First Parish Unitarian UniversalistIt Doesn’t Just Happen
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane D. Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
February 18, 2007
I don’t know how they chose February to be the month for Black History Month. I remember somebody once quipped, “they were only willing to give us the shortest month.”
Hopefully it’s because so many important African Americans were born in February. Activist Rosa Parks on the 4 th in 1913, author Alice Walker on the 9 th in 1944, abolitionist Frederick Douglass on the 14 th in 1817, author Toni Morrison today in 1931, actor Sidney Poitier on the 20 th in 1929, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan on the 21 st in 1936, and scholar W. E. B. DuBois on the 23 rd in 1868.
Also, born in February, on the 12 th, Abraham Lincoln in 1809 and in 1909 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And on the 26th in 1939, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution in protest of the fact that they did not allow the great African American singer Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall.
My source for these dates is the 2007 Peace Calendar published every year since 1982 by the Syracuse Cultural Workers, along with posters, bumper stickers, buttons, and greeting cards promoting progressive causes; they also sell rainbow flags, one of which has flown proudly since June 2004 on our 1825 Meeting House, prone to wrapping around its flag pole as if it knows we don’t want to lose it in a breeze!
Seeing Rosa Parks’ birthday on the calendar sparked this sermon today. It had bothered me greatly at the time of her death in October 2005 that some media reports described her as an elderly seamstress who was just simply too tired to get up out of her seat so that a white man could sit down, on December 1 st, 1955 in Montgomery Alabama. As if she was an innocent, little old lady with no clue as to the mass movement she would set in motion. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
As a former labor and community organizer myself, it really sticks in my craw that the truth about Rosa Parks isn’t better known. Similarly, last week, in my sermon on altruism, we heard about Wesley Autrey, the New York City Subway hero, who jumped onto the subway tracks to save the life of a man who had fallen there while having a seizure. Well, it turns out in a very fitting way for this sermon today, that Mr. Autrey wasn’t just a guy riding the subway and his brave action did not “just emerge” out of nowhere, either. Mr. Autrey was acting in concert with his role as a shop steward with the Laborers Union Local 79, a role which is all about helping others.
Thanks to my husband Don for that bit of news. Two weeks ago, in my sermon on the story of Mary and Martha in the Christian scriptures, we had a good laugh at his expense. So much so that the president of the congregation asked him afterwards if he “wanted equal time.”
No, I won’t go so far as to offer him equal time. But, I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for often being my sermon muse and, in particular, for bringing to my attention the Laborers newsletter article about Mr. Autrey, which was posted above the water cooler where he works in the Department of Work Environment at U-Mass Lowell.
Back to the truth about Rosa Parks…
First of all, in 1955, Rosa Parks wasn’t elderly. She was only 42. (I used to think that was elderly, but I sure don’t any longer!) She was in fact, though, a seamstress. She worked for a department store and also made extra money doing sewing for white families. She admitted to having been tired that day, but it wasn’t the first time she resisted mistreatment. As she said wryly, “I did a lot of walking in Montgomery.” (“Rosa Parks, 92, Intrepid Pioneer of Civil Rights Movement, Is Dead” by E.R. Shipp, NY Times, October 25, 2005; pp. 1, C18).
She wasn’t naïve, or unaware. She and her husband Raymond, a barber, had taken part in the earliest voter registration drives. She in fact tried to register three times before finally succeeding in 1943. She was a member of the NAACP. Not only was she a member, she was an officer of the Montgomery chapter and had been since at least 1943—so, for twelve years (“Tribute to Rosa Parks” by Pam McMichael in Highlander Reports, October 2005). In fact, it was she who signed Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter of appointment to the chapter’s executive committee, in 1955, the year after he was called to serve the Dexter Street Baptist Church there in Montgomery. (Parting the Waters: American in the King Years 1954-63, Taylor Branch, p. 124).
Not only was Rosa Parks an NAACP leader, in July 1955, she was among a few who attended an interracial leadership development conference at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee (interracial gatherings were illegal then, remember). The Highlander Center was founded in 1932 to serve as an adult education center for community workers involved in social and economic justice movements. The goal of Highlander was and is to provide education and support to poor and working people fighting economic injustice, poverty, prejudice, and environmental destruction. It helps grassroots leaders create the tools necessary for building broad-based movements for change. The founding principle and guiding philosophy of Highlander is that the answers to the problems facing society lie in the experiences of ordinary people. Those experiences, so often belittled and denigrated in our society, are the keys to grassroots power.
At Highlander, Rosa Parks later said, “I gained strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks but for all oppressed people”(Shipp) and “for the first time lived in an atmosphere of equality with members of the other race.” (McMichael).
Perhaps her experience at Highlander empowered her, so that five months later, on December 1 st, when the bus driver asked her if she was going to stand up, she said, “No, I’m not.” And when he said, “Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested,” she said, “You may do that.” (Shipp).
Back at Highlander the following March for a planning meeting, one hundred days into what would become the Montgomery Bus Boycott as a result of her “standing up by sitting down,” the founder of Highlander Myles Horton asked Parks, “What was on your mind [that day], Rosa?” She replied, “Well, in the first place I had been working all day on the job, not feeling too well after spending a hard day working. The job required I handle and work on clothing that white people would wear and that accidentally came into my mind. And this was what I wanted to know—when, how would we ever determine our rights as human beings?” (McMichael).
Twenty-five years later I, too, went to the Highlander Center for an interracial leadership development conference. This one was for women organizers in the South. I was the founder of a bi-racial organization of women office workers, Atlanta 9to5. Though the conference at Highlander wasn’t my first time living in equality with persons of the other race, it was an eye-opening first exposure to stories of rural poverty and injustice, and the struggles of rural women, both black and white, to better their lives. And I still remember Highlander’s emblematic circle of wooden rocking chairs in which we (half of us white, half of us black) sat and shared what we were learning about empowering women in our respective communities, in a large room with great views of the Tennessee hills.
I went back to Highlander Center a couple more times, one of them with my husband in 1982 on the occasion of its 50 th anniversary celebration. Rosa Parks came too, from her home in Detroit. It seemed we were in the presence of royalty. I think that may have been when I first realized that Rosa Parks hadn’t been just an old lady, tired from her hard day sewing, when she sparked history by refusing to stand up in the bus.
Why is it that Americans want to think their heroes and heroines just appear out of nowhere, innocently arising out of mundane daily life to prominence on the national stage? Why do we refuse to see the organizations behind the individual actions, why don’t we want to know that their actions are planned? Why don’t we realize that these people develop into leaders, they don’t just wake up one day a leader? Why do we want to think that change just happens?
The story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott is well-told in Taylor Branch’s first volume history of the civil rights movement, Parting the Waters: American in the King Years 1954-63, on which I will rely this morning and which is dedicated to the Choir at All Soul’s Unitarian Church in Washington DC. He reveals the combination of individual commitment and organizational preparedness that can bring about social change, in this case, social change for human rights. (I don’t doubt that a similar combination of individual commitment and organizational preparedness works for any cause, including those of the Religious Right.)
I was fascinated to read (Branch, p. 120-123) that in Montgomery in 1955 there actually had been two previous arrests of women who refused to give up their bus seat for white men. In each case, local civil rights leaders met with the family and potential witnesses to weigh carefully whether this was the case on which to base a legal attack on segregation, and decided, ultimately, “no.”
The first was in March, when an eighteen year old student named Claudette Colvin put up a feisty fight for her seat and was dragged off the bus by policemen, screaming as they handcuffed her, using language that “brought words of disapproval from passengers of both races.”
The Women’s Political Council, an organization of Negro middle class church women many of whom worked or taught at the all-Negro Alabama State College in Montgomery, conducted interviews of the likely witnesses in the case. But, it didn’t look promising. Most of the witnesses were frightened, they found, and might deny what they had seen. Colvin, on the other hand, wouldn’t recant, but she was prone to breakdowns and outbursts of profanity. Worse, they learned, she was pregnant. In the end, it was decided that an unwed teenager wouldn’t do for a case that would end segregation on Montgomery’s busses.
The following October, a white woman boarding a bus asked the driver to make Mary Louise Smith vacate a seat for her but Smith refused, was arrested, convicted and fined under the segregation law. Branch writes that “Negro activists pitched themselves into another flurry of battle preparations,” but this time, too, they decided that the arrestee wouldn’t make a good public figure—her father was an alcoholic and they lived in a “see-through clapboard shack in the country.”
So, on Thursday evening, December 1 st, when word came to civil rights leaders that one of their own, Rosa Parks, had been arrested, jailed, and charged with violating the bus segregation laws, but with no charges of resisting arrest or assaulting police officers, I think they must have had a “this might be It!” feeling.
However, no one says her action that day was planned ahead of time. Parks said later that it wasn’t really a good day for her to get arrested. She was headed home in a hurry after work that day, in order to send out notices of the NAACP’s upcoming election and prepare for a youth leadership workshop she was to lead that weekend. (Shipp).
Instead, she was hauled off to jail. Within a few hours, two fellow civil rights leaders had posted bail and she was released. Later that evening, they put the obvious question to her: “would she be willing to fight the case, the way she knew they had wanted to fight earlier with Colvin and Smith?” She asked for time to consult her mother and then husband. Branch writes, “the proposal upset both of them. Raymond Parks came nearly undone. Having just felt primitive, helpless terror when his wife had been snatched into jail, he could not bear the thought that she would reenter that forbidden zone by choice… ‘The white folks will kill you, Rosa,’ he said, pleading with her not to do it.
She decided to go ahead and quickly word was put out that night to key people. First the young Negro lawyer one year out of law school who agreed to represent Parks. He then contacted a friend in the Women’s Political Council. (I love this next part of the story as Taylor Branch tells it). The women, most of whom were active members of King’s new church, met at about midnight that night at their offices at Alabama State, under the pretext of grading exams, to draft a letter of protest of the arrest. The plan for the bus boycott emerged as they kept revising the letter. “Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus and give it to a white person. Until we do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or you or you. This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses on Monday in protest of the arrest and trial.”
But, how to get the word out? “They realized that the best way to notify Montgomery Negroes, given their lack of access to newspapers or radio, was to leaflet the town through the churches and the contacts of the Women’s Political Council. The best place to get copies of such an incendiary letter printed, they realized, was precisely where they were—at Alabama State, on the mimeograph machines. But this would require stealth” and certainly couldn’t be done during office hours. They worked all night printing 35,000 copies.
At 3 a.m., one of them took a break to call the civil rights leader E.D. Nixon to tell him the plan. He instantly approved, saying he’d thought of something similar himself. Nixon was a train porter and leader of the Alabama chapter of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first Black union in the US. He had to leave on a train run through Atlanta to New York and back that day, but told her he would call a planning meeting to take place that afternoon without him. At 5 a.m. he started calling the leading black ministers to ask for their support and explain the boycott. King said he’d think about it. Nixon said, fine, but told King he wanted to use King’s church basement for the meeting. Nixon went on to make the rest of his calls. The last of which was to a white newspaper reporter, tipping him off about the boycott. Then he boarded his train.
The meeting did take place at King’s church. He and fifty Negro leaders came. They endorsed the bus boycott plan. They drafted a short leaflet, based on the women’s letter, that announced the one-day boycott on Monday as well as a mass meeting on Monday night for further information. They called the city’s 18 Negro taxi companies to ask them to transport Negroes to work on Monday for the cost of a bus ride, ten cents, instead of their normal fares. They printed leaflets. And dealt with myriad details.
By the next day, Saturday, thousands of Montgomery’s Negroes had either seen the leaflets or heard the news word of mouth. But, there was one minister of a black church who couldn’t seem to confirm the rumors he’d heard about it. Though his church was black, it was a Lutheran “mission church” and the denomination had sent an eager young white man right out of seminary. Being a white man, his parishioners weren’t sure they could trust him with the news of the boycott, so no one answered his questions.
So, he decided to phone the person he knew best outside his own congregation (having been shunned by most of the whites in town), the woman who used his church building for her NAACP Youth Council. “Mrs. Parks,” he said, “I keep hearing that somebody was arrested on the bus and there’s going to be a boycott. Is that true? Who was it?” There was a long pause. “It’s true,” Parks said, almost sheepishly. “It was me, Pastor Graetz. I was the one arrested.”
“You?” he exclaimed. He rushed over to the Parks home to get the details. And the next morning, from his pulpit he announced that he and his family would observe the boycott, and he urged his members to do likewise. A murmur of approval went through the congregation. King, Abernathy and all the rest of the Negro clergy made similar announcements that Sunday.
On Monday morning, as Branch tells it, the Kings were up before dawn keeping watch at the front window for the first morning bus. “When Coretta saw the headlights cutting through the darkness, she called out to her husband and they watched it roll by together. The bus was empty! The early morning special on the South Jackson line, which was normally full of Negro maids on their way to work…was empty. So was the next bus, and the next. In spite of the bitter morning cold, their fear of white people and their desperate need for wages, Montgomery Negroes were turning the City Bus Lines into a ghost fleet. King, astonished and overjoyed, jumped into his car to see whether the response was the same elsewhere in the city. It was. He drove around for several hours, watching buses pass by carrying handfuls of white passengers.”
I’d love to tell you the rest of the story in this much detail, but unfortunately time won’t allow. As you know, the boycott that Monday was wildly successful. “Some blacks rode in carpools. Others rode in black-owned taxis…But most black commuters—40,000 people—walked, some more than 20 miles.” (Shipp). At a planning meeting that afternoon, the Negro leaders met, decided on the negotiating demands for the bus boycott, formed a bus boycott organization, elected the newest minister (King) in town as its President, and planned the mass meeting to be held that night. To everyone’s complete astonishment, 5000 people by police reports and 2-3 times that by Negroes’ reports, showed up for the mass meeting, so many they filled the streets outside around the church. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his first public speech as a civil rights leader, perfectly tapped and even increased the energy and commitment of the people who had walked everywhere that day.
The non-violent Montgomery Bus Boycott went on for 381 days--more than a year of organizing, car pooling, planning meetings and mass meetings-- more than a year of withstanding arrests, imprisonments, and all manners of violence against them--and not responding in kind, for more than a year.
On December 20, 1956 U.S. Supreme Court notifications arrived at the federal courthouse in Montgomery and deputy U.S. marshals served notices on city officials. The buses were to be integrated. That night, King told a mass meeting that the walking was over. The next morning, before dawn, he boarded a city bus with a couple other Negro ministers and a white activist, with whom King sat near the front of the bus for a photo op. “We are glad to have you,” the driver politely said as he pulled from the curb. He even went so far as to make an unscheduled stop to pick up Pastor Graetz, the white Lutheran minister who had supported the boycott from day one.
It’s a tremendous story of faith, courage and organization, isn’t it? As we all know, it was just the beginning of a tremendous struggle that would include boycotts and sit-ins, voter registration drives, marches and rallies, Supreme Court decisions and landmark legislation.
None of it “just happened.” None of its leaders “just emerged.”
They found their leadership voices and learned their leadership skills in organizations. E.D. Nixon in his union. Rosa Parks and others in the NAACP and at Highlander Center. The Women’s Political Council members, Rev. King and the other clergy, in the Black Church. So many got their start, and their inspiration to keep up the long hard work of organizing for change, in the church.
Let me end by quoting from Dr. King’s first speech, on the night of the first day of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
“And I want to tell you this evening that it is not enough for us to talk about love. Love is one of the pinnacle parts of the Christian faith. [But] there is another side, called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which would work against love. God is not just the God of love. He’s also the God that standeth before the nations and says, ‘Be still and know that I am God—and if you don’t obey Me I’m gonna break the backbone of your power—and cast you out of the arms of your international and national relationships.’ Standing beside love is always justice.”
Amen.