A Resistance Garden on Rosa Parks Avenue

In Montgomery you can be convicted for planting rye grass in your front yard

Georgette Norman and her life partner Nomad Stewart lived on Rosa Parks Avenue in Montgomery, Alabama in a house she inherited from her parents. The two of them dug up the sod around the house and gave it away. In the front yard, they built a deck, archway and trellis from found wood. They hauled in broken pieces of cement from demolition projects and slowly, over the years, built a wall surrounding their corner lot. Inside and outside the wall they planted vegetables, flowers, fruit and nut trees. They made a magical garden.

Georgette had returned from abroad a few years before to Montgomery as a vegetarian. She sought to use her yard in the way that her parents and grandparents had, as productive space. She and Nomad, who was white, cultivated beans, tomatoes, squash, rye, grapes, peaches, you name it. The fresh produce was essential, living where they did, a long distance from groceries selling fresh food.

“We were all organic,” Georgette said. On a nearby vacant lot they started a compost pile. Neighbors came and added their food scraps. They dug in other gardens on vacant lots. They planted cover crops of clover and buckwheat. Georgette showed me photos of the rich dark tilth in their yard. The images are stunning, landscape architecture at its most arresting.

Unfortunately, the City of Montgomery found Georgette to be in violation of the city’s vegetation restrictions. City prosecutors tried Georgette in court for having plants higher than ten inches. That was the law. It didn’t matter that the plants fed her or that they were beautiful. The judge classified her a criminal and gave her a fine.

Although we had many conversations on the phone in the last few years, I met Georgette for the first time in person on a recent visit to Montgomery to give a reading at New South Bookstore.

While the court proceedings and appeals were going on, Georgette got a call from a man who identified himself as a member of the Klan. He agreed, he said, with her position. She should be able to do whatever she wants with her lawn. He said the Klan would look out for her if need be. Georgette thanked him and quickly explained she needed no help. For months after that, any startling noise, a tail pipe backfiring, got her jumping.

Other than the Klan, Georgette felt she received no support from her neighbors or local politicians. “They asked me why I just didn’t put a lawn back in. Why make trouble?” Georgette did make trouble. She carried her case up the courts, preparing for a hearing in the Alabama Supreme Court. But then something changed. In 1999, after years in court, the press covering the case, the long-serving, law-and-order mayor of Montgomery, Emory Folmer, was voted out. The new mayor’s office immediately reverse Georgette’s original conviction. Georgette saw that election as a sign that her resistance had been effective.

In Montgomery in 1951, Rosa Parks refused to stand for a white passenger on the bus, breaking a law of the Jim Crow South. Parks’ act publicized a movement of non-violent resistance to unjust, discriminatory laws. Georgette, living on Rosa Parks Avenue, likewise broke an unjust law. Municipalities increasingly passed vegetation laws across the United States in the years after the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Vegetation restriction that often targeted Black families living in white neighborhoods or mixed race couples living anywhere supplanted discriminatory real estate practices banned by the Fair Housing Act.

Vegetation laws work to turn producers of food into consumers. More and more, the food we are left to consume is costly yet tasteless and skimpy on nutrients. Recently Maine passed a right to garden law stating that humans have a right to healthy food. But in most states, as in Alabama today, planting a garden in the wrong place is against the law. Gardeners in Montgomery complain that they still can’t grow what they like in their front yards.

Like Rosa Parks and Georgette Norman, we have the right to break unjust laws on the path to building a more just world. Because of vegetation restrictions in many cities and towns, the simple act of putting seeds in the ground is an act of resistance.

So, there you have it. Call a friend, go out, thumb a few seeds in the ground, and watch something beautiful bloom.