Blues, haints and bayous: snippets from the Deep South: Black ribbons for Rosa

Rosa Parks, the First Lady of Civil Rights

Just a young teen when Harper Lee was born, Rosa Parks, who grew up in the next big town, could not have had a more different life. Driving to Rosa's town we chose the stretch of road between Salem to Montgomery that has gone down in history as the route of the Freedom March. For three days, in 1965, black men and women walked this route, demonstrating for their right to vote in elections.

Their march was successful, and Rosa Parks was their backbone, their spine. Standing them tall. We found the exact spot in Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, just ten years earlier. Today it is marked with a bronze plaque.

That cold evening, Rosa was on her way home from work, when she chose an empty seat in the middle of a bus and sat down. It had been a long day. Her patience was at an end. White folk got on the bus at the next two stops. There was standing room only. Many began to complain that black folk were occupying white folks seats.

These were the days of deliberate segregation, when there were separate White and Coloured entrances into public buildings, White and Coloured drinking fountains. These were the days of the Ku Klux Klan when a black person could be found hanging dead from a tree for nothing more than raising his eyes to a white man. In Montgomery, it had long been the tradition that a black person occupying the only seat available on a bus had to vacate that seat, then move to the back of the bus, if a white person, needing that seat, entered.

Rosa Parks knew this. Every day of her working life she got up out of her bus seat and offered it to a white person. So did every other black person in Montgomery if they wanted a bus ride home after a long day at work. Every day that action was yet another nail in the heart. A deep, soul-destroying stab of utter humiliation.

This day, when white folk began complaining, the driver came down and ordered all those occupying seats to get up and move to the back of the bus. The black person to the window side of Rosa stood up, edged by her, and stood at the back of the bus. Two black people two seats across the aisle from Rosa stood up, and did the same thing.

Rosa remained seated. Whispers started at the back of the bus. The bus driver again ordered her to move herself. Rosa stayed seated.

She was a member of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. She believed she knew her rights. She believed it was her right to stay seated in this section of the bus. She also believed that the bus driver was overstepping his rights. She stayed firmly seated. He left the bus, phoned his boss and informed him that a black woman refused to give up her seat. He then called the police, who were but moments arriving on the scene.

The police, too, had long allowed this arrangement to exist in this town, perpetuating it. They, too, ordered Rosa to stand at the back of the bus. When Rosa refused they man-handled her off the bus, arrested here, and took her to jail. There, for a long time, they would not even allow her to use a telephone. But when she did, she phoned friends who quickly bailed her out, then began assembling their arguments for her day in court.

Her defiance hit every newspaper. Worldwide. It lit a tiny spark in the Montgomery black community: a spark that became a flame, inspired by the many folk who thought Rosa’s action brave. That flame began to burn hotter. Black people began to sense that this action of Rosa’s might just be that one defining moment in Montgomery time when something really positive, something possible, might come from saying, 'No'.

Ministers of religion joined in. One particular Minister, a very young Martin Luther King, recently appointed pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church entered the scene. He beseeched all black folk in town to stay peaceful. His words became a chant. No violence. None at all. We will object peacefully.

They quickly devised a plan to boycott the Montgomery buses. Which was no easy feat, as it was mainly black folk who used these buses, going the many many miles daily they needed to travel to get to work. The black community, with the help of Martin Luther King and other organisers, soon arranged travel alternatives. They found private cars, they carpooled, they used taxis if necessary, to transport Montgomery’s blacks to where they needed to go. People offered them lifts.

Their boycott of the Montgomery bus system lasted for 381 days. The Montgomery buses stayed mostly idle during that entire time. At the end of it all a federal court upheld a ruling that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. Rosa’s action was the catalyst that lead to this.

This brave woman has been called “the first lady of civil rights”. Her actions on that night on the bus led to other actions of bravery, including the Freedom March for voting rights from Salem to Montgomery.

Even so, and at the end of it all, in Montgomery, Rosa was not safe. She was constantly receiving threats on her life. She and her husband were finally advised to leave Montgomery. To go north. They moved to Detroit. Rosa stayed politically involved for much of her life. She died in 2005, at the venerable age of 92. In her honour, the buses in Montgomery and Detroit were tied with black ribbons until the day of her funeral.