Mortification of Blacks in Montgomery Buses
Black skin was the blacks’ basis of apparent mortification. Martin Luther King Jr elaborates, “An even more humiliating practice was the custom of forcing Negroes to stand over empty seats reserved for “whites only.” Even if the bus had no white passengers, and Negroes were packed throughout, they were prohibited from sitting in the first four seats (which held ten persons). But the practice went further. If white passengers were already occupying all of their reserved seats and additional white people boarded the bus, Negroes sitting in the unreserved section immediately behind the whites were asked to stand so that the whites could be seated. If the Negroes refused to stand and move back, they were arrested. In most instances the Negroes submitted without protest.” The prejudiced tendencies embody the ‘White versus Black’ binary which was the derivation of racism in Montgomery. The whites were reckoned to be unequivocally more privileged than the blacks.
Claudette Colvin
Claudette Colvin’s illustration elicits the imagery of tense relationship between the whites and the blacks. Martin Luther King recalls, “A few months after my arrival a fifteen-year-old high school girl, Claudette Colvin, was pulled off a bus, hand-cuffed, and taken to jail because she refused to give up her seat for a white passenger. This atrocity seemed to arouse the Negro community. There was talk of boycotting the buses in protest. A citizens committee was formed to talk with the manager of the bus company and the city com-mission, demanding a statement of policy on seating and more courtesy from the drivers.” The imagery of Claudette Colvin’s disgrace illustrates the ubiquity of bigotry. She was reckoned to be affronting the ideal of white superiority when she disregarded the conformist onus to relinquish her seat for a white. The judiciary emphatically promoted the blacks’ persecution.
Conferences
Mrs. Rosa Parks’ refusal to vacate her seat sparked monumental events. Martin Luther King convened conferences with journalists interested in the aftermath of Rosa Park’s resistance: “ But Mrs. Parks quietly refused. The result was her arrest. There was to be much speculation about why Mrs. Parks did not obey the driver. Many people in the white community argued that she had been “planted” by the NAACP in order to lay the groundwork for a test case, and at first glance that explanation seemed plausible, since she was a former secretary of the local branch of the NAACP. So persistent and persuasive was this argument that it convinced many reporters from all over the country. Later on, when I was having press conferences three times a week—in order to accommodate the reporters and journalists who came to Montgomery from all over the world—the in-variable first question was: “Did the NAACP start the bus boycott?” The systematic conferences are signs of the impression of Mrs. Rosa Parks’ antiphon. Mrs. Parks’ presented the impetus for shunning buses because the black people’s experience of prejudice had reached its bounds.
