Women and Gender in the Civil Rights Movement: The Montgomery Bus Boycott
The story of the African American civil rights movement often gets boiled down to just a few moments featuring but a few key figures, at the expense of many who worked tirelessly to enact lasting change. For instance, the Montgomery Bus Boycott responsible for the Supreme Court ruling that segregation of public transportation was unconstitutional, is often oversimplified to the effect that many of the key participants and organizers, who were women, with the exception of Rosa Parks, were left out of the celebrated story. Many mark the boycott as the emergence of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a prominent black civil rights leader. However, there is much more to the story than these two figures reveal. Moreover, even though Parks is credited for catalyzing the boycott, she has not been given enough public recognition for many of the other ways in which she was already a stalwart militant for the cause of equal civil rights. In the past few decades, however, historians have worked tirelessly to reclaim history for those who labored to change it. In this light, this post highlights a couple women important to civil rights history and some of Park’s activism before the boycott.
Another historian interested in recovering black women’s roles in the civil rights movement is Danielle McGuire. Her work, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance, reclaims the Montgomery Bus Boycott for the many black women who made up the backbone of the movement. These women were largely left out of public narrative because of the ways in which black male leaders either excluded them from visible leadership roles or otherwise skewed the public’s perception of their roles within the movement. Black leaders felt that this was necessary for the sake of gaining and maintaining white support for civil rights. Thus, the prevailing history of the movement remembers the women as the men portrayed them, and not as they were: radical, militant, and courageous.
McGuire’s prologue opens with the gang rape of Recy Taylor. She describes a dark night in 1944 in Abbeville, Alabama when six white men abducted Taylor while she was on her way home from church, in the presence of her 18-year-old son, West, and good friend, Fannie Daniel. The white abductors claimed Taylor had cut a white boy in Clopton; her alibi, Fannie said she had been with Taylor all day. The men did not care for any excuses, as they knew what they wanted and were determined to have her. They blindfolded Taylor, drove her to an undisclosed location, and took turns violating her. After the rape they blindfolded her once more for the drive and let her off by the highway, where they left her to walk home.[i]
Notably, Rosa Parks was the investigator assigned by the NAACP to go to Abbeville to investigate the assault of Recy Taylor, approximately a decade before she refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, AL to spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This demonstrates something that not many people realize: that Rosa Parks was an involved civil rights activist long before she entered civil rights memory with a supposedly “solitary and spontaneous act.”[ii] Indeed, Parks had been an important activist for quite some time and was much more radical and militant than history and even her contemporaries made her out to be. After her encounter with Recy Taylor, Parks contributed to the formation of the Committee for Equal Justice, which would later become to Montgomery Improvement Association responsible for the bus boycotts. This shows that Rosa Park’s act of protest in 1955 was hardly her first, but in fact was the culmination of a long process of organizing on behalf of and by women. McGuire shows that one of the core motivations for civil rights activism was both women and women’s issues, such as sexual assault and rape. This was largely because sexual assault was a part of the tradition of racial violence. Abductions and assaults like this were unfortunately very common in the South. Historically, white men used rape as a weapon to uphold the status quo over black women during and after Reconstruction when black men and women who “tested their freedom” as a “weapon of terror.” McGuire has attempted to fix an important error in civil rights historiography that has previously overemphasized the abuse of and violence against black men, to the detriment of black women who also faced violent abuse.[iii]
White supremacists also used false allegations of raping white women to justify the widespread practice of lynching black men in the Jim Crow South. This is a phenomenon that Ida B. Wells, editor of the newspaper the Memphis Free Press, had been calling out in her publications since the 1890s after the lynching of two of her close friends, local grocers who had gotten into competition with the wrong white man’s store. Wells recognized that white female sexuality and innocence was a tool that white men used to justify their “‘system of intimidation’ designed to keep blacks ‘subservient and submissive.’”[iv] In one of her publications, Southern Horrors.: Lynch Law in all its Phases, Wells wrote, “Eight lynched in one week and five of them charged with rape! The thinking public will not easily believe freedom and education more brutalizing than slavery, and the world knows that the crime of rape was unknown during four years of civil war, when the white women of the South were at the mercy of the race which is all at once charged with being a bestial one.”[v]
With these words, Wells poked holes through white supremacy’s perception of the sanctity of white womanhood and the way white men used it to justify their violence. In the editorial she wrote immediately following her friends’ lynchings, Wells stated that “‘Nobody in this section believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men assault white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.’”[vi] Here she explicitly impugned white women for their moral indiscretions. It was often their false claims of rape that caused innocent black men to be lynched, when in fact the white women had been consensual sexual partners. However, admittedly it took little prompting for volatile white men to enact violence against a black man. Even if the white woman admitted his innocence it could mean nothing. The mere suggestion of interracial sex between a black man and a white woman would spell the former’s doom.
Another misconception that McGuire seeks to remedy is the notion that Rosa Parks was the first or only woman to ever stand up to the Montgomery city bus drivers or officers, and as such was the only logical figure behind which to rally. In fact, black women had been sick enough of the harsh treatment and discomfort on city busses for many years, and certain people were beginning take a radical approach to changing the world around them. One such heroine was but a teenager. Claudette Colvin was fifteen years old, a sophomore at Booker T. Washington, when she got on the city bus after school one afternoon. She, and a pregnant woman, Mrs. Hamilton, snagged the last two available seats in the colored section of the bus, as it was very crowded. Two white people took the last remaining seats on the bus next to them. As white people could not legally sit across from black people in segregated Alabama, they driver felt compelled to stop the bus and order the black woman and young girl to stand in the aisle. A black man further back on the bus offered Mrs. Hamilton his seat because she was with child, leaving Colvin alone in protest. She refused to move, and loudly declared that she was just as good as any white person, and therefore had a right to sit. At this, bus driver lost his patience with the plucky, high-spirited girl, whom he had encountered before on his route. He called the police who dragged Claudette, kicking and screaming, out of the bus. She was arrested for not only violating segregation laws, but was also accused of resisting arrest and assault.[vii]
Despite not yet being able to contest the constitutionality of segregation, nor was she the first woman to be accosted as she was being arrested on a bus, Claudette Colvin was able to stimulate almost immediate support from the black community, thanks to the tireless efforts of Jo Ann Robinson. Robinson, who had been eager to launch a bus boycott for over a year, observed the way in which many black women increasingly came up with measures to avoid taking public transit in favor of organized carpooling. Community support was stronger than ever, and she thought the time was nigh. Colvin, a straight A student and member of the NAACP youth council, seemed the perfect fit.[viii]
The NAACP’s E.D. Nixon, howeverm would not be persuaded until he made a visit to Claudette’s parents. When Claudette answered the door for Nixon, he observed that she was pregnant. McGuire reports that Colvin’s mother told Nixon that, “‘My daughter done took a tumble.’”[ix] Nixon then decided that this fifteen-year-old girl with child, whose mother was too ashamed to let her be seen in public, could not possibly command the respect of the larger community in Montgomery, be it the black or the white community. Moreover, Nixon argued that Colvin’s working class background, dark skin color, and neighborhood of origin, might make her too divisive of a symbol for the boycott. Rosa Parks, keenly aware of the boundaries of female respectability in Alabama during the 1950s, agreed with Nixon that Claudette was not yet the one, and this was not yet the time.[x] Nixon and Parks knew that putting Colvin on display would merely serve to bolster white stereotypes about black female sexuality and promiscuity.
Jo Ann Robinson, according to Nixon’s account, was furious at his decision. “She ‘liked to have fit’ Nixon recalled. ‘She jumped all over me.’”[xi] Robinson likely recognized, even from the vantage of her middle class background, that Colvin represented exactly the kind of woman who got harassed and abused by bus drivers and police every day, and thus would be a fitting standard barer for the cause.[xii] However, Nixon’s account presents a rather different view of events than Robinson would later recall. In Robinson’s autobiography, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, she wrote of the decision surrounding Colvin, but presented a different view of the matter. She wrote that, “opinions differed where Claudette was concerned. Some felt she was too young to be the trigger that precipitated the movement. She might get hurt! The time for action was not now. Not everybody was ready. So, after getting opinions from various groups, the boycott was postponed.”[xiii] What different takes on the sequence of events! In Robinson’s autobiography, Colvin’s pregnancy is not mentioned, and the reason given for abandoning her cause is chalked up to age. There is a kernel of truth in the sentiment that Claudette “might get hurt,” but this is vague enough to mean anything. What can one make of Jo Ann Robinson’s disparate reactions at the time of the decision, and later in her memoir?
It is likely that Robinson, by the time she penned her memoir in the 1980s, had realized what Rosa Parks had in 1955 about Colvin’s inability to withstand the public scourge of the media given her pregnant state. McGuire stated that Rosa Parks feared that by nature of her ‘condition,’ Colvin would be branded as a “‘bad girl’” by the press and public, essentially ending the case and protest before it even started.[xiv] So, Robinson was likely trying to protect Colvin by obscuring her pregnancy in the record she left of events. In doing this, however, she also unwittingly allowed the truth about the decision to be further obscured. With her silence, Robinson only served to further perpetuate the notion that black female sexuality is problematic or shameful, and that conservative notions of female respectability dictate the boundaries of justice.
Even the story told of Parks’ protest on December 1, 1955 would be skewed and retold with an eye toward conservative respectability in mind. Nixon claimed he needed “‘a plaintiff beyond reproach.’” To achieve this, one had to rock the system without overtly appearing as if they were doing so, so as not to alarm white reactionaries. Too often Parks is depicted as merely a frail, aging seamstress who was too tired to give her seat. Very rarely is she celebrated for her other work with the NAACP and her previous legacy of activism. (And by no means was she old, at only 42!) Many contemporary observers and later commentators failed to recognize the Parks who had been radicalized since her childhood by decades of experiencing racial injustice. She was also a long-time advocate for the NAACP and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.[xv] Public memory downplays Park’s history, her early education on Marcus Garvey’s teachings, her stacks of notes on those who had faced abuse at the hands of bus drivers and policemen in the past, her training at the Highlander Folk School for activists, and her premeditated plan for the day.
Parks’ role in the day-to-day organizing of the rally is not often remembered, nor is her marginalization from leadership positions due to concerns about sexuality and respectability. The details of her bus boycott activism and its aftermath, however, must be the subject of another post.
In sum, black women were integral to the civil rights movement. Not only were they key participants in the process of mobilization and organization, but their experiences at the hands of white male officials also shaped the agendas of activism. However, due to the white mainstream perception of black womanhood as promiscuous and inherently morally corrupt, black male leaders found it prudent to very carefully select and modulate the female figures it showcased, if it showcased them at all. Because of this, both historians and the public have largely overlooked the role that women, gender, and sexuality played in the civil rights movement, and continues to affect the black community today. This last point is paramount. In order for history to be usable it must be accurate enough to show who affected change and how. In the master narrative of civil rights that has for decades been perpetuated, the women of movement and their importance is obscured. It takes narratives like McGuire’s to uncover the truer, more complex nature civil rights organizing and the motivations for it.
About the author: Katrina Cassiere is a second-year MA student working with Dr. Jennifer Thigpen. Her research examines Confederates who immigrated to Brazil during Reconstruction. In particular, she seeks to discern how American perceptions of gender contributed to the process of creating a cultural empire. She received a BA in History from Louisiana State University in May 2016.
i Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), Kindle Loc 145-179.
ii Ibid, Loc 186.
iii Ibid, Loc 201.
iv Ibid, 201.
v Jacqueline Jones Royster, ed. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900, (Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997), 53.
vi Ibid, 1.
vii Ibid, Loc 1719-1752.
viii Ibid, Loc 1822.
ix Ibid, Loc 1839.
x Ibid, Loc 1822-1839.
xi Ibid, Loc 1857.
xii Ibid.
xiii Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, and David J. Garrow, ed. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 39.
xiv McGuire, At the Dark Side of the Street, Loc 1857.
xv McGuire, At the Dark Side of the Street, Loc 1927.
Another historian interested in recovering black women’s roles in the civil rights movement is Danielle McGuire. Her work, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance, reclaims the Montgomery Bus Boycott for the many black women who made up the backbone of the movement. These women were largely left out of public narrative because of the ways in which black male leaders either excluded them from visible leadership roles or otherwise skewed the public’s perception of their roles within the movement. Black leaders felt that this was necessary for the sake of gaining and maintaining white support for civil rights. Thus, the prevailing history of the movement remembers the women as the men portrayed them, and not as they were: radical, militant, and courageous.
| Rosa Parks |
Notably, Rosa Parks was the investigator assigned by the NAACP to go to Abbeville to investigate the assault of Recy Taylor, approximately a decade before she refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, AL to spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This demonstrates something that not many people realize: that Rosa Parks was an involved civil rights activist long before she entered civil rights memory with a supposedly “solitary and spontaneous act.”[ii] Indeed, Parks had been an important activist for quite some time and was much more radical and militant than history and even her contemporaries made her out to be. After her encounter with Recy Taylor, Parks contributed to the formation of the Committee for Equal Justice, which would later become to Montgomery Improvement Association responsible for the bus boycotts. This shows that Rosa Park’s act of protest in 1955 was hardly her first, but in fact was the culmination of a long process of organizing on behalf of and by women. McGuire shows that one of the core motivations for civil rights activism was both women and women’s issues, such as sexual assault and rape. This was largely because sexual assault was a part of the tradition of racial violence. Abductions and assaults like this were unfortunately very common in the South. Historically, white men used rape as a weapon to uphold the status quo over black women during and after Reconstruction when black men and women who “tested their freedom” as a “weapon of terror.” McGuire has attempted to fix an important error in civil rights historiography that has previously overemphasized the abuse of and violence against black men, to the detriment of black women who also faced violent abuse.[iii]
White supremacists also used false allegations of raping white women to justify the widespread practice of lynching black men in the Jim Crow South. This is a phenomenon that Ida B. Wells, editor of the newspaper the Memphis Free Press, had been calling out in her publications since the 1890s after the lynching of two of her close friends, local grocers who had gotten into competition with the wrong white man’s store. Wells recognized that white female sexuality and innocence was a tool that white men used to justify their “‘system of intimidation’ designed to keep blacks ‘subservient and submissive.’”[iv] In one of her publications, Southern Horrors.: Lynch Law in all its Phases, Wells wrote, “Eight lynched in one week and five of them charged with rape! The thinking public will not easily believe freedom and education more brutalizing than slavery, and the world knows that the crime of rape was unknown during four years of civil war, when the white women of the South were at the mercy of the race which is all at once charged with being a bestial one.”[v]
With these words, Wells poked holes through white supremacy’s perception of the sanctity of white womanhood and the way white men used it to justify their violence. In the editorial she wrote immediately following her friends’ lynchings, Wells stated that “‘Nobody in this section believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men assault white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.’”[vi] Here she explicitly impugned white women for their moral indiscretions. It was often their false claims of rape that caused innocent black men to be lynched, when in fact the white women had been consensual sexual partners. However, admittedly it took little prompting for volatile white men to enact violence against a black man. Even if the white woman admitted his innocence it could mean nothing. The mere suggestion of interracial sex between a black man and a white woman would spell the former’s doom.
| Ida B Wells |
Despite not yet being able to contest the constitutionality of segregation, nor was she the first woman to be accosted as she was being arrested on a bus, Claudette Colvin was able to stimulate almost immediate support from the black community, thanks to the tireless efforts of Jo Ann Robinson. Robinson, who had been eager to launch a bus boycott for over a year, observed the way in which many black women increasingly came up with measures to avoid taking public transit in favor of organized carpooling. Community support was stronger than ever, and she thought the time was nigh. Colvin, a straight A student and member of the NAACP youth council, seemed the perfect fit.[viii]
The NAACP’s E.D. Nixon, howeverm would not be persuaded until he made a visit to Claudette’s parents. When Claudette answered the door for Nixon, he observed that she was pregnant. McGuire reports that Colvin’s mother told Nixon that, “‘My daughter done took a tumble.’”[ix] Nixon then decided that this fifteen-year-old girl with child, whose mother was too ashamed to let her be seen in public, could not possibly command the respect of the larger community in Montgomery, be it the black or the white community. Moreover, Nixon argued that Colvin’s working class background, dark skin color, and neighborhood of origin, might make her too divisive of a symbol for the boycott. Rosa Parks, keenly aware of the boundaries of female respectability in Alabama during the 1950s, agreed with Nixon that Claudette was not yet the one, and this was not yet the time.[x] Nixon and Parks knew that putting Colvin on display would merely serve to bolster white stereotypes about black female sexuality and promiscuity.
Jo Ann Robinson, according to Nixon’s account, was furious at his decision. “She ‘liked to have fit’ Nixon recalled. ‘She jumped all over me.’”[xi] Robinson likely recognized, even from the vantage of her middle class background, that Colvin represented exactly the kind of woman who got harassed and abused by bus drivers and police every day, and thus would be a fitting standard barer for the cause.[xii] However, Nixon’s account presents a rather different view of events than Robinson would later recall. In Robinson’s autobiography, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, she wrote of the decision surrounding Colvin, but presented a different view of the matter. She wrote that, “opinions differed where Claudette was concerned. Some felt she was too young to be the trigger that precipitated the movement. She might get hurt! The time for action was not now. Not everybody was ready. So, after getting opinions from various groups, the boycott was postponed.”[xiii] What different takes on the sequence of events! In Robinson’s autobiography, Colvin’s pregnancy is not mentioned, and the reason given for abandoning her cause is chalked up to age. There is a kernel of truth in the sentiment that Claudette “might get hurt,” but this is vague enough to mean anything. What can one make of Jo Ann Robinson’s disparate reactions at the time of the decision, and later in her memoir?
It is likely that Robinson, by the time she penned her memoir in the 1980s, had realized what Rosa Parks had in 1955 about Colvin’s inability to withstand the public scourge of the media given her pregnant state. McGuire stated that Rosa Parks feared that by nature of her ‘condition,’ Colvin would be branded as a “‘bad girl’” by the press and public, essentially ending the case and protest before it even started.[xiv] So, Robinson was likely trying to protect Colvin by obscuring her pregnancy in the record she left of events. In doing this, however, she also unwittingly allowed the truth about the decision to be further obscured. With her silence, Robinson only served to further perpetuate the notion that black female sexuality is problematic or shameful, and that conservative notions of female respectability dictate the boundaries of justice.
Even the story told of Parks’ protest on December 1, 1955 would be skewed and retold with an eye toward conservative respectability in mind. Nixon claimed he needed “‘a plaintiff beyond reproach.’” To achieve this, one had to rock the system without overtly appearing as if they were doing so, so as not to alarm white reactionaries. Too often Parks is depicted as merely a frail, aging seamstress who was too tired to give her seat. Very rarely is she celebrated for her other work with the NAACP and her previous legacy of activism. (And by no means was she old, at only 42!) Many contemporary observers and later commentators failed to recognize the Parks who had been radicalized since her childhood by decades of experiencing racial injustice. She was also a long-time advocate for the NAACP and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.[xv] Public memory downplays Park’s history, her early education on Marcus Garvey’s teachings, her stacks of notes on those who had faced abuse at the hands of bus drivers and policemen in the past, her training at the Highlander Folk School for activists, and her premeditated plan for the day.
Parks’ role in the day-to-day organizing of the rally is not often remembered, nor is her marginalization from leadership positions due to concerns about sexuality and respectability. The details of her bus boycott activism and its aftermath, however, must be the subject of another post.
In sum, black women were integral to the civil rights movement. Not only were they key participants in the process of mobilization and organization, but their experiences at the hands of white male officials also shaped the agendas of activism. However, due to the white mainstream perception of black womanhood as promiscuous and inherently morally corrupt, black male leaders found it prudent to very carefully select and modulate the female figures it showcased, if it showcased them at all. Because of this, both historians and the public have largely overlooked the role that women, gender, and sexuality played in the civil rights movement, and continues to affect the black community today. This last point is paramount. In order for history to be usable it must be accurate enough to show who affected change and how. In the master narrative of civil rights that has for decades been perpetuated, the women of movement and their importance is obscured. It takes narratives like McGuire’s to uncover the truer, more complex nature civil rights organizing and the motivations for it.
About the author: Katrina Cassiere is a second-year MA student working with Dr. Jennifer Thigpen. Her research examines Confederates who immigrated to Brazil during Reconstruction. In particular, she seeks to discern how American perceptions of gender contributed to the process of creating a cultural empire. She received a BA in History from Louisiana State University in May 2016.
i Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), Kindle Loc 145-179.
ii Ibid, Loc 186.
iii Ibid, Loc 201.
iv Ibid, 201.
v Jacqueline Jones Royster, ed. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900, (Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997), 53.
vi Ibid, 1.
vii Ibid, Loc 1719-1752.
viii Ibid, Loc 1822.
ix Ibid, Loc 1839.
x Ibid, Loc 1822-1839.
xi Ibid, Loc 1857.
xii Ibid.
xiii Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, and David J. Garrow, ed. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 39.
xiv McGuire, At the Dark Side of the Street, Loc 1857.
xv McGuire, At the Dark Side of the Street, Loc 1927.
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