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LEARNING FROM THE COURAGE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT  
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Jeanne Theoharis
March 17, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Many on the Left are wondering what to do against the Trump
administration’s vicious assaults on workers, immigrants, and free
speech. We can look to US civil rights activists, who kept taking
great risks even after demoralizing setbacks. _

Rosa Parks, whose refusal to move to the back of a bus, touched off
the Montgomery bus boycott and helped spark the civil rights movement,
is fingerprinted in Montgomery, Ala., Feb. 22, 1956., GENE HERRICK/AP
FILE

 

It was very difficult to keep going when all our efforts seemed in
vain,” Rosa Parks described her work in the 1940s and early ’50s.
Getting her political start with the Scottsboro Boys case in the early
1930s, Rosa Parks was part of a small band of activists in the 1940s
that sought to transform Montgomery’s NAACP into a more activist
chapter. With union organizer E. D. Nixon, they worked for the next
dozen years on voter registration and criminal justice (or the lack
thereof) for black people: trying to prevent the legal lynching of
black men and seeking justice under the law for black victims of white
brutality, particularly black women who had been raped.

Over and over, they tried to find justice — and over and over, there
was no justice.  People got scared and refused to provide testimony.
And when they did stand up, the cases went nowhere. Killers and
rapists went free. Black men were executed for crimes they did not
commit. Parks and her comrades filed affidavit after affidavit to the
Justice Department, and the DOJ turned the other way.

This was dangerous and demoralizing work — there was “almost no
way,” according to Parks, to see any progress. Amid that fearsome
climate, NAACP comrade Johnnie Carr noted, many people “lost faith
in themselves.” But their small crew kept at it, because, as Parks
explained, “someone had to do something.” They couldn’t turn
away. But she hated how a “a militant Negro was almost a freak of
nature to [white people], many times ridiculed by others of his own
group.”

We are in a frightening moment in this country, as the Trump
administration pledges mass deportations
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government workers, and now appears to be launching an authoritarian
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free speech and civil liberties. Many people have been asking me, as a
historian of the civil rights movement: How do we resist this
onslaught of racism, rights abridgment, and mass firings
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can we do? What measures will actually be effective?

The greatest lesson from studying the civil rights movement is not
that there is one right way to make change. Rather, it is summoning
the will to take action after action — even when there is little
sign that it will do any good — that does. This is not the
Hollywood-movie version of courage, where one day Rosa Parks refused
to move on the bus, people rose up, and the law was changed. In the
movie, it may take a couple years and a lot of work, but ultimately
fear is faced, bravery is rewarded, court cases are won, and injustice
is vanquished.

What the history of the civil rights movement actually shows is that
when change happens, it is often because people were courageous for
decades and sometimes generations in the wilderness. They took action
with little reason to think it would do anything, and most of the time
it didn’t. The fear didn’t go away — and sometimes it grew,
because people saw firsthand the bad things that befell
“troublemakers.” There is a well-worn adage that “insanity is
doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different
results.” But that is also, in key contexts, the definition of
courage. It doesn’t work . . . until it does.

The Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

In 1954, finding many of her peers too “complacent,” Rosa Parks
started a Youth Council for Montgomery’s NAACP. She was buoyed by
the spirit of these young people; they worked on voter registration
and organized a sit-in at the segregated downtown library. But most
parents didn’t want their kids participating for fear of
repercussions.

One who did was fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin, who on March 2,
1955, refused to give up her seat on the bus and was arrested. Black
Montgomerians were outraged, and Parks fundraised for Colvin’s case.
Black community leaders circulated a petition for better treatment
that they took to the city, which made promises it didn’t keep.
(Parks refused to go: “I had decided I wouldn’t go anywhere with a
piece of paper in my hand asking white folks for any favors.”) And
then, community leaders backed away from Colvin’s case, seeing her
as too young and feisty.

In August 1955, Rosa Parks attended a two-week workshop at Highlander
Folk School
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an organizer training school in Tennessee. She found the workshop
extremely inspiring. Nonetheless, when organizers were asked what they
would do when they returned home, Parks told those gathered that
“Montgomery was the Cradle of the Confederacy, that nothing would
happen there because blacks wouldn’t stick together. But she
promised to work with those kids.” In other words, four months
before her bus arrest, Rosa Parks left Highlander not seeing the
possibility for a mass movement in Montgomery but placing her hopes in
young activists.

Four days before her historic stand, Parks attended a packed mass
meeting; the lead organizer on the Emmett Till case had come to town
to bring the bad news that the two men who had lynched Till had just
been acquitted. The massive attention they had worked to garner for
the Till case was far beyond anything these Montgomery activists had
ever secured and had — incredibly — led to an indictment. Yet now,
Till’s killers had gone free. Angry and despairing, Rosa Parks was
at the breaking point.

On December 1, 1955, coming home from work, when bus driver James
Blake ordered her to move, she thought about Emmett Till and —
“pushed as far as she could be pushed” — she refused. “I felt
like if I got up, I approved of that treatment, and I didn’t
approve.” Part of what made Parks’s action so courageous was that
she had made stands before, other people had made stands before, and
there was nothing to suggest that it would make a difference this
time, and much to suggest that something bad could happen (which it
did — she lost her job five weeks later and never found steady work
in Montgomery again). But still, she saw an opening.

“One of the worst days” of her life, she wished someone else on
the bus had joined her. Why didn’t they? Many people would be brave
and accept the consequences if they knew their actions would make a
difference. But the catch is that you don’t know until long after
whether your courage will make a difference, and so like many people
on the bus that day — and like Congressman Al Green
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fellow Democrats during Donald Trump’s address to Congress earlier
this month — we often don’t join other people’s bold refusals.

Late that night, Parks decided to pursue her legal case. Hearing that,
the Women’s Political Council (WPC) leapt into action, deciding to
call for a bus boycott on Monday, the day Parks would be arraigned in
court. WPC head Jo Ann Robinson went to Alabama State College where
she was a professor and, in the middle of the night, ran off 35,000
leaflets to distribute around town: “Another woman has been arrested
on the bus. . . . Boycott on Monday.”

Early the next morning, Nixon began to mobilize Montgomery’s handful
of political ministers to support the Monday boycott. His first call
was to Rev. Ralph Abernathy and then, around 6 a.m., Nixon phoned
Martin Luther King to tell him about the boycott. Nixon wanted to use
King’s church, centrally located downtown, for a meeting to coalesce
support for the protest.

The twenty-six-year-old King hesitated. The Kings had a two-week-old
new baby, and he wasn’t sure he could commit, given his new family
responsibilities. “Let me think about it a while and call me
back,” he told Nixon. A few hours later, when Nixon called back,
King agreed they could meet at his church, and they worked to find
other ministers and community leaders to attend that evening. Looking
back on that Friday morning, there was no lightning bolt that showed
King what to do. Similar to Parks, part of King’s gift was the
ability to move forward despite fear and uncertainty.

Rosa Parks worried about whether the community would support her
action. And there is a new myth that they did so because she was the
“right” person. But Montgomery’s black community was at the
breaking point in no small part because of Colvin’s arrest eight
months earlier. Many of Montgomery’s activists were nervous that
weekend: Would people stay off the bus on Monday? The Kings got up at
5:30 to see when the buses began their routes at 6 a.m. “Come
quickly,” Coretta shouted at Martin. “There was not one person on
that usually crowded bus! . . . We were so excited we could hardly
speak coherently.” Parks too found that first day
“unbelievable.” Still, she wondered why “we had waited so long
to make this protest.”

In the Face of Uncertainty

After Parks’s appearance in court, a group of Montgomery’s black
male leaders (but not Parks or Robinson) met to discuss the day’s
successful protest. Many of the men still feared being publicly
associated with the action. Eventually, Nixon exploded in anger at
their hesitation: “Where are the men?” King, who had entered late,
said he wasn’t a coward and agreed to speak that night at the mass
meeting.

That night, a huge crowd packed into Holt Street Baptist Church with
thousands more congregating outside. King was terrified, and he had
only a few minutes to prepare his thoughts. But buoyed by the power of
the day’s protest, the community decided to extend the one-day
boycott into an indefinite one. Being in action had changed what
seemed possible. To sustain it, they built a tremendously organized
carpool system, setting up forty pickup stations across the city. At
its height, they were giving ten to fifteen thousand rides a day.

Police harassed the carpool system mercilessly, giving out scores of
tickets. Robinson got seventeen in the first two months. On January
26, after King gave some people a ride, police pulled him over,
supposedly for going thirty in a twenty-five-mile-per-hour zone.
Realizing it was “that damn King fellow,” the police didn’t give
him a ticket but made him get in their car and drove him around the
city — he was terrified they intended to kill him. Finally they took
him to jail.

Four days after his speeding arrest, the Kings’ home was bombed.
Both Coretta and baby Yolanda were home. She heard a thump and moved
fast, succeeding in getting them out unscathed. Furious and terrified
by the news, both Martin’s and Coretta’s fathers came to
Montgomery that night to pressure them to leave immediately — or, at
the very least, to get Coretta and Yolanda out of there. But Martin
and Coretta wouldn’t budge. “I knew I wasn’t going anywhere,”
Coretta explained. The next morning at breakfast Martin was grateful:
“Coretta . . . you were the only one who stood with me.” Facing
that pressure, where it would have been more than understandable to
leave with the baby or to insist Martin put their family’s
protection first, Coretta Scott King cut a different path. The
trajectory of the boycott and the emerging civil rights movement would
have been very different had she flinched.

Claudette Colvin stepped forward again — being willing to be one of
four women on a federal case filed against bus segregation. (No
ministers were willing to be on the suit.) That case, _Browder v.
Gayle_, went to the Supreme Court and ultimately desegregated
Montgomery’s buses on December 21, 1956.

All of those actions — a decade of Parks’s, Nixon’s and the
Montgomery NAACP’s work, Colvin’s arrest, Parks’s bus stand, the
WPC’s call for a boycott, the Kings’ willingness to step forward
and stand fast, a 382-day community boycott, a federal court case —
created this victory. Activists weren’t sure. They and their
interventions weren’t perfect. But it was the accumulation of
efforts that mattered.

What this history demonstrates is that it isn’t clear in the moment
which actions will work. Many didn’t seem to. But it was the ability
to step forward and act again and again amid that fear and uncertainty
that made the difference. It did then, and it will today.

_Jeanne Theoharis is distinguished professor of political science at
Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and the author of the
award-winning The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, which was
turned into a documentary directed by Johanna Hamilton and Yoruba
Richen._

_Jacobin relies on your donations to publish. Contribute today.
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* Rosa Parks
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* Montgomery bus boycott
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* Grassroots Organizing
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