When Everything Changed (15 page)

6. Civil Rights

“I
DON’T CARE IF SHE SINGS FROM THE TOP OF THE
W
ASHINGTON
M
ONUMENT
.”

I
n the late 1950s, Virginia Williams was traveling to South Carolina for a family funeral. When the bus passed near Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, a black soldier got on and tried to take a seat near the front. Williams can still remember her astonishment as the driver insisted that a man serving his country in the military go to the rear of the bus. “This was fifty years ago, and it’s still right there,” she said, pointing to her heart.

In the postwar era, if you had asked average black Americans such as Williams about injustice, they probably would have talked about the soldiers who risked their lives in World War II and came back to be told they did not deserve either fairness or respect. But if you had asked an average white American for an example of “injustice to Negroes,” chances are the answer would have been Marian Anderson, the singer who was denied the right to perform in the nation’s capital because of her race.

Anderson had been blessed
with an astonishing voice that was the pride of her poor Philadelphia neighborhood. Her first direct contact with racism came when she applied to a local school of music and was told coldly, “We don’t take colored.” Members of her church scraped together money to pay for private lessons instead. She eventually went to study in Europe and became a world-renowned contralto with a voice that the conductor Arturo Toscanini said “is heard only once in a hundred years.” Yet in 1939 she was prohibited from singing in Washington’s Constitution Hall. The Daughters of the American Revolution, which owned the building, cited shadowy rules and regulations, but it was clear that the problem was Anderson was black. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR in protest and lobbied her husband. “
I don’t care if
she sings from the top of the Washington Monument as long as she sings,” Franklin Roosevelt told his aides, and Anderson was invited to give a concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday.

At least 75,000 people came to hear the concert, while millions more listened over the radio. With the great statue of Abraham Lincoln behind her and a crowd stretching beyond her vision in front, Anderson was almost paralyzed when she approached the microphone. “I sang, I don’t know how,” she wrote later. When it was over, she was nearly overrun by the adoring crowd. She had gone from being a little-known concert singer to an icon who reminded Americans not just of the evils of segregation but of their capacity to do better. She had created what her agent,
Sol Hurok, called
“as nearly spontaneous an arising of men and women of goodwill… as there can be in our times.”

Marian Anderson’s story had two very different lessons. One was that if the nation’s attention was fixed on the evils of segregation, Americans would probably draw back in disgust and do the right thing. The other was that when it came to getting that attention, the bar was very, very, very high. Preventing an internationally acclaimed American singer from performing in the nation’s capital struck even many die-hard conservatives as outlandish. And Anderson was both the most sympathetic and least threatening victim imaginable. A woman of extraordinary dignity and impeccable reputation, she was always the best-behaved person in any room. She was also reluctant to make a scene or to remind her white supporters that when it came to injustice against black people, singing venues were the least of the problem.

Her sex was also very important. White Americans had always found it easier to relate to the black struggle for equal rights when it was framed around the saga of a good, abused woman.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
the book that drew so many Northern whites to the cause of abolition, was about mothers separated from their children and innocent young girls left at the mercy of lascivious slave owners. (Along, of course, with the extremely deferential Tom.) In the twentieth century, the stories about racial injustice that whites found most compelling were not generally about black men being lynched or black soldiers being welcomed home with discrimination and abuse. Rather, whites were moved by images of black women—mainly very young or middle-aged black women—who were both powerless and noble in the face of vicious racism.

Civil rights organizations were well aware of white America’s feelings, and as the NAACP went looking for test cases to challenge segregation, the targets were new versions of Marian Anderson. That was never more true than in Montgomery, Alabama, where black working people were being tormented by a bus system that consigned them to the back, required them to relinquish their seats to whites, and left the enforcement of the rules to the drivers—who often carried guns and seemed to get particular pleasure in tormenting their black passengers. “
I felt like a dog
,” said Jo Ann Robinson, a newcomer to Montgomery who inadvertently sat in the wrong place and was shrieked at by the driver, who leaped up and advanced on her with a raised fist. During the 1950s a number of black riders had rebelled, refused a driver’s order to relinquish their seats, and suffered arrest. But to the NAACP, none of them seemed perfect test cases. Some were men. One of the women, a teenager, had a slightly disreputable family. Another seemed too confrontational. Another, a minister’s wife, lacked the requisite coolness needed to face the city’s angry white power structure without being flustered. Like Goldilocks wandering through the bears’ bedrooms, the civil rights leaders rejected one possibility after another—until they found Rosa Parks just right.

Parks, an old schoolmate
remembered, was “self-sufficient, competent, and dignified” even as a child, a student who always wore a clean uniform, planned ahead, and never sneaked over to the boys’ side of the school like some of the other girls did. Even in defiance, she was a perfect lady. When the Montgomery bus driver told her to give up her seat to a white man or be arrested, the petite, middle-aged seamstress calmly replied, “You may do that.”
Later, when her husband
begged her not to allow herself to be turned into a test case, she coolly went ahead. (“He had a perfect terror of white people,” recalled a friend. “The night we went to get Mrs. Parks from the jail, we went back to her apartment and he was drunk and he kept saying, ‘Oh, Rosa, Rosa, don’t do it, don’t do it…. The white folks will kill you.’ ”) When she appeared for her court date, she wore a long-sleeved black dress with white cuffs and a small velvet hat with pearls across the top. “
They’ve messed with the wrong
one now,” cried out a black teenager, who turned out to be absolutely correct. “
My God, look
what segregation has put in my hands,” extolled the local NAACP leader, E. D. Nixon.

“Y
OU ALL ARE TOO SCARED TO STAND ON YOUR FEET
.”

Rosa Parks’s simple act of defiance in 1955 marked the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. Black Americans had always staged personal acts of rebellion and challenged segregation in court—a year earlier, the NAACP had won the landmark Supreme Court ruling on public schools,
Brown v. Board of Education.
But it was in Montgomery, after Parks’s arrest, that an entire black community rose up to express solidarity, boycotting the city bus system for more than a year. The sight of elderly women walking in foul weather, of clerks and maids struggling with makeshift car pools, broadcast to the world that Southern blacks were not, as the white community had always insisted, perfectly happy with things the way they were.

The boycott was not spontaneous. It operated on two levels: a public leadership of male ministers, headed by the charismatic young pastor Martin Luther King Jr., and an organization of women volunteers, who did the behind-the-scenes work. The women, although unsung, were not simply following the directions from above. They had long ago thought up the idea for the boycott, and they had been preparing for it for almost nine years.

The Women’s Political Council
, a quiet organization of Montgomery’s middle-class black teachers and social workers, had struggled with hostile poll workers and arcane literacy tests to register to vote themselves and then to help others register. But the bus service had been their particular target. The council head, Jo Ann Robinson, never forgot the day her long-anticipated vacation was ruined by the driver who shrieked at her until she ran, weeping, into the street. The council leaders had met with city officials over and over to complain about the service. “
True, we succeeded
only in annoying [them], but this was better than nothing,” said one of the members. When word of Parks’s action spread around Montgomery, the women were ready. The next day they wrote a leaflet calling for a bus boycott, and that midnight they were at Alabama State University, where Robinson taught, cutting a mimeograph stencil and running off 35,000 copies.
The following morning, Rosa
Parks recalled, Robinson “and some of her students loaded the handbills into her car, and she drove to all the local black elementary and junior high and high schools to drop them off so the students could take them home to their parents.”

The women were not only far better organized than the male ministers who were the public face of the black community but more radical.
While the ministers pressed
the bus company for a more orderly system of dividing the seats between the races and more courteous drivers, the women wanted total integration. The women were also more fearless. The ministers were wary of being too far out in front in so controversial an enterprise. That was why they had tapped Dr. King, a newcomer, to take the lead, and why they originally wanted to call a mass meeting without letting the white community know that they were the ones doing the calling. (
E. D. Nixon of the NAACP
said he warned the ministers that if they didn’t assume public leadership, he would let the black community know it was because “you all are too scared to stand on your feet and be counted.”)
Later, when Parks’s lawyer
was looking for a handful of volunteer plaintiffs to file a suit against the bus segregation in federal court, not a single minister volunteered to step forward. In the end, the plaintiffs were four women: Aurelia Browder, a seamstress, a widow, and mother of six; Susie McDonald, who was in her seventies; and two teenagers who had refused to give up their seats on the bus before Parks but who had been passed over by the NAACP as not quite right to carry their cause.

Parks herself was far from the simple, weary seamstress her backers tried to depict. She was one of the most active NAACP members in Montgomery. Like the women who organized the boycott, she had actually been preparing for this moment for years. But at the community meeting when the black citizens of Montgomery came together, inspired by her defiance to challenge segregation, the newly energized ministers monopolized the podium and told her she wouldn’t be required to speak. “
You have said enough
,” they assured her.

“O
THER
N
EGROES WILL HAVE THE CAREER
I
DREAMED OF
.”

When Marian Anderson was interviewed
by
Ladies’ Home Journal
in 1960, she was asked how it felt to have “accomplished everything you set out to do.” Anderson—who had just endured a cab ride with a driver who had thought she was a maid and urged her to do well by the “boss lady”—mildly pointed out that she had actually wanted to be an opera singer. Although she did become the first black performer ever invited to sing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the invitation came when she was 58 and well past her prime. “Other Negroes will have the career I dreamed of,” she told the interviewer.

By 1960 the Supreme Court had ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional and had struck down segregation in interstate transportation. (
Looking for their perfect
plaintiff in that case, the Virginia NAACP lawyers had found Irene Morgan, a married 27-year-old defense worker who was ill and on her way to see a doctor when she was arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat.) But on the ground in the South, very little had changed. The buses and trains were still segregated, and black students still went to separate, inferior schools. Joyce Ladner, who grew up in Mississippi, attended an all-black high school with no lab equipment in its science classes and was barred from using the city library her family paid taxes to support. “I felt the Hattiesburg public library held all the knowledge I wanted,” she recalled. “But my school library consisted of one bookshelf.” Blacks were still relegated to the balconies in theaters. Swimming pools and amusement parks were off-limits to black children. (Lucy Murray of Washington, DC, never forgot going on an expedition with a white friend’s family to Glen Echo Park in Maryland, where the children piled onto the merry-go-round. “All of a sudden, this state trooper came over and told me to get off.”) Restaurants, restrooms, and all other public accommodations were strictly segregated. When Marian Anderson arrived in a Southern town to sing, she was often escorted quickly and surreptitiously to a hotel room that had been reserved by special arrangement for the black guest who was too famous to reject.

If Anderson believed young black people would have a different life from hers, the young people intended that as well. Students from Southern black colleges had been holding classes in nonviolence and civil disobedience, and they began to claim what was being withheld from them. That meant sitting in at white-only lunch counters, picketing white-only restaurants, and allowing themselves to be dragged off to jail in defiance of unjust laws. The demonstrations spread quickly from Greensboro, North Carolina, to Nashville, Atlanta, and other cities, drawing in the best of the postwar generation of black youth. Many of them were children from poor families whose parents had placed all their hopes on their smart, striving sons and daughters. To join the protest movement was to risk the one clear path to a better future.
Gwendolyn Robinson, a scholarship student
at Spelman College in Atlanta, vowed to stay clear of the demonstrations: “I certainly had no intention of getting involved. I had my priorities straight. This was an opportunity of a lifetime for me; I certainly wasn’t going to blow it.” Despite her resolve, she was soon on the picket lines and then in jail. Worst of all, Robinson was forced to call her grandmother, who had raised her. “She said I had disgraced the family, reminding me that I was the first person in our family to ever be arrested. She sounded so sad, so pained. Her voice was all low and husky.”