The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (2 page)

The public memorial promoted an inspirational fable: a long-suffering, gentle heroine challenged backward Southern villainy with the help of a faceless chorus of black boycotters and catapulted a courageous new leader, Martin Luther King Jr. into national leadership. Mrs. Parks was honored as midwife—not a leader or thinker or long-time activist—of a struggle that had long run its course. This fable is a romantic one, promoting the idea that without any preparation (political or psychic) or subsequent work a person can make great change with a single act, suffer no lasting consequences, and one day be heralded as a hero. It is also gendered, holding up a caricature of a quiet seamstress who demurely kept her seat and implicitly castigating other women, other black women, for being poor or loud or angry and therefore not appropriate for national recognition. Parks’s memorialization promoted an improbable children’s story of social change—one not-angry woman sat down and the country was galvanized—that erased the long history of collective action against racial injustice and the widespread opposition to the black freedom movement, which for decades treated Parks’s extensive political activities as “un-American.”

This fable—of an accidental midwife without a larger politics—has made Parks a household name but trapped her in the elementary school curriculum, rendering her uninteresting to many young people. The variety of struggles that Parks took part in, the ongoing nature of the campaign against racial injustice, the connections between Northern and Southern racism that she recognized, and the variety of Northern and Southern movements in which she engaged have been given short shrift in her iconization. Parks’s act was separated from a community of people who prepared the way for her action, expanded her stand into a movement, and continued with her in the struggle for justice in the decades that followed.
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This limited view of Parks has extended to the historical scholarship as well. Despite the wealth of children’s books on Parks, Douglas Brinkley’s pocket-sized, un-footnoted biography
Rosa Parks: A Life
and Parks’s own young-adult-focused autobiography with Jim Haskins,
Rosa Parks: My Story
, are the only more detailed treatments of her life and politics.
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With biographies of Abraham Lincoln numbering over a hundred and of Martin Luther King in the dozens, the lack of a scholarly monograph on Parks is notable. The trend among scholars in recent years has been to de-center Parks in the story of the early civil rights movement, focusing on the role of other activists in Montgomery; on other people, like Claudette Colvin, who had also refused to give up their seats; and on other places than Montgomery that helped give rise to a mass movement. While this has provided a much more substantive account of the boycott and the roots of the civil rights movement, Rosa Parks continues to be hidden in plain sight, celebrated and paradoxically relegated to be a hero for children.

When I began this project, people often stared at me blankly—another book on Rosa Parks? Surely there was already a substantive biography. Others assumed that the mythology of the simple, tired seamstress had long since been revealed and repudiated. Many felt confident we already knew her story—
she was the NAACP secretary who’d attended Highlander Folk School and hadn’t even been the first arrested for refusing to move
, they quickly recited. Some even claimed that if Rosa Parks had supported other movements, “don’t you think we would know that already.”

For my part, I had spent more than a decade documenting the untold stories of the civil rights movement in the North. This work had sought to complicate many of the false oppositions embedded in popular understandings of the movement: North versus South, civil rights versus Black Power, nonviolence versus self-defense, pre-1955 and post. When Rosa Parks died in 2005, I, like many others, was captivated and then horrified by the national spectacle made of her death. I gave a talk on its caricature of her and, by extension, its misrepresentation of the civil rights movement, decrying the funeral’s homage to a post-racial America and ill-fitting tribute to the depth of Parks’s political work. Asked to turn the talk into an article, I felt humbled and chastened. Here in the story of perhaps the most iconic heroine of the civil rights movement lay all the themes I had written about for years. And yet I kept bumping up against the gaps in the histories of her. It became clear how little we actually knew about Rosa Parks.

If we follow the actual Rosa Parks—see her decades of community activism before the boycott; take notice of the determination, terror, and loneliness of her bus stand and her steadfast work during the year of the boycott; and see her political work continue for decades following the boycott’s end—we encounter a much different “mother of the civil rights movement.” This book begins with the development of Parks’s self-respect and fierce determination as a young person, inculcated by her mother and grandparents; her schooling at Miss White’s Montgomery Industrial School for Girls; and her marriage to Raymond Parks, “the first real activist I ever met.” It follows her decades of political work before the boycott, as she and a small cadre of activists pressed to document white brutality and legal malfeasance, challenge segregation, and increase black voter registration, finding little success but determined to press on. It demonstrates that her bus arrest was part of a much longer history of bus resistance in the city by a seasoned activist frustrated with the vehemence of white resistance and the lack of a unified black movement who well understood the cost of such stands but “had been pushed as far as she could be pushed.” The community’s reaction that followed astonished her. And thus
chapter 4
shows how a 382-day boycott resulted from collective community action, organization, and tenacity, as Parks and many other black Montgomerians worked to create and maintain the bus protest for more than a year.

The second half of the book picks up Parks’s story after the boycott. It shows the enduring cost of her bus stand for her and her family, and the decade of death threats, red-baiting, economic insecurity, and health issues that followed her arrest. Forced to leave Montgomery for Detroit, her life in the North—“the promised land that wasn’t”—is a palpable reminder that racial inequality was a national plague, not a Southern malady. Parks’s activism did not end in the South nor did it stop with the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights acts. And so the last chapters of the book illustrate the interconnections between the civil rights and Black Power movements, North and South, as Parks joined new and old comrades to oppose Northern segregation, cultivate independent black political power, impart black history, challenge police brutality and government persecution, and oppose U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

One of the greatest distortions of the Parks fable has been the ways it made her meek and missed her lifetime of progressive politics and the resolute political sensibility that identified Malcolm X as her personal hero. The many strands of black protest and radicalism ran through her life. Parks’s grandfather had been a follower of Marcus Garvey. She’d gotten her political start as a newlywed when her husband, Raymond, worked to free the Scottsboro boys, and she spent a decade with E. D. Nixon helping transform Montgomery’s NAACP into a more activist chapter. She attended Highlander Folk School to figure out how to build a local movement for desegregation and helped maintain—not simply spark—the 382-day Montgomery bus boycott. Arriving in Detroit in 1957, she spent more than half of her life fighting racial injustice in the Jim Crow North and was hired by the newly elected congressman John Conyers in 1965 to be part of his Detroit staff. Parks’s long-standing political commitments to self-defense, black history, criminal justice, and black political and community empowerment intersected with key aspects of the Black Power movement, and she took part in numerous events in the late 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, the reach of Parks’s political life embodies the breadth of the struggle for racial justice in America over the twentieth century and the scope of the roles that women played.

Finding and hearing Rosa Parks has not been easy. The idea of the “quiet” Rosa Parks has obscured much of what she said and did. It has made it all too easy to be satisfied with a narrow sense of her contributions, which rest on a gendered caricature of a quiet NAACP secretary who kept her seat on the bus. Despite a voluminous number of articles about and interviews with her, most reporters asked similar questions. They tended to see her without hearing her, without listening for the political sensibility of the real actor behind the idea of Rosa Parks. Mrs. Parks’s words were slow and measured, and interviewers often missed what she was actually saying, impatiently plowing ahead with the story they wanted to tell.
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The history of the boycott, of what led up to it and what happened during it, has become the stuff of legend—and numerous mistakes and misimpressions have been canonized in the historical record, creating another set of blinders. Memories fade, distort, and bend—and the invaluable oral histories of the period offer different, sometimes contradictory accounts of the boycott and its pre-history. Moreover, as her friends and colleagues make amply clear, Mrs. Parks never volunteered information that wasn’t directly asked for. She was a political activist and a Southern black woman—both of which called for the judicious use of stories, the masking of unpleasant or unnecessary details, and the tendency to background the individual to put forth the interests of the group. Her political activism was born in the viciousness of the 1930s Jim Crow South and the anti-Communist hysteria that attended it—and this would indelibly shape how she obscured her own political sensibility and activities. While maintaining her activism over decades, she remained circumspect about it. Finally, for the second half of her life, Rosa Parks yearned for privacy and found her fame hard to bear, yet she simultaneously believed in her responsibility to continue telling the story of the movement as a way to keep it going. Wanting the history of black struggle to be preserved but disliking the spotlight, she often sought to endure the interviews, rather than use them to tell a different story.

Thus, identifying her frame of these events—her philosophy and narrative voice—has required listening around the margins of those scores of interviews to excavate a more substantive account of what was happening and how she saw it. She chose her words with care, and so, particularly in the sections related to her bus stand and the boycott, I have stitched together many, many quotes from dozens of interviews so that we might hear her insights and understand the events as she saw them. The black press has proven invaluable to this work, providing some record of her activities, particularly in the years after she left Montgomery. In addition to combing the archives for mentions of her activities, letters, meeting records, newsletters, and other documents, I have interviewed many of her friends, family, and political associates to round out this picture.

Unfortunately, many of Parks’s personal effects—dresses, awards, sewing basket, eyeglasses, and papers—have been caught up in an extended legal dispute over her estate between the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute, which she cofounded with Elaine Steele, and her family. This led a Michigan probate judge to give Guernsey’s, a celebrity auction house in New York City, the responsibility of selling all of it, with the profits to be distributed between her institute and family. Guernsey’s has been attempting to sell the Rosa Parks Archive for five years, steadfastly unwilling to let any scholar make even a cursory examination. The auction house prepared an inventory of materials, a sixty-four-page list and companion sampling of interesting documents
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—a task that would be unthinkable without a scholar to contextualize the significance of the documents if Parks was considered a serious political thinker like Thomas Jefferson or Martin Luther King Jr.

The legacy of Rosa Parks over the past decade has been besieged by controversies around profit, control, and the use of her image. This treatment is at odds with how Parks lived and her commitment to the preservation and dissemination of African American history. Parks had donated the “first” installment of her papers to Wayne State University in 1976. “I do hope that my contribution can be made use of,” she told a Wayne student reporter.
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Yet a vast trove of her papers, letters, and other ephemera sits in a storage facility in Manhattan, of use to no one, priced at $6 million to $10 million. Institutions such as Wayne State University, Alabama State University, and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture would be logical homes for Parks’s papers, but they cannot compete in such an auction. And so Parks’s ideas and life’s work sit idly in a New York warehouse, waiting to be purchased. When that archive is finally opened to researchers, a far more nuanced and detailed record of Parks’s political ties and perspectives will be available, no doubt deepening and challenging aspects of this book.

All of this provides certain challenges for a biographer. In attempting to find Rosa Parks I have tried to go beyond the symbol to excavate the political actor, to hear her amidst the bells and whistles. Although I believe I have come to understand some of her political sensibility and to contextualize its roots and historical landscape, there is much still unknown. This is fundamentally a political biography; it does not fully capture her community of friends and family ties, her faith and church life, her marriage, her daily activities. That is a task for others.

What I have endeavored to do is to begin the job of going behind the icon of Rosa Parks to excavate and examine the scope of her political life. In the process, I have used her history to retell and reexamine the span of the black freedom struggle, and to critique the many mythologies that surround much of the popular history of the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks’s life is already employed to tell a story of the United States. And so what I do here is tell a different story—showing the much broader truths about race in America, the struggle for black freedom, and the nature of individual courage to be gained from a fuller accounting of her life, a “life history of being rebellious” as she put it. It is a story with far greater lessons on how we might work for social justice today—how a person makes change in a moment and over a lifetime, and what is entailed in the struggle for justice.