her experience, we need to know the following:

Though Parks later wrote an autobiography, her notes from decades earlier give a more personal sense of her thoughts. In numerous accounts, she highlighted the difficulty of navigating a segregated society and the immense pressure put on black people not to dissent. She wrote that it took a “major mental acrobatic feat” to survive as a black person in the United States. Highlighting that it was “not easy to remain rational and normal mentally in such a setting,” she refused to normalize the ability to function under American racism.

For her, the frustration began in childhood, when even her beloved grandmother worried about her “talking biggety to white folks.” She recounts how her grandmother grew angry when a young Rosa recounted picking up a brick to challenge a white bully. Rosa told her grandmother: “I would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated and not be allowed to say ‘I don’t like it.’ ”

Parks viewed the power of speaking back in the face of racism and oppression as fundamental — and saw that denying that right was key to the functioning of white power. Parks’s “determination never to accept it, even if it must be endured,” led her to “search for a way of working for freedom and first class citizenship.”

Parks carried that determination into adulthood, though she made clear the impossible mental state it required. She lyrically described the difficulty of being a rebel, the ways black children were “conditioned early to learn their places,” and the toll it took on her personally: “There is just so much hurt, disappointment and oppression one can take…. The line between reason and madness grows thinner.”

In the longest piece of the collection, an 11-page document describing a near-rape incident, Parks decisively uses the power of speaking back. When the document became public in 2011, there was controversy around its release and questions about whether it was a work of fiction. But it does not appear that Parks wrote fiction, and details of the story correspond to Parks’s life. Like the narrator of the story, Parks was doing domestic work during the Scottsboro trial, during her late teens in 1931. It’s written in the first person, though the narrator is unnamed.

In the account, a young Rosa is threatened with assault by a white neighbor of her employer, who was let into the house by a black worker, “Sam.” The heavy-set white man she aptly called “Mr. Charlie” (a term black people of the era used for white people and their arbitrary power) gets a drink, puts his hand on her waist, and attempts to make a move on her.

Furious and terrified, she resolved to resist: “I was ready and willing to die, but give any consent, never, never, never.” When Mr. Charlie said he’d gotten permission from Sam to be with her, she replied that Sam didn’t own her, that she hated the both of them, and that nothing Mr. Charlie could do would get her consent. “If he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body,” Parks wrote, “he was welcome but he would have to kill me first.”

…

After years of activism, Parks had reached her breaking point on the bus that December evening: “I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn’t take it any more.” Her writings reveal the burden that this decade of political activism — which, with a small cadre of other Montgomery NAACP members, had produced little change — had been on her spirit. Describing the “dark closet of my mind,” she wrote about the loneliness of being a rebel: “I am nothing. I belong nowhere.”

Repeatedly in her writings, Parks underscored the difficulties in mobilizing in the years before her bus protest: “People blamed [the] NAACP for not winning cases when they did not support it and give strength enough.” She found it demoralizing, if understandable, that in the decade before the boycott, “the masses seemed not to put forth too much effort to struggle against the status quo,” noting how those who challenged the racial order like she did were labeled “radicals, sore heads, agitators, trouble makers” (Theoharris 2-4).

The account.

Shortly after 5 p.m., on a cool Alabama evening 60 years ago Tuesday, a 42-year-old woman clocked out from her job as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair Department Store. Rosa Parks walked westward along Montgomery Street to Court Square to board the Cleveland Avenue bus to make the five-mile, 15-minute trek back to her apartment at Cleveland Courts to cook supper for her husband, Raymond.

Encountering a standing-room-only bus and having been on her feet all day operating a huge steam press, Parks decided to cross the street and do some Christmas shopping at Lee’s Cut Rate Drug while waiting for a less crowded bus. Around 6 p.m., as she boarded bus number 2857 at the corner of Montgomery and Moulton streets, Parks was about to change the course of the 20th century.

Montgomery municipal buses each had 36 seats. The first 10 were reserved for whites only. The last 10 seats were theoretically reserved for blacks. The middle 16 seats were first-come-first-serve, with the bus driver retaining the authority to rearrange seats so that whites could be given priority.

Parks was sitting in an aisle seat on the front row of this middle section. To her left, across the aisle, were two black women. To her right, in the window seat, was a black man.

A few minutes later, when the bus reached the third stop in front of the Empire Theater, several white passengers boarded, and driver James E. Blake (1912–2002) noticed a white man standing near the front. He called out for the four black passengers in Parks’s row to move to the back, where they would have to stand, as all of the seats were now taken.

They did not respond. Blake got out of his seat and instructed the four to move, saying, “Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.” Three of the black passengers reluctantly proceeded to go and stand in the back of the bus. Parks, however, refused to get up, sliding from the aisle seat to the window seat, which would have allowed for the white passenger to sit in any of the three seats in her row.

The bus driver asked: “Are you going to stand up?” Parks looked him in the eye and responded with a quiet but resolute, “No.” She explained that she had gotten on board first, that she paid the same fare and that she wasn’t sitting in the white section.

She didn’t think it was fair that she had to stand for someone else to sit who arrived after her and that she was not violating the city ordinance. (She didn’t complain how nonchivalrous it was that a supposed gentleman would make a woman stand so he could sit, or how irrational it was that he wouldn’t even want to sit in the same row with her.)

“Well,” Blake responded, “I’m going to have you arrested.” Parks gave him the permission he did not request: “You may do that.”

Blake called his supervisor, who advised him that after warning the passenger he had to exercise his power and put Parks off the bus. He then radioed the police, who sent officers F.B. Day and D.W. Mixon.

As they boarded the bus while several passengers exited through the rear, the officers debriefed Blake and then peacefully arrested Parks. “Why do you all push us around?” she asked the tired beat cops. Officer Day responded, “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.” They drove her in their squad car to the city jail, booked her and held her in a dank and musty cell.

Parks’s boss and friend, NAACP president E.D. Nixon, bailed her out that evening. …

If Rosa Parks had been paying attention, she never would have gotten on the bus driven by the tall, blond, 43-year-old Blake. He had a reputation for spitting his tobacco juice, using derogatory language toward blacks (and black women in particular) and making black passengers pay their fare in the front of the bus but reenter in the rear, only to pull away before they could get back on.

A dozen years earlier — in November 1943 — Blake had tried to make Parks exit and reenter his bus through the crowded rear entrance after she had already boarded his bus in the front. Parks refused, so Blake grabbed her sleeve to push her off the bus. She intentionally dropped her purse and sat down in the white section to retrieve it. As she looked at Blake, she warned him: “I will get off…. You better not hit me.”

For the next 12 years, Parks intentionally avoided riding on Blake’s bus, walking whenever she could, despite her chronic bursitis. But on Dec. 1, 1955, she absentmindedly boarded without noting that she was once again entering a bus driven by Blake. It proved to be a serendipitous mistake.

Parks sought to set the record straight: “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 was at the end of a working day…. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” She later said she couldn’t have lived with herself if she had given in and stood up (Taylor, 2-5).


Works cited:

“Rosa Parks and The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” Wesleyan University. Web. < http://www.wesleyan.edu/mlk/posters/r...

Taylor, Justin. “5 Myths about Rosa Parks, the woman who had almost a ‘biblical quality’.” The Washington Post. December 1, 2015. Web.

Theoharis, Jeanne. “How history got the Rosa Parks story wrong.” The Washington Post. December 1, 2015. Web.

Arrested December 1, 1955, for violating the Montgomery city ordinance that required black riders of city busses to give up their seats to whites when the section of seats reserved for whites was full, Rosa Parks was fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. She immediately called E. D. Nixon, who, assisted by activist lawyers Clifford and Virginia Durr, had her released on bail.

Clifford Durr wanted to get the case dismissed, but E.D. Nixon saw the opportunity to use Mrs. Parks’ case as an ideal middle class, respectable plaintiff to challenge segregation. Raymond Parks didn’t agree. After much debate, she and Raymond made the difficult, courageous choice knowing they’d probably lose everything as a result (Schmitz 7).

Mrs. Parks was “a faithful member of St. Paul AME Church in Montgomery. She taught Sunday school during the 9:30 morning hour and helped prepare the Lord’s Supper during the 10:30 hour.

According to James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, what set Parks apart was that she had an almost “biblical quality.” “There was,” he recalled, “a strange religious glow about Rosa — a kind of humming Christian light” (Taylor 1).

Rosa and Raymond, however, were not middle class blacks. We have this myth that she's middle-class. They're not middle class. They're living in the Cleveland Courts projects when she makes her bus stand. Their income is cut in half. … She loses her job; her husband loses his job. They never find steady work in Montgomery ever again. … In fact, it takes 11 years for the Parks to post an annual income equal to what they're making in 1955. They will move to Detroit in 1957 because things are so tough in Montgomery (NPR 2).

Questioned about Mrs. Parks’s selection to be the public face in the black citizens’ challenge to the city ordinance, Claudette Colvin said that the NAACP and all the other black organizations felt Parks would be a good icon because "she was an adult. They didn't think teenagers would be reliable."

She also says Parks had the right hair and the right look.

"Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle class," says Colvin. "She fit that profile."

After Colvin's arrest, she found herself shunned by parts of her community. She experienced various difficulties and became pregnant. Civil rights leaders felt she was an inappropriate symbol for a test case (Adler 1).

Released from jail, Mrs. Parks called Fred Gray, who she had had lunch with that day, and asked him to represent her. Mr. Gray called Jo Ann Robinson, a leader of The Women’s Political Council, a group of African American women who had been calling for a bus boycott. Ms. Robinson called E.D. Nixon, and they agreed to call a bus boycott for Monday, the day of Mrs. Parks’ arraignment. Along with another staff member and two students, she [Robinson] used the mimeograph machine overnight at Alabama State College to print more than 15,000 fliers. Can you imagine doing that many fliers today, let alone on 1955 technology? This was especially risky since the university was funded by the segregationist state legislature. The Women’s Political Council members met her at dawn and fanned the community with the fliers Friday morning (Schmitz 8). The fliers read: “Don’t ride the bus to work, town, to school, or any place Monday, December 5. . . . Come to a mass meeting, Monday at 7:00 P.M. at the Holt Street Baptist Church for further instruction” (Montgomery 1).

At 6 AM, E.D. Nixon phoned Rev. Ralph Abernathy of First Baptist Church and suggested pulling the pastors together that night for a meeting. Rev. Abernathy suggested that he call the newest pastor in town Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church because he had no set alliances, enemies, and had little to lose if things didn’t work out. Dr. King was reluctant at first, but eventually agreed with prodding from Rev. Abernathy. About 50 pastors met Friday night with Mrs. Parks and Ms. Robinson. They agreed to support the boycott from their pulpits on Sunday and announce a mass meeting for Monday night.

On Saturday, Mrs. Parks went to Alabama State College where she was conducting a leadership training for the NAACP. She was discouraged when only 5 students attended. She was no longer discouraged on Monday, when she and other leaders marveled at the empty buses and the streets filled with African American citizens walking to school and work. The boycott was on.

Leaders gathered Monday afternoon before the mass meeting to plan an organization to sustain the boycott effort, The Montgomery Improvement Association. Rufus Lewis was a business man and rival of E.D. Nixon’s. He did not want Nixon to lead the new organization, so he nominated his pastor, Dr. King, to lead it, arguing that he was a neutral choice (and hoping he could pull strings from behind). That is how Dr. King was drafted into movement leadership. That night, 15,000 people attended a mass meeting and new 26 year old MIA President Dr. King’s prophetic oratory inspired them to commit to the boycott (Schmitz 9-10).

“There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” King explained … “There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time” (Taylor 2).

Mrs. Parks never spoke or was consulted on strategy. Sexism and a desire to make her sound more sympathetic converted the experienced activist into a “tired seamstress” (Schmitz 10).


Works cited:

Adler, Margot. “Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin.” NPR. March 15, 2009. Web. < https://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719...

“The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” Khan Academy. Web. < https://www.khanacademy.org/humanitie...

“No Meekness Here: Meet Rosa Parks, 'Lifelong Freedom Fighter'.” NPR Books. Web. < https://www.npr.org/2015/11/29/457627...

Schmitz, Paul. “How Change Happens: The Real Story of Mrs. Rosa Parks & The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” HUFFPOST. Web.

Taylor, Justin. “5 Myths about Rosa Parks, the woman who had almost a ‘biblical quality’.” The Washington Post. December 1, 2015. Web.