Lorraine Hansberry wrote of black Chicago, “All travelers to my city should ride the elevated trains that race along the back ways of Chicago. The lives you can look into!
“I think you could find the tempo of my people on their back porches. The honesty of their living is there in the shabbiness. Scrubbed porches that sag and look their danger. Dirty gray wood steps. And always a line of white and pink clothes scrubbed so well, waving in the dirty wind of the city.
“My people are poor. And they are tired. And they are determined to live.
“Our Southside is a place apart: each piece of our living is a protest.”16
Because segregation was the major enemy of the community, the defeat of segregation was a major goal. Just as the music evolved with the changing times, so did the style of activism shift with urbanization.
Angelo Herndon, a young black Communist labor organizer in the South, told of many clashes with the old “accommodationist” leadership. The following story, from his experiences in Birmingham in 1930, reflects both the urgency of his wish to be free, and his rage at the old styles of fighting.
“On my way home one day I got on a trolley. I sat among the Negroes in the Jim Crow section in the rear. Iron bars separated us from the whites. As many of the latter kept coming on we were shoved back into the rear behind the bars, which were movable. I felt like a monkey in the zoo. I knew I was going to lose my temper upon the slightest provocation. I had been sitting on a bench right behind these bars when some white boys in front of me asked me to move back. This made me angry. I said:
“‘What do you mean? I paid my cold cash to ride on this car just as you did and you can bet your sweet life I won’t budge.’
“Meekly other Negroes on the car began moving back, urging me to do the same. I felt so ashamed of them! A Negro preacher sitting across from me came over to me and whispered in my ear:
“‘Please, son, for the Lord’s sake, don’t do that. You’ll only cause trouble for yourself and for all of us. What need is there for it? You know you don’t own this car. White people run things like they want to, and it’s not up to us to tell them what to do.’
“Revulsion seized me, and I said to him:
“‘Dear Reverend, will you please go and take ten steps to hell!’
“The conductor finally came back and rudely asked me to move over. I rose from my seat and said to him:
“‘You white people are so civilized that you seem to think that you can afford to behave worse than savages toward us defenseless Negroes. I know you hate us, but it strikes me awfully funny that you are ready to accept money from a black hand as well as from a white. Now understand me clearly, I’ve paid my fare to ride this car and I won’t give up my seat to any white man until hell freezes over!’
“The conductor said to the white boys:
“‘Leave him alone—he’s crazy.’”17
Angelo Herndon, who was crazy for freedom, was jailed shortly thereafter for “attempting to incite insurrection,” a charge that carried the death penalty. A young black Harvard-educated lawyer, Benjamin J. Davis, stepped forward to represent him. It is possible that Ben Davis recognized in Angelo Herndon the “crazy-for-freedom” characteristics of his Grandfather Davis, who was beaten half to death by his owner, yet refused to give up his defiance. Finally, after protecting his wife from a beating, Grandfather Davis was sold away from the plantation and never seen again.
That ferocious appetite for freedom was passed along to Ben Davis’s father, who published a small black newspaper, the Atlanta Independent. On one occasion a bundle of papers was returned from a small town called Covington, and someone had scribbled the words “Nigger Ben, we don’t allow this paper in this town stirring up trouble among our niggers. Keep it out of here and stay out of here yourself.”
The elder Davis refused to be intimidated by the Ku Klux Klan; a few weeks later he set off for Covington, where he had arranged to give a talk on the Constitution. That subject entitled the black people of the area to secure a room in the Covington courthouse. Young Davis accompanied his father. A group of two hundred black people and fifty whites awaited their arrival. On entering the courthouse, all the black men removed their hats, but the whites did not. Ben Davis remembered the tense atmosphere, and the pockets of men, black and white, bulging with firearms.
“My father rose to speak, and my heart was in my mouth. ‘Fellow citizens,’ he began, ‘white and black. I am glad to see that my people respect this courthouse by removing their hats.’
“That was the challenge and my father had boldly chosen the issue—it was an audacious one. We looked around at the audience. Naturally, our eyes fell on the white men standing around the wall with their hats on. What would they do?
“My father paused a full minute, awaiting the reaction to the blow he had struck. As he later explained, he wanted to see whether the whites hated the Negroes so much that they would not respect their own courthouse.
“The next move was up to the badly outnumbered whites slumped along the walls. After about two minutes, one removed his hat. Then another followed suit. One of them walked out. Slowly and sullenly, as if they realized they were beaten, all who remained removed their hats.
“The tension relaxed.”18
Not only did he win the moment, but the senior Davis won subscriptions as well. His son went on to become a councilman from Harlem, the first member of the Communist Party to hold such a position. He was jailed for his beliefs during the McCarthy period. His activism took a different political course from his father’s Republicanism, but like his forebears—and like his client Angelo Herndon—he remained crazy for freedom.
At about the time Ben Davis was getting out of federal prison, Rosa Parks started the modern civil rights movement by refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. In Montgomery, black bus riders were exposed to a degree of humiliation and danger that is nearly unimaginable, considering—from the perspective of our times—that blacks were consumers paying for a public service. Astounding as it may seem, bus drivers, as enforcers of segregation, were given free reign in abusing the black passengers:
• Blacks couldn’t sit in the first rows of seats reserved for whites, even if there were no whites on the bus—even if there were no whites on the bus route!
• If the white section of the bus became full, black people were expected to give up their seats to the white people—and not simply the seat needed for the person, but to vacate the row of seats so that the white person might sit in a “white row.”
• Blacks were forced to pay at the front of the bus, then dismount and enter via the rear entrance. It was not uncommon for black people to be left behind, even though they had paid their fares.
• Angry bus drivers could—and frequently did—throw blacks off the bus, have them arrested, yell at them in a humiliating manner, and hit them. In some cases this led to the permanent injury and even death of the black bus rider.
The black community of Montgomery, dependent on the buses for transportation, was thoroughly and repeatedly traumatized by these racist practices. They had tried to meet with the city and the bus company to win courteous treatment. One brief interlude of peace was won, but matters quickly reverted to the high levels of abuse and traumatization.
Jo Ann Robinson and other members of the local Women’s Political Council, frustrated by the failure of their efforts to negotiate with the bus company, had agreed years before to boycott the buses when the time was right. They had even worked out some fundamental logistics, such as how to spread the word throughout the black community.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, who was known to all as a “respectable seamstress,” was arrested for refusing to give up her seat in the “colored” section to a white man. Jo Ann Robinson and her colleagues agreed the time had come. Rosa Parks was a beloved woman and dedicated community leader.