0 - Eureka Street

Brian F. McCoy
Tired of the injustice
Fifty years ago Rosa Parks inspired African Americans by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man,
and her example is still inspiring Aboriginal people today
0 N
' D cccMBU '955, a Thu"day
night in Montgom ery, Alabama, Rosa
Parks, 42, boarded a bus to head home.
It had been a long h ard day and she
was tired. She and three other African
Americans sat in the fifth row, the farthest
forward they were allowed. After a
few stops the first four rows were fi lled
with whites and a white man was still
standing. By law in Alabama black and
white could not share the sa me row. The
other three stood. She refused.
The bus driver threatened to call the
police. Everyone else stood up except her.
'Go ahead and call them,' she said, 'I'm
not moving.' The police came; she was
arrested and later charged. This was not
the fi rst time an African American had
protested against racial discrimination or
refused to give up their scat on a public
bus. But this time was to prove different.
Rosa was a committed Christian
who belonged to the African Methodist
Episcopal Church. She had worked with
Dexter Nixon, secretary of the National
Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, and enjoyed considerable
respect in her own community.
When she later said, 'Our mistreatment
was just not right, and I was tired
of it,' she gave voice to a feeling many
others could share. This time, facing a
driver who had refused her once before
because she would not enter the bus by
the rear door, she realised she had taken
an important step. She was found guilty
and fi n ed $14.
Her charge, violating a city segregation
code, provided the opportunity for a legal
test case in the United States Supreme
Court. However, the result of that challenge
rem ained more than a year away.
Her arrest touched and encouraged others
to act, and within three days a boycott of
Montgomery buses h ad been called. On
the evening before the boycott, a you ng
Baptist minister stood up and spoke to a
large assembled church gathering. 'There
com es a time,' he reminded them, 'when
people get tired.' He added: 'We are tired
of being segregated and humiliated; tired
of being kicked about by the brutal feet of
oppression.' The speaker was 26-ycar-old
M artin Luther King. Ordained a Baptist
minister at 19, Nobel Peace Prize recipient
at 35, assassinated at 39.
Later that night the enormity of the
challenge was revealed. Any protest, the
assembled group realised, would need to
stand up against the violence that continued
to be expressed by white people and
institutions towards them . And, as if that
wasn't enough to contend with, the protesters
also h ad to consider possible retaliation
by their own people. In many cases
they were the ones most directly affected
by the hardship of a bus boycott.
As the imminent danger and risks
dawned upon them , King would la tcr recall,
'The clock on the wall read almost midnight,
but the clock in our souls revealed
that it was daybreak.' Whatever his oratory
that night, and whatever the skills a nd
energy others brought to that meeting, it
was Rosa Parks who provided the mom ent
others could identify with and support.
She was not the only one who was tired.
Rosa Parks, at th e time of th e bus boycott,
and left, in a 2001 photograph.
The Montgom ery bus boycott went for 381
days and proved a success. In many ways it
launched a significant but painful chapter
in the journey to achieve American civil
rights. In the following decade there was
King's letter from Birmingham Jail ('there
comes a time when the cup of endurance
runs over'), his 'I have a dream' speech ('In
spite of the difficulties and frustrations of
the moment, I still have a dream'), and the
250,000 people who gathered at the Lincoln
Memorial to hear him that clay in August
1963. There was the 'bloody Sunday' demonstration
in Selma, Alabama, in March
1965, the hundreds of school children
and teachers who protested and who were
arrested that same year. There were the
many young university students who
were spat upon, abused and assaulted as
they protested non-violently against racial
inequality and injustice.
Three of those students were Michael
Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James
Chaney. They were only in their early
twenties when they entered Mississippi in
January 1964 to support the right of people
there to register to vote. 'Nowhere in
the world is the idea of white supremacy
m ore firmly entrenched, or more cancerous,
than in Mississippi,' Schwerner said.
22 EUREKA STREET NOVEMBER- DECEMBER 2005