Part One: “It Came To That” – Stories From Those Who Forged A Protest Movement

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide

Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett recently chided civil rights leaders and Black churches for not protesting against Trump’s controversial policies.

But, exhibits in multiple museums show the nation’s civil rights movement gained momentum one protest at a time. This means the civil rights movement of the late 50s ad 60s was launched by an anonymous seamstress in Alabama, four unknown Greensboro college students, an obscure NAACP attorney, and an unheard of Nashville seminarian from Troy, Ala. They pushed back against the racism of their day, in other words. And history changed.

No one knows who will launch the next major civil rights movement, including Crockett, who recently said on the radio show “The Breakfast Club” that outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo “are really the ones that are speaking truth to power right now.” On Feb. 11, Trudeau criticized the U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, calling them “entirely unjustified.” He said the country would respond “if it comes to that.”

On March 4, Pardo said there was no justification for President Donald Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on imports from Mexico and her government would respond with tariff and non-tariff measures if it comes to that. “There is no reason, rationale or justification to support this decision that will affect our people and nations … Nobody wins with this decision,” Pardo said at her regular morning press conference.

This is the point. “It came to that” during the Civil Rights Movement. Blacks changed history one protest at a time.

The way a tiny snowball rolls down a snow-covered mountain and barrels ahead until it becomes an avalanche, “it came to that” for Rosa Parks, a seamstress.

Parks unknowingly launched the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama when she told Montgomery bus driver James Frederick Blake that she would not move to the back of the segregated bus. On Dec. 1, 1955, Park simply shook her head no. She told Blake she would not move to the back of the bus.

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Blake told Parks, “Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.” When Parks refused to move to the back of the segregated bus, Blake called his boss.  “I called the company first, just like I was supposed to do,” Blake told the Washington Post. “I got my supervisor on the line. He said, ‘Did you warn her, Jim?’ I said, ‘I warned her.’ And he said, and I remember it just like I’m standing here, ‘Well then, Jim, you do it, you got to exercise your powers and put her off, hear?’ And that’s just what I did.”

After Blake, a White bus driver forced Parks to exit the segregated bus, he contacted the police and signed an arrest warrant. Parks was arrested, fined $10 plus $4 in court fees and released. Parks, the White bus driver, who retired in 1974 and died at age 89 of a heart attack, said, “I wasn’t trying to do anything to that Parks woman except do my job. She was in violation of the city codes, so what was I supposed to do? That damn bus was full and she wouldn’t move back. I had my orders. I had police powers – any driver for the city did. So the bus filled up and a white man got on, and she had his seat and I told her to move back, and she wouldn’t do it,” the Guardian noted in Blakes’ March 27, 2002 obituary.

“To bring about change, you must not be afraid to take the first step,” Parks said years later in a trademark quote. “You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right. One person can change the world. As long as people use tactics to oppress or restrict other people from being free, there is work to be done. I wanted to be treated like a human being,” Parks said.

Parks’ desire to be treated like a human being did not go well. She encountered real-life terrorism. For example, she was fired as a tailor’s assistant at the Montgomery Fair department store. Her husband, Raymond, was fired from his job as a barber at Maxwell Air Force Base and he also suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1957, Parks and her husband fled the South and relocated to Detroit, where her brother and cousin lived. But they did not find jobs there. So Parks soon headed to Virginia to take a job as a hostess at Hampton Institute’s Holly Tree Inn. But when promised accommodations for her mother and husband never came through, Parks returned to Detroit at the end of the 1958 fall semester.

In Detroit, Parks underwent surgery for an ulcer – a condition that developed during the stressful Montgomery bus boycott. She had a throat tumor removed. The NAACP ended up paying her hospital bill, which had gone into collection.

Medical costs and the difficulties of working while ill pushed Parks and her family to the edge. In July 1960, Jet magazine described her as a “tattered rag of her former self – penniless, debt-ridden, ailing with stomach ulcers, and a throat tumor, compressed into two rooms with her husband and mother.”

When people asked Parks why it came to that, she said, “The reason I did not give up my seat was because I was tired-not physically tired. My feet were not hurting. I was tired in a different way. I was tired of seeing so many men treated as boys and not called by their proper names or titles. I was tired of seeing children and women mistreated and disrespected because of the color of their skin. I was tired of Jim Crow laws, of legally enforced racial segregation.”

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Parks and her husband were able to bounce back in Detroit in about six years. This means racist terrorism did not destroy her life. In 1961, her husband found work as a barber in Detroit. The same year she began working as a seamstress at the Stockton Sewing Company. There she put in 10-hour days and was paid 75 cents for each piece of the aprons and skirts she completed.

“I do the very best I can to look upon life with optimism and hope,” she said.

Four year later Parks’ life took another promising turn in 1965, when she began working as a receptionist and assistant in Congressman John Conyers’ Detroit office, where she had worked as a volunteer for his campaign. She obtained health insurance and earned a pension. She worked for Conyers until her retirement in 1988.

Conyers once said, “Rosa Parks was so famous that people would come by my office to meet her, not me.”

In 1996, Bill Clinton presented Parks with a Presidential Medal of Freedom for “one modest act of defiance that changed the course of history.” Before she died nearly a decade later, in October 2005 at age 92, she reflected on how it came to that: her refusal to obey harsh, anti-Black Jim Crow laws. “I had no idea that history was being made,” Parks explained. “I was just tired of giving up.”

… Continued Next Week

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