The Moment That Was Montgomery

December 5 marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott, and the recent passing of Rosa Parks gives the date special poignancy. Unfortunately, we can be almost certain that, as was the case with remembrances of Parks, much of the nation will get the history wrong even as it tries to honor it.

Consider Parks herself, most often rendered as some simple woman who stumbled into great historical events. In fact, the search for social justice was a central theme in her life from early on.

"What I learned best was that I was a person with dignity and self-respect, and I should not set my sights lower than anybody else just because I was black," Parks said of the training she received as a child at the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls.

As a young adult, Parks joined the NAACP in 1943, a time when joining that organization was a chancy, possibly dangerous, thing to do in the Deep South. She became its secretary and worked in voter registration campaigns, and registered herself in 1945. She ran the local NAACP Youth Council, served as secretary to the state NAACP Conference of Branches and attended an NAACP Leadership Training Conferences, a national effort to identify some of the more aggressive local leaders in the organization.

And, from the 1940s on, she refused on several occasions to comply with bus segregation laws -- frequently enough that some bus drivers recognized her and refused to stop.

A few months prior to her arrest on Dec. 1, 1955, Parks spent a week at the Highlander Folk School, a school for social activists and arguably the most important site of radical thinking in the 1950s South. When asked what she intended to do when she got home, she replied that she was sick of trying to work with black adults in Montgomery; they just wouldn't stick together. She intended to devote her efforts to young people, for whom she had more hope.

It is galling to see a life of such commitment and purpose reduced to that one iconic moment on the bus in 1955, thereby reducing her historical significance to a cheerleader.

Parks, of course, is not the only one so slighted. Other key organizers of the supposedly-spontaneous Montgomery bus boycott had also been confronting segregation for years. Take as examples E. D. Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson.

Nixon, a Pullman porter with a sixth-grade education and in his mid-fifties at the time of the boycott, had organized the state branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1928 under the guidance of A. Philip Randolph. In the 1930s, Nixon organized a committee to make sure that Alabama blacks got their fair share of benefits from federal programs; in 1940, he helped organize the Montgomery Voters League; in 1944, he led a march of 750 people on the registrar's office; from 1939 to 1951, he headed the Montgomery NAACP and from 1951-53, the state conference.

Robinson was at the time an English professor at nearby Alabama State College and president of the Women's Political Caucus, a group of 300 educated black women who had been concerned with voter registration and segregated public facilities since 1946. The Caucus women had been agitating the Montgomery city commission about segregated buses since the early 1950s, and in May 1954 had sent a letter to the mayor threatening a boycott if improvements weren't made. Between the spring of 1955 and Parks' arrest on Dec. 1, the Caucus, along with Nixon, had considered three bus incidents as potential test cases but decided against them on various tactical grounds.

It was a group formed by Nixon and Robinson that was largely responsible for the initial mobilization of black Montgomery after Parks' arrest. Within four days, they had effectively organized the boycott in a community of more than 40,000 people -- a feat indicative of how well they knew their community after decades of meetings, demonstrations, barbershop arguments and beauty-parlor conversations.

We are usually told that a tired woman refused to give up her seat on the bus and an eloquent, nonviolent prophet rose up and a new movement was born. But that rendering hides more than it reveals. It hides the variety of people who can play leadership roles, it hides the depth of their commitment, it makes it difficult to see, as one scholar put it, "that reflective and purposeful people matter." Rosa Parks was one of those purposeful people.

We have been taught to think of Montgomery as a moment of beginning. In many respects, it would be more appropriate to remember it as a moment of culmination, the end product of lives devoted to struggle.