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<h1 class="entry-title" itemprop="headline"> <span> More Than A
Seat On The Bus </span> </h1>
<div class="entry-meta"><span class="date"><time
class="entry-date" itemprop="datePublished"
datetime="2015-12-01T16:34:47+00:00">December 1, 2015 <br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://werehistory.org/rosa-parks/#comment-454">http://werehistory.org/rosa-parks/#comment-454</a></small></small></b><br>
</time></span><span class="author" itemprop="author"
itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">By <a
class="entry-author-link"
href="http://werehistory.org/author/dmcguire/" title="View
all posts by Danielle McGuire" itemprop="url" rel="author">Danielle
McGuire</a></span></div>
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href="http://werehistory.org/rosa-parks/" title="More Than A
Seat On The Bus"> <span class="thumb-caption"><br>
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<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>oday 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. </p>
<p>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 <em>and</em>
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 <a
href="http://www.aapf.org/sayhernamereport/">#SayHerName</a>
twitter campaigns designed to remind us that the lives of black
women matter.</p>
<p>In 1997, an <a
href="http://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/src-circle934/">interviewer</a>
asked Joe Azbell, former city editor of the <em>Montgomery
Advertiser</em>, 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. </p>
<p>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.” </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=134131369">Recy
Taylor</a>, 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. </p>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.trenholmstate.edu/rufus-lewis.cms">Rufus
Lewis</a>, who organized voter registration campaigns, Rosa
Parks, who was still serving as secretary of the Montgomery
NAACP chapter, and members of the newly formed <a
href="http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_womens_political_council.1.html">Women’s
Political Council</a>, 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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.” </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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 <em>saying the
names</em> of Gertrude Perkins, Flossie Hardman, Recy Taylor,
and all the black women who were mistreated in Montgomery. </p>
<p>Today, as we celebrate the anniversary of Rosa Parks’s arrest,
witness the growth of the <a
href="http://blacklivesmatter.com/">#BlackLivesMatter</a>
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.</p>
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