Wide Angle 7 - Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott

This week I write about a rather interesting event in American history which forever changed the way the society worked in terms of race relations and accelerated the coming to fore of the black race in American life. We in India do not know of Rosa Parks but this name is etched in American history forever. The parallel of Rosa Parks can be drawn with Mangal Pandey or with Gandhiji’s humiliation in South Africa i.e. a small token action of protest that tips the scales of a nascent movement into a big conflagration and changes history beyond recognition. This is what Rosa Parks’ contribution has been to American history.
Let me start from the beginning and build a little context into the history that led to Rosa Parks and the Montgomery boycott. As we all know, most of the African American population in the US is a descendant of the slaves brought over from Africa by slave traders to work in the agricultural regions of the Southern states. This influx of slaves started in the 17th century from the time the colonists from Europe (primarily UK) started moving to the New World (they called America that). They started cultivating cotton and tobacco and required manual labor for these farms. This is where the slaves came in. The slaves were horribly treated and subjected to animal like behavior. However, the Northern part of the US started developing more industrially as compared to agriculture in the South. A bit of geography here – by south, we mean the bible belt states of Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas etc.; by north – the progressive states of New York, Maryland, Washington DC, Connecticut, Massachusetts etc. The divide between these set of states was very stark i.e. the South supported slavery and the North opposed it.
America was founded in the East starting from Virginia and its expansion went westwards i.e. they cleared the Indian population and claimed and cultivated land. For a long time, the American government followed the policy of appeasing both North and South by dividing any newly formed state into a Northern component and a Southern component. The tensions kept mounting and this led to the American Civil war in 1861-1864 during Lincoln’s presidency. This was fought over slavery and the South was defeated – the South wanted to secede but Lincoln wanted to hold the county together and hence the Civil War. After the Civil War, slavery was abolished throughout America. This was supposed to bring in freedom to the slaves in the South.
However, in the place of slavery a new system called “Jim Crow” came into place in the South. This effectively meant a segregation of social life into the white zone and the black zone. Everything was separate – black people could not eat with whites, could not go school with whites, had to live away from the town, could not use the same toilets etc. All the facilities for blacks were vastly inferior. Also, till the mid 30s, blacks were often lynched by white mobs on any pretext and the killers would go scot free. To be a black in the South was a life of humiliation and poverty. The North was better and hence quite a few blacks moved to cities like New York, Chicago etc. during the 20s till the 50s. This is often called the Great Migration – this also led to white populations moving to suburbs of the cities leaving the inner cities. In the South, there were laws that forced segregation and politicians took stand for segregation since the population supported it. There had already started movements that were opposing this which comprised of blacks from the South and North but also liberal white folks from the North (remember Mississippi Burning the movie). The NAACP (National Association for Colored People) was busy fighting these laws and practices but all the efforts were sporadic and non cohesive till Rosa Parks happened.
On Dec 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a middle aged seamstress, boarded the bus from her workplace to come home in Montgomery town, Alabama. The practice in those buses was that White folks would sit in the front of the buses and black folks would sit at the back of the bus in designated seats. If the white seats got full, the black folks sitting at the front of the black zone had to get up and make way for the white folks who were standing. On that day, the same thing happened and the conductor of the bus asked Rosa and a few others to move behind. Everyone did but Rosa refused for some reason (she is still not clear why, maybe she had had enough). The conductor threatened to have her arrested but she did not budge. The bus was stopped and Rosa Parks was put under arrest. The NAACP which was looking for a reason to rally decided to use this incident as a token and bailed her out and from here began the great Montgomery bus boycott.
This is also the first time Martin Luther King Jr. came into picture. He was 26 at that time and the NAACP folks from Montgomery asked King to lead the protest. All the black folks from Montgomery decided to boycott the bus service till the segregation policy was not abandoned. King believed in non violent protest like Gandhiji (he was inspired by him) and decided to use this way to make the protest hence the bus boycott. All blacks of the city boycotted the bus service. Of course, it was a mighty inconvenience for everyone because people had to travel miles to work but the boycott continued. To tide over peoples’ difficulties, everyone pooled in cabs, cars, mini trucks etc. The police was against the boycotting population and used every trick in the book to trouble them. People got fined for minor traffic infractions, for running “illegal business” i.e. for the cars that were pooling people. During this process, King’s house was fire bombed but he kept his cool and did not let his followers get violent.
The entire nation was witness to this drama and public sympathy was slowly turning in favor of King. In parallel, King and his people had filed a case in the Supreme Court against the segregation in the bus service. For 381 days during which the boycott was carried out, Montgomery’s buses went empty and many people walked to work, but the unity and sense of purpose was not broken. Finally, the judgment of the Supreme Court was in favor of the protesters and that is when King and his few followers entered from the front of a bus and sat in the front. Thus ended the boycott resulting in a victory for the black population of Montgomery.
This form of protest was repeated across different places in the country in different ways to similar results. In many places, the Central government sent Federal troops to maintain peace over forced de-segregation of schools (black students going to white only schools) but slowly the tide of public opinion turned over the fifties and sixties and that led to President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Bill that ended all segregation and set up laws for positive discrimination in favor of blacks in the workplace and beyond. Look where America has reached now despite all its racial problems which have not yet ceased – it has a black president. The root cause of all this can be traced to one little lady who refused to vacate her seat – sometimes a small light of match is enough to burn the whole forest down, this event amply demonstrates that.