Black. Revolutionary. Life.

Like the black mammy of white women's dreams in every Hollywood movie ever, Black people rushed to the ballot boxes in Alabama to save both the Republicans and America from its racist self. And when the smoke of political fire cleared Black women had handed Roy Moore a mighty defeat -- all 98% of them (Black men = 92%). Even still, one question lingered: were Black voters voting against Roy Moore, OR were they consciously casting their lot with the other white dude, Doug Jones, the Democratic challenger?

Our history holds the answer.

In the summer of 1961, Robert Kennedy implored Black student activists to redirect their immensely successful direct-action campaigns toward more peaceful voter registration efforts. Kennedy, backed by the Justice Department, essentially argued that the free exercise of the ballot would result in profound and significant social change. Starving for political power and haunted by the violent arrest the sit-in actions levied, Black citizens understood quite well that the collective strength of their voices at the ballot box could substantially shift their political reality. By October of the following year four of the nation's leading Black organizations, SNCC, NAACP, SCLC, and CORE, joined forces to help administer the institutionally-funded Voter Education Project. The major battle grounds were, of course, Mississippi and ALABAMA.

White political opposition to Moore's candidacy was rooted in the very real possibility of loosing an election to a moral and political reprobate. White America's collective memory around their oppression of Black bodies -- both political and physical -- is at best reprehensibly short-term and at worst… "We gave you your freedom, what else do you want?" But that was before Tr**p. At this point one need not search very hard to find life-long Republicans who are considering how best to apologize for the last presidential election. Black voters in Alabama, however, did not want to take a chance at staying home on this election day. So they voted with their feet. Although most Black residents in Alabama are Democrats, they could not have cared less about Doug Jones. He wasn't their guy either. 

For Black Americans elections are not about liberation. We are well aware that the freedom we ultimately seek will not be secured at a ballot box. The electoral system in this nation is not even designed to facilitate that. In America you can win the popular vote by two million and still lose the election. In America the powers that be can change polling times, removes voting machines, and find any number of creative ways to slow down, if not all together block Black people from voting. Any notion of fair democracy, one in which those most marginalized are protected and their richer, more powerful marginalizes held to account is yet an ongoing project. Black people comprehend this better than anyone.

In the coming years, Montgomery would see the arrest of many more Black women — Viola White, Claudette Colvin, Katie Wingfield — and even children who dared to challenge entrenched white power by violating the city’s segregation laws on the public bus lines through their refusal to vacate seating reserved for white passengers. Throughout the nation Blacks (and increasingly their white solidarity partners) were beginning to evince heightened levels of intolerance to, and direct action against, Jim Crow segregation. Their objective was less about the individual indignities of anti-Black racism they encountered on Montgomery’s bus lines, as it was about the imperative to confront systemic white supremacy itself.

In 1952 Montgomery police shot and killed a Black man over a fare dispute literally as he exited the bus. In yet another particularly horrid 1953 example, Epsie Worthy refused a white bus driver’s coercive attempt to rob her of an additional transfer fee. “Rather than pay again,” says Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, one of the boycott lead organizers and head of the Montgomery Women’s Political Council (WPC). “[Worthy] decided that she did not have far to go and would walk the rest of the way.” Angered by Worthy’s principled resistance the bus driver leapt from his seat and violently beset upon her. Although she mounted a valiant defense, fearlessly returning counter strikes to the white driver’s rain of fists, she would ultimately suffer a loss this day, which meant jail and a fifty-two dollar fine. After the arrest of eighteen-year-old Mary Louise Smith on October 21, 1955 Black Montgomery drew a proverbial line in the sand.

Out of Montgomery’s total Black population (which numbered nearly fifty thousand), more than half of all the Black women laboring outside of their homes found paid work as domestics in white homes — far beyond the economic safe haven of labor protection laws or a union. Unable to afford private vehicles due in large part to their shamefully low wages, Black domestics relied heavily upon the city’s public transportation system. Herein, as a directly affected group, Black domestic workers became the all-important foot soldiers of the Montgomery bus boycott. The thoroughly networked social and cultural lives of domestic workers proved to be an invaluable resource for the success of the boycott. As seasoned guerrillas, Black women clandestinely transported food, items, and, most critical to the boycott, key information gradually gleaned from white conversations eavesdropped upon.

1950’s Montgomery was home to a significant community of Black women, many of whom held professional-class careers as principals, professors, nurses, and social workers. Brown University historian, Dr. Françoise Hamlin, in her multiple award-winning book, Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II, remarked on the powerful regional influence of the Montgomery bus boycott: “… Black Clarksdale continued efforts in 1956 to apply pressure on the foundations of segregation. The news of the Montgomery bus boycott had spread fast in Mississippi. If change could happen in Alabama, why not Mississippi?”

Charged with getting the boycott off the ground, middle-class women of the WPC were essential to the initial organizational effort of the boycott. However, labor scholar Premilla Nadasen points out that during the 381-day-long boycott the remarkable networking acumen of domestic workers was indispensable:

They filled the pews at mass meetings and served as the foot soldiers that made the boycott a success, and they also exhibited leadership by raising money and mobilizing others in the community to support the campaign.

Black women, like Parks, who labored away from the home in relative isolation — particularly domestic workers — routinely suffered the compounded indignities of white supremacy on their return trips home. Throughout the day Black women often found themselves verbally accosted by white female employers, and sexually assaulted by white male employers. Thus, on the bus ride back to their communities Black women held little tolerance for the inhumane social violence that was part and parcel of a racially segregated public transit system, especially one that they largely financed. Racist and misogynist epithets like “‘coons’ … ‘Black nigger,’ ‘Black bitches,’ ‘heifers,’ ‘whores,’” were humiliating daily occurrences as Robinson remembers.

Rosa Parks was arrested for engaging in a nonviolent, direct action against state-sponsored white supremacy. Parks clearly was not the first Black woman to resist segregated seating, nor was Montgomery’s the first public transit protest by African Americans. Yet, over the years Parks has been arguably the most essential protagonist in liberal white America’s fictive narrative of acceptable Blackness. Throughout the decades Parks has come to be embraced as an icon in the American cultural imaginary following the moment of the 1955 bus boycott, indeed one of the most sophisticated boycotts in the long Black radical tradition. However, her courageous and radical activism can be traced back some twenty years prior to her calculated refusal to cede her dignity to white supremacy on that bus in 1955. As early as 1932 Parks and her husband began holding clandestine meetings in their Montgomery home to organize support, legal and otherwise, for the Scottsboro Boys -- nine Black teenagers who had been framed-up for the alleged rape of two white women.

Parks reflected on the fugitive gatherings at her home:

“Whenever they met, … they had someone posted as lookout and someone always had a gun.”

At one particular meeting Park recalls the men, armed and seated together at a small card table:

“This was the first time I’d seen so few men with so many guns. I didn’t even think to offer them something to drink … I don’t know where I would have put any refreshments. No one was thinking of food anyway.”

In the early 1940s, a full decade later, as part of a campaign to combat political violence, Parks and her husband began organizing “Voter League meetings,” McGuire explains, “where they encouraged their friends and neighbors in Montgomery to register to vote, even though it was a dangerous proposition.” Blacks in Montgomery were obliged to pay a $1.50 (approx. $25 today) poll tax and pass a literacy test ostensibly designed to “prove their intellectual fitness to vote” -- something white people were either not required to do or given the answers for. After a third attempt, Parks succeeded in registering to vote, but not without a clever political tactic. Her method? During the last try she hand-copied each question from the literacy test in preparation to “bring suit against the voter registration board” had the registrar tried to deny her a third time. Recognizing Parks’s intrepid action as a potential legal threat, they decided to certify her voter registration… by mail. Only white citizens received immediate certification on site.

Twelve years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott Parks flouted Alabama segregation law by refusing to exit the front door of a city bus and re-enter from the rear door. (Under Jim Crow, Montgomery segregation statutes stipulated that Black bus passengers must pay at the front, but enter to be seated by way of the rear door. They could not walk past the “whites only” seating area.) Enraged by her dignified defiance the driver lunged at Parks, grabbed her sleeve, and shoved her toward the door. In a display of resistance so as to forestall any further physical violence Parks warned the attacking driver, “I know one thing, you better not hit me!” Pretending to drop her purse, Parks intentionally sat on a front seat and kneeled to pick it up… taking her sweet time, of course. “Get off my bus!” cried the cracker driver.

Soon after being assaulted on the bus Parks would join the Montgomery NAACP chapter, becoming part of a tiny minority of Black women in the local organization. Parks’s husband, Raymond Parks, had been actively involved with the NAACP in the 1930s, but soon grew disenchanted with the domesticated organization, and left. Jeanne Theoharis, a 2014 NAACP Image Award winner and eminent Rosa Parks historian, observed that Raymond’s discontent with the NAACP was rooted their persistent “cautiousness and elitism, which led some to look down on working-class men like himself…”  

The pretentiousness of the NAACP notwithstanding, Rosa Parks, a working-class woman, decided to join the organization and was immediately voted in as secretary of the chapter… a gendered decision sharply informed by the societal patriarchy absorbed within the organization. Soon Parks assumed the task of traveling throughout Alabama “interviewing people and documenting acts of brutality, unsolved murders, voter intimidation, and other racial incidents.”

As Parks quickly emerged as a leading figure in the Montgomery NAACP branch her mother, Leona Edwards, became increasingly concerned about Parks’s radical activity in the organization. E. D. Nixon, the new branch president and comrade of Parks, a man whom Harrison Wofford, special assistant for civil rights under President Kennedy, called “Gandhi with guns” reminisced that Parks’s mother said…

“The white folks was going to lynch us, her and me both.”

Her mother’s sobering warning was not without merit. In 1944 Parks was dispatched to Abbeville, Alabama to conduct an interview with twenty-four-year-old Recy Taylor. Taylor had been kidnapped on her walk home from church by six white men who blindfolded and gang raped her at gunpoint. Although Taylor reported the heinous crime to the police, nothing was done. Parks’s presence in Abbeville was under close surveillance. During her meeting with Taylor the deputy sheriff burst into Taylor’s home with two options for Parks: leave town or face arrest. Collecting her notes, Parks fled back to Montgomery and straightway begin mobilizing many of the “city’s most militant Black activist,” explains McGuire, toward the cause of justice for Taylor.

By 1945 the fruit of Parks’s radical organizing work began to garner national attention with the formation of the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor. This coalition of Black political organizations from across the country sought to see the six white rapist brought to trial. The Chicago Defender, the most important Black press outlet during the era, called this the “strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade.”