What If

Deciphering the Meaning of Uncommon Courage

Much has been written and celebrated about Rosa Parks’ courage. Type both her name and that enviable attribute into Google and you’ll turn up more than 500,000 sources—everything from biographies (Courageous Citizen, A Life of Courage, and The Courage to Make a Difference, to name a few) to TV and film documentaries and historical and journalistic accounts. When the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor in 2013, on what would have been her 100th birthday (an event that took place at The Henry Ford as part of a National Day of Courage celebration), the design prominently featured “courage” alongside her portrait.

If we travel back in time to the December evening in 1955 when Rosa Parks boarded that city bus, we can begin to glimpse just why her courage was so extraordinary. We know from her account of the event that she made her defiant decision in an instant. It took tremendous courage. But it took even more courage for her to stand by her decision in the minutes, days, and years that followed.

To understand why, board bus No. 2857 assigned to the Cleveland Avenue route that December night. That very bus, painstakingly restored, is now parked inside Henry Ford Museum, and open to everyone. Enter through the front door and picture the scene from years ago: Most of the front 10 seats reserved for whites are occupied, as are the 10 seats at the rear marked with a sign for the “colored” section. See the overhead light shining down on the green-cushioned seat in the middle? Settle yourself here, just as Rosa Parks did.

We know from many accounts that Rosa Parks recognized the bus driver—he had humiliated her and other black riders over the years. Twelve years earlier, in fact, she’d even had a personal confrontation with him when he demanded that she exit the bus and board through the rear door (on that occasion, she had relented; when she stepped off, the driver promptly sped away before she could board in the rear). She also knew that this man, who threatened to have her arrested, carried a pistol in his holster. She was aware of recent racial atrocities, including the mistreatment of another black woman, Claudette Colvin, for not giving up her seat, and the death earlier that summer of 14-year-old Emmett Till from a lynching.

Let your imagination revisit the moments that unfolded as the flustered bus driver pointedly asked her, “Are you going to stand up?”

As one of her biographers, Douglas Brinkley, observed, Rosa Parks in that moment felt fearless, bold, and serene. She looked straight at the bus driver and said, “No.”

Three other black riders sat in the same row, one next to Rosa Parks, the other two across the aisle. When the bus driver again demanded that all four passengers give up their seats, the three other riders reluctantly got up. All the black riders were now at the back, all the whites at the front. Rosa Parks sat between them, a brave solitary figure marking the painful boundary between races. “As I sat there, I tried not to think about what might happen,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I knew that anything was possible. I could be manhandled or beaten. I could be arrested. People have asked me if it occurred to me then that I could be the test case the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] had been looking for. I did not think about that at all. In fact if I had let myself think too deeply about what might happen to me, I might have gotten off the bus.”

In that moment between “might have” and “didn’t,” her courage began to transform into something extraordinary. As Brinkley observed, “A lifetime’s education in justice—from her grandfather’s nightly vigils to the murder of Emmett Till—had strengthened her resolve to act when the time came. What arose in Parks on that fateful evening was her belief in what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., often said: that ‘some of us must bear the burden of trying to save the soul of America.’” Rosa Parks later put it this way: “When I made that decision, I knew that I had the strength of my ancestors with me."

Tracing the Long History of Racial Inequality

"To understand the real risks Rosa Parks faced in refusing to give up her seat,” says Donna Braden, Curator of Public Life at The Henry Ford, “we must explore the nature of segregated travel in the ‘Jim Crow South.'" “Jim Crow” laws enforcing racial segregation in southern U.S. states were first enacted in the 1880s by angry and resentful whites against freed African Americans. Favoring whites and repressing blacks became an institutionalized form of inequality. And, by 1896, with the Plessy v. Ferguson case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states had the legal power to require segregation between blacks and whites.

"Negro Motorist Green Book, An International Travel Guide," 1949

  Details

"Negro Motorist Green Book, An International Travel Guide," 1949

View in our Collectionson thehenryford.org 

Artifact

Guidebook

Date Made

1949

Summary

Before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, African Americans faced persistent racial discrimination when traveling. It could be difficult to find restaurants, hotels, or other amenities. The Negro Motorist Green Book, begun in 1936, became a guide for the African American traveler. This 1949 edition listed travel information that would keep the traveler "from running into difficulties [and] embarrassments," and would "make his trips more enjoyable."

Creators

Victor H. Green and Company 

Place of Creation

United States, New York, New York 

Keywords

Alaska 

Bermuda 

Canada 

Mexico 

United States 

Guidebooks 

African Americans 

Hotels (Public accomodations) 

Restaurants 

Segregation 

Travel 

Object ID

87.135.1736

Credit

From the Collections of The Henry Ford. Gift of the Automobile Club of Michigan.

 On Exhibit

at Henry Ford Museum in Driving America

Get more details in Digital Collections at:

thehenryford.org

"Negro Motorist Green Book, An International Travel Guide," 1949

View in our Collectionson thehenryford.org 

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Details

Travel in the segregated South was particularly humiliating for African Americans, beginning with railroads back in the 19th century, where blacks of all economic classes were generally relegated to the most uncomfortable cars just behind the locomotive—and also, should a collision or boiler explosion occur, the most dangerous. With the arrival of affordable automobiles, it seemed southern blacks might escape the indignities of long-distance rail travel. But that didn’t happen: service stations and roadside restrooms were usually closed to them. As a result, black motorists often resorted to stashing buckets or portable toilets in their trunks. They also brought food along with them, since many diners and restaurants turned away black customers. There was similar discrimination with roadside motels, and blacks had to depend on the hospitality of fellow blacks or chance the discovery of a “Negro” rooming house.

The laws on city transit systems separating blacks and whites were equally humiliating—and often arbitrary. By 1905, every southern state had outlawed blacks from sitting next to whites on trolleys and streetcars, while it was left to the whims of individual conductors whether black passengers were ordered to move from this or that seat. By the 1950s, black passengers were enduring the same unjust treatment by city bus drivers. Bus drivers could demand more seats for whites at any time and in any number. And drivers often forced black riders, once they had paid their fare, to get off the bus and re-enter through the back door—sometimes driving away without them, as had happened to Rosa Parks. Those who didn’t comply with these rules could be verbally abused, slapped, knocked on the floor, pushed out the door, beaten, or even killed.

As stories of abusive drivers and humiliating incidents continued to spread, anger in the black community grew. However, most of the time, the indignities went unchallenged. “Expecting African Americans to resist these long-established laws and traditions,” Braden notes, “meant asking them to risk great harm and to summon an extraordinary amount of personal courage.”

The Legacy of One Courageous Woman

Rosa Parks' awareness of social injustice started at an early age. Growing up in Alabama, where she was born in 1913, she hated the disrespectful way that whites often treated black people. Her grandfather, a former slave, instilled a sense of pride and independence in her. Her life took a radical turn when she married Raymond Parks, a self-educated activist (she once called him the “first real activist I ever met”) who encouraged her to work as a secretary at the local branch of the NAACP. Contrary to early portraits of Parks as a timid, tired seamstress who became an accidental figure in sparking the civil rights movement, she had years of training and experience as a civil rights advocate challenging racial injustice.

 

As historian Jeanne Theoharis notes in her substantive biography, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, “If we follow the actual Rosa Parks—see her decades of community activism before the boycott; take notice of the determination, terror, and loneliness of her bus stand and her steadfast work during the year of the boycott; and see her political work continue for decades following the boycott’s end—we encounter a much different ‘mother of the civil rights movement.’”

Not long after that December day in 1955, Rosa Parks told a radio interviewer that she had acted because the “time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed, I suppose. I had decided that I would have to know, once and for all, what rights I had as a human being, and a citizen.”

She stood alone on that day in her willingness to face great risks, just as she did in the years after as she continued to face great burdens. She and her husband lost their jobs, she received threatening phone calls, and her marriage became strained. In 1957, she fled Montgomery for Detroit, where she eventually found steady employment working for Congressman John Conyers until her retirement in 1988. It wasn’t until nearly three decades after her bus stand that she was recognized as a significant figure in the civil rights movement, as notable as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Rosa Parks is not an innovator in the traditional sense, nor would she have considered herself to be one. Yet, her simple, spontaneous act embodies the notion of social transformation—that a new idea or way of doing things can have such far-reaching impact that it renders old ways obsolete and radically alters how people think about themselves, their social interactions, and their place in the larger world.