Barbara’s uncle was Vernon Johns, a well-known pastor and advocate for Black civil rights. In fact, he was pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church before Martin Luther King Jr. took over, and was so well-known at the time that King introduced himself as Johns’s successor. As time passed and King’s fame grew, Johns the Baptist, as some called him, was relegated to the role of the man who came before Martin Luther King. Perhaps it was Vernon’s influence, but when Barbara’s teacher listened to her complaint and encouraged her to do something about it, the idea took root in Barbara’s young mind. Why not me? Barbara asked herself.
She pondered how she, a literal teenager, could fix the situation. An idea finally occurred to her: We could go on strike. She began to plan exactly how to carry out a school strike, and on the appointed morning, she had notes delivered to every teacher’s classroom. The notes said: “Come immediately to the auditorium for an emergency meeting.”[15] Once they were in the meeting, they said the Pledge of Allegiance, and then Barbara asked all the teachers to leave.
It’s hard for me to imagine teachers being like, “Okay, sure, we’ll leave you here unsupervised,” but maybe they were with Barbara in solidarity.
Barbara rallied the students to go on strike with her until they got what they wanted, which was a new school building. The students decided to contact the NAACP for help with their efforts. The NAACP later said that the students were so intent and they handled themselves so well that they would help if the students’ parents were also on board. But, the organization told them, the strike couldn’t be just about better facilities. It needed to be about equality and integration. A month later, the NAACP filed a lawsuit.[16]
Prince Edward County schools denied the NAACP’s request to integrate, but they suddenly found the money to build a new high school. After it opened in 1953, many white residents were puzzled as to why the NAACP didn’t drop their lawsuit. After the case became part of the Brown v. Board of Education cohort that made its way to the Supreme Court, Virginia senator Harry Byrd said it was “the most serious blow that has yet been struck against the rights of the states in a matter vitally affecting their authority and welfare…. In Virginia now we are facing a crisis of the first magnitude.”[17] To be clear, the “crisis” Byrd believed they were facing was that white and Black children might be ordered to share schools.
White citizens’ councils sprang up around the country, opposed to the integration of schools. Eventually, more than eighty thousand people belonged to one of these groups, who were actively working to keep races separate.[18]
After Brown v. Board II, one white group, the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberty, held a meeting in Prince Edward County. More than thirteen hundred people showed up. The group presented their plan: if a court ordered them to integrate, they would simply close the schools.[19]
Senator Byrd and other southern members of Congress signed on to “The Southern Manifesto,” which said, in part: “This unwarranted exercise of power by the Court…is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through ninety years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.” It went on to say, “We commend the motives of those States which have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means.”[20]
The Virginia General Assembly then passed a set of laws known as the Stanley Plan, which gave the governor the power to close any schools that integrated and remove their state funding.[21] But Virginia lost a series of court battles, and slowly, schools around the state began integration. Not Prince Edward County, though. Prince Edward County, a mere seventy-five miles from where Virginia Randolph was living out her retirement, decided to form private schools that were only available to white students and to give white parents tuition vouchers so their children could attend. No such provisions were made for Black students.
School closures didn’t just affect school-age children, they affected the entire family. Some parents had to enroll their children in the state welfare system so they could be placed with foster families in other parts of the state to be able to attend school. Some children lived with teachers like Virginia Randolph. Several women began grassroots learning centers in homes and churches. They wouldn’t make them full-fledged schools, because they feared that if they created private schools, it would impact their lawsuit. One student’s father rented an empty, dilapidated house across county lines to establish the fact that he lived there, so he could drive his children there and they could be picked up by the school bus.
Prince Edward County closed its public schools for five years.
The school closures lasted until the 1960s, when Attorney General Robert Kennedy got involved. “We may observe with much sadness and irony that, outside of Africa, south of the Sahara, where education is still a difficult challenge, the only places on earth known not to provide free public education are Communist China, North Vietnam, Sarawak, Singapore, British Honduras—and Prince Edward County, Virginia,” he said.[22]
In 1963, Prince Edward County schools had still not integrated, nine years after Brown v. Board of Education.
Twenty-six
Montgomery, Alabama1955
The civil rights movement was about far more than integrating buses. It was about far more than voting rights. It was about far more than Jim Crow laws. It was also about violence against Black women at the hands of white men.
Women like Recy Taylor were also the catalysts for the modern civil rights movement. Recy was a married mother walking home from a church event in September 1944 when a car of white men pulled over and forced her into their vehicle. They drove off into the woods, and six of them raped her. Then they dropped Recy Taylor off, blindfolded, on the side of the highway.
When Recy staggered into her house, bruised and broken, she told her husband and the sheriff what had happened to her. The sheriff knew immediately who was to blame, as there was only one vehicle in the tiny town of Abbeville, Alabama, that matched the description.
The day after the rape, Recy Taylor’s house was firebombed. How dare she report us, the rapists thought. She needs to shut up. Two all-white grand juries refused to charge any of the six men with a crime. The NAACP sent their best investigator, a woman named Rosa Parks. She went to Abbeville to get to the bottom of things, which led to two months of protests.[1]
You’d be mistaken if you believe that Black women did not speak up. You’d be mistaken if you thought that Black women did not risk their personal safety to work for justice. You’d be mistaken if you thought these facts were never going to see the light of day again, swept under the rug of today’s moral panic, the moral panic of learning about the real, true, beautiful, infuriating, horrific, meaningful history of the United States and calling it by some other boogeyman name like Critical Race Theory (it’s not) or labeling it a divisive concept (it’s only divisive if lies and cover-ups benefit you in some way).
What is done in darkness must come to light. Seeds of resistance, seeds of momentum, were planted not just in the hearts of men and women all over the South, they were planted in the hearts of their children and their relatives.
In 2011, the Alabama legislature formally apologized for never prosecuting anyone for Recy Taylor’s rape. At the time, Recy Taylor was ninety-two years old.[2]
Rosa, as a longtime activist and investigator, was one of thousands of Black women, men, and children who organized and resisted and planned and did not give up.
When Rosa Parks stepped on the bus on Thursday, December 1, 1955, she recognized the driver. He was the driver who, years before, had humiliated her. James Blake was an overt bigot, and often made Black riders deposit their fare, exit the bus, and then reenter the bus through the back door—they weren’t even allowed to pass through the white section of the vehicle.[3]
Back in 1943, Rosa had boarded a bus and was quickly sandwiched in by more people who boarded behind her. Blake demanded that she get off the bus and go in the back door, but she couldn’t leave. He got up to grab her sleeve to try to force her off. Rosa dropped her purse, and then used the moment she picked it up to quickly sit down in a whites-only seat.
Enraged, Blake forced her off the bus and drove away without her, taking her money and leaving her without a ride. Rosa vowed never to ride any bus driven by him again. But by the time she had deposited her fare that day in December 1955, it was too late. She had not recognized him in time.
The story of Rosa’s refusal to stand up unfolded much like Claudette’s. She was sitting in a section reserved for Black riders, behind the white section. When the white section filled, James Blake demanded that all of the Black riders in Rosa’s row get up and move. At first, none of them did. Then Blake became belligerent, yelling, “Let me have those seats!” Everyone in the row got up except for Rosa, the ember of anger toward Blake growing into a hot flame inside her chest.
“No,” Rosa said. “I got on first and paid the same fare, and it isn’t right for me to have to stand so someone else who got on later could sit down.”
“I’m going to have you arrested,” Blake seethed.
“You may do that,” she told him.[4]
Everything Rosa had done and seen had led to this moment. It wasn’t that she was tired from Christmas shopping or a long day at work. It was decades of organizing, of investigating rapes, of baking cookies to sell for someone’s legal defense. It was witnessing violence against people she knew and loved, it was a lifetime of feeling threatened and humiliated.
Nothing had been wasted. Not one moment, not one sacrifice. Everything she lived through was now being used.
She was arrested and famously photographed after being taken to the police station. Her friend’s husband, attorney Clifford Durr, came to her aid.
Rosa wasn’t alone in her efforts that December. Jo Ann Robinson (no known relation to Bernice) had a job teaching at Alabama State. She was a member of the Women’s Political Council, which was a political activism group for Black women. She was so important and integral to the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King mentioned her by name in his memoir. He said, “Apparently indefatigable, she, perhaps more than any other person, was involved in every level of protest.”[5]
Every level of protest. And few people even know her name.
When Claudette Colvin was arrested, Jo Ann was outraged, recalling a time when she was new to town and sat in a white section of a bus inadvertently, uneducated on the rules of the caste system. How dare they, she thought. How dare they treat a little girl that way. Jo Ann began collecting accounts of other people, most of them Black women, who had been abused by white male bus drivers.[6] Soon, her file was fat with papers, and she began writing letters to the city council and the mayor.[7] The mayor of Montgomery was named—get this—William “Tacky” Gayle And he was Tacky as heck too.
Jo Ann attended Claudette Colvin’s trial, and when Rosa Parks was arrested, Jo Ann stayed up all night using the mimeograph machines at Alabama State to make thirty-five thousands leaflets.[8] If you’re not familiar with a mimeograph machine, it’s a precursor to a copy machine, and you make reproductions by rotating the handle. So to make thirty-five thousands leaflets, she didn’t just press a button and come back later when the copies were done—she literally stayed up turning a handle all night long.
Jo Ann sent messages to organizers to come pick up the leaflets in the morning and distribute them all over town. One of the organizers who helped leaflet Montgomery was Claudette Colvin’s favorite teacher, Geraldine Nesbitt. The leaflets read, “This is for Monday December 5th, 1955…. Another negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. Negroes have rights too…. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. Next time it may be you or your daughter or mother.”[9]
Jo Ann drove more leaflets around the city to spread the word far and wide. By the end of Friday, December 2, nearly the entire Black community of Montgomery had agreed to a plan. The plan was cemented by Black religious leaders from the pulpit on Sunday. The following day, Monday, December 5, 1955, as many Black Montgomerians as were able would not take the bus. They would instead walk, ride bikes, call in sick, and organize carpools. They agreed to reconvene Monday evening after a one-day boycott to see how it went and if they should continue. Between thirty and fifty thousand Black residents said “enough is enough,” and refused to step foot on the bus that day.
The one-day bus boycott was so successful that the leaders agreed to make it last longer, and within a few days they had organized the MIA, the Montgomery Improvement Association, with Martin Luther King Jr. playing a prominent role.
