Claudette Colvin (13 page)

It was the first of millions and millions of steps to come. The Montgomery bus boycott was born.

C
LAUDETTE:
Mom and Velma went to the mass meeting, but I stayed home. I was in a different mind. I was depressed, I was pregnant, I had been expelled from school, and I was leaving home. I had already taken the NAACP records back to Rosa's house and left them with her mother.

Right before Christmas, Mom drove Velma and me to Birmingham. We had
Christmas there with my birth mother's family and visited some friends. Then Mom and Velma went back to Montgomery. I was on my own.

That was an important time for me. My parents were so strict, especially Mom. She tried to make all the decisions for me. Being away from her in Birmingham gave me a chance to clear my head. I thought a lot about what was going down in Montgomery.

A protest of some kind had been coming on for a long time. Black people weren't going to take segregation much longer. If you were black, you experienced abuse every day of your life. Every day. You couldn't even walk through the park without looking over your shoulder for a policeman. The bus boycott was a way of expressing anger at the system at last.

I was thinking, Where are we going? In church the adults kept saying Reverend King would eventually be driven out of Montgomery or they'd murder him, since whites would never give in. People were saying the boycott wouldn't succeed. But I was glad it was happening. So many black people were just struggling from day to day—most of us. We had to do it. There had been so much injustice, from Jeremiah Reeves to all the horror stories involving black women abused by white men, to my own arrest. I really wanted to be a part of the boycott.

I also used the time to clear my head about my own life. When I left Montgomery, everyone was saying I was “mental” and “crazy.” But I wasn't. The most horrifying part of my last year hadn't been finding out I was pregnant, or getting kicked out of school. It was the sound of the jailer's key in the cell door. It was my arrest. And I had gotten through that. The pregnancy was, in a way, a chance to regroup and think about my life. I was a healthy young woman and I was going to have this baby, and I would deal with motherhood when it came. I could take the G.E.D.—a high school equivalency exam—in Montgomery and get my diploma that way.

I only stayed in Birmingham about two weeks. I missed my dad, Q.P. He was always there for me. Besides, I'd had justice on my mind for a long time. Just because I was pregnant didn't change my mission. I had been talking about revolution ever since Jeremiah Reeves. I wanted to be part of the bus boycott even if I couldn't be a leader. I had helped get all this started.

So I went back home.

We are going to hold our stand. We are not going to be a part of any program that will get Negroes to ride the buses again at the price of the destruction of our heritage and way of life
.

—W. A. “Tacky” Gayle, mayor of Montgomery

W
ITH THE TURN
of the new year of 1956, Montgomery throbbed with excitement. Day by day, reporters and photographers poured into town to cover the Negro bus protest in the heart of Dixie. As the boycott entered its second month, black leaders continued to press for the same three modest changes that Jo Ann Robinson and others had requested two years earlier—which did not include integrated seating—but city officials wouldn't budge. “Give them an inch and they'll take a mile,” they told one another. The City Lines bus company declared the proposed changes illegal and said that, unfortunately, their hands were tied.

Members of Montgomery's black community gather at the Holt Street Baptist Church in support of the boycott

Mass meetings continued at black churches every Tuesday and Thursday night. Young, round-faced Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who urged boycotters to refrain from violence and seek charity toward whites in their hearts, inspired crowds with stirring speeches that often included ideas and philosophies from distant times and places. He talked about the power of love to change the world. “He had poetry in his voice, and he could snatch scripture outa the air and make it hum,” said E. D. Nixon, who admitted “he was saying it better 'n I ever could.” King began to emerge as a charismatic national figure.

Determined to apply economic pressure peacefully, black protesters let the nearly empty buses rumble on by like green ghosts, ignoring the doors that snapped open invitingly at the corners, and devised their own transportation system. Coached by leaders of Baton Rouge's bus boycott of 1953, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) designed an alternative to the buses on the scale of a wartime military transport system, moving tens of thousands of maids and yard men and clerks and students around Montgomery's far-flung neighborhoods every day. And it was entirely voluntary—it ran on dedication, generosity, and hope.

The MIA network was unveiled in detail at a mass meeting on December 12. There would be forty-two morning pickup “stations” and forty-eight evening stations scattered throughout Montgomery. These points had been carefully plotted on maps by mail carriers, the workers who knew the city best. The central dispatch station would be a black-owned downtown parking lot, manned by an on-call transportation committee. The “buses” would be a giant car pool consisting of ordinary people's automobiles. Car owners were asked to lend their vehicles to the MIA car pool so that other people could drive them around town. For most people, especially if they had little money, having a car was a proud symbol of status. Letting total strangers drive one's car around all day was a hard thing to ask, but nearly two hundred people turned over their keys to the boycott.

Here's how it worked: a maid needing to get across town to her white employer's home would walk to the morning station nearest her home and wait for a ride. After work she would walk to the nearest night station to be picked up and driven to a drop-off point nearer her home. Since it was against the law for private cars to charge fares like licensed taxis, the network would be paid for by donations collected at the mass meetings. Most of the rides would be free.

Though the network was elegantly designed, there were not enough seats in the car pool to replace an entire city bus system. Thousands of black
workers, including many who were elderly and some who were disabled, set out from home in the predawn darkness and walked miles each day. Some preferred to walk to show their support for the boycott rather than accept a ride even from the MIA car pool. One MIA driver told the story of having come upon an elderly woman hobbling along the road. “Jump in, grandmother,” he said to her, pushing open the door. She waved him on. “I'm not walking for myself,” she said. “I'm walking for my children and my grandchildren.”

The third month of the boycott and another day of walking

Family members made enormous sacrifices and sometimes hobbled home with barely enough energy to eat supper. And family chores like shopping had to continue. That meant more steps. The foot-weary warriors told their stories at the mass meetings, inspiring and encouraging one another to keep walking.

Many were initially skeptical of the boycott. “When they first sent the leaflets saying ‘don't ride the bus,' I was worried about my momma,” remembers Alean Bowser. “I got angry, and I said they'd better not do anything to her. I thought she'd still go on
riding the bus because she did housecleaning and she worked far away from home. But then they had worked out this whole plan of having people to drive and pick up. I got behind it. I and three other girls from my typing class at school started working at the Baptist Center, typing up and mimeographing lists of the people who were driving in the bus boycott. We had to make the list every third night in order to keep the information current. They had stations downtown. Who was driving this direction and that direction. I had to call the drivers and make sure they were still willing and available. And people in most families had walking jobs, too. I was appointed to walk downtown and pay our bills. But I could use the network for that, too.”

Boycott supporters climb out of one of the dozens of station wagons that were purchased during the 381-day protest. Many of the vehicles were assigned to churches