Late one cold Thursday afternoon, a seamstress boarded a Montgomery, Ala., city bus for the ride home from work. As the bus filled up with more passengers, African-American riders, including the seamstress, were ordered by the driver to move to the back to allow white riders to be seated. Nearly every aspect of life in Montgomery was, by law, segregated, so when the seamstress refused to surrender her seat, she was arrested.
Anyone with a passing knowledge of 20th century U.S. history will recognize this as the story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott her act of defiance sparked. In a popular telling of this story, Parks was just too weary after her day’s labor to leave her seat on the bus.
Just how tired Parks was that evening isn’t recorded. She was, though, by all accounts a healthy and active 42-year-old woman. She also was the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was a veteran civil rights activist and advocate. And she wasn’t, and didn’t act, alone.
A new opera, She Who Dared, puts Parks’ story in perspective, as she was one of a group of women instrumental in the planning and execution of the act that began the year-plus long bus boycott.
She Who Dared is believed to be the first professionally-staged opera written by two black women: librettist Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton and composer Jasmine Arielle Barnes.
Mouton’s mother claimed her cousin had refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus before Parks did. Mouton’s research found that her mother’s cousin, Aurelia Browder, was indeed arrested for her refusal to give up her bus seat five months before Parks did the same.
Browder may not be as familiar a name as Parks, but it’s enshrined in legal history. Browder v. Gayle was the case that resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court decision ending legal segregation on public transportation.
Browder and Parks were part of the same group of women, and as the opera makes clear, Parks’ refusal was less about fatigue and all about challenging an unjust law.
“The reality was she trained for it,” She Who Dared composer Jasmine Arielle Barnes told NPR. “It was planned. She knew exactly when she was going to do it.”
She Who Dared celebrates the accomplishments of a movement, a coordinated effort, not what’s often portrayed as an impulsive act by an exhausted woman.
Browder and other women from her group had been arrested for not giving up their bus seats before Parks. The opera explores how Parks came to be the one whose arrest sparked the boycott, and it shows the considerations activists faced trying to successfully make their case to a white populace that was either actively opposed to or apathetic about racial injustice.
That Parks was part of a movement and not a lone wolf in no way detracts from what she did. She was a courageous and fiercely determined woman who paid for the stand (or seat) she took: She and her husband both were fired from their jobs, and she was harassed, vilified and threatened.
She Who Dared premiered June 3 in a production by Chicago Opera Theater. The Chicago Tribune’s review praised Barnes’ score for “grazing gospel, tango and even klezmer in an ever-lively orchestration” and Mouton’s libretto for “striking a consciously light-hearted tone without making light of its subject matter … Whether crackling with humor or invoking prayer, Mouton’s text says what it means.”