Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Determination, courage made protest a success

Parks and supporters put their lives on the line to avoid the buses in fight for blacks' rights.

By Shawn D. Lewis / The Detroit News

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"They've arrested the wrong woman now," E.D. Nixon said the night of Rosa Parks' arrest.

It was about 10 p.m., and the Montgomery, Ala., NAACP president was speaking on the phone to Johnnie R. Carr, a friend of Parks' since the fifth grade. Carr was active, along with Parks, in Montgomery's National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and remains an active civil rights advocate today. She was involved in the 381-day bus boycott following Parks' arrest.

"When I heard it was Rosa who had been arrested, I just couldn't believe it," Carr, now 94, said from her home in Montgomery. "Rather than be bothered, I thought she would just get up out of her seat. But she felt she had been pushed around long enough and wasn't going to be pushed around any longer."

The community was notified soon after Parks' arrest.

"The next day, I began to spread the word at my job," Carr said.

Carr worked as a saleswoman and staff manager at the Atlanta Life Insurance Co., a black-owned company that had a branch in Montgomery. "We were asking everybody to stay off the buses that Monday in protest of Mrs. Parks' arrest," Carr said.

Carr and others provided transportation throughout the boycott. Some workers drove to work in car pools or rode horses and mules. Many walked.

"We had all suffered so much injustice and humiliation that everyone was ready to do whatever they could to help," Carr said.

During the boycott, after five or six attempts to recruit big-name preachers around Montgomery to spearhead the protest, the group found a leader in an obscure minister at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. King became president of the Montgomery Improvement Association.

In her autobiography, "Rosa Parks: My Story," Parks wrote: "The advantage of having Dr. King as president was that he was so new to Montgomery and to civil rights work that he hadn't been there long enough to make any strong friends or enemies. Mr. Nixon thought he was a good choice."

As the boycott continued, some in the white community responded with terrorism and harassment. Car pool drivers were arrested for picking up hitchhikers. Blacks waiting on street corners for a ride were arrested for loitering.

Bombs were set off in early 1956 at King's home, at Nixon's house and at the residence of the Rev. Robert Graetz, the white pastor of an all-black Lutheran congregation.

Parks' misdemeanor conviction was upheld on appeal, but a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the segregation law was filed in February 1956 by the Montgomery Improvement Association.

On Nov. 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Montgomery's segregated seating law unconstitutional. The boycott continued until Dec. 20.