When the bus boycott was triggered by Rosa Parks’ decision not to move to the back of the bus, my family and I were living in downtown Montgomery, Ala., in an apartment building within walking distance of Daddy’s job.
My father worked at the same department store as Parks, and he described her with affection before she ever became famous: “A sweet lady. A seamstress. She keeps herself pretty.” When she got arrested, he marveled, “She’s always been such a quiet woman.” Rosa Parks became a paradox for him: a quiet woman who had caused an uproar.
Job security mattered to him. An orphan who was the product of the Depression, my father fretted about where our next meal would come from because he had known hunger. It truly puzzled him that Parks would jeopardize her own financial security for what seemed to him (and other security-minded workers) as one of many inconveniences and indignities that most working people endured. He didn’t condemn it or praise it. He thought about it and talked about it for a long time.
My sisters and I heard the conversations that buzzed among whites about black people behaving uncharacteristically. They were “rocking the boat” and “causing waves.” Raised to fear authority, we didn’t understand what seemed more impolite behavior than activism.
In the early days of the civil rights movement, my family and neighbors belonged to the same class of taxpayers as many of the black civil rights activists. We were hardworking people too, with a hierarchy of needs that kept our scared white noses close to our respective grindstones. It was called “minding our own business.” We paid our bills, which meant we didn’t make waves. To do so might result in our inability to pay our bills.
As the political conflagration ignited and began to work its way through our city, we became acquainted with and shocked by the stories of church bombings and death threats. Martin Luther King Jr.’s march from Selma meant my music recital as a singing buttercup got canceled. The voices of a long-trusted government, like Birmingham officials with bullhorns and Gov. George Wallace in the schoolhouse doorway, were heard and discussed, as we tried to figure out what was happening.
It wasn’t always clear.
For at that time when the work and residential cultures were so Southern–family-insulated and stratified by wealth–we were surprised not by what other factions of the population wanted but that they didn’t already have it. I didn’t know that the group to which I had either been assigned by birth or simply belonged to by skin color was in possession of a power that deprived other people of the privileges to move about with ease and dignity and earn a living unterrorized.
It wasn’t easy to see while it was happening. I grew up shopping at a department store where the signs over two water fountains planted side by side read “Whites” and “Colored.” In my mind I thought “colored” people didn’t want to drink after me, and there was enough of the humility assigned to my economic strata that I didn’t blame them.
As black people earned their civil rights, many white people evolved in our personhood as well. I grew up as civil rights legislation did.
So did my father.
A few years after the department store released Mrs. Parks from employment (the details were foggy to us), my father missed a day’s work. Thirteen years without missing a day, he called in sick with chills and fever. The department store docked his pay. A man who believed in being loyal to a company knew that was unfair. He began to see himself as someone who deserved sick leave, which was a new idea for him. He started looking for a better job. When he applied at Maxwell Air Force Base, he told me about it, saying that if he got that midnight-shift job we’d eat better and maybe have Christmas together too. “There are times in your life when you just have to make your move. I knew a woman once. Do you remember that seamstress at the department store? She got into some trouble going home from work on that bus, and the store didn’t treat her very well. I should have seen this coming.”
Rosa Parks’ story had stayed with him. When it was his time to question authority and what was right, some part of her story ignited him to make a choice for self-respect and for a better quality of life for his family. That we were white became incidental in the bigger framework of justice for all.
Rosa Parks was a catalyst for a major movement in American history. That’s understood and celebrated. But Mrs. Parks sparked some other important changes in American families as well. She taught the necessity of action for self-respect and fair play to a generation of families emerging from a depression that had scared them into obeying authority when it was wrong. When Parks’ refusal to be treated with disrespect triggered a bus boycott, her example crossed the color line for good.
She taught families and individuals everywhere to respond to injustice, to act with dignity when treated with indignity. Her story always will.
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Daphne Simpkins is the author of “Nat King Cole: An Unforgettable Life of Music.” Cole was a native of Montgomery.
