February 3, 2014 • 24 mins
Anyone who has ever heard about the Civil Rights Movement in the United States is sure to know that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus. But that's but a tiny sliver of her life story.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. They we
are going to talk about someone who Anyone who has
ever heard anything about the civil rights movement in the
(00:22):
United States, it's probably heard one thing about. Yes, this
is kind of one of those quick encapsulation people can
spit out the name and sort of what it's associated with. Yes,
Rosa Parks. Now you go, Montgomery bus boycott. Right, She
refused to give up her seat one day on the bus,
and that spawned the Montgomery Bus boycott, which in turn
(00:46):
spawned the creation of the Montgomery Montgomery Improvement Association, of
which Martin Luther King Jr. Was elected as its first president.
So this is sort of a keystone moment in the
American civil rights movement. Consequently, Rosa is known as the
mother of the Civil rights movement. Um But as with
many of the most memorable historical stories, this sort of
(01:08):
elementary school version that a lot of people know about
how one day Rosa didn't give up her seat on
a segregated bus and then the boycatt happened like it's
that's a really simplified version. It's extremely oversimplified, and it uh,
it misses a lot of the work that she did
in her life. UM. Yeah, she was way more than
(01:30):
that one incident. She was basically amazing, uh and extremely
I mean that one act of civil disobedience was a
monumental act that was deeply important, but it was a tiny,
tiny piece of this whole big story. So this that's
why this episode blossomed into two parts. So, UM, today
we're going to talk about Rosa Park's early life. We're
(01:52):
going to go up to the actual day on the bus,
and then in part two we will talk about the
boycott and how that unfolded and had happened afterward, and
what her life was like after the boycott was over.
And we're going to start with a little bit of
background that we have learned is necessary, UM, and other
times that we've talked about the civil rights movement in America.
Basically when we've done episodes that have touched on the
(02:14):
civil rights movement, we've gotten, um, quite a few messenger
messages from listeners outside the United States who felt like
they didn't have enough context to really understand what we
were talking about um and like didn't really have a
sense of what segregation was all about and all of
that kind of stuff. And in the United States, as
we just referenced, schools have a pretty sanitized and oversimplified
view of the movement and of the social conditions at
(02:37):
the time. So in light of all that, we're gonna
have a very very brief recap of this. So, slavery
was abolished in the United States in the early eighteen sixties. However,
a number of laws and social systems continued to really
deliberately subjugate African Americans even though slavery was technically over
(02:57):
am Using the air quotes all over the place here,
a racism, discrimination, and unequal treatment are still things that
you will find today. They still exist, and some of
the other things we're about to talk about also continue
to happen. But the first one hundred years that followed
the end of the Civil War, a lot of this
really unfair treatment was completely legal. It was in fact
(03:21):
encouraged in many cases, and it was pretty much a
constant in terms of the social picture. Yes, so the
laws included, among many others, things like polling an election,
laws that were explicitly meant to keep African Americans from voting.
And they're also segregation laws known as Jim Crow laws,
which separated white people from people of color and everything
(03:44):
from schools to buses to restrooms. So the Supreme Court
had upheld the constitutionality of segregation in eight as long
as these separate facilities were also equal. So in reality,
the facilities that were marked colored were early inferior than
the ones for white people, and as we talked about
(04:04):
in our episode on Loving versus Virginia last year, that
was actually a two parter. Regardless of their quality, the
fact that these separate facilities even existed was inherently a
form of discrimination, and the social part of this equation
really wove its way through every facet of life. So
(04:25):
we have just a couple of examples. There were businesses
that would hire only African Americans for service positions, which
sort of maintained this atmosphere and a certainly a visual
sense of slavery. Black people were held too vastly different
behavioral standards and white people, especially when speaking to Caucasians,
(04:46):
African Americans were expected always to be subservient and meek
and never talk back or stand up for themselves, and
those who broke these social rules really risked some horrible consequences.
They could be beaten. Uh, they would certainly invite scorn
and derision and sometimes death, and sometimes it would get very,
(05:08):
very violent. And as Tracy said end in their ending, yes,
violence specifically by Caucasians against African Americans was also just
frequent and severe, and often authorities just chose not to
investigate or prosecute what was going on. But on the
other hand, African Americans are frequently arrested, tried, and convicted
(05:29):
for crimes they absolutely did not commit at all, and
sometimes which had not even happened. And there were times
when there was not even an arrest or conviction. Uh,
they didn't bother with the paperwork or the legalities. There
would simply be a mob that took the law into
its own hands and lynched someone for a crime which
may or may not have happened, may have been entirely
(05:51):
made up. And you told me about how postcards of
such things were sold in stores until the sixties. Yeah,
I um, I had a boss at one of my
previous jobs in the library who had happened upon them
at one point. I think in a book collection that
we had acquired, and they're they're literally postcards of lynchings.
They were horrifying, and he kind of kept them in
(06:12):
his desk and when students it was in the university library,
would be talking about it, and any time they were like,
it really wasn't that bad, was it, he was always
ready to pull those out and go, oh, it's really
that bad, horrifying. Yes. So this was the most obvious
and notorious in the American South, especially in the states
that had still allowed slavery at the start of the
(06:34):
Civil War. But explicit racism and discrimination were really systemic,
and they existed all over the country. It was not
just quote a Southern problem. The Ku Klux Klan and
other white supremacy organizations flourished throughout the country. So for
total clarity, ending segregation was an important part of the
(06:56):
civil rights movement. But the civil rights movement was not
just about who who sat in what seat on the bus,
And for Rosa Parks, it wasn't just about not giving
up her seat that one day. It was also a
much bigger picture. It was a lifelong part of her
and that's we're going to start with the early part
of her life. Now. Rosa Parks was born Rosa mcaulay
(07:17):
and she grew up in Alabama, And in her autobiography
she describes herself as having a sense of fairness from
a very young age. And she also had, in her
own words quote a life history of being rebellious. And
during her childhood she had several encounters in which she
was threatened by a white person and actually stood up
(07:38):
for herself in spite of all of the social expectations
that she would do exactly not that. In one a
white boy threatened to punch her, and she picked up
a brick and threatened to hit him back, which is
startling well, especially considered that she's portrayed as sort of
this diminutive sweet lady. Yes, she always is characterized as
(08:00):
being just this very gentle, kind, wonderful person, but which
is also true, there was a spitfire in there that
was not going to stand for unfair treatment. Uh. And
in another instance, that white boy accused her and one
of her friends of taking berries from the bushes outside
his house, and she and her friends said, if you
come over here, we'll give you a good beating, which
(08:21):
is very brave. Yes, And there were many similar incidents
throughout her childhood as well. So in all of these cases,
when Rosa told an adult what had happened, she would
be scolded for speaking that way to a white person.
The adults in her life told her quite directly that
she should never ever defend herself or he's even raise
her voice against a white person. Because of the very
(08:43):
real risks that were involved in the case of the berries,
her aunt told her that if the white boy told
anybody else about it, they could be lynched. And Rosa
simply did not agree with this, And as she grew
up uh and got married, neither did her husband, Raymond Parks,
who she met in the spring of nine one. They
were married in December of nine and everyone referred to
(09:06):
him as just Parks uh. And so for that reason,
as we go forward telling the story, we will call
him Parks and Rosa will go by the name of Rosa.
I have this whole conversation with myself every time we
talk about a person about how to name that person
in the episode, and so that's why we have Parks
with Parks and Rosa Rosa. So Parks was an activist.
(09:28):
When he met Rosa, he was working extensively on behalf
of a group of people known as the Scottsboro Boys.
These were nine black teenagers who had been falsely accused
of the gang rape of two white women. This was
an incident which had not even happened, and they had
been sentenced to death. So this work was extremely dangerous
because of the threat of retaliation and violence from the
(09:51):
white community. So all of the meetings took place completely
in secret, and Parks wouldn't even tell Rosa the names
of the other men who were working with him because
of the danger her that was involved for all of them.
So for many many years before Rosa became an activist,
she had been observing Parks's own political work UH, and
he had not wanted her to be involved because his
(10:13):
own involvement was so incredibly dangerous. And this was not
This was not like an exaggerated threat dangerous like activists,
houses were bombed frequently. So in Ninette, Rosa joined the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or the
n double a CP, and this was an organization that
started out UM to make sure that African Americans were
(10:35):
getting the protections that were granted to them by the UH.
The amendments to the Constitution that had followed the Civil War.
So Parks had been a member when they had met,
but eventually he had become kind of disillusioned with the
Montgomery Chapter. At the time, it tended to exclude blue
collar members, and the most powerful African Americans in Montgomery
(10:57):
were kind of reluctant to make waves because a lot
of them had gotten to where they were by getting
favors from the white community, so they sort of felt
like trying to to go against that community would be
biting the hand that fed them, right, they didn't want
to risk their own situation. But after seeing a picture
of a former schoolmate at an n double a CP
meeting one day and realizing that they weren't for men only,
(11:21):
Rosa decided to attend a meeting herself, and she wound
up being the only woman at the meeting that night,
and she was actually asked to take notes like you're
a lady, why don't you do secretary things? That that
is a theme of her adult life actually, and this
was also election day, so she actually was elected the
group secretary. So she described herself as being too timid
(11:42):
to say no that night that if she had been
a little braver. She might have said that, you know,
she declined the nomination, but this sort of sparked a
change in in her. She wound up working extensively with
the N Double A CP for many many years. She
dedicated herself to grass roets organization and progress for African Americans.
She attended leadership conferences and annual meetings, She chaired committees,
(12:06):
she gave addresses at conferences, and she worked with other
social movement organizations and other organizations that were working towards
some specific civil rights and as well, um including the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Reporters, among others. And one of
Rose's duties as secretary of the N Double A CP
was to document crimes and discrimination against African Americans. She
(12:30):
traveled to record the testimonies of black people who had
been the victims of crimes on the part of white people,
including beatings and gang rapes, and she also talked to
the families of people who had been lynched. I can't
imagine how difficult that had to have been at times. Uh.
She also looked for new homes and work in Montgomery
when victims were facing retaliation in their own communities. In
(12:53):
the instances where they spoke up, and she advocated for
African Americans who were wrongfully imprisoned, as well as course
bonding with them and offering aid and comfort when she could.
Along with Parks, she worked extensively on getting African Americans
registered to vote. So today, in most places in the
United States, you can register to vote by sending in
(13:15):
a postcard or sometimes they have people like outside of
stores or in other public areas. This is not how
it was, No, it took some effort. Yes, So around
this time, there were several thousand African Americans living in Montgomery, Alabama,
but only about thirty were registered to vote. And this
(13:35):
is because for African Americans in this part of the
United States, registration was a huge tangle of bureaucracy and discrimination.
Applications required people to identify their employers and their backgrounds.
There were tests and poll taxes that were more difficult
and more expensive for black people and African Americans uh
(13:56):
in Montgomery had to have a white person to vouch
for them to be able to do it at all.
And Rosa tried multiple times over the course of two
years to register and she was actually denied every time.
And this continued until one attempt in which she wrote
down all the questions on her registration exam so she
could file suit against the registration board. When the registrar
(14:18):
caught onto what she was doing, she was finally told
that she had passed the test and then she was
allowed to register. So in that instance, making waves kind
of helped a little bit. Yeah, Parks actually tried to
register for many, many years and he was told no,
over and over and over. Um he did not. He
(14:39):
was not registered to vote until they actually left Montgomery
way farther down the road in this story. Um Rosa
resigned her position as in double a CP secretary in
because her mother was ill, and although she scaled her
work back with them at the time, she did continue
to be active, and she returned to the post in
nineteen fifty two when the Supreme Court verdict of Brown
(15:01):
versus Board of Education overturned school segregation. In nineteen fifty four,
she also worked on the integration of schools. Before we
get to this next piece of her life, do you
want to pause for a moment, share word from our sponsor.
Let's do that already already. Are you ready to talk
about buses? Yes? So, Rosa's famous refusal to give up
(15:25):
her bus seat took place in nineteen but this was
not the first time she had been removed from a
Montgomery bus were breaking segregation rules. The first one was
actually on her second attempt to register to vote. Black
people were supposed to board the bus at the front,
pay their fare, and exit the bus and then walk
to the back door of the bus to get on,
(15:46):
so that they would not walk through the white people
section at the front. Just incredibly degrading. It's sort of ridiculous. Yes,
So on that day, the back of the bus was
just packed with people. Voter registration hours were just very limited,
and they were extremely sporadic, and this was a deliberate
attempt to discourage black people from registering. So as soon
(16:08):
as a voter registration day would be announced, word would
spread through the community and the buses would fill up
with people who were going to try to register. So,
rather than try to push her way through this crowd
of people trying to register to vote, Rosa paid her
fare and she walked straight back and the driver demanded
that she get off and enter her section of the
bus through the back door, and she refused, and the
(16:30):
driver actually grabbed her sleeve to pull her off of
the bus. And I love the thing that she did
next so much, which is that when she got to
the front of the bus, she dropped her purse and
instead of bending it down to just pick it up,
she sat on the front seat and then reached down
and got it off the floor and then left the bus.
It's kind of awesome. I love her. Uh. Twelve years
(16:51):
later she was removed from another Montgomery bus and the
act of civil disobedience that people know about because in
many ways catalyzed this of the rights movement. So by
this point the n double a CP had been looking
for a test case for getting bus segregation overturned for
several years. Bus segregation was particularly demoralizing and degrading. Even
(17:13):
though lots and lots of places were segregated, the buses,
in particular, they were extra upsetting. More African Americans than
Caucasians rode the bus, so the black community made up
the majority of the customers and everyone was paying the
same fare, but African Americans were treated very badly and
they were often forced to give up their seats for
(17:33):
white passengers. Over the years, many people had been arrested
for violating segregation laws on Montgomery's buses, but for various reasons,
none of them had worked out to be a good
plaintiff in a test case. One in particular, named Claudette Colvin,
had been considered until it was discovered that she was pregnant,
which was problematic because she was an unmarried teenager. So
(17:55):
Rosan knew all this. She was working with the Double
A c P at the time, but she wasn't trying
to get herself arrested when she got on the bus
that day. In fact, it was being driven by the
same man who had taken her off the bus twelve
years earlier, and she had at that point decided to
never ever get on one of his busses again. She
didn't notice that he was the one behind the wheel
(18:17):
when she was on her way home from work on
December one, and once she made that connection, she had
already paid her fare, so she stayed on board. At
the next stop, white passengers boarded the bus and they
filled the last of the seats in the white only
section up front, and the driver called back for people
sitting in roses row to give up their seats. If
(18:38):
one white person was in a road then there could
be no black people in it, even if there were
empty seats, right, so it wasn't It wasn't enough for
just the seat to be empty. It had to be
the whole row. So at first nobody moved, But then
the three other people who were sitting in Roses row
stood up and went to stand at the back. Rosa
(19:00):
stayed where she was, and she kind of moved her
legs to let the man who was in the window
seat get past her, she wrote in her autobiography. 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
(19:21):
old then I was forty two. No, the only tired
I was was tired of giving in. And when the
driver saw that Rosa was still sitting there, he said
he was going to have her arrested, and she answered,
you may do that, I love her, I really do. Uh.
She was taken into custody by two policemen and driven
(19:43):
to city Hall, where she was jailed, and she was
eventually allowed to make a phone call, and she called
home to ask Parks to come bailor out. She really
thought that it was going to take a long time
because Parks did not have a car. He was gonna
have to, you know, either take a bus or ride
along or walk a long way to get there. But
word had already spread that she had been arrested, and
a friend who had heard about it went to the
(20:05):
Parks home to give him a ride. Edie Nixon was
someone that Rosa and Parks had worked with for many years.
At the end of a c P and he got
in touch with a lawyer named Clifford dr and helped
get Rosa out of jail and the trial was set
for the following Monday. At this point Edie Nixon, who
he did a lot in Montgomery with a civil rights movement,
(20:25):
He asked Rosa whether she would be willing to be
the play defend a test case to try to overturn
bus segregation. He really thought she would be an ideal candidate.
He had known her for years. He considered her reputation
and her demeanor to be impeccable. She was a devout
Christian and a member of an African Methodist Episcopal Church.
She was also married, and she had a job, and
(20:46):
there were no skeletons in her closet, that we're going
to come out during a trial and and throw everything
off the rails. And so after talking it over with
Parks and with her mother, Rosa agreed and that I
swear going to pause the end of part one. Uh,
I think I will read some listener mail before we
sign off for this episode. It sounds like a capital idea.
(21:10):
This one is from our listener, Amelia, and it is
actually in reference to our Mendez Versus Westminster episode, which
was about the segregation of Mexican American children in southern
California schools. Uh So it's it fits a little with
what we're talking about today, so Amelia says, Hi, Tracy
and Holly. I just listened to the Mendez Versus Westminster
podcast and was reminded of one of my favorite undergraduate
(21:32):
history classes, African American History eighteen sixty five to present,
which covered many many topics related to segregation, desegregation, and
legalized discrimination. It was the first class I took that
required me to memorize Supreme Court cases. I was an
art major before embracing history and getting a master's in it.
At any rate, This podcast reminded me of one of
(21:53):
the cases we had to memorize Lum versus Rice seven,
which clearly influenced Mendez versus Westminster, and not in a
good way. A Chinese American father sued to have his
daughter attend the local white school in Mississippi by the
logic that since they weren't black, she shouldn't have to
attend the black school, which was poorly funded. Unfortunately for
(22:14):
the Lump family, they lost with the court saying that
since Martha Lum was not white, she couldn't attend the
white school. I've always been curious about the background of
the case in the family. She has in parentheses. How
does the Chinese American family end up in Mississippi in
the nineties and what became of them? Perhaps a suggestion
for a future podcast. Keep up the good work. And
(22:35):
then she says that she listens to our podcast while
rehabbing our home, and we've distracted her from the crummy
jobs like pulling carpet staples from the wood floors and
fixing window stashes. I hate pulling carpet staples, and that's
the windows stashes, when I should have said sashes Um,
thank you so much, Amelia. There were so many cases
that were precursors to Mendez versus Westminster that I kept
(22:56):
having to like trim some of them out and the
actively figure out which ones to talk about because there
were lots. Yeah, I know that myself. I lose that
sense of how many of these types of incidents were
going on leading up to desegregation, That there were lots
of these little pockets of individuals that were trying to
(23:18):
figure out the best way to you know, raise their
family and live their lives, and they kind of get
lost in the bigger picture kind of quick version that
you often get. Yeah. Well, and that's a good segue
to where we're gonna leave off for our next episode
because one of the uh, one of the things before
the civil rights movement was that there were a lot
(23:38):
of people who were working on civil rights issues, most
of them before the Montgomery bus boycott, did not think
they were going to see a whole lot of action
on it in their lifetimes. Um. So we will talk
more about that in our next episode. If you would
like to write to us on this or anything else.
We were a history podcast apiscope dot Com We're also
(24:01):
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pinterest dot com slash miss in history. If you would
like to learn more about this, you can come to
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search bar and you will find our article on how
(24:22):
the civil rights movement work. You can do all that
and a whole lot more at our website, which is
how Stuff Works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Because it has to works dot
com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. They we
are going to talk about someone who Anyone who has
ever heard anything about the civil rights movement in the
(00:22):
United States, it's probably heard one thing about. Yes, this
is kind of one of those quick encapsulation people can
spit out the name and sort of what it's associated with. Yes,
Rosa Parks. Now you go, Montgomery bus boycott. Right, She
refused to give up her seat one day on the bus,
and that spawned the Montgomery Bus boycott, which in turn
(00:46):
spawned the creation of the Montgomery Montgomery Improvement Association, of
which Martin Luther King Jr. Was elected as its first president.
So this is sort of a keystone moment in the
American civil rights movement. Consequently, Rosa is known as the
mother of the Civil rights movement. Um But as with
many of the most memorable historical stories, this sort of
(01:08):
elementary school version that a lot of people know about
how one day Rosa didn't give up her seat on
a segregated bus and then the boycatt happened like it's
that's a really simplified version. It's extremely oversimplified, and it uh,
it misses a lot of the work that she did
in her life. UM. Yeah, she was way more than
(01:30):
that one incident. She was basically amazing, uh and extremely
I mean that one act of civil disobedience was a
monumental act that was deeply important, but it was a tiny,
tiny piece of this whole big story. So this that's
why this episode blossomed into two parts. So, UM, today
we're going to talk about Rosa Park's early life. We're
(01:52):
going to go up to the actual day on the bus,
and then in part two we will talk about the
boycott and how that unfolded and had happened afterward, and
what her life was like after the boycott was over.
And we're going to start with a little bit of
background that we have learned is necessary, UM, and other
times that we've talked about the civil rights movement in America.
Basically when we've done episodes that have touched on the
(02:14):
civil rights movement, we've gotten, um, quite a few messenger
messages from listeners outside the United States who felt like
they didn't have enough context to really understand what we
were talking about um and like didn't really have a
sense of what segregation was all about and all of
that kind of stuff. And in the United States, as
we just referenced, schools have a pretty sanitized and oversimplified
view of the movement and of the social conditions at
(02:37):
the time. So in light of all that, we're gonna
have a very very brief recap of this. So, slavery
was abolished in the United States in the early eighteen sixties. However,
a number of laws and social systems continued to really
deliberately subjugate African Americans even though slavery was technically over
(02:57):
am Using the air quotes all over the place here,
a racism, discrimination, and unequal treatment are still things that
you will find today. They still exist, and some of
the other things we're about to talk about also continue
to happen. But the first one hundred years that followed
the end of the Civil War, a lot of this
really unfair treatment was completely legal. It was in fact
(03:21):
encouraged in many cases, and it was pretty much a
constant in terms of the social picture. Yes, so the
laws included, among many others, things like polling an election,
laws that were explicitly meant to keep African Americans from voting.
And they're also segregation laws known as Jim Crow laws,
which separated white people from people of color and everything
(03:44):
from schools to buses to restrooms. So the Supreme Court
had upheld the constitutionality of segregation in eight as long
as these separate facilities were also equal. So in reality,
the facilities that were marked colored were early inferior than
the ones for white people, and as we talked about
(04:04):
in our episode on Loving versus Virginia last year, that
was actually a two parter. Regardless of their quality, the
fact that these separate facilities even existed was inherently a
form of discrimination, and the social part of this equation
really wove its way through every facet of life. So
(04:25):
we have just a couple of examples. There were businesses
that would hire only African Americans for service positions, which
sort of maintained this atmosphere and a certainly a visual
sense of slavery. Black people were held too vastly different
behavioral standards and white people, especially when speaking to Caucasians,
(04:46):
African Americans were expected always to be subservient and meek
and never talk back or stand up for themselves, and
those who broke these social rules really risked some horrible consequences.
They could be beaten. Uh, they would certainly invite scorn
and derision and sometimes death, and sometimes it would get very,
(05:08):
very violent. And as Tracy said end in their ending, yes,
violence specifically by Caucasians against African Americans was also just
frequent and severe, and often authorities just chose not to
investigate or prosecute what was going on. But on the
other hand, African Americans are frequently arrested, tried, and convicted
(05:29):
for crimes they absolutely did not commit at all, and
sometimes which had not even happened. And there were times
when there was not even an arrest or conviction. Uh,
they didn't bother with the paperwork or the legalities. There
would simply be a mob that took the law into
its own hands and lynched someone for a crime which
may or may not have happened, may have been entirely
(05:51):
made up. And you told me about how postcards of
such things were sold in stores until the sixties. Yeah,
I um, I had a boss at one of my
previous jobs in the library who had happened upon them
at one point. I think in a book collection that
we had acquired, and they're they're literally postcards of lynchings.
They were horrifying, and he kind of kept them in
(06:12):
his desk and when students it was in the university library,
would be talking about it, and any time they were like,
it really wasn't that bad, was it, he was always
ready to pull those out and go, oh, it's really
that bad, horrifying. Yes. So this was the most obvious
and notorious in the American South, especially in the states
that had still allowed slavery at the start of the
(06:34):
Civil War. But explicit racism and discrimination were really systemic,
and they existed all over the country. It was not
just quote a Southern problem. The Ku Klux Klan and
other white supremacy organizations flourished throughout the country. So for
total clarity, ending segregation was an important part of the
(06:56):
civil rights movement. But the civil rights movement was not
just about who who sat in what seat on the bus,
And for Rosa Parks, it wasn't just about not giving
up her seat that one day. It was also a
much bigger picture. It was a lifelong part of her
and that's we're going to start with the early part
of her life. Now. Rosa Parks was born Rosa mcaulay
(07:17):
and she grew up in Alabama, And in her autobiography
she describes herself as having a sense of fairness from
a very young age. And she also had, in her
own words quote a life history of being rebellious. And
during her childhood she had several encounters in which she
was threatened by a white person and actually stood up
(07:38):
for herself in spite of all of the social expectations
that she would do exactly not that. In one a
white boy threatened to punch her, and she picked up
a brick and threatened to hit him back, which is
startling well, especially considered that she's portrayed as sort of
this diminutive sweet lady. Yes, she always is characterized as
(08:00):
being just this very gentle, kind, wonderful person, but which
is also true, there was a spitfire in there that
was not going to stand for unfair treatment. Uh. And
in another instance, that white boy accused her and one
of her friends of taking berries from the bushes outside
his house, and she and her friends said, if you
come over here, we'll give you a good beating, which
(08:21):
is very brave. Yes, And there were many similar incidents
throughout her childhood as well. So in all of these cases,
when Rosa told an adult what had happened, she would
be scolded for speaking that way to a white person.
The adults in her life told her quite directly that
she should never ever defend herself or he's even raise
her voice against a white person. Because of the very
(08:43):
real risks that were involved in the case of the berries,
her aunt told her that if the white boy told
anybody else about it, they could be lynched. And Rosa
simply did not agree with this, And as she grew
up uh and got married, neither did her husband, Raymond Parks,
who she met in the spring of nine one. They
were married in December of nine and everyone referred to
(09:06):
him as just Parks uh. And so for that reason,
as we go forward telling the story, we will call
him Parks and Rosa will go by the name of Rosa.
I have this whole conversation with myself every time we
talk about a person about how to name that person
in the episode, and so that's why we have Parks
with Parks and Rosa Rosa. So Parks was an activist.
(09:28):
When he met Rosa, he was working extensively on behalf
of a group of people known as the Scottsboro Boys.
These were nine black teenagers who had been falsely accused
of the gang rape of two white women. This was
an incident which had not even happened, and they had
been sentenced to death. So this work was extremely dangerous
because of the threat of retaliation and violence from the
(09:51):
white community. So all of the meetings took place completely
in secret, and Parks wouldn't even tell Rosa the names
of the other men who were working with him because
of the danger her that was involved for all of them.
So for many many years before Rosa became an activist,
she had been observing Parks's own political work UH, and
he had not wanted her to be involved because his
(10:13):
own involvement was so incredibly dangerous. And this was not
This was not like an exaggerated threat dangerous like activists,
houses were bombed frequently. So in Ninette, Rosa joined the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or the
n double a CP, and this was an organization that
started out UM to make sure that African Americans were
(10:35):
getting the protections that were granted to them by the UH.
The amendments to the Constitution that had followed the Civil War.
So Parks had been a member when they had met,
but eventually he had become kind of disillusioned with the
Montgomery Chapter. At the time, it tended to exclude blue
collar members, and the most powerful African Americans in Montgomery
(10:57):
were kind of reluctant to make waves because a lot
of them had gotten to where they were by getting
favors from the white community, so they sort of felt
like trying to to go against that community would be
biting the hand that fed them, right, they didn't want
to risk their own situation. But after seeing a picture
of a former schoolmate at an n double a CP
meeting one day and realizing that they weren't for men only,
(11:21):
Rosa decided to attend a meeting herself, and she wound
up being the only woman at the meeting that night,
and she was actually asked to take notes like you're
a lady, why don't you do secretary things? That that
is a theme of her adult life actually, and this
was also election day, so she actually was elected the
group secretary. So she described herself as being too timid
(11:42):
to say no that night that if she had been
a little braver. She might have said that, you know,
she declined the nomination, but this sort of sparked a
change in in her. She wound up working extensively with
the N Double A CP for many many years. She
dedicated herself to grass roets organization and progress for African Americans.
She attended leadership conferences and annual meetings, She chaired committees,
(12:06):
she gave addresses at conferences, and she worked with other
social movement organizations and other organizations that were working towards
some specific civil rights and as well, um including the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Reporters, among others. And one of
Rose's duties as secretary of the N Double A CP
was to document crimes and discrimination against African Americans. She
(12:30):
traveled to record the testimonies of black people who had
been the victims of crimes on the part of white people,
including beatings and gang rapes, and she also talked to
the families of people who had been lynched. I can't
imagine how difficult that had to have been at times. Uh.
She also looked for new homes and work in Montgomery
when victims were facing retaliation in their own communities. In
(12:53):
the instances where they spoke up, and she advocated for
African Americans who were wrongfully imprisoned, as well as course
bonding with them and offering aid and comfort when she could.
Along with Parks, she worked extensively on getting African Americans
registered to vote. So today, in most places in the
United States, you can register to vote by sending in
(13:15):
a postcard or sometimes they have people like outside of
stores or in other public areas. This is not how
it was, No, it took some effort. Yes, So around
this time, there were several thousand African Americans living in Montgomery, Alabama,
but only about thirty were registered to vote. And this
(13:35):
is because for African Americans in this part of the
United States, registration was a huge tangle of bureaucracy and discrimination.
Applications required people to identify their employers and their backgrounds.
There were tests and poll taxes that were more difficult
and more expensive for black people and African Americans uh
(13:56):
in Montgomery had to have a white person to vouch
for them to be able to do it at all.
And Rosa tried multiple times over the course of two
years to register and she was actually denied every time.
And this continued until one attempt in which she wrote
down all the questions on her registration exam so she
could file suit against the registration board. When the registrar
(14:18):
caught onto what she was doing, she was finally told
that she had passed the test and then she was
allowed to register. So in that instance, making waves kind
of helped a little bit. Yeah, Parks actually tried to
register for many, many years and he was told no,
over and over and over. Um he did not. He
(14:39):
was not registered to vote until they actually left Montgomery
way farther down the road in this story. Um Rosa
resigned her position as in double a CP secretary in
because her mother was ill, and although she scaled her
work back with them at the time, she did continue
to be active, and she returned to the post in
nineteen fifty two when the Supreme Court verdict of Brown
(15:01):
versus Board of Education overturned school segregation. In nineteen fifty four,
she also worked on the integration of schools. Before we
get to this next piece of her life, do you
want to pause for a moment, share word from our sponsor.
Let's do that already already. Are you ready to talk
about buses? Yes? So, Rosa's famous refusal to give up
(15:25):
her bus seat took place in nineteen but this was
not the first time she had been removed from a
Montgomery bus were breaking segregation rules. The first one was
actually on her second attempt to register to vote. Black
people were supposed to board the bus at the front,
pay their fare, and exit the bus and then walk
to the back door of the bus to get on,
(15:46):
so that they would not walk through the white people
section at the front. Just incredibly degrading. It's sort of ridiculous. Yes,
So on that day, the back of the bus was
just packed with people. Voter registration hours were just very limited,
and they were extremely sporadic, and this was a deliberate
attempt to discourage black people from registering. So as soon
(16:08):
as a voter registration day would be announced, word would
spread through the community and the buses would fill up
with people who were going to try to register. So,
rather than try to push her way through this crowd
of people trying to register to vote, Rosa paid her
fare and she walked straight back and the driver demanded
that she get off and enter her section of the
bus through the back door, and she refused, and the
(16:30):
driver actually grabbed her sleeve to pull her off of
the bus. And I love the thing that she did
next so much, which is that when she got to
the front of the bus, she dropped her purse and
instead of bending it down to just pick it up,
she sat on the front seat and then reached down
and got it off the floor and then left the bus.
It's kind of awesome. I love her. Uh. Twelve years
(16:51):
later she was removed from another Montgomery bus and the
act of civil disobedience that people know about because in
many ways catalyzed this of the rights movement. So by
this point the n double a CP had been looking
for a test case for getting bus segregation overturned for
several years. Bus segregation was particularly demoralizing and degrading. Even
(17:13):
though lots and lots of places were segregated, the buses,
in particular, they were extra upsetting. More African Americans than
Caucasians rode the bus, so the black community made up
the majority of the customers and everyone was paying the
same fare, but African Americans were treated very badly and
they were often forced to give up their seats for
(17:33):
white passengers. Over the years, many people had been arrested
for violating segregation laws on Montgomery's buses, but for various reasons,
none of them had worked out to be a good
plaintiff in a test case. One in particular, named Claudette Colvin,
had been considered until it was discovered that she was pregnant,
which was problematic because she was an unmarried teenager. So
(17:55):
Rosan knew all this. She was working with the Double
A c P at the time, but she wasn't trying
to get herself arrested when she got on the bus
that day. In fact, it was being driven by the
same man who had taken her off the bus twelve
years earlier, and she had at that point decided to
never ever get on one of his busses again. She
didn't notice that he was the one behind the wheel
(18:17):
when she was on her way home from work on
December one, and once she made that connection, she had
already paid her fare, so she stayed on board. At
the next stop, white passengers boarded the bus and they
filled the last of the seats in the white only
section up front, and the driver called back for people
sitting in roses row to give up their seats. If
(18:38):
one white person was in a road then there could
be no black people in it, even if there were
empty seats, right, so it wasn't It wasn't enough for
just the seat to be empty. It had to be
the whole row. So at first nobody moved, But then
the three other people who were sitting in Roses row
stood up and went to stand at the back. Rosa
(19:00):
stayed where she was, and she kind of moved her
legs to let the man who was in the window
seat get past her, she wrote in her autobiography. 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
(19:21):
old then I was forty two. No, the only tired
I was was tired of giving in. And when the
driver saw that Rosa was still sitting there, he said
he was going to have her arrested, and she answered,
you may do that, I love her, I really do. Uh.
She was taken into custody by two policemen and driven
(19:43):
to city Hall, where she was jailed, and she was
eventually allowed to make a phone call, and she called
home to ask Parks to come bailor out. She really
thought that it was going to take a long time
because Parks did not have a car. He was gonna
have to, you know, either take a bus or ride
along or walk a long way to get there. But
word had already spread that she had been arrested, and
a friend who had heard about it went to the
(20:05):
Parks home to give him a ride. Edie Nixon was
someone that Rosa and Parks had worked with for many years.
At the end of a c P and he got
in touch with a lawyer named Clifford dr and helped
get Rosa out of jail and the trial was set
for the following Monday. At this point Edie Nixon, who
he did a lot in Montgomery with a civil rights movement,
(20:25):
He asked Rosa whether she would be willing to be
the play defend a test case to try to overturn
bus segregation. He really thought she would be an ideal candidate.
He had known her for years. He considered her reputation
and her demeanor to be impeccable. She was a devout
Christian and a member of an African Methodist Episcopal Church.
She was also married, and she had a job, and
(20:46):
there were no skeletons in her closet, that we're going
to come out during a trial and and throw everything
off the rails. And so after talking it over with
Parks and with her mother, Rosa agreed and that I
swear going to pause the end of part one. Uh,
I think I will read some listener mail before we
sign off for this episode. It sounds like a capital idea.
(21:10):
This one is from our listener, Amelia, and it is
actually in reference to our Mendez Versus Westminster episode, which
was about the segregation of Mexican American children in southern
California schools. Uh So it's it fits a little with
what we're talking about today, so Amelia says, Hi, Tracy
and Holly. I just listened to the Mendez Versus Westminster
podcast and was reminded of one of my favorite undergraduate
(21:32):
history classes, African American History eighteen sixty five to present,
which covered many many topics related to segregation, desegregation, and
legalized discrimination. It was the first class I took that
required me to memorize Supreme Court cases. I was an
art major before embracing history and getting a master's in it.
At any rate, This podcast reminded me of one of
(21:53):
the cases we had to memorize Lum versus Rice seven,
which clearly influenced Mendez versus Westminster, and not in a
good way. A Chinese American father sued to have his
daughter attend the local white school in Mississippi by the
logic that since they weren't black, she shouldn't have to
attend the black school, which was poorly funded. Unfortunately for
(22:14):
the Lump family, they lost with the court saying that
since Martha Lum was not white, she couldn't attend the
white school. I've always been curious about the background of
the case in the family. She has in parentheses. How
does the Chinese American family end up in Mississippi in
the nineties and what became of them? Perhaps a suggestion
for a future podcast. Keep up the good work. And
(22:35):
then she says that she listens to our podcast while
rehabbing our home, and we've distracted her from the crummy
jobs like pulling carpet staples from the wood floors and
fixing window stashes. I hate pulling carpet staples, and that's
the windows stashes, when I should have said sashes Um,
thank you so much, Amelia. There were so many cases
that were precursors to Mendez versus Westminster that I kept
(22:56):
having to like trim some of them out and the
actively figure out which ones to talk about because there
were lots. Yeah, I know that myself. I lose that
sense of how many of these types of incidents were
going on leading up to desegregation, That there were lots
of these little pockets of individuals that were trying to
(23:18):
figure out the best way to you know, raise their
family and live their lives, and they kind of get
lost in the bigger picture kind of quick version that
you often get. Yeah. Well, and that's a good segue
to where we're gonna leave off for our next episode
because one of the uh, one of the things before
the civil rights movement was that there were a lot
(23:38):
of people who were working on civil rights issues, most
of them before the Montgomery bus boycott, did not think
they were going to see a whole lot of action
on it in their lifetimes. Um. So we will talk
more about that in our next episode. If you would
like to write to us on this or anything else.
We were a history podcast apiscope dot Com We're also
(24:01):
on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in history
and on Twitter at miss in history. Our tumblers miss
in history dot tumbler dot com, and our pinterest is
pinterest dot com slash miss in history. If you would
like to learn more about this, you can come to
our website and put the words Rosa Parks into our
search bar and you will find our article on how
(24:22):
the civil rights movement work. You can do all that
and a whole lot more at our website, which is
how Stuff Works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Because it has to works dot
com
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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