AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We continue now with Part 2 of our history lesson with Brooklyn College historian Jeanne Theoharis, author of The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks. She has just written a piece in The Guardian newspaper about Rosa Parks, about “What we get wrong about the Montgomery bus boycott — and what we can learn from it.”

It was December 5th, 1955, that the Montgomery bus boycott was launched, after, on December 1st, 1955, Rosa Parks sat down on the bus. Many people characterized her feelings at the time as she was just sick and tired of standing up so white passengers could sit down. But in Part 1, we went through her decades of activism, the fact that she was the secretary of the local NAACP, had been challenging racial injustice, the rapes of Black women, horrified and galvanized by the murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, just months before.

Professor Theoharis, in Part 1, you took us through her sitting down on the bus, colleagues outside printing out tens of thousands of mimeograph sheets saying a bus boycott would begin. That was Jo Ann Robinson, December 5th, 1955. Take it from there.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: So, a couple of things. One of my favorite quotes from Rosa Parks when she gets arrested is she finds it “annoying.” And I think what we can hear in that is there is nothing to suggest that some history-changing moment has just happened. Many of us know that mugshot of Rosa Parks. It’s often misattributed to be the mugshot from that evening. It is not. It is a mugshot, actually, from an arrest she has a couple months later when they arrest — they indict and arrest 90 boycott leaders. But we’ll get to that. But that’s the first thing. There is nothing to suggest that this is a history-changing moment. And, in fact, many of Montgomery’s longtime activists that weekend worry: Will people stay off the bus on Monday when she’s going to be arraigned in court? Because, to remember, it starts off just as a one-day boycott.

The King — so, we have a young Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King. They’ve been in Montgomery just about a year, and they have had their first baby two weeks earlier. So they are brand-new parents. They’re very nervous. In fact, they get up at 5:30 to see if people stayed off the buses. And they were like, “Well, maybe if 60% stay off, we’ll be good.” So, there, like, the bus goes by. People — there’s nobody — no Black people on it. And another. This is at 5:30 in the morning. King calls it a “miracle.”

AMY GOODMAN: Who calls Dr. King and says, “We want to use your church”?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: So, right about then, they get a call from E. D. Nixon. E. D. Nixon is one of Montgomery’s longtime, stalwart union activists, NAACP activists. And as we talked about in the first part, he and Rosa Parks have spent the past decade trying to turn the Montgomery NAACP into a more activist chapter. And what E. D. Nixon knows — oh, sorry, I need to wait. Wait, wait, wait. We got to go back.

This is three days earlier. This is not Monday morning. This is Friday morning. He wakes King up, because E. D. Nixon wants to use King’s church — this is the day after Rosa Parks has made her bus stand — because Nixon knows you have to get the community leaders on board. We’ve got the Women’s Political Council fanning out, putting the leaflets there, and Nixon knows we need the community leaders. King’s church, Dexter Avenue, is located right downtown, if you know Montgomery, right across from the Capitol. It’s very centrally located. Nixon wakes the Kings up. Again, they have a new baby.

Like most of us, when somebody wakes you up at 6 a.m. and wants to use your place for a meeting, guess what he says. He says, “I need to think about it. Can you call me back?” And I mention that because the ways that we remember the Montgomery bus boycott is that it’s so destined to work that it just seems to proceed, you know, inexorably. And I think the thing we have to understand is, over the course of those days and that year, people are having to make hard choice after hard choice. When Nixon calls King back a few hours later, he says, “Yes, you may use my church.”

That night, they have a meeting at his church. Rosa Parks is very nervous. Will people, like, be — you know, like, what will they think of what she did? The meeting doesn’t go well at first. And then, finally, Jo Ann Robinson speaks, and Rosa Parks speaks, and people decide, “OK, we will support this boycott on Monday.” And again, as I mentioned, everyone’s nervous: Will they stay off the bus?

In fact, as some people may know, about four months earlier, Rosa Parks had attended Highlander Folk School. It’s an adult organizer training school in Tennessee. At the end of that workshop, when they say, “What are you going to do when you go home?” she says, “There’s never going to be a mass movement in Montgomery, so I’m going to work with the young people.” Rosa Parks, by 1955, had really started to despair of a movement with her peers. And across her life, here and over the next decades, she puts her greatest hope in the militancy and spirit of young people. So, this is four months before the boycott. She’s saying there’s never going to be a mass movement, people are never going to stick together, and Montgomery is the cradle of the Confederacy.

So, what unfolds December 5th is so stunning to her. It’s so unbelievable. And it’s so stunning to so many people, that there is a mass meeting that night at Holt Street Baptist Church, and people decide, “We’re going to turn this one-day boycott into a longer boycott.”

Now, again, in the way we remember it and tend to talk about it, it’s all about walking. It is not. How they sustain a 382-day boycott is they build this incredible carpool system, where they set up 40 pickup stations around the city, and you can go to one of those stations, and you can get a ride to work or to the doctor. At the peak of it, as I mentioned, they’re giving 15,000 to 20,000 rides a day. That’s massive. The city hates it. And so, also — 

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, let’s talk about this.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: The bus system is a business.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: It’s a business.

AMY GOODMAN: They relied on Black people to ride those buses.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yes. And that’s a very important point. Let us underline that. This is a disruptive consumer boycott. It is meant to be. They are accused — King and the many of the leaders of the Montgomery Improvement Association are accused of being disruptive. They’re accused of being just like the segregationist White Citizens’ Councils for using an economic boycott. We need to remember also, again, we’ve, like, sanitized this. We assume everybody would be on board with this. Everybody was not on board. We want to remember the national NAACP will support the legal challenge, but it will not support the boycott, because, again, it is too disruptive. So, A, it’s a disruptive consumer boycott, and the city doesn’t like it. So, outside of all those pickup stations, the police sit there, and they give ticket after ticket. Jo Ann Robinson gets like 17 tickets.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain again who Jo Ann Robinson is.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Jo Ann Robinson is the head of the Women’s Political Council. It’s the Women’s Political Council that organizes that first day of the boycott. She gets 17 tickets in the first couple months of the boycott. The police —

AMY GOODMAN: Tickets for?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Like, for driving people, for being at pickup stations. The police, like, egg and throw, like, horrible stuff on her car. I mean, the city is doing all sorts of things to try to break the boycott. And when the tickets don’t work, they decide to dredge up this old anti-syndicalism law, sort of anti-boycott law, and they indict 90 boycott leaders. So, that famous mugshot of Rosa Parks, that famous mugshot of Martin Luther King, that’s from this arrest.

AMY GOODMAN: And that was when?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: That’s February 1956. We’re two months in. So, then, you know, the city’s trying to break the back of the boycott by indicting its leaders. They make a crucial error, because that actually redoubles people’s sort of commitment. And so, you see the goals of the boycott change. Originally, it was just first come, first serve; respectful treatment on the bus; hiring Black bus drivers. When the city goes so hard, when we get into the second and third month, that’s when the community — again, each action then widens the possibility of what can be imagined. And I think that’s another lesson about how movements work — right? — is that taking steps helps to sort of see sort of possibilities that one couldn’t have imagined.

But this is not without cost. So, Rosa Parks loses her job five weeks in. Her husband loses his job. About eight weeks into the boycott, the Kings’ house is bombed, and Coretta and baby Yolanda, who’s 10 weeks old by this point, are home. And Coretta acts fast, and she gets them out unscathed. But that night, both her father and Martin’s father show up, because they are scared, they’re angry, and they want them out of there. “You’ve done enough. You should leave.” And — 

AMY GOODMAN: They’d only been there for a year.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yes, and this is — I mean, King has just turned 27. Coretta is 28. This is their first baby. This is completely understandable. But she, Coretta Scott King, says, “No, we’re not going anywhere.” And if she had — I mean, it would be understandable, right? They got out OK this time, but you can’t assume you’re going to get out OK the next time. But they stay put.

And I think this is also a lesson, as a more middle-aged person now, right? We have two moments in the Montgomery bus boycott where adults don’t always trust sort of younger people. We have the Kings, both Kings’ parents being like, “Get out of here.” Obviously, a few months earlier, we have adults in Montgomery deciding not to stick with Colvin’s case. They see her as too feisty, too emotional. Again, Colvin is the 15-year-old who had been arrested on the bus back in March.

AMY GOODMAN: Who had sat down on the bus before.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And they thought she wasn’t — couldn’t be the symbol of the Montgomery bus boycott, if that were to happen.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right, in part because she — again, she was 15. But again and again, young people step forward, because one of the things that Fred Gray, Rosa Parks’ young lawyer, 25 years old — there’s a lot of young people in this story — decides is, learning from that Viola White case we talked about in the first part, they worry that the state will just hold up Rosa Parks’s appeal in state court.

AMY GOODMAN: Viola White, who had sat down on the bus.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yeah, yes. And that had been a decade earlier, and the state had used that tactic, never to hear her appeal. So, Gray decides to file a proactive case into federal court. That case will become known as Browder v. Gayle. Four Black women — Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald and two teenagers, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith — are on that case. Gray wants a minister. No ministers are willing to be on that case, but two teenagers step forward. And it is that case that makes its way all the way to the Supreme Court and leads to the desegregation of Montgomery’s buses, December 21st, 1956.

So, again, I think the lesson of the Montgomery bus boycott is much harder, but much more beautiful, right? It is a story of a community that builds this incredible carpool system. We have Black women, Black women’s groups in Montgomery actually competing every week at the mass meeting who can sort of, like, bring more money. They’re selling pies. They’re selling cakes. They’re selling lunches. Georgia Gilmore’s Club from Nowhere, and then Inez Ricks’ club, Friendly Club. So, there’s this incredible fundraising Black women are doing. There’s this carpool system they’ve developed. There’s the sort of learning that they’ve had.

And so, Gray files this, you know, proactive federal case. I should say Rosa Parks is not on that federal case for two reasons. One, he doesn’t want it thrown out because she has a case in state court. He doesn’t want it thrown out on a procedural reason. The second is there is some worry that Rosa Parks’ long activist history, her longtime work with the NAACP — we want to remember that the NAACP is being red-baited in the wake of the Brown decision. It will be outlawed in the state of Alabama by June of 1956. So, her political history is seen as perhaps a liability, and so they decide to keep her off that federal case.

AMY GOODMAN: Where is the white community throughout this?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: The white community is outraged by the boycott, by using an economic boycott. In fact, you see white people trying to organize a reverse boycott, and so they try to — or, like, tell people to take the bus. So there’s a reverse boycott. As we mentioned with King, but there’s a set of leaders, like, find their homes bombed — E. D. Nixon. The one white minister who is supporting the boycott, Reverend Graetz, his house is bombed. So, there’s physical violence. There’s economic violence. As we mentioned earlier, Rosa Parks loses her job. A number of people lose their jobs.

There’s criticism. Many moderates in Montgomery will criticize the Montgomery Improvement Association, which is the organization running the boycott, the new organization that’s been found, of being just like the segregationist White Citizens’ Council for, you know, using an economic boycott. We have the Montgomery newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, calling it “dangerous.” There’s a lot of red-baiting happening. All sorts of rumors snake through Montgomery’s white community about Rosa Parks. They say she’s a communist. They say she’s Mexican. They say she has a car. Right? But, you know, at base, this is about calling her an outside agitator, right?

And so, there’s a — I think, sort of going back to where we started, part of the power of the Montgomery bus boycott, and part of what we can learn from it, is that the rightness and the righteousness aren’t necessarily going to be visible at the moment. Right? There’s tremendous red-baiting. They’re being called un-American. Now how we celebrate the Montgomery bus boycott is it’s like the most American thing ever.

AMY GOODMAN: And, I mean, the different movements that come out of this? E. D. Nixon, known for the organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters — 

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — and the significance of that?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, the Black porters on the trains going across the United States.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right. I mean, there’s — I mean, and in part, what the Montgomery bus boycott also shows is all of these people coming together who have been active for years. So, one of the things Rosa Parks will say, and E. D. Nixon will say, in that decade before her bus stand, is how hard it was to keep going when all our efforts seemed in vain. And I think that that, to me, in this moment that we’re living in, is perhaps the greatest lesson of this — right? — is the lesson of, like, making step after step, not knowing which of them are going to be the one, but sort of having a faith that you just have to keep making those steps, that the courage Rosa Parks has is the courage of perseverance.

AMY GOODMAN: So, in that year, you also have the launching of Dr. Martin Luther King. And explain what happened, because Rosa Parks was responsible for that.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right. So, we go back — right? — to the day after her bus stand, right? And we have E. D. Nixon calling Dr. King, wants to use his church. King agrees, but this is a hard decision. Then, on Monday — right? — when she’s arraigned in court, we’ve had the successful one-day boycott.

AMY GOODMAN: December 5th, 1955.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: December 5th, 1955, successful one-day boycott. And they have a meeting to talk about having — there’s going to — like, there’s a meeting of the male leaders. Rosa Parks isn’t invited. Robinson is not invited. But a number of the male leaders, civil rights leaders in town, meet. And there’s going to be a mass meeting that night, as we mentioned, at Holt Street Baptist Church. But none of those ministers want to speak. They’re scared. And E. D. Nixon erupts in anger. And he’s like, “You’re cowards. These women, who basically walked that day — right? — to stay off the bus. You’ve been — you know, they’re leading you.” And King comes in late. Again, this is — he’s 26 years old, and he says, “I’m not a coward, and I will speak.”

So, that’s Monday night. He’s terrified. He doesn’t have very long to prepare. He’s shaking. Coretta can’t even come, because, again, we’re just two weeks after the birth of their first child, so she’s still not allowed to leave the house. Now, what we know is, that night, King, you know, finds his voice. We begin to see kind of the Dr. King that we will sort of see emerge begins that night. He talks about, when the history books are written — right? — they will say, sort of, a great — you know, “A great people lived here in Montgomery.” And I’m paraphrasing him, but it’s a beautiful speech.

But I think we want to remember, this is going to take — this is not, like, inevitable. The Kings have to take step after step. As we mentioned, the parents come down after the house is bombed. Then, when King gets indicted, when all the boycott leaders are indicted, his dad again says, “You’ve done enough. Don’t go back.” They’re actually in Atlanta. He’s giving a speech. King’s like, “I’m going to go back. I’m not going to abandon this.” Right? So, the pressure and how hard it is and how scary it is, I think we often sort of erase that from it. And over the course of that year — right? — Dr. King will kind of emerge as a local leader and, in some ways, as a national leader. But that process, in many ways, the movement makes him as much as he makes the movement. And finally, that he — it is a — the Kings have to make choice after choice. They have to step and step again and again.

This is, I think, the kind of most important lesson of the Montgomery bus boycott, is it’s not about making one choice, and then the world opens up — right? — or one choice, and the fear goes away. No. It’s about making choice after choice, and of saying, “We are the people to do this. We can stand fast” — right? — “having that conviction” — right? — “that this is unjust, it’s immoral. And we are going to refuse until it changes.”

AMY GOODMAN: What was that day like when the Supreme Court decision came down? What did the integration of the bus system of Montgomery look like?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: So, it actually — back in those days, it would take a while for the decision to get — so, the decision actually happens in November, but it doesn’t make its way down, and then 'til — so, December 21st, Montgomery's buses are integrated. There are famous pictures both of King and of Parks getting on the bus that day.

But white people in Montgomery are angry. And so you actually see a real flurry of violence afterwards. You know, the Kings’ house is bombed again. Graetz’s house is bombed again. People are attacked at bus stops.

Going back to the Parks family, as we mentioned, Rosa Parks loses her job. Her husband loses his job. They never find steady work in Montgomery ever again. So, in fact, Rosa Parks — Rosa and Raymond Parks will be forced to leave Montgomery eight months after the boycott’s successful end, because they still don’t have work, they’re still getting death threats, and so they will move to Detroit to what she will then describe as “the Northern promised land that wasn’t,” and she will spend the second half of her life challenging the racism of the North.

AMY GOODMAN: And the whole motto, “Make America Great Again,” harkening back to when? These times, before the integration? And the latest move of President Trump to remove Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth, the day that celebrates the end of slavery, off of the day for people to come into the national parks —

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — for free, and instead putting his own birthday on that list, June 14th. Your thoughts, bringing what happened then to today?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: I mean, I think — and Dr. King’s daughter, Bernice King, said it more eloquently than me, that part of what upsets her much more — right? — is the defiling of kind of the social safety net, so what’s happened with SNAP and making people reapply and this, the —

AMY GOODMAN: One in five children go hungry in the United States.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Exactly. The horrible violence we were watching in the earlier part of the show about ICE, masked ICE members. So that part of what Bernice King, Dr. King’s daughter, kind of reminded us is that it’s those things that are most upsetting to her and would be most upsetting to her father, that, yes, it is wrong that they’ve taken the holiday off the national parks, but what is far wronger is the kinds of injustice that we’re seeing, and in many ways the kinds of ways that people are — that some people are giving in to the politics of fear — right? — and being silent, right? And Dr. King would talk a lot about people who prefer order to justice, that famous quote from the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” that we’re going to remember “the silence of our friends,” right? So that I think the other reminder that I think he gives us in this moment is the need to step forward, even though it may — you know, may cost things — right? — and to oppose what we’re seeing today.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeanne Theoharis, historian, professor of political science at Brooklyn College, author of 13 books about the civil rights movement and the fight for racial justice in the United States, including the award-winning book, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, which was made into a film by director Yoruba Richen. Professor Theoharis’s latest book is King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside the South. And we'll link to her piece in The Guardian, headlined “What we get wrong about the Montgomery bus boycott — and what we can learn from it.” We’ll link to it at democracynow.org. To see Part 1 of our discussion, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.