A Shot Heard 'Round the World

I freely admit that I have largely ignored Black History month. This year is different. 

The more I learn about African American history, the more I believe that it is an essential piece of the American Story, as fundamental to the understanding of ourselves as a people as the American Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution.

If you need a starting place, try Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer prize-winning “Parting the Waters,” a history of the civil rights movement 1954-63. I first read it in 1988 when originally published and now do so again. It still packs the same punch.

Part I: A Shot Heard ‘Round The World 

In the 1950s “Jim Crow” still prevailed in the South. I don’t know what is taught in school today about Jim Crow. I sense it is glossed over or soft-pedaled so as not to upset the genteel notion that we are God’s-Chosen. To be blunt, Jim Crow was a system of apartheid used to control and subjugate the black population.

The 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown v Board of Education of Topeka represented one of the first serious inroads against Jim Crow law. At the time it was the model for advancing black civil rights: cherry-pick a cause and a plaintiff, bring suit in federal court, hope like hell the court rules in favor, and then struggle to implement the ruling in the recalcitrant States.

Rosa Parks would change all this on December 1, 1955.

Rosa Parks with Martin Luther King, Jr.
in the background

Almost everyone knows the basic Rosa Park’s story. Tired of always having to move to the back of the Montgomery city buses for white patrons, she finally said “no,” and thus became—justifiably—a folk hero. But this seemingly impulsive act could have easily been forgotten—an arrest, a quick trial, a fine or perhaps a jail term, and a return to the status quo. 

That’s what happened to Claudette Colvin, a 15-year old Montgomery high school girl, who earlier in 1955 had refused her bus seat to a white patron. The local civil rights leadership considered her case. While they judged her actions courageous, they found her character wanting—she was feisty, immature, unwed and pregnant—and decided against taking her case to federal court. 

[Eventually they would reconsider. Colvin became a co-plaintiff in Browder v Gayle, wherein the Supreme Court decided, by upholding a lower court decision, that the City of Montgomery had violated her Constitutional rights.] 

Rosa Parks was something different. She was a seamstress by trade who worked at the Montgomery Fair department store. At the moment she entered history, she was 42 and married to a local barber. She was also the quiet-spoken, diligent secretary of the local NAACP. Taylor Branch described Rosa’s character as “one of those isolated high blips on the graph of human nature.” She was a registered voter in Alabama when this was both rare and difficult for an African American. She was the teacher and mother-figure for the local NAACP Youth Council. Ten years previously in her NAACP capacity she had investigated the gang rape of Recy Taylor by six white men in nearby Abbeville, Alabama, and then initiated the black community’s response—an all-white jury never convicted any of the assailants.  If Rosa was quiet and shy, and that is often reported, she was a lioness when it came to fighting for black civil rights.

Her part-time employers Clifford and Virginia Durr, a white couple who actively supported the local civil rights movement, must have recognized this in her. In the summer of 1955 they sponsored her trip to a desegregation workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. The Highlander Folk School grew out of the social justice movement and in the 50s provided training to many future civil rights leaders. In 1961 the State of Tennessee shut the school down because it didn’t much care for such stuff.

In August of that same year, a 14-year old black boy named Emmett Till was lynched by two white men in Money, Mississippi. Till was visiting Mississippi relatives from Chicago. His “crime” was flirting with the young wife of one of the men. His body, beaten and shot, was pulled from the Tallahatchie River three days after he disappeared. In the September murder trial—injustice moved quickly in those days—no one was convicted. Later, protected by double-jeopardy, the two white defendants admitted they killed Till.

Till’s murder became national news. Every African American in the Deep South would have been talking about it. Rosa Parks later said that Till’s murder weighed heavily on her. 

Approaching that fateful day in December, I speculate that Rosa Parks found herself at the confluence of powerful psychic forces: disappointed that a lifetime immersed in the civil rights struggle had little to show for it, perhaps frustrated that the local black leadership failed to aggressively pursue legal action on behalf of Claudette Colvin, empowered by her recent leadership training at the Highlander Folk School, and, finally, righteously enraged at the awful death of Emmett Till. 

Describing her mindset at the time, she wrote,

 “I am nothing. I belong nowhere.”

There was one more thing: she despised the white bus driver who ordered her to give up a seat to a white patron. His name was James Blake. Twelve years earlier, after paying her bus fare, Blake required Rosa re-enter the bus through the rear door rather than walk down the aisle past the white riders. When she stepped off, Blake drove away. For this long-remembered petty act of humiliation, Rosa later wrote “I never wanted to be on that man’s bus again.” Blake died in 2002 lamenting that he was just a city employee doing his job. With such pathetic justifications is the road to hell paved.

Which brings us to the afternoon of December 1, 1955…. After finishing work Rosa Parks boarded the Montgomery City bus to go home. She was so preoccupied that she failed to notice James Blake was the driver, else she would have waited for the next bus. At a later stop, a white man got on. As there were no more seats available at the front, Blake ordered the four African Americans in the so-called “no-man’s land” to move back. At first no one complied and Blake said “Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.” The three African American riders in the row with Rosa moved back. Rosa refused, which prompted Blake to say,

 “Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.”

To which Rosa Parks replied,

“You may do that.”

I love that—I give you permission and fuck off! at the same time. 

Rosa was a longstanding member of the local NCAAP, but she was not part of its top leadership, nor was she part of black Montgomery’s social elite. She was the good soldier, the dutiful worker bee, one of those essential people who keep the wheels turning and rarely gets invited to parties. Yet Rosa must have instinctively known that her arrest, unlike Claudette Colvin’s nine months before, couldn’t be shunted aside by the Montgomery civil rights leadership. Her action forced the hand of both sides of the racial divide.  

From this point forward, the fight for black civil rights would take place in the streets as much as the court room. Rosa Parks had fired a shot in the air, she just didn’t know how far away it would be heard. It would be heard ‘round the world.