The Power of Habit – Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

fluctuations in the churches people attend-is a three-part process that historians and sociologists say shows up again and again: [222]

A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances.

It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together.

And it endures because a movement’s leaders give participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership.

Usually, only when all three parts of this process are fulfilled can a movement become self-propelling and reach a critical mass. There are other recipes for successful social change and hundreds of details that differ between eras and struggles. But understanding how social habits work helps explain why Montgomery and Rosa Parks became the catalyst for a civil rights crusade.

It wasn’t inevitable that Parks’s act of rebellion that winter day would result in anything other than her arrest. Then habits intervened, and something amazing occurred.

Rosa Parks wasn’t the first black passenger jailed for breaking Montgomery’s bus segregation laws. She wasn’t even the first that year. In 1946, Geneva Johnson had been arrested for talking back to a Montgomery bus driver over seating. [223] In 1949, Viola White, Katie Wingfield, and two black children were arrested for sitting in the white section and refusing to move. [224] That same year, two black teenagers visiting from New Jersey-where buses were integrated-were arrested and jailed after breaking the law by sitting next to a white man and a boy. [225] In 1952, a Montgomery policeman shot and killed a black man when he argued with a bus driver. In 1955, just months before Parks was taken to jail, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith were arrested in separate incidents for refusing to give their seats to white passengers.

None of those arrests resulted in boycotts or protests, however. “There weren’t many real activists in Montgomery at the time,” Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian, told me. “People didn’t mount protests or marches. Activism was something that happened in courts. It wasn’t something average people did.”

When a young Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in Montgomery in 1954, for instance, a year before Parks’s arrest, he found a majority of the city’s blacks accepted segregation “without apparent protest. Not only did they seem resigned to segregation per se; they also accepted the abuses and indignities which came with it.” [226]

So why, when Parks was arrested, did things change?

One explanation is that the political climate was shifting. The previous year, the U.S. Supreme Court had handed down Brown v. Board of Education, ruling that segregation was illegal within public schools; six months before Parks’s arrest, the Court had issued what came to be known as Brown II-a decision ordering that school integration must proceed with “all deliberate speed.” There was a powerful sense across the nation that change was in the air.

But that isn’t sufficient to explain why Montgomery became ground zero for the civil rights struggle. Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith had been arrested in the wake of Brown v. Board, and yet they didn’t spark a protest. Brown, for many Montgomery residents, was an abstraction from a far-off courthouse, and it was unclear how-or if-its impact would be felt locally. Montgomery wasn’t Atlanta or Austin or other cities where progress seemed possible. “Montgomery was a pretty nasty place,” Branch said. “Racism was set in its ways there.”

When Parks was arrested, however, it sparked something unusual within the city. Rosa Parks, unlike other people who had been jailed for violating the bus segregation law, was deeply respected and embedded within her community. So when she was arrested, it triggered a series of social habits-the habits of friendship-that ignited an initial protest. Parks’s membership in dozens of social networks across Montgomery allowed her friends to muster a response before the community’s normal apathy could take hold.

Montgomery’s civil life, at the time, was dominated by hundreds of small groups that created the city’s social fabric. The city’s Directory of Civil and Social Organizations was almost as thick as its phone book. Every adult, it seemed-particularly every black adult-belonged to some kind of club, church, social group, community center, or neighborhood organization, and often more than one. And within these social networks, Rosa Parks was particularly well known and liked. “Rosa Parks was one of those rare people of whom everyone agreed that she gave more than she got,” Branch wrote in his history of the civil rights movement, Parting the Waters. “Her character represented one of the isolated high blips on the graph of human nature, offsetting a dozen or so sociopaths.” [227] Parks’s many friendships and affiliations cut across the city’s racial and economic lines. She was the secretary of the local NAACP chapter, attended the Methodist church, and helped oversee a youth organization at the Lutheran church near her home. She spent some weekends volunteering at a shelter, others with a botanical club, and on Wednesday nights often joined a group of women who knit blankets for a local hospital. She volunteered dressmaking services to poor families and provided last-minute gown alterations for wealthy white debutantes. She was so deeply enmeshed in the community, in fact, that her husband complained that she ate more often at potlucks than at home.

In general, sociologists say, most of us have friends who are like us. We might have a few close acquaintances who are richer, a few who are poorer, and a few of different races-but, on the whole, our deepest relationships tend to be with people who look like us, earn about the same amount of money, and come from similar backgrounds.

Parks’s friends, in contrast, spanned Montgomery’s social and economic hierarchies. She had what sociologists call “strong ties”-firsthand relationships-with dozens of groups throughout Montgomery that didn’t usually come into contact with one another. “This was absolutely key,” Branch said. “Rosa Parks transcended the social stratifications of the black community and Montgomery as a whole. She was friends with field hands and college professors.”

And the power of those friendships became apparent as soon as Parks landed in jail.

Rosa Parks called her parents’ home from the police station. She was panicked, and her mother-who had no idea what to do-started going through a mental Rolodex of Parks’s friends, trying to think of someone who might be able to help. She called the wife of E. D. Nixon, the former head of the Montgomery NAACP, who in turn called her husband and told him that Parks needed to be bailed out of jail. He immediately agreed to help, and called a prominent white lawyer named Clifford Durr who knew Parks because she had hemmed dresses for his three daughters.

Nixon and Durr went to the jailhouse, posted bail for Parks, and took her home. They’d been looking for the perfect case to challenge Montgomery’s bus segregation laws, and sensing an opportunity, they asked Parks if she would be willing to let them fight her arrest in court. Parks’s husband was opposed to the idea. “The white folks will kill you, Rosa,” he told her. [228]

But Parks had spent years working with Nixon at the NAACP. She had been in Durr’s house and had helped his daughters prepare for cotillions. Her friends were now asking her for a favor.

“If you think it will mean something to Montgomery and do some good,” she told them, “I’ll be happy to go along with it.” [229]

That night-just a few hours after the arrest-news of Parks’s jailing began to filter through the black community. Jo Ann Robinson, the president of a powerful group of schoolteachers involved in politics and a friend of Parks’s from numerous organizations, heard about it. So did many of the schoolteachers in Robinson’s group, and many of the parents of their students. Close to midnight, Robinson called an impromptu meeting and suggested that everyone boycott the city’s buses on Monday, four days hence, when Parks was to appear in court.

Afterward, Robinson snuck into her office’s mimeograph room and made copies of a flyer.

“Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down,” it read. “This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial.” [230]

Early the next morning, Robinson gave stacks of the flyers to schoolteachers and asked them to distribute it to