I first met Raymond Parks when a mutual friend, a lady I knew very well, introduced us. It seems he had just broken up with a young lady that my friend knew real well, and then she told him that she would like for him to meet me. But I wasn’t very interested at that particular time because I’d had some unhappy romantic experiences too.

He was in his late twenties and working as a barber in a black barbershop in downtown Montgomery owned by Mr. O. L. Campbell. I was in my late teens. I knew he was interested in me, but I just spoke politely to him and didn’t give him another thought. Later he decided to look me up again. He came driving down our road and he saw my mother standing on the porch. He’d already asked an elderly lady farther down the road if she knew me.

Farther on down the road he saw my mother standing on the porch with her hair in braids, and he stopped to speak to her. He asked if she knew where I lived, and of course she turned out to be my mother, and she invited him in, and that’s when we got acquainted. He came in and sat down and talked a little while. I was very shy and still wasn’t interested in him. He came back, and this time I wouldn’t go out to see him. I went to bed and covered up and wouldn’t come out. I heard him say, “If she’s gone to bed, I won’t stay,” and off he went.

But he came back again, and after that we started going on rides to different places. He had a car, a little red Nash with a rumble seat in the back. It was something very special for a young black man to own his own car, particularly when he wasn’t driving for any of the white folks.

Parks-everyone called him Parks-was a very nice person, and I enjoyed talking to him. He would drive along and tell me about his life experiences and problems that he’d had as a youngster growing up and being very fair complected.

He was born on the 12th of February in 1903, the same month I was born, in a place called Wedowee, Alabama, near Roanoke in Randolph County, northeast of Montgomery. His parents were David Parks and Ceri Culbertson Parks. Both his parents had died by the time we met. His father had left his mother when Raymond was an infant, and he never saw him again. His father died from a fall off a house roof while he was working as a carpenter.

He told me he grew up in an all-white neighborhood, completely surrounded by white people. Parks was so light, he could have passed for white, but he didn’t have white people’s hair. He was the only black child in the neighborhood, and they wouldn’t let him go to the neighborhood school because it was a white school. He didn’t live near enough to the black school to go there, so his mother taught him to read and write as a young child at home.

Parks said he always did his best to get along, but whenever white people accosted him, he always wanted to let them know he could take care of business if he had to. They didn’t bother you so much back then if you just spoke right up. But as soon as you acted like you were afraid, they’d have fun with you.

By the time I met him, he was twenty-eight and living in Montgomery and working as a barber. He was the first man of our race, aside from my grandfather, with whom I actually discussed anything about the racial conditions. And he was the first, aside from my grandfather and Mr. Gus Vaughn, who was never actually afraid of white people. So many African Americans felt that you just had to be under Mr. Charlie’s heel—that’s what we called the white man, Mr. Charlie—and couldn’t do anything to cross him. In other words Parks believed in being a man and expected to be treated as a man.

I was very impressed by the fact that he didn’t seem to have that meek attitude-what we called an “Uncle Tom” attitude-toward white people. I thought he was a very nice man, an interesting man who talked very intelligently. He could talk for hours at a time about all the things he had lived through. Parks was also the first real activist I ever met.

He was a long-time member of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, when I met him. It was the spring of 1931 when we got to know each other, and the Scottsboro case had come up. Parks was the first person ever to mention that case to me—about what was going on with the Scottsboro Boys and how he and a few others had gotten together to raise money to help pay for the legal fees and defend them in court and keep them out of the electric chair. They were working in secret, and he didn’t even tell me the names of the others. Parks used to say that all their names were Larry.

The Scottsboro Boys were nine young men who didn’t even know each other before they were arrested on charges of raping two white women. Haywood Patterson, Eugene Williams, and brothers Roy and Andy Wright were from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Clarence Norris, Charlie Weems, Olen Montgomery, Ozie Powell, and Willie Roberson were from various parts of Georgia. They ranged in age from nineteen down to fourteen. They were all hoboing on the same freight train that went from Tennessee through Georgia to Alabama. There were many others on that freight train, African American and Caucasian. It was the time of the Great Depression, and millions of people were out of work. A lot of them rode the trains looking for jobs. At some point the whites on that particular train started throwing gravel at the blacks and telling them to get off the train. The blacks fought back and threw most of their attackers off the train near Stevenson, Alabama.

Farther on the train stopped to take on water at Paint Rock, Alabama. A white mob was waiting, armed with sticks and guns, and they forced the blacks off the train and threatened to lynch them. But the police came along and broke up the mob. Then they put handcuffs on the young black men and took them to the nearest jail, in Scottsboro, Alabama. That is why the young men came to becalled the Scottsboro Boys. The police also put the white hobos in jail.

The next day the police took the blacks from the holding pen where they had spent the night and lined them up in front of two white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price. Ruby Bates picked out six of them and claimed they had raped her. The police decided that it stood to reason that the other three had raped Victoria Price, although she hadn’t picked them out.

The defendants went to trial on April 6, 1931. The Interdenominational Ministers’ Alliance, a group of black preachers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, raised $50.00 to pay a lawyer. He met with the young men for one half hour before the trial. There were four trials for the nine defendants, and all together the trials lasted three days. The two women testified that the defendants had beat them and used guns and knives, but the police hadn’t found any guns or knives. Two doctors testified that the women did not have any wounds or bruises. But the judge made it clear that he thought the defendants were guilty and that the trials were a waste of time and money. All were found guilty. On April 9 the judge sentenced all but the youngest to die in the electric chair on July 10.

I thought it was awful that they were condemned to die for a crime they did not commit. It demonstrated how little regard segregationists had for the lives of black people and the lengths they would go to, to keep us in fear.

By this time the case had made the newspapers, and people outside the South were up in arms about the way the young men had been railroaded. By the end of April the International Labor Defense, a Communist organization, had stepped in to help them. By early May the NAACP was on the case. Between them these two organizations managed to get the execution date set aside and filed an appeal. In November the United States Supreme Court ordered a new trial for the defendants on the grounds that the lawyer at the first trials did not really represent them. The trials and appeals went on for years and years. Not until 1950 was the last defendant released on parole.

Parks was working for the Scottsboro Boys from the beginning. I don’t know if he was working officially with one of the big organizations. The people he was working with came from places other than Montgomery. He was working with them when I first met him, and then through that year and the next year he was still involved. Whites accused anybody who was working for black people of being a Communist, but I don’t think anyone in Parks’ group was a Communist.

The second time Parks and I were ever in each other’s company, he talked about getting married. I hadn’t given marriage a thought at all. He spoke about it, and I didn’t pay it any attention. But one day he said, “I really think we ought to get married,” and I agreed with him. The next day, when I was at church, he asked my mother’s permission to marry me, and when I came home from church she told me that she had agreed. He didn’t actually propose to me at all, or anyway not formally.

That was in August of 1932. We were married in December of 1932 in Pine Level, in my mother’s home. It was not a big wedding, just family and close friends. We didn’t even send out any invitations.

My husband was very supportive of my desire to finish school, and I went back to school after we were married. I received my high school diploma in 1933 when I was twenty years old. At that time only a small percentage of black people in Montgomery were high school graduates. In 1940, seven years after I got my diploma, only seven out of every hundred had as much as a high school education.

In 1941 I got a job at Maxwell Field, the local Army Air Force base. The base was integrated because President Roosevelt had issued an order forbidding segregation in the public places, trolleys, or buses at military bases.

I could ride on an integrated trolley on the base, but when I left the base, I had to ride home on a segregated bus. I remember there was a white woman who lived in the same building on the base where I worked. We would get on the base bus and sit right across from each other. She had a little boy about nine years old. She and the little boy would be sitting together, and this other worker named Rose and I would be sitting together, and we’d sit across from each other and talk. And then when we’d get the city bus, the white woman would stop at the front and we’d go to the back and the little boy would be looking at us so strangely. That woman was from Mississippi, but it didn’t bother her to ride with us.

Parks kept going to his night meetings about the Scottsboro case. I didn’t go to the meetings because it was very dangerous. Whenever they met, they had someone posted as lookout, and someone always had a gun. That was something that he didn’t want me to take an active part in, because the little committee he was working with had to meet late at night and into the morning when everybody else was asleep. He didn’t want me to go because it was hard enough if he suddenly had to run. He wouldn’t be able to leave me, and I couldn’t run as fast as he could. Also, he felt that I was just too young at the time.

He also did not tell me much about what went on at those meetings. That way if someone asked me, I could truthfully say I didn’t know. He wanted to protect me.

I remember a meeting we had when we were living on Huffman Street in what they called a shotgun house. You could shoot one bullet and it would go through the whole house because of the way the rooms were lined up one behind the other. It was the first meeting we’d ever had at our house, and it was in the front room. There was a little table about the size of a card table that they were sitting around. This was the first time I’d seen so few men with so many guns. The table was covered with guns. I didn’t even think to offer them anything-refreshments or something to drink. But with the table so covered with guns, I don’t know where I would have put any refreshments. No one was thinking of food anyway.

I can remember sitting on the back porch with my feet on the top step and putting my head down on my knees, and I didn’t move throughout the whole meeting. I just sat there. I guess there were about half a dozen men. I can’t even remember who they were, although I probably knew them. After the meeting was over, I remember, my husband took me by the shoulders and kind of lifted me from the porch floor. I was very, very depressed about the fact that black men could not hold a meeting without fear of bodily injury or death. Also I was reminded of the time I was a child and I sat next to my grandfather waiting for the Ku Klux Klan to ride down on us.

During the time when the Scottsboro case was in all the newspapers, the police were always on the lookout for people to intimidate. They’d try to find out where the people who were doing this late-night meeting lived and who they were. One night two cops on motorcycles passed by. I was sitting on the porch on the swing, and Mr. Kelly was on the porch too. I kept talking about how a couple of days before, the police had killed two men who were connected with the group Parks was with, people Parks knew well. Every time he was at those meetings with those people, I wondered if he would come back alive, if he wouldn’t be killed.

So I was there on the porch on the swing, and the two motorcycle cops were going up and down the same block. They would go down and turn around and come back. I was so frightened, I was shaking. Later Mr. Kelly said, “I could hear that swing trembling while you were sitting there.” I didn’t even realize I was shaking so much that I was making the swing tremble.

When Parks came home, he knew the cops were out there. So instead of coming in the front door as usual, he came up from the back. There was a little pathway back to Bainbridge Street from where we lived, and he came through there and in the back door. Next thing I knew, he was in the house. So I felt better. At least they didn’t get him that time.

While we were living at Mr. Kelly’s, an incident happened to me that I didn’t even tell my husband about. I went downtown to the railroad station with the Kellys-Mr. Kelly and his daughter and her two children-to see them off on the train. I was walking a little behind them. We were on our way to the train when a policeman approached me and asked if I had a ticket. I told him, “No.” He pushed me back against the railing and said, “If you don’t have a ticket, you can’t go.” I knew that he had a club and a gun and that there wasn’t anything for me to do but just get out of the way. It upset me quite a bit.

After the Scottsboro Boys were saved from execution, Parks got involved in voter registration, which was something he was interested in even before we met. He was very discouraged about how few blacks were registered to vote.

The right to vote is so important for Americans. We vote for people to represent us in government. If we do not like the way they represent us, we can vote for someone else. But in those days most black people in the South could not vote.

The segregationists made it very difficult for black people to register to vote. In order to get registered, blacks had to have white people to vouch for them. A small number of blacks who were in good favor with the white folks did get registered in that way. But once they got registered, they did not want other blacks to do the same. I guess they felt that when the white people vouched for and approved of them being registered, that put them on a different level from the rest of us. They would tell Parks and his friends that they ought to go about their business and not be concerned about registration and voting.

That’s how it was in those days. Most blacks were afraid. Those who were in good favor with the white folks didn’t want to lose their privileged position. The rest didn’t think anything could be done. There really wasn’t any activist, public civil-rights movement that masses of people participated in until the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. Until then only a few people were activists, and of course they were not in good favor with the whites.

They had died but they were still on the list. So there were very few, and we didn’t get much accomplished until Mr. E. D. Nixon decided to break down those barriers.

Mr. Edgar Daniel Nixon was one of the most active African Americans in Montgomery. When I first met him in 1943, he was president of the Montgomery Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He was a proud, dignified man who carried himself straight as an arrow. In getting black people registered to vote, he had the help of a black lawyer named Arthur A. Madison, a native of Alabama who was practicing in New York City.

The second time I tried to register to vote, I was put off a Montgomery city bus for the first time. I didn’t follow the rules.

Black people had special rules to follow. Some drivers made black passengers step in the front door and pay their fare, and then we had to get off and go around to the back door and get on. Often, before the black passengers got around to the back door, the bus would take off without them. There were thirty-six seats on a Montgomery bus.

It was up to the bus drivers, if they chose, to adjust the seating in the middle sixteen seats. They carried guns and had what they called police power to rearrange the seating and enforce all the other rules of segregation on the buses. Some bus drivers were meaner than others. Not all of them were hateful, but segregation itself is vicious, and to my mind there was no way you could make segregation decent or nice or acceptable.

The driver who put me off was a mean one. He was tall and thickset with an intimidating posture. One day in the winter of 1943 the bus came along, and the back was crowded with black people. They were even standing on the steps leading up from the b1ack door. But up front there were vacant seats right up to the very front seats. So I got on at the front and went through this little bunch of folks standing in the back, and I looked toward the front and saw the driver standing there and looking at me. He told me to get off the bus and go to the back door and get on. I told him I was already on the bus and didn’t see the need of getting off and getting back on when people were standing in the stepwell, and how was I going to squeeze on anyway? So he told me if I couldn’t go through the back door that I would have to get off the bus-”my bus,” he called it. I stood where I was. He came back and he took my coat sleeve, not my arm, just my coat sleeve.

He didn’t take his gun out. I was hardly worth the effort because I wasn’t resisting. I just didn’t get off and go around like he told me. So after he took my coat sleeve, I went up to the front, and I dropped my purse. Rather than stoop or bend over to get it, I sat right down in the front seat and from a sitting position I picked up my purse.

He was standing over me and he said, “Get off my bus.” I said, “I will get off.” He looked like he was ready to hit me. I said, “I know one thing. You better not hit me.” He didn’t strike me. I got off, and I heard someone mumble from the back, “How come she don’t go around and get in the back?”

I guess the black people were getting tired because they wanted to get home and they were standing in the back and were tired of standing up. I do know they were mumbling and grumbling as I went up there to get myself off the bus. “She ought to go around the back and get on.” They always wondered why you didn’t want to be like the rest of the black people. That was the 1940s, when people took a lot without fighting back.

I did not get back on the bus through the rear door. I was coming from work, and so I had already gotten a transfer slip to give the next driver. I never wanted to be on that man’s bus again. After that, I made a point of looking at who was driving the bus before I got on. I didn’t want any more run-ins with that mean one.

By the time I was put off the bus, I was a member of the NAACP. It was a national organization with headquarters in New York, founded by a small group of African Americans and Caucasians who believed in democracy. They chose February 12, 1909, to start the organization, in honor of President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. They formed the group to protest against racial discrimination, lynching, brutality, and unequal education.

In Alabama, in the early 1940s, there were a few local branches-in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Mobile. Parks was a member of the Montgomery branch, but he did not encourage me to join because he felt it was too dangerous. Members of the Montgomery NAACP risked reprisals for being activists. I did not know there were any women involved until I saw in the Alabama Tribune a picture of Johnnie Carr, my friend and classmate at Miss White’s school. She was the only female member, and there was no youth division of the branch.

The article said that Johnnie was working with the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, in fact I think she was secretary at that time. So I thought, Maybe one time I’ll go over to the NAACP and see if I can run into Johnnie. In December of 1943 they were having their annual election of officers meeting, and I went to it. That day she wasn’t at the meeting, and there were just a few men, maybe about a dozen or fifteen. I paid my membership dues, and then they had the election of officers. I was the only woman there, and they said they needed a secretary, and I was too timid to say no. I just started taking minutes, and that was the way I was elected secretary. There was no pay, but I enjoyed the work, and Parks was very supportive of my involvement.

I remember when I first joined the NAACP and became the secretary, the only two women who attended the meetings were Johnnie Carr and me. Mr. E. D. Nixon was president then, and once in a while Mrs. Nixon would come to a meeting, but I think she just kept up with the meetings because he was always on the scene. I remember I would be working hard trying to get articles out for Mr. Nixon, sending letters, and going to meetings, and he would just laugh. He used to say, “Women don’t need to be nowhere but in the kitchen.”

I would ask him, “Well, what about me?” He would respond, “But I need a secretary and you are a good one.” He always complimented my work and encouraged me to continue.

There were more violent incidents against black people in the late 1940s, after World War II ended. Black soldiers who had served in the armed forces were coming home, and they felt as if they should have equal rights since they had served their country.

I remember 1949 as a very bad year. Things happened that most people never heard about, because they never were reported in the newspapers. At times I felt overwhelmed by all the violence and hatred, but there was nothing to do but keep going.

By that time I was both secretary of the Senior Branch of the NAACP, which was for the older people, and adviser to the NAACP Youth Council. I enjoyed working with young people. The high school students were the largest group in the Youth Council. One of our projects was getting the young people to try to take out books from the main library instead of going to the little branch across town that was the colored library.

The colored library did not have many books, and a student who wanted a book that wasn’t there had to request it from the colored library, which in turn would order it from the main library. The student would have to return to the colored library to get the book. The members of the NAACP Youth Council went to the main library and asked for service there, saying that it was inconvenient for them to go to the colored library, which was quite far away. They did this again and again, but they were unsuccessful in changing the practice.

By the early 1950s Mr. E. D. Nixon had stepped down as head of the Montgomery NAACP, but he was still very active in the organization. He was also president of the local branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, so he used his union office downtown to conduct his community business.

It was Mr. Nixon who introduced me to Mrs. Virginia Durr. She was at his house, and he came by and picked me up to have me meet her. Mrs. Durr was a white woman, born and raised in Birmingham, who managed to overcome all the racism with which she grew up. She and her husband, Clifford, who was an attorney, did a lot for black people, and they didn’t have many white friends as a result. I guess it was just the type of person she was, because her family believed in segregation.

I got to know Virginia quite well (at that time, when I was working for her, I called her Mrs. Durr even though she wanted me to call her by her first name). She told me that she had become conscious of racism when she had gone off to college in Massachusetts. One day she went into the college dining room, and there was a black girl at the table she was assigned to. Virginia had to make up her mind about whether she was going to sit next to the girl. She had never before sat down with a black person as an equal. So she chose to accept the fact that this young woman had the same right to sit there as the other students. She said she didn’t ever regret that decision. Later she got married, and she and Mr. Durr were living in Washington, D.C., where he was a member of the Federal Communications Commission. When they talked about returning to Alabama, she had to decide if she wanted to, because she knew she and her husband didn’t have the same attitude about segregation as most white people in Alabama did. In coming back to Alabama after being away for twenty years, she wanted to be part of our efforts to end segregation, even though that meant being ostracized and made to suffer.

The year I met Mrs. Durr, 1954, the United States Supreme Court handed down the famous decision Brown v. Board of Education that declared segregated education unconstitutional. The NAACP had been working for that for years and years, since around 1925. They had attacked the issue of “separate but equal” education from all different angles, because of course from whatever angle you looked at it, education in the South was separate but not equal. Just in my growing up, I had seen that.