Jeanne Theoharis
Jacobin
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| Martin Luther King Jr. (à esquerda) discute o boicote aos ônibus de Montgomery com outros organizadores, incluindo o Rev. Ralph Abernathy (segundo da esquerda) e Rosa Parks (terceira da esquerda), 27 de janeiro de 1956, em Montgomery, Alabama. (Don Cravens / Getty Images) |
"Foi muito difícil continuar quando todos os nossos esforços pareciam em vão", Rosa Parks descreveu seu trabalho nas décadas de 1940 e início dos anos 1950. Começando politicamente com o caso Scottsboro Boys no início da década de 1930, Rosa Parks fez parte de um pequeno grupo de ativistas na década de 1940 que buscava transformar a NAACP de Montgomery em um capítulo mais ativista. Com o organizador sindical E. D. Nixon, eles trabalharam pelos próximos doze anos no registro de eleitores e na justiça criminal (ou na falta dela) para pessoas negras: tentando impedir o linchamento legal de homens negros e buscando justiça sob a lei para vítimas negras de brutalidade branca, particularmente mulheres negras que foram estupradas.
Várias vezes, eles tentaram encontrar justiça — e repetidamente, não havia justiça. As pessoas ficaram assustadas e se recusaram a dar depoimento. E quando se levantaram, os casos não deram em nada. Assassinos e estupradores ficaram livres. Homens negros foram executados por crimes que não cometeram. Parks e seus companheiros apresentaram declaração após declaração ao Departamento de Justiça, e o DOJ virou para o outro lado.
Este era um trabalho perigoso e desmoralizante — não havia "quase nenhuma maneira", de acordo com Parks, de ver qualquer progresso. Em meio a esse clima assustador, o camarada da NAACP Johnnie Carr observou que muitas pessoas "perderam a fé em si mesmas". Mas sua pequena equipe continuou, porque, como Parks explicou, "alguém tinha que fazer alguma coisa". Eles não podiam se afastar. Mas ela odiava como um "negro militante era quase uma aberração da natureza para [pessoas brancas], muitas vezes ridicularizado por outros de seu próprio grupo".
Estamos em um momento assustador neste país, pois o governo Trump promete deportações em massa, corta funcionários essenciais do governo e agora parece estar lançando uma repressão autoritária à liberdade de expressão e às liberdades civis. Muitas pessoas têm me perguntado, como historiador do movimento pelos direitos civis: como resistimos a esse ataque de racismo, redução de direitos e demissões em massa? O que podemos fazer? Quais medidas serão realmente eficazes?
A maior lição do estudo do movimento pelos direitos civis não é que existe uma maneira certa de fazer a mudança. Em vez disso, é convocar a vontade de tomar ação após ação — mesmo quando há poucos sinais de que isso fará algum bem — que faz. Esta não é a versão cinematográfica de coragem de Hollywood, onde um dia Rosa Parks se recusou a sair do ônibus, as pessoas se levantaram e a lei foi alterada. No filme, pode levar alguns anos e muito trabalho, mas, no final das contas, o medo é enfrentado, a bravura é recompensada, os processos judiciais são vencidos e a injustiça é vencida.
O que a história do movimento pelos direitos civis realmente mostra é que, quando a mudança acontece, geralmente é porque as pessoas foram corajosas por décadas e, às vezes, gerações no deserto. Elas agiram com poucos motivos para pensar que isso faria alguma coisa, e na maioria das vezes não fez. O medo não foi embora — e às vezes aumentou, porque as pessoas viram em primeira mão as coisas ruins que aconteceram com os "encrenqueiros". Há um ditado bem usado que diz que "insanidade é fazer a mesma coisa repetidamente e esperar resultados diferentes". Mas essa também é, em contextos importantes, a definição de coragem. Não funciona... até que funcione.
As origens do boicote aos ônibus de Montgomery
Em 1954, achando muitos de seus colegas muito "complacentes", Rosa Parks iniciou um Conselho da Juventude para a NAACP de Montgomery. Ela foi encorajada pelo espírito desses jovens; eles trabalharam no registro de eleitores e organizaram um protesto na biblioteca segregada do centro. Mas a maioria dos pais não queria que seus filhos participassem por medo de repercussões.
Uma que o fez foi Claudette Colvin, de quinze anos, que em 2 de março de 1955 se recusou a ceder seu assento no ônibus e foi presa. Os negros de Montgomery ficaram indignados e Parks arrecadou fundos para o caso de Colvin. Black community leaders circulated a petition for better treatment that they took to the city, which made promises it didn’t keep. (Parks refused to go: “I had decided I wouldn’t go anywhere with a piece of paper in my hand asking white folks for any favors.”) And then, community leaders backed away from Colvin’s case, seeing her as too young and feisty.
In August 1955, Rosa Parks attended a two-week workshop at Highlander Folk School, an organizer training school in Tennessee. She found the workshop extremely inspiring. Nonetheless, when organizers were asked what they would do when they returned home, Parks told those gathered that “Montgomery was the Cradle of the Confederacy, that nothing would happen there because blacks wouldn’t stick together. But she promised to work with those kids.” In other words, four months before her bus arrest, Rosa Parks left Highlander not seeing the possibility for a mass movement in Montgomery but placing her hopes in young activists.
Four days before her historic stand, Parks attended a packed mass meeting; the lead organizer on the Emmett Till case had come to town to bring the bad news that the two men who had lynched Till had just been acquitted. The massive attention they had worked to garner for the Till case was far beyond anything these Montgomery activists had ever secured and had — incredibly — led to an indictment. Yet now, Till’s killers had gone free. Angry and despairing, Rosa Parks was at the breaking point.
On December 1, 1955, coming home from work, when bus driver James Blake ordered her to move, she thought about Emmett Till and — “pushed as far as she could be pushed” — she refused. “I felt like if I got up, I approved of that treatment, and I didn’t approve.” Part of what made Parks’s action so courageous was that she had made stands before, other people had made stands before, and there was nothing to suggest that it would make a difference this time, and much to suggest that something bad could happen (which it did — she lost her job five weeks later and never found steady work in Montgomery again). But still, she saw an opening.
“One of the worst days” of her life, she wished someone else on the bus had joined her. Why didn’t they? Many people would be brave and accept the consequences if they knew their actions would make a difference. But the catch is that you don’t know until long after whether your courage will make a difference, and so like many people on the bus that day — and like Congressman Al Green’s fellow Democrats during Donald Trump’s address to Congress earlier this month — we often don’t join other people’s bold refusals.
Late that night, Parks decided to pursue her legal case. Hearing that, the Women’s Political Council (WPC) leapt into action, deciding to call for a bus boycott on Monday, the day Parks would be arraigned in court. WPC head Jo Ann Robinson went to Alabama State College where she was a professor and, in the middle of the night, ran off 35,000 leaflets to distribute around town: “Another woman has been arrested on the bus. ... Boycott on Monday.”
Early the next morning, Nixon began to mobilize Montgomery’s handful of political ministers to support the Monday boycott. His first call was to Rev. Ralph Abernathy and then, around 6 a.m., Nixon phoned Martin Luther King to tell him about the boycott. Nixon wanted to use King’s church, centrally located downtown, for a meeting to coalesce support for the protest.
The twenty-six-year-old King hesitated. The Kings had a two-week-old new baby, and he wasn’t sure he could commit, given his new family responsibilities. “Let me think about it a while and call me back,” he told Nixon. A few hours later, when Nixon called back, King agreed they could meet at his church, and they worked to find other ministers and community leaders to attend that evening. Looking back on that Friday morning, there was no lightning bolt that showed King what to do. Similar to Parks, part of King’s gift was the ability to move forward despite fear and uncertainty.
Rosa Parks worried about whether the community would support her action. And there is a new myth that they did so because she was the “right” person. But Montgomery’s black community was at the breaking point in no small part because of Colvin’s arrest eight months earlier. Many of Montgomery’s activists were nervous that weekend: Would people stay off the bus on Monday? The Kings got up at 5:30 to see when the buses began their routes at 6 a.m. “Come quickly,” Coretta shouted at Martin. “There was not one person on that usually crowded bus! . . . We were so excited we could hardly speak coherently.” Parks too found that first day “unbelievable.” Still, she wondered why “we had waited so long to make this protest.”
Diante da incerteza
After Parks’s appearance in court, a group of Montgomery’s black male leaders (but not Parks or Robinson) met to discuss the day’s successful protest. Many of the men still feared being publicly associated with the action. Eventually, Nixon exploded in anger at their hesitation: “Where are the men?” King, who had entered late, said he wasn’t a coward and agreed to speak that night at the mass meeting.
That night, a huge crowd packed into Holt Street Baptist Church with thousands more congregating outside. King was terrified, and he had only a few minutes to prepare his thoughts. But buoyed by the power of the day’s protest, the community decided to extend the one-day boycott into an indefinite one. Being in action had changed what seemed possible. To sustain it, they built a tremendously organized carpool system, setting up forty pickup stations across the city. At its height, they were giving ten to fifteen thousand rides a day.
Police harassed the carpool system mercilessly, giving out scores of tickets. Robinson got seventeen in the first two months. On January 26, after King gave some people a ride, police pulled him over, supposedly for going thirty in a twenty-five-mile-per-hour zone. Realizing it was “that damn King fellow,” the police didn’t give him a ticket but made him get in their car and drove him around the city — he was terrified they intended to kill him. Finally they took him to jail.Four days after his speeding arrest, the Kings’ home was bombed. Both Coretta and baby Yolanda were home. She heard a thump and moved fast, succeeding in getting them out unscathed. Furious and terrified by the news, both Martin’s and Coretta’s fathers came to Montgomery that night to pressure them to leave immediately — or, at the very least, to get Coretta and Yolanda out of there. But Martin and Coretta wouldn’t budge. “I knew I wasn’t going anywhere,” Coretta explained. The next morning at breakfast Martin was grateful: “Coretta . . . you were the only one who stood with me.” Facing that pressure, where it would have been more than understandable to leave with the baby or to insist Martin put their family’s protection first, Coretta Scott King cut a different path. The trajectory of the boycott and the emerging civil rights movement would have been very different had she flinched.
Claudette Colvin stepped forward again — being willing to be one of four women on a federal case filed against bus segregation. (No ministers were willing to be on the suit.) That case, Browder v. Gayle, went to the Supreme Court and ultimately desegregated Montgomery’s buses on December 21, 1956.
All of those actions — a decade of Parks’s, Nixon’s and the Montgomery NAACP’s work, Colvin’s arrest, Parks’s bus stand, the WPC’s call for a boycott, the Kings’ willingness to step forward and stand fast, a 382-day community boycott, a federal court case — created this victory. Activists weren’t sure. They and their interventions weren’t perfect. But it was the accumulation of efforts that mattered.
What this history demonstrates is that it isn’t clear in the moment which actions will work. Many didn’t seem to. But it was the ability to step forward and act again and again amid that fear and uncertainty that made the difference. It did then, and it will today.
Colaborador
Jeanne Theoharis é professora renomada de ciência política no Brooklyn College, City University of New York, e autora do premiado The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, que foi transformado em um documentário dirigido por Johanna Hamilton e Yoruba Richen.
Jeanne Theoharis é professora renomada de ciência política no Brooklyn College, City University of New York, e autora do premiado The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, que foi transformado em um documentário dirigido por Johanna Hamilton e Yoruba Richen.
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