[News] More Than A Seat On The Bus - 60th anniversary of the arrest of Rosa Parks

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  More Than A Seat On The Bus

December 1, 2015
*http://werehistory.org/rosa-parks/#comment-454*
By Danielle McGuire <http://werehistory.org/author/dmcguire/>


// <http://werehistory.org/rosa-parks/>

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks in 
Montgomery, Alabama. We all know the popular story of what happened on 
that cold December day in 1955. Indeed, it has become an American myth. 
A soft-spoken seamstress with tired feet refused to move to the back of 
the bus to make room for a white man. Her spontaneous action and 
subsequent arrest sparked a yearlong boycott of the city’s buses that 
brought down Jim Crow in the cradle of the Confederacy. And the path to 
black equality was cleared.

But that story, of Rosa Parks tiptoeing into history, both 
oversimplifies the deep roots of the boycott and disregards the bold 
actions of the many black women who made the Montgomery movement about 
more than a seat on a bus. In truth, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a 
protest against racial /and/ sexual violence, and Rosa Parks’s arrest on 
December 1, 1955 was but one act in a life devoted to the protection and 
defense of black people generally, and black women specifically. Indeed, 
the bus boycott was, in many ways, the precursor to the #SayHerName 
<http://www.aapf.org/sayhernamereport/> twitter campaigns designed to 
remind us that the lives of black women matter.

In 1997, an interviewer 
<http://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/src-circle934/> asked 
Joe Azbell, former city editor of the /Montgomery Advertiser/, who was 
the most important person in the bus boycott. Surprisingly, he did not 
say Rosa Parks. “Gertrude Perkins,” he said, “is not even mentioned in 
the history books, but she had as much to do with the bus boycott as 
anyone on earth.” On March 27, 1949, Perkins was on her way home from a 
party when two white Montgomery police officers arrested her for “public 
drunkenness.” They pushed her into the backseat of their patrol car, 
drove to a railroad embankment, dragged her behind a building, and raped 
her at gunpoint.

Left alone on the roadside, Perkins somehow mustered the courage to 
report the crime. She went directly to the Holt Street Baptist Church 
parsonage and woke Reverend Solomon A. Seay Sr., an outspoken minister 
in Montgomery. “We didn’t go to bed that morning,” he recalled. “I kept 
her at my house, carefully wrote down what she said and later had it 
notarized.” The next day, Seay escorted Perkins to the police station. 
City authorities called Perkins’s claim “completely false” and refused 
to hold a line-up or issue any warrants since, according to the mayor, 
it would “violate the Constitutional rights” of the police. Besides, he 
said, “my policemen would not do a thing like that.”

But African Americans knew better. What happened to Gertrude Perkins was 
no isolated incident. Montgomery’s police force had a reputation for 
racist and sexist brutality that went back years, and black leaders in 
the city were tired of it. When the authorities made clear that they 
would not respond to Perkins’s claims, local NAACP activists, labor 
leaders, and ministers formed an umbrella organization called the 
“Citizens Committee for Gertrude Perkins.” Rosa Parks was one of the 
local activists who demanded an investigation and trial, and helped 
maintain public protests that lasted for two months.

By 1949 Rosa Parks was an experienced anti-rape activist. The campaign 
on behalf of Perkins, for example, was modeled on a protest Parks helped 
launch several years earlier for Recy Taylor 
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=134131369>, a 
young black mother kidnapped and brutally raped in 1944 in the town of 
Abbeville, Alabama, by a group of white men who threatened to kill her 
if she told anyone. Taylor reported the crime anyway and the Montgomery 
NAACP sent Parks to Abbeville to investigate. After gathering Taylor’s 
testimony, Parks carried it back to Montgomery, where she and other 
activists launched “The Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy 
Taylor,” a nationwide campaign that demanded protection for black 
womanhood and accountability for Taylor’s assailants.

Two years after the protest on behalf of Gertrude Perkins, meanwhile, 
black activists rallied to defend yet another victim of white sexual 
violence in Montgomery. In February 1951, a white grocer named Sam Green 
raped a black teenager named Flossie Hardman whom he employed as a 
babysitter. After Hardman told her parents about the attack, they 
decided to press charges, and when an all-white jury returned a 
not-guilty verdict after five minutes of deliberation, the family 
reached out to community activists for help. Together, individuals such 
as Rufus Lewis <http://www.trenholmstate.edu/rufus-lewis.cms>, who 
organized voter registration campaigns, Rosa Parks, who was still 
serving as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter, and members of the 
newly formed Women’s Political Council 
<http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_womens_political_council.1.html>, 
launched a boycott of Green’s grocery store. After only a few weeks, 
African Americans delivered their own guilty verdict by driving Green’s 
business into the red.

By the early 1950s, then, a history of sexual assaults on black women 
and of the use of the boycott as a powerful weapon for justice had laid 
the groundwork for what was to come. Given that history, it made sense 
that city buses served as the flashpoint for mass protest. Other than 
police officers, few were as guilty of committing acts of racist 
violence and sexual harassment of black women as Montgomery’s bus 
operators, who bullied and brutalized black passengers daily. Worse, bus 
drivers had police power. They carried blackjacks and guns, and they 
assaulted and sometimes even killed African Americans who refused to 
abide by the racial order of Jim Crow.

In 1953 alone, African Americans filed over thirty formal complaints of 
abuse and mistreatment on the buses. Most came from working-class black 
women, mainly domestics, who made up nearly 70% of the bus ridership. 
They said drivers hurled nasty, sexualized insults at them, touched them 
inappropriately, and physically abused them. In May 1954, JoAnn 
Robinson, leader of the Women’s Political Council, threatened a boycott 
of Montgomery’s city buses, and only after months of futile efforts to 
get city officials to address the problem did the boycott finally come 
into being. Women walked rather than ride the buses, Rosa Parks said in 
1956, not in support of her, but because she “was not the only person 
who had been mistreated and humiliated.” Other women, she said, “had 
gone through similarly shameful experiences, most worse than mine.”

These experiences propelled African American women into every 
conceivable aspect of the boycott. Women were the chief strategists and 
negotiators of the boycott and ran its day-to-day operation. Women 
helped staff the elaborate car pool system, raised most of the local 
money for the movement, and filled the majority of the pews at the mass 
meetings, where they testified publicly about physical and sexual abuse 
on the buses. And of course, by walking hundreds of miles to protest 
their humiliation, African American women reclaimed their bodies and 
demanded the right to be treated with dignity and respect.

Rooted in the struggle to protect and defend black womanhood from racial 
and sexual violence, the Montgomery Bus Boycott is impossible to 
understand and situate in its proper historical context without 
understanding the stories and /saying the names/ of Gertrude Perkins, 
Flossie Hardman, Recy Taylor, and all the black women who were 
mistreated in Montgomery.

Today, as we celebrate the anniversary of Rosa Parks’s arrest, witness 
the growth of the #BlackLivesMatter <http://blacklivesmatter.com/> 
movement on city streets and campus quads across the country, and 
#SayHerName to demand an end to police violence against women of color, 
we should look to the past – and remember it correctly. Parks and the 
women who started the Montgomery bus boycott fought for more than a seat 
on the bus. They demanded the right to move through the world without 
being molested, fought against police brutality and racial and sexual 
violence, and insisted on the right to ownership and control of their 
own bodies.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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