Rosa Parks: My Story: Chapters 1–3

It was the home of Tuskegee Institute, which Mr. Booker T. Washington had founded back in 1881 as a school for blacks.

He wanted to do contracting work and make more money.

They just couldn’t coordinate their lives together, because he wanted to travel and she wanted to be situated in a permanent home.

I had chronic tonsillitis all through my childhood, but this was very early.

My mother didn’t go. I think she was ailing—it must have been just before my brother was born.

In those days, over in Europe, poor white people were sometimes indentured servants.

They signed an agreement that in return for their fare to America, they would work for someone for a particular number of years.

He married Mary Jane Nobles, a person of African descent with no white ancestors.

The younger slave children were then sent to sit and to play on the freshly dug soil to tamp it down.

A gimlet is a little tool you use to bore holes in wood.

An overseer named Battle took over the plantation, and he disliked my grandfather so much that he beat him every time he saw him.

My grandfather was the one who instilled in my mother and her sisters, and in their children, that you don’t put up with bad treatment from anybody.

He took every bit of advantage of being white-looking. He was always doing or saying something that would embarrass or agitate the white people.

My grandfather had a somewhat belligerent attitude toward whites in general.

When we wanted to play with them, or when they wanted to play with us, Grandfather would be very hostile. He made us stay away from them.

His irritability also might have had something to do with his being crippled. He had arthritis. We called it rheumatism then.

He and my grandmother married very young, and the one thing he wanted most of all was for none of his children or anyone related to him to ever have to cook or clean for whites. He wanted all his children to be educated so they wouldn’t have to do that kind of work. Domestic work paid very little, and those who did domestic work were not respected.

Teaching was a prestigious job, and it paid more.

I got very upset about that. I felt that I was very much in my rights to try to defend myself if I could. My grandmother remarked that I was too high-strung and that if I wasn’t careful, I would probably be lynched before I was twenty years old.

I don’t know what the ratio of blacks to whites was, but it was a small town.

There were very few public facilities, like buses and water fountains, so as a child growing up in Pine Level, I didn’t see any drinking fountains marked “Colored” and “White.”

Mr. Freeman would answer in an authoritarian manner, “Sherman, if I didn’t have you all working for me, I’d have some others..."

But they didn’t even let colored people ride inside the bus. They had to sit on top of the bus with the luggage. But growing up in Pine Level, I had never heard of that. If there was a bus, then black people in Pine Level didn’t want to put up with that sort of degradation.

It was a small business district for farmers, who could purchase staples and feed there.

Cousin Ida lived next door to a medical doctor, so if my throat or tonsils hurt, as they did often, medical attention was easily available. My mother thought it was an ideal situation, and she was willing for me to stay with Cousin Ida for the school term.

All her faculty were white women from the North.

That meant that when they came south to educate black girls, they were ostracized by the white community in Montgomery.

Out in the country, in the cold and drafty Spring Hill church school, I was always catching a chill.

The doctor I had out in the country had said that my heart was too weak to sustain the general anesthesia that would put me to sleep and that was usually required for the operation.

He showed my mother how he could do the operation with me sitting in a chair, and with just a local anesthetic, but she said No.

We were in the hospital one or two nights. It was called Hale’s Infirmary, and the doctor was white, as I recall.

It seems that there was some animosity between the two schools. And there would have been more than animosity if that tall fence hadn’t separated them.

We were taught to be ambitious and to believe that we could do what we wanted in life.

She said, “You all crazy? You keep your mouths shut. If he’d gone and told somebody, they would have had y’all lynched and all we could do was cry a little bit about it.”

It wasn’t that the white children meant to be as cruel as they were, but they had been indoctrinated with that type of attitude by the adults around them.