Claudette’s mother didn’t have a car, so she called their minister to drive her to the jail to bail her daughter out. They found her, overwrought, terrified that she would be trapped there forever like Jeremiah Reeves. “Are you all right?” her mom soothed, too worried to be mad. Claudette might have walked out of jail that day, but she didn’t wake up from the ensuing nightmare. The Colvins were now a target. They knew that it would occur to some Klan member that they should firebomb their house—or worse. No one on their street slept that night. Her father sat facing the door, unblinking, shotgun in hand.
Their family minister said to her, “Everyone prays for freedom. We’ve all been praying and praying. But you’re different—you want your answer the next morning. And I think you just brought the revolution to Montgomery.”[12] Claudette didn’t have some master plan in her mind—she was a teenager. But what she did know is that she was done pretending. She was done pretending all of this—picture Claudette sweeping her arm toward society at large—was fine. Because it wasn’t fine, and what she just had to endure on that bus, in that police car, and in that jail was evidence of that.
In 1955 Montgomery, some leaders of the civil rights movement believed this was their moment, the revolution they’d been waiting for. A boycott of the bus system, which was primarily patronized by the African American community, had been discussed for months, but leaders were afraid that the wrong person, someone whose background was questionable in some way, would stall their efforts if they became the face of the movement.
The Colvins got in touch with two civil rights workers in Montgomery, E. D. Nixon and Fred Gray. Gray was a recent law school graduate, who as of this writing is still practicing law in his nineties. Fred Gray was determined to destroy everything segregation touched, and that included the Montgomery bus system. But when Gray met with Claudette and her family, he urged them to seriously consider the repercussions of publicly fighting the charges the police had levied against her: assaulting a police officer, disturbing the peace, and violating segregation laws.[13]
But the Colvins didn’t need time to think—they were ready to move forward.
If not now, when? If not them, then who?
The first time Claudette met Rosa Parks was not long before her assault trial, when she began to attend NAACP meetings for young people. When Parks first laid eyes on Colvin, whose name was all over the papers, she said, “You’re Claudette Colvin? Oh my god, I was looking for some big old burly overgrown teenager who sassed white people out…but no, they pulled a little girl off the bus.”[14]
Rosa helped raise money for Claudette’s legal defense, baking homemade cookies and selling them after church services on sunny Sunday mornings. She and Claudette became close, and Claudette sat near her, watching as Rosa altered wedding dresses with her tiny, perfect stitches.
—
Claudette went to trial in March 1955. Fred Gray called more than a dozen witnesses who had been on the bus, all of whom attested to the same facts: Claudette did not fight back, she didn’t assault any officers, and she was sitting in the section for Black riders. The police, on the other hand, testified under oath that Claudette hit and kicked and scratched them, and they solicited letters from other white bus riders, who said that the officers were perfect gentlemen and didn’t so much as lay an unkind finger on the unruly Claudette.[15]
It didn’t take long for the judge to consider the testimony of whites and weigh it against the testimony of Blacks, and to find Claudette guilty of all the charges. He declared her a ward of the state, sentenced her to probation, and sent her home with her parents. Spectators in the courtroom brushed away their own tears, listening to the anguished sobs of the teenage girl who had just been wrongfully convicted.
Before Claudette’s case could be appealed, two of the charges—disturbing the peace and violating the city’s segregation laws—were dropped. One has to ask themselves why they would drop the charges for which it seemed so easy to gain a conviction? The most obvious answer was strategy. Prosecutors knew that Claudette’s lawyers planned to file a federal lawsuit challenging Montgomery’s bus segregation laws. By dropping the charges, they closed off the legal avenue Claudette’s lawyers needed for the challenge. Claudette’s assault conviction, however? That was upheld.
—
Clifford Durr was a southern man, born and bred. One of his grandfathers owned a plantation, the other was a cotton broker. Both of them served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Clifford was married to Virginia Foster Durr, whose sister was the wife of Supreme Court justice Hugo Black. One of Virginia’s grandfathers was in the KKK, and the other was an enslaver.[16]
You might think it odd, then, that Clifford and Virginia ultimately became civil rights activists. And you’d be right; it certainly was odd that people of the Durrs’ background and pedigree would lead them to be, not on the board of an all-white Concerned Citizens League, but instead under constant surveillance by the FBI for their “subversive” work on behalf of the Black community in Montgomery and across the South. Virginia had attended Wellesley, where Katharine Bates taught years before, and credited her time there as transformational. She befriended Rosa Parks.
Clifford Durr was an attorney who worked defending people who refused to sign loyalty oaths to the government, and Fred Gray had tapped him to help appeal Claudette’s case to the Supreme Court. But when the doors on that potential case closed, it freed up Durr’s schedule. And it was Clifford Durr who took a phone call in December 1955 from his wife’s good friend, Rosa Parks. She had just been arrested for refusing to give up her seat.
—
Several months before Rosa was arrested, Virginia Durr saw how downtrodden and tired she seemed, and she arranged for her to receive a full scholarship to the Highlander Folk School.[17] Highlander was the brainchild of Myles Horton, a white Tennessean who wanted to help the poor communities of Appalachia and the South develop leadership skills they could use. Highlander offered residential workshops in Monteagle, Tennessee, that were a week or two long.
The workshop Rosa attended was about how to go about integrating schools and other public accommodations in light of the Supreme Court’s recent Brown v. Board decision. Rosa was painfully shy, and for the first few days at the workshop, she barely spoke. But it marked the first time in Rosa’s life that she “had lived in an atmosphere of complete equality with the members of the other race.”[18] Highlander had total racial integration, which the vast majority of attendees had never experienced.
When civil rights leader John Lewis attended a Highlander workshop, he said, “This was the first time in my life that I saw Black people and white people not just sitting down together at long tables for shared meals, but also cleaning up together afterward, doing the dishes together, gathering together late into the night in deep discussion and sleeping in the same cabin dormitories.”[19]
“From the beginning,” sociologist Aldon Morris writes, “Highlander was a rarity. In the midst of worker oppression, racism, and lynchings, Highlander unflinchingly communicated to the world that it was an island of decency that would never betray its humanitarian vision.”[20]
When Rosa left Highlander after her workshop, her mood was notably changed. Virginia Durr remarked, “When she came back she was so happy and felt so liberated and then as time went on she said the discrimination got worse and worse to bear after having for the first time in her life, been free of it at Highlander. I am sure that had a lot to do with her daring to risk arrest as she is naturally a very quiet and retiring person.”[21]
And here, my friend, is where I get to introduce you to someone you should know. Because without Rosa’s time at Highlander, it’s not at all clear that she would have refused to give up her seat on the bus that December day. And Rosa’s time at Highlander would have been nothing without Septima Clark.
Twenty-three
Septima ClarkCharleston, South Carolina, 1898
Septima Poinsette Clark was the daughter of a formerly enslaved man and a laundress. She was raised in Charleston, and her mother refused to allow her children to become “domestics,” a job that involved doing domestic chores, like childcare, cleaning, and laundry for white families. Domestic work was easy to get, but it also made people extremely vulnerable to abuse and fraud. If women working as domestics were raped, assaulted, or not paid as promised, they had no recourse in the legal system that was set up to benefit whites. Victoria, Septima’s mother, wanted more for her children. So Septima became a teacher, one of the best tickets to the Black middle class at the time.
As an aside, I kept coming back to Septima’s maiden name, Poinsette. Like, poinsettia, I wondered? The Christmas flower? And in fact, yes, exactly like the Christmas flower. Peter, Septima’s father, had been enslaved at the home of Joel Poinsett, and Poinsett was friends with Andrew Jackson. Poinsett was named secretary of war under Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren.[1]
Joel Poinsett was Septima’s biological grandfather. He was an amateur botanist whose home had unique and glorious gardens, and when he was appointed the first U.S. minister to Mexico, he found that a native plant with large red flowers bloomed at Christmastime. Mexicans called it Flower of the Holy Night, but when Poinsett brought it to South Carolina, it became known as the poinsettia.[2]
As secretary of war, Poinsett oversaw the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, which dispossessed Native Americans of millions of acres of their ancestral land and forced them to move west of the Mississippi to “Indian Territory.”
So it’s remarkable that Peter Poinsette—up until the mid-1800s, many names did not have standardized spellings—grew to be a kind, gentle man who was quick to help anyone who needed him. Septima’s mother was feisty and stubborn, and Septima was raised to be a combination of both of her parents. “Strengthen each other’s weaknesses,” Septima’s father always told her. “See that there is something fine and noble in everyone.”[3]
When Septima was coming of age, Black teachers were not allowed in Charleston public schools. And I don’t just mean Black teachers couldn’t teach in the white schools, I mean they couldn’t teach at all, in any schools. Like many Black teachers, Septima was required to accept a position in a poor rural school outside the district that served only Black students.
In 1916, South Carolina had no school taxes and no laws mandating school attendance. According to historian Katherine Mellon Charron, South Carolina schools, on average, spent $48.59 per year educating a white student and $.95 educating a Black student. Only 5 percent of Black South Carolinians entered high school, and even though there were eighteen thousand more Black students than white, schools that served Black students made up only 9 percent of school properties.[4]
Black teachers often had fifty to one hundred students in a single-room school, and the school year was only three to four months long. Coleman Blease, on his first day as governor of South Carolina, proclaimed, “I am opposed to white people’s taxes being used to educate Negroes…. In my opinion, when the people of this country began to try to educate the Negro, they made a serious and grave mistake, and I fear the worst result is yet to come So why continue?”[5]
Septima’s first job was on Johns Island, one of the many barrier islands that dot the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Black residents that lived on Johns and other islands had largely been cut off from the mainland since the 1700s, when they were enslaved there as rice farmers. Over time, they developed their own culture and language, called Gullah or Gullah Geechee. Gullah was a mixture of Portuguese, English, Spanish, and West African vocabulary, put into a West African accent and grammatical structures.[6] Most outsiders couldn’t understand it, but Septima found that she could get by well enough, and what she needed to learn, she did.
Septima witnessed firsthand the abject poverty of Johns Island in 1916. Mothers were forced to work to provide for their children, and babies were often left at the edges of rice fields unattended, a “sugar tit” in their mouths. Mothers mixed together sugar and lard in a cloth and put it in the mouths of their little ones to keep them quiet. But babies would be swarmed by flies and mosquitoes, and the humid, swampy climate led to huge numbers of contagious illnesses. Infant mortality was staggering.[7]
Septima’s first classroom at Promise Land school was a log structure with no glass in the windows, so shutters were used instead. The shutters made the inside of the single room dark, and children were forced to sit on backless benches. There were chalkboards, but no chalk. There were a handful of outdated books, but none of them matched. She was paid thirty-five dollars a month, while her white counterparts made eighty-five dollars teaching three students and had all the supplies they needed.[8]
Septima was eventually able to teach in Charleston, after the NAACP became involved and threatened to sue the district if they continued to refuse to hire Black teachers for Black schools.
She married a man named Nerie Clark and had a baby girl that she named after her mother, Victoria. When baby Victoria was three weeks old, it was discovered that she had an undetected birth defect, and she died.[9]
Distraught at the loss of the daughter she deeply loved, Septima contemplated suicide. What was the point of carrying on, if carrying on meant leaving her baby girl behind? She walked down the dock overlooking the sea, pondering whether to throw herself in. Her family didn’t approve of her marriage to Nerie. She was a disappointment to them in every way, she was sure of it. Before she had a chance to act, Septima saw her little brother riding his bike toward her. Their mother had sent him out to look for her, worried that she might be thinking of doing something she couldn’t take back. “Mama wants you to come home,” he told her. She loved her little brother too much to make him watch her death, so she pushed her contemplations aside and followed him back to their mother’s house.
A few years later, Septima had another child, Nerie Jr., and then discovered something that was impossible to fully comprehend: her husband was unfaithful. And not just a cheat, but a master of deceit. When he wasn’t with Septima, she believed he was off working. But while he was away at work, he was also spending time with his secret second family, able to chalk up his extended absences to his job as a sailor. And then, shortly after Septima’s discovery, he died. Septima spent the rest of her life as a single mother, struggling to make a way for her child. For Septima, this often meant being forced to leave Nerie Jr. in the care of Nerie Sr.’s family for months at a time so she could work.[10]
