Today, it is easy to forget that the civil rights revolution came as a great surprise. Those like Gunnar Myrdal, author of the influential 1944 study An American Dilemma, who saw that the South's racial system could not survive indefinitely, expected the challenge to develop in the North, where blacks had far greater latitude for political organization. One virtue of studying Parks' early life is that it makes clear the extent to which the revolution arose out of earlier local struggles for racial justice that have been largely forgotten. Although Brinkley does not quite put it this way, these earlier struggles were catalyzed during the 1930s and World War Two by a broad left-wing movement of Communists, trade unionists and social reformers, operating in an uneasy coalition with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This was the world in which Parks matured.
Her politicization began during the 1930s, when she married Raymond Parks, one of the founding members of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP and an avid reader of black periodicals like the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier and the Crisis, the latter a brilliant chronicle of black achievements and disabilities edited by W.E.B. Du Bois. Beginning in 1933, she took part in meetings to protest the case of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths falsely accused of rape and sentenced first to death and later to long prison terms in a series of trials that revealed Alabama justice to the world as a travesty. Largely through the efforts of the American Communist Party, the case became an international cause cà �là �bre. In 1943, she joined the NAACP and, as the only woman at her first meeting was chosen as secretary. For the next decade, while living with her husband and infirm mother in a Montgomery housing project and earning money as a seamstress, Parks organised the files and maintained the correspondence of E.D. Nixon, the NAACP's charismatic and militant local leader and a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which was led by the civil rights pioneer A. Philip Randolph.
Brinkley rightly points out that historians of the movement have ignored the full story of Parks' life as an "authentic grass-roots activist." Her image as a simple seamstress, so inspiring to blacks and non-threatening to whites, obscured the fact that she was well-informed about racial politics and enjoyed a wide range of experience. When in 1943 Nixon founded the Alabama Voters' League to challenge the disenfranchisement of blacks, Parks tried to register to vote, only to be barred because she had supposedly failed a literacy test. Unlike other rejected aspirants, she persevered and on her third attempt became one of very few Montgomery blacks added to the voter rolls, but only after she had paid a hefty poll tax.
At the time, Parks was working at Maxwell Air Force base near Montgomery. On the base buses were integrated, but in the city blacks were constantly treated with discourtesy by white drivers and forced to give up their seats if whites needed them. In 1943, when she boarded a bus through the front door, the driver, James F. Blake, brusquely ordered her to leave and re-enter through the rear. Parks was so disturbed by her treatment that she resolved never again to ride a bus driven by Blake, a pledge she kept for 12 years. Ironically, the bus on which her historic act of defiance took place in 1955 was driven by the same James F. Blake.
In 1954, Parks obtained work as a seamstress for Clifford and Virginia Durr, prominent white supporters of racial justice whose commitment to this and other left-wing causes, including the Presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948, had led to their ostracism by Montgomery society. The Durrs arranged for her to attend a training session at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a meeting ground for labor and civil rights radicals, where activists were trained and political issues and strategies discussed in a fully integrated setting. Many of the local leaders of the civil rights movement passed through Highlander.
Thus, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, she was more than the simple lady with tired feet canonized in the press. "The only tired I was," she wrote in her memoir, "was tired of giving in." She was well aware that their treatment on city buses was a deeply-felt grievance among Montgomery's black population and that local black leaders were actively seeking an incident to inspire a boycott. Jo Ann Robinson, a professor of English at the all-black Alabama State University, had publicly threatened city officials with a boycott in 1954. In March 1955, Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old high school junior, had refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. Nixon and the NAACP moved to organize a boycott only to call it off at the last moment when they discovered that Colvin was several months pregnant. Parks, however, was the perfect plaintiff: a demure, married, God-fearing woman about whom no one seemed to have a bad word.
We will never know precisely why Parks refused to leave her seat when ordered to do so. Her decision was not premeditated but neither was it completely spontaneous. Perhaps it was because an all-white jury in Mississippi had just acquitted the murderers of Emmett Till, a black teenager who had allegedly whistled at a white woman. Perhaps the reason was that she had inadvertently boarded a bus driven by the same driver who had evicted her 12 years earlier. Parks knew that talk of a boycott was in the air. At any rate, in the wake of her arrest the boycott began.
Brinkley ably introduces the cast of characters who organized this remarkable episode: Nixon, Robinson, the talented black lawyer Fred Gray, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and, of course, the 25-year-old Martin Luther King, who had recently come to Montgomery to serve as minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and whose elevation to spokesman for the movement launched his career as a national figure while annoying many of the city's long-time civil rights leaders. The boycott was a complete success. For 13 months, black maids, janitors, teachers and students walked to their destinations or rode an informal network of private taxis. Eventually, the Supreme Court declared bus segregation statutes unconstitutional. The Montgomery boycott launched the black movement as a mass non-violent crusade, based in the black churches of the South, that eventually toppled the edifice of segregation.
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