 |
| Johnnie
Carr worked with the Montgomery Improvement Association, which
organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott. (Mickey Welsh,
Montgomery Advertiser) |
The large room
was filled with white light and bustled with the voices of familiar
friends.
They came up
to her one by one, hugging her, shaking her hand, telling her about
their latest endeavors, wishing her well.
"Good morning,
Mrs. Carr," they shout from across the room, moving like anxious
youngster to a mother figure. She smiled back, and greeted them
as if they were her own children.
This room was
full with people of all backgrounds: blacks, whites, young, older.
It's just the way Johnnie Carr likes it. It's what she and others
fought for nearly 50 years ago.
Carr worked
with the NAACP and later with the Montgomery Improvement Association
(the organization that spearheaded the 381-day bus boycott).
She vividly
remembers a time when the diversity of the room wasn't possible,
wasn't acceptable and was even dangerous.
She's 94 years
old now, but she can still summon the memories of the 1955 Montgomery
Bus Boycott with ease. She has told the stories so many times now,
she said, but she never grows weary of sharing her experiences.
"When you know
that you're doing something that means something, you don't get
tired of it," she said.
She and Rosa
Parks were childhood friends, meeting for the very first time
at "Miss White's School," which was run by a woman who came from
the North to teach young black girls.
Carr recalled
Parks as being such a quiet young girl.
She was proud
that her friend did not back down from the bus driver.
When he yelled
for her to get up or he would call he police, she said, 'You may
do so,'" Carr said.
The times were
dark back then, and the partition between the races was overt and
legal.
"Everything
you had was segregated," Carr said, "and we were discriminated against.
We had a rough time."
She scoffs
at the thought of "separate but equal," a term often used by segregationists
to validate separatist views.
The truth was,
Carr said, "It was very much separate, but never equal."
"We had so
many things that we were denied the opportunity and the privilege
to enjoy."
Carr lives
on Hall Street in Montgomery, and she recalls the park across from
her home. She couldn't take her children there, just steps away
from her front door, because it was off limits: unless you were
a maid taking a white child there to play, Carr recalled, a black
woman could not enter.
Then there
were the buses and the mistreatment of blacks on the city's main
mode of transportation.
"Whatever transport
you had, it was segregated," Carr said, recalling the treatment.
If you were
black, you had to give the driver your money, then get back off
the bus, walk around it to the back. You couldn't just get on through
the front and walk through to the back. That route was for whites
only.
Sometimes,
after a black rider had paid his or her fare, she said: "He (the
bus driver) would drive off and leave them standing."
Then there
was the humiliation of being ordered to get up from a seat when
a white person needed a place to sit.
Although it
was deemed the "black" section of the bus, Carr said, when the bus
was filled and a white passenger boarded and needed to sit, blacks
were ordered to clear an entire seat to let one white bus rider
sit down.
Most blacks
obliged because it was the law.
"You tried
to be a law-abiding citizen because you didn't want to be put in
jail," Carr said.
But the day
came when things would be turned around.
That day came
when Carr's childhood friend Rosa Parks was arrested.
E.D.
Nixon, often called the father of the civil rights movement,
called Carr and told her the news.
Carr says she'll
never forget the words of Nixon when he called her that day, the
day the movement shifted: "He told me, 'Mrs. Carr, they have arrested
the wrong woman now.'"
