What Barbershop didn't tell you about Rosa Parks

Ebony, Feb, 2003 by Lerone Bennett, Jr.

In the movie Barbershop, one of the main characters said: "Rosa Parks didn't do nothin' but sit on her Black--." The movie triggered a national controversy which indicated, among other things, that the schools and media have not educated the post-'60s generations about one of the most significant social movements in American history. The following article is taken from the book, Great Moments In Black History, by Lerone Bennett Jr., copyright [c] 1979.

IT would grow in size and weight. It would become legend and myth and would bring blood and glory. But there was no glory in it in the beginning. In the beginning, there was tiredness, one Black woman, and a bus.

It began, if events of such magnitude can be said to have a beginning, with the woman. It began on the December day that this woman--Rosa Parks--left her job at the Fair Department Store near historic Court Square in Montgomery, Ala. The square, on this day, was festooned with red and green Christmas lights, and there was a big banner over one of the stores saying, "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men."

Rosa Parks paid no attention to the lights or the banner. She had been working since early morning as a seamstress in the department store, raising and lowering hemlines, mumbling yes ma'am and no ma'am through a mouthful of pins; and she was, she realized suddenly, unutterably weary. There was a little pain across her neck and shoulders, and there were telltale signs of throbbing protests in her aching feet.

Rosa Parks stood for a moment and considered these signs. Then she moved through the throng to the curb and looked up the streets for a bus. It was a little after 5 on Thursday, December 1, 1955. The Black Revolution was about to begin. Rosa Parks didn't know it; nobody knew it. Life flowed on in Court Square as it had since time immemorial. The Whites were overbearing, the Blacks were deferential, the businesses, the restrooms, the restaurants were segregated. It had always been like this. It would always be like this. It was a law of life; it was a law of nature. Or so most White people thought on the day it all started coming apart and coming together. The sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, Birmingham, Black Power, Watts, clenched fists, the "Afro," the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the swirling smoke of burning buildings, and the sharp, ugly sound of gunfire within blocks of the White House: it was all there, in embryo, in the scene on Court Square. But nobody noticed. Nobody paid any attention to Rosa Parks, a slim woman of 42, tidily and precisely dressed, with every strand of hair in place and rimless glasses perched on her handsome face.

If the Revolution was going to come, it was extremely unlikely that it was going to come in such a gentle and genteelly dressed package. As a matter of fact, nothing was further from Rosa Parks' mind on this day. Although she was surrounded by history, although slaves had been auctioned in this square and although it was at the Exchange Hotel across the street that "the man and the hour" came together in the beginning of the Confederacy, Rosa Parks was consumed at this moment not by history but by the tedium of survival in the Jim Crow South. She was tired, and every atom of her being was concentrated on the task of finding a seat on a bus. This was, everything considered, a small thing to ask. But it was a dangerously complicated task in old Montgomery. And to understand what happened next, and in the weeks and years that followed, one must first understand the logistics of Jim Crow travel.

In Montgomery, as in most Southern cities, most of the bus passengers were Black. Despite this fact, the first four seats on all buses were reserved for Whites and could not be used, under any circumstances, by Blacks. (It was a common sight in those days to see Black men and women standing in silence and silent fury over the four empty seats reserved for Whites.) Behind these four seats was a middle section, or no-man's land, of two or three seats which Blacks could use if there was no White demand. But "the rule was," Rosa Parks remembered later, "that if the front section filled up and one White person came to sit in the middle section," all Blacks in the middle section "had to get up and stand in the back." There was more, and worse, including a rule that Blacks had to enter the bus in front, pay their fare, get off the bus and re-enter by the back door. This was a needless provocation, and it caused no end of trouble and hard feeling. In the 12 months preceding this Christmas season, at least three Black females, including a 15-year-old girl, had been arrested for refusing to give their seats to White men.

There was no need for Rosa Parks to rehearse all this. This was a history engraved in her bones and viscera. In fact, she had been evicted from a bus some 12 years before for refusing to obey the rule that required Blacks to pay in the front and enter in the rear. But she wasn't looking for trouble on this Thursday. What she wanted, what she had to have at this moment, was a comfortable seat. She had had one of those days we all have from time to time, and a person with a keen eye would have seen that this was not the day, this was not the hour, to give this mild-mannered woman a hard time.