Abernathy, Ralph(1926–
90): Martin Luther King’s
trusted lieutenant.
Parks, Rosa (1913–
2005): ‘The mother of the
civil rights movement’
who sparked the Montgo-
mery bus boycott.
Gray, Fred(1930– ): Civil
rights attorney who won
desegregation cases
against the Montgomery
bus company and Univer-
sity of Alabama.
silk-stocking Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where the Reverend Vernon
Johns thundered against segregation and docile blacks who tolerated it. Such
uncompromising rhetoric had inspired his niece, Barbara Johns, to protest
against her inferior high school in Virginia, and she fled to him for safety after
the NAACP sued the district to desegregate. A plain-spoken, young Baptist
minister and World War II veteran named Ralph Abernathyalso used his
pulpit to demand racial equality. All of these leaders could count on Clifford
Durr, a New Deal lawyer, and his wife Virginia, white southern liberals who
belonged to the NAACP.
These reformers made little headway among a black community that was
still cowed. One story illustrates this sense of futility. In 1950, when the
Reverend Johns fumbled his dime while putting it in the bus coin box,
the driver insulted him: ‘Uncle, get down and pick up that dime and put it
in the box.’ Johns refused, and implored the black passengers to leave the
bus in protest. None did. Days later, Johns saw a parishioner who was on
the bus with him. Before Johns could chide her, she reproached him: ‘You
ought to knowed better.’ Johns told a friend that ‘even God can’t free
people who behave like that.’ Johns bought a car to avoid the daily humili-
ation of bus-riding. Most blacks could not afford this luxury.
A new spirit surfaced among Montgomery blacks after the Browndecision.
As disobedience on buses became more frequent, drivers threatened black
men with pistols and called the police to arrest several black women and
children. Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old, refused a white passenger’s
demand for her seat, only to have a policeman kick her and knock her school
books away. ‘I done paid my dime, I ain’t got no reason to move,’ she
screamed as she was dragged off the bus, handcuffed, and carted to jail.
Colvin was willing to be the long-awaited plaintiff against segregated buses,
but black leaders declined her offer upon learning that she was pregnant,
which could doom a $500,000 challenge.
When Rosa Parkswas arrested, she changed American history. Parks, a
trim, soft-spoken, bespectacled 42-year-old seamstress at the Montgomery
Fair department store, prepared for that decisive day all of her life. She mar-
ried a civil rights activist and, at E.D. Nixon’s suggestion, joined the NAACP
during World War II. She became resentful when her brother was drafted
into the army to protect a democracy in which neither of them could vote.
As the city’s NAACP secretary, she advised teenagers like Claudette Colvin
and attempted to register voters and integrate the city’s libraries. When James
Blake forced her off his Cleveland Avenue bus in 1943, Parks vowed never to
ride with him again, and she kept that vow for twelve years. In the mean-
time, she cultivated Fred Gray, a young black lawyer who was Clifford
Durr’s protégé, to use the courts against Jim Crow. In the summer of 1955,
Virginia Durrarranged for Parks to attend a desegregation workshop at the44 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Durr, Virginia(1903–99):
Alabama civil rights act-
ivist against Jim Crow and
the poll tax.