Democracy Now! Audio - Jeanne Theoharis on the Montgomery Bus Boycott & "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks" (Part 2)

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

Part 2 of our conversation with historian Jeanne Theoharis on the 70th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott, which began days after Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955.

This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the war and peace report by Mimi Goodman. We continue now with part two of our history lesson with Brooklyn College historian Gene Theo Harris, author of the rebellious life of Rosa Parks. She has just written a piece in the Guardian newspaper about Rosa Parks, about what we get wrong, about the Montgomery Bus Boycott and what we can learn from it. It was December 5, 1955, that the Montgomery Bus Boycott was launched. After, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks sat down on the bus. Many people characterized her feelings at the time as she was just sick and tired of standing up so white passengers could sit down.

But in part one, we went through her decades of activism. The fact that she was the secretary of the local NAACP had been challenging racial injustice, the rapes of black women, horrified and galvanized by the murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, just months before. Professor Theo Harris, in part one, you took us through her sitting down on the bus, colleagues outside printing out tens of thousands of mimicraft sheets saying a bus boycott would be. begin. That was Joanne Robinson, December 5th, 1955. Take it from there. So a couple of things. One of my favorite quotes from Rosa Parks when she gets arrested is she finds it annoying. And I think what we can hear in that is there is nothing to suggest that some history-changing moment has just happened. Many of us know that mugshot of Rosa Parks. it's often misattributed to be the mugshot from that evening.

It is not. It is a mugshot actually from an arrest she has a couple months later when they indict and arrest 90 boycott leaders. But we'll get to that. But that's the first thing. There is nothing to suggest that this is a history-changing moment. And in fact, many of Montgomery's longtime activists that we can worry, will people stay off the bus on Monday when,

she's going to be arraigned in court. Because to remember, it starts off just as a one-day boycott. The king, so we have a young Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King. They've been in Montgomery just about a year, and they have had their first baby two weeks earlier. So they are brand-new parents. They're very nervous. In fact, they get up at 5.30 to see if people stayed off the buses. And they were like, well, maybe if 60% stay off will be good.

So they're like, the bus goes by. People, there's nobody, no black people on it. another. This is at 5.30 in the morning. King calls it a miracle. Who calls Dr. King and says we want to use your church? So right about then, they get a call from E.D. Nixon. E.D. Nixon is one of Montgomery's long-time stalwart union activists and N.ACP activists. And as we talked about in the first part, he and Rosa Parks have spent the past decade trying to turn the Montgomery N.A.C. into a more activist chapter.

And what E.D. Nixon knows. Oh, sorry. I need to, wait, wait, wait, wait. We got to go back. This is three days earlier. This is not Monday morning. This is Friday morning. He wakes King up because Ed. Nixon wants to use King's Church. This is the day after Rosa Parks has made her bus stand because Nixon knows you have to get the community leaders on board.

We've got the Women's Political Council fanning out, putting the leaflets there, and Nixon knows we need the community leaders. King's Church, Dexter Avenue, is located right downtown. If you know Montgomery, right across from the Capitol, it's very centrally located. Nixon wakes the Kings up. Again, they have a new baby. Like most of us, when somebody wakes you up at 6 a.m. and wants to use your place for a meeting, guess what he says? He says, I need to think about it.

Can you call me back? And I mention that because the ways that we remember the Montgomery Bus Boycott is that it's so destined to work. that it just seems to proceed, you know, inexorably. And I think the thing we have to understand is over the course of those days and that year, people are having to make hard choice after hard choice. When Nixon calls King back a few hours later, he says, yes, you may use my church. That night, they have a meeting at his church. Rosa Parks is very nervous.

Will people, like, be, you know, like, what will they think of what she did? The meeting doesn't go well at first. and then finally Joanne Robinson speaks and Rosa Parks speaks and people decide okay we will support this boycott on Monday and again as I mentioned everyone's nervous will they stay off the bus in fact as some people may know about four months earlier Rosa Parks had attended Highlander Folk School it's an adult organizer training school in Tennessee at the end of that workshop

when they say what are you going to do when you go home she says there's never going to be a mass movement in my Montgomery. So I'm going to work with the young people. Rosa Parks, by 1955, had really started to despair of a movement with her peers, and across her life here and over the next decades, she puts her greatest hope in the militancy and spirit of young people. So this is four months before the boycott. She's saying there's never going to be a mass movement. People are never going to stick together, and Montgomery's the cradle of the Confederacy. So what unfolds December 5th is so stunning to her. It's so unbelievable. And it's so stunning to so many people that there is a mass

meeting that night at Holt Street Baptist Church and people decide we're going to turn this one-day boycott into a longer boycott. Now again, in the way we remember it and tend to talk about it, it's all about walking. It is not. How they sustain a 382-day boycott is they build this incredible carpool system, where they set up 40 pickup stations around the city and you can go to one of those stations and you can get a ride to work or to the doctor. At the peak of it, as I mentioned, they're giving 15,000 to 20,000 rides a day. That's massive. The city hates it. And so also, I mean, let's talk about this. The bus system is a business. It's a business. They relied on black people to ride those buses. Yes. Then that's a very important point. Let us understand.

underline that. This is a disruptive consumer boycott. It is meant to be. They are accused King and many of the leaders of the Montgomery Improvement Association are accused of being disruptive. They're accused of being just like the segregationist white citizens councils for using an economic boycott. We need to remember also, again, we've like sanitized this. We assume everybody would be on board with this. Everybody was not on board. We want to remember the National NACP will support the legal challenge, but it will not support the boycott because, again, it is too disruptive. So, A, it's a disruptive consumer boycott, and the city doesn't like it.

So outside of all those pickup stations, the police sit there and they give kick it after ticket. Joanne Robinson gets like 17 tickets. And explain again who Joanne Robinson is. Joanne Robinson is the head of the Women's Political Council. It's the Women's Political Council that organizes that first day of the boycott. She gets 17 tickets in the first couple of months. of the boycott, tickets for driving people, for being at pickup stations, the police like egg and throat, like horrible stuff on her car. I mean, the city is doing all sorts of things to try

to break the boycott. And when the tickets don't work, they decide to dredge up this old anti-sindicalism law, sort of anti-boycott law. And they indict not. 90 boycott leaders. So that famous mugshot of Rosa Parks, that famous mugshot of Martin Luther King, that's from this arrest. And that was when? That's February, 1956. We're two months in. So then, you know, the city's trying to break the back of the boycott by indicting its leaders.

They make a crucial error because that actually redoubles people's sort of commitment. And so you see the goals of the boycott change. Originally, it was just first come, first serve, respectful treatment on the bus, hiring black bus drivers. When the city goes so hard, when we get into the second and third month, that's when the community, again, each action then widens the possibility of what can be imagined. And I think that's another lesson about how movements work, right, is that taking steps helps to sort of see sort of possibilities that one couldn't have imagined. But this is not without cost. So Rosa Parks loses her job five weeks in.

Her husband loses his job. About eight weeks into the boycott, the king's house is bombed. And Coretta and baby Yolanda, who's 10 weeks old by this point, are home. And Coreta acts fast, and she gets them out unscathed. But that night, both her father and Martin's father show up, because they're scared, they're angry, and they want them out of there. You've done enough. You should leave. And they've only been there for a year.

Yes. And this is, I mean, King has just turned 27. Coretta's 28. This is their first baby. This is completely understandable. But she, Coretta Scott King, says no. We're not going anywhere. And if she had, I mean, it would be understandable, right? they got out okay this time, but you can't assume you're going to get out okay the next time. But they stay put. And I think this is also a lesson as a more middle-aged person now, right? We have two moments in the Montgomery bus boycott where adults don't always trust sort of younger people. We have both King's parents being like, get out of here. Obviously,

a few months earlier, we have adults in Montgomery deciding not to stick with Colvin's case. They or is too feisty to emotional. Again, Colvin is the 15-year-old who'd been arrested on the bus back in March. Who had sat down on the bus before. Right. And they thought she couldn't be the symbol of the Montgomery bus boycott if that were to happen. Right. In part because she, again, she was 15. But again and again, young people step forward because one of the things that Fred Gray, Rosa Parks' young lawyer, 25 years old, there's a lot of young people in this story, decides, is learning from that Viola White case we talked about in the first part, they worry that the state will just hold up Rosa Parks' appeal in state court.

Veola White, who had sat down on the bus. Yes, and that had been a decade earlier, and the state had used that tactic, never to hear her appeal. So Gray decides to file a proactive case into federal court. That case will become known as Browder v. Gale, four black women. Aurelia Browder, Susie MacDonald, and two teenagers, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith are on that case. Gray wants a minister, no ministers are willing to be on that case, but two teenagers step forward. And it is that case that makes its way all the way to the Supreme Court and leads to the desegregation of Montgomery's buses December 21st, 1956.

So again, I think the lesson of the Montgomery Bus Boycott is much harder, but much more beautiful, right? It is a story of a community that builds this incredible carpal system. We have black women, black women's groups in Montgomery actually competing every week at the mass meeting. Who can sort of like bring more money? They're selling pies. They're selling cakes. They're selling lunches. Georgia Gilmore's Club from nowhere.

Ines Rex Club, friendly club. So there's this incredible fundraising black women are doing. There's this corporal system they've developed. There's the sort of learning that they've had. And so Gray files this, you know, proactive federal case. I should say Rosa Parks is not on that federal case for two reasons. One, he doesn't want it thrown out because she has a case in state court. He doesn't want it thrown on a procedural reason.

The second is there is some worry that Rosa Parks long activist history, Her longtime work with the NACP, we want to remember that the NWACP is being red-baited in the wake of the Brown decision. It will be outlawed in the state of Alabama by June of 1956. So her political history is seen as perhaps a liability, and so they decide to keep her off that federal case. Where is the white community throughout this? The white community is outraged, by the boycott by using an economic boycott. In fact, you see white people trying to organize a reverse boycott,

and so they try to tell people to take the bus. So there's a reverse boycott. As we mentioned with King, but there's a set of leaders like find their homes bombed, E.D. Nixon, the one white minister who is supporting the boycott, Reverend Gratz, his house is bombed. So there's physical violence. There's economic violence, as we mentioned earlier.

Rosa Parks loses her job. A number of people lose their jobs. There's criticism. Many moderates in Montgomery will criticize the Montgomery Improvement Association, which is the organization running the boycott, the new organization that's been found, of being just like the segregationist White Citizens Council, for using an economic boycott.

We have the Montgomery newspaper, the Montgomery advertiser, calling it dangerous. There's a lot of red baiting happening. All sorts of rumors snake through Montgomery's white community about Rosa Parks. They say she's a communist. They say she's Mexican. They say she has a car, right? But at base, this is about calling her an outside agitator, right? And so there's a, I think, sort of going back to where we started,

part of the power of the Montgomery Best Boycott and part of what we can learn from it is that the rightness and the righteousness aren't necessarily going to be visible at the moment, right? There's tremendous red baiting. They're being called un-American. Now how we celebrate the Montgomery Best Boycott is it's like the most American thing ever.

And I mean the different movements that come out of this, E.D. Nixon known for the organizing the brotherhood of sleeping car porters, And the significance of that, you know, the black porters on the trains going across the United States. I mean, there's all, I mean, and in part, what the Montgomery bus boycott also shows is all of these people coming together who have been active for years. So one of the things Rosa Parks will say and E.D. Nixon will say in that decade before her bus stand is how hard it was to keep going when all our efforts seemed in vain. And I think that, that to me, in this moment that we're living in, is perhaps the greatest lesson of this, right?

Is the lesson of, like, making step after step, not knowing which of them are going to be the one, but sort of having a faith that you just have to keep making those steps, that the courage Rosa Parks has is the courage of perseverance. So in that year, you also have the launching of Dr. Martin Luther King and explain what happened. Rosa Parks was responsible for that. Right. So we go back, right, to the day after her bus stand, right? And we have Edie Nixon calling Dr. King, wants to use his church. King agrees.

But this is a hard decision. Then on Monday, right, when she's arraigned in court, we've had the successful one-day boycott. December 5th, 1955. Successful one-day boycott. And they have a meeting to talk about having, like there's a meeting of the mail leaders. Rosa Parks isn't invited. Robinson's not invited. But a number of the male leaders, civil rights leaders in town meet. And there's going to be a mass meeting that night, as we

mentioned, at Holt Street Baptist Church. But none of those ministers want to speak. They're scared. And E.D. Nixon erupts in anger. And he's like, you're cowards. These women who basically walked that day, right, to stay off the bus. You've been, you know, they're really. They're leading you. And King comes in late. Again, this is, he's 26 years old and he says, I'm not a coward, and I will speak. So that's Monday night. He's terrified. He doesn't have very long to prepare. He's shaking. Corretta can't even come because, again, we're just two weeks after the birth of their first child, so she's still not allowed to leave the house. Now, what we know was that night, King finds his voice. We began to see kind of the Dr. King that we will sort of

see emerge begins that night. He talks about when the history books are written, right? They will say sort of a great, you know, a great people lived here in Montgomery, and I'm paraphrasing him. But it's a beautiful speech. But I think we want to remember this is going to take, this is not like inevitable. The kings have to take step after. step. As we mentioned, the parents come down after the house is bombed. Then when King gets indicted, when all the boycott leaders are indicted, his dad again says, you've done enough, don't go back. They're actually in Atlanta. He's giving a speech. King's like, I'm going to go back. I'm not going to abandon this, right? So the pressure and how hard it is and how scary it is,

I think we often sort of erase that from it. And over the course of that, year, right, Dr. King will kind of emerge as a local leader and in some ways as a national leader, but that that process, in many ways, the movement makes him as much as he makes the movement. And finally, that he, it is a, it is, the kings have to make choice after choice. They have to step and step again. And again, this is, I think, are the kind of moment. important lesson of the Montgomery Bus Boycott is it's not about making one choice and then the world opens up, right? Or one choice and the fear goes away. No, it's about making choice after choice. And of saying, we are the people to do this. We can stand fast, right, having that

conviction, right, that this is unjust, it's immoral, and we are going to refuse until it changes. What was that day like when the Supreme Court decision came down? What did the integration of the bus system of Montgomery look like? So it actually, back in those days, it would take a while for the decision to get. So the decision actually happens in November, but it doesn't make its way down. So December 21st, Montgomery's buses are integrated. There are famous pictures, both of King and of Parks getting on the bus that day. But white people in Montgomery are angry. And so you actually see a real flurry of violence afterwards. The King, the King's house is bombed again, the Gratz's house is bombed again. People are attacked at bus stops.

Going back to the Parks family, as we mentioned, Rosa Parks loses her job, her husband loses his job. They never find steady work in Montgomery ever again. So in fact, Rosa and Raymond Parks will be forced to leave Montgomery eight months after the boycott's successful end because they still don't have work. They're still getting death threats. And so they will move to Detroit, to what she will then describe as the Northern Promise Land that wasn't. And she will spend the second half of her life challenging the racism of the North. And the whole motto, make America great again, harkening back to when these times before the integration and the latest move of President Trump to remove Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth, the day that celebrates the end of slavery, off of the day

for people to come into the national parks for free and instead putting his own birthday on that list, June 14th. Your thoughts, bringing what happened then to today? I mean, I think, and Dr. King's daughter, Bernice King, said it more eloquently than me, that part of what upsets her much more, right, is the defiling of kind of the social safety net. So what's happened with SNAP

and making people reapply and and this one and five children go hungry in the United States today. The horrible violence we were watching in the early or part of the show about ice, masked ice members. So that part of what Bernice King, Dr. King's daughter kind of reminded us is that it's those things that that are most upsetting to her and would be most upsetting to her father. That yes, it is it is wrong that they, that they've taken the holiday off the National Parks, but what is far wronger is the kinds of injustice that we're seeing, and in many ways the kinds of ways that people are, that some people are giving into the politics of fear, right, and being silent, right? And Dr. King would talk a lot about people who prefer order to justice,

that famous quote from the letter from a Birmingham jail, that we're going to remember the silence of our friends, right? So that I think the other reminder that I think he, gives us in this moment is the need to step forward, even though it may cost things, right, and to oppose what we're seeing today. Jean Theo Harris, historian, professor of political science at Brooklyn College, author of 13 books about the civil rights movement and the fight for racial justice in the United States, including the award-winning book, The Rebellious Life of Mrs.

Rose of Parks, which was made into a film by director Yoruba Richan. Professor Theo Harris's latest book is King of the North, Martin Luther King Jr's Life of Struggle Outside the South, and we'll link to her piece in the Guardian, headlined what we get wrong about the Montgomery bus boycott and what we can learn from it. We'll link to it at DemocracyNow.org. To see part one of our discussion, go to DemocracyNow.org. I'm Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us. I don't know.