Indeed, part of what made Parks’s bus stand so courageous was that there was nothing to suggest that taking a stand on that day would change anything. For two decades, Parks had taken stands, other people she knew had taken stands, and by and large nothing had changed – except that people had been ostracized, hurt or killed for these actions. By that December evening, she had grown quite pessimistic about the possibility of change. “There will never be a mass movement in Montgomery,” she told the other participants at the end of a two-week organizing workshop she attended at Highlander Folk School that summer.
But when the driver asked her to get up, Parks saw the line. If she got up, she “approved of this treatment – and I did not approve”. No one on the bus joined her – worried for their safety, wanting to get home, seeing the action as fruitless. She knew what could happen to a Black woman getting arrested – that she might not get off the bus alive – but still when the officers asked why she didn’t move, she spoke back: “Why do you push us around?” There’s an aphorism that the mark of insanity is doing things over and over and expecting a different result. But that is also the definition of courage.
Late that night, she called Fred Gray, a young Black attorney she knew from the NAACP, to represent her. Gray then called Jo Ann Robinson, head of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), to let her know. And it was the WPC, who had been organizing against bus segregation for years, that decided to call a boycott for Monday, the day Parks would be arraigned. In the middle of the night, Robinson snuck into Alabama State College, where she was a professor, and with the help of two students, ran off 35,000 leaflets. (Robinson would get in trouble for doing this.) The leaflet began: “Another woman has been arrested on the bus.” The accumulation of injustice was clear.
Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King had moved to Montgomery the year before and, just two weeks before Parks’s arrest, had their first baby. The next morning at about 6am, ED Nixon woke King up; he wanted to use King’s church for a meeting that night to organize for Monday’s boycott. The then 26-year-old new father hesitated: “Let me think about it awhile and call me back.” There was no lightning bolt, no clear sign of destiny. When Nixon called back in a few hours, King agreed. In the days and months ahead, King would assume an important leadership role. But there was nothing easy about it. Like Parks, part of King’s gift was the ability to act despite fear and uncertainty. This decision would have significant consequences for their family – and by the end of the boycott, he had gained national notice. But the roles he and Coretta would come to play were complex and difficult. The movement made him as much as he made the movement.