The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (25 page)

Because of the
Brown
decision and the mounting racial tension surrounding the boycott and Autherine Lucy, Alabama authorities began to take steps against the NAACP. On June 1, 1956, state attorney general John Patterson secured a court injunction barring the NAACP from further activity in Alabama on the grounds that it was a “foreign” corporation. The injunction specifically mentioned the boycott and Autherine Lucy’s desegregation of the University of Alabama. Patterson’s attack on the organization, according to Parks, came “because the people had become so unified in this protest, and it was our only civil rights organization in the city, and people were paying memberships faster than we could actually take them in. So, in order to retard the progress that this organization was making in the state of Alabama, it was outlawed a few years. But it did not separate the people because the organization was outlawed. The MIA just became stronger.”
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WITH THE CITY STANDING FIRM
for segregation, the economic and physical harassment of boycotters intensified. Parks’s action had come at a significant sacrifice to her family’s economic stability. When Montgomery Fair discharged her a month after her bus stand, this jeopardized the family’s stability, as they relied greatly on her steady income. A week later, forbidden from discussing the protest at work, Raymond resigned his job at Maxwell Air Force Base. Shortly after, their landlord raised their rent ten dollars a month. The Parks family was now in severe economic trouble.

While the physical violence the boycotters and leaders endured is an integral part of civil rights history, this economic catastrophe—the sacrifice Rosa’s bus stand entailed for her family and, more broadly, the economic retaliation against civil rights activists—is not as widely recognized. Indeed Parks’s sacrifice—the toll her bus stand took on her and her family—barely gathers a mention in the triumphal story of her journey from Montgomery to the Capitol rotunda. Learning to live with such economic insecurity was excruciating, particularly the paradox for Parks of being “famous” and yet having no money. Additionally, the phone rang constantly with hateful messages: “Die, nigger. Die” or “You should be killed.” Sometimes she was verbally accosted on the street.
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The fear of white violence was ever present.

The faith and fortitude it took to stay active proved immense. To live with death threats and witness friends’ homes bombed, to lose her job and wonder how her family would survive, to spend a decade being famous yet still without steady employment, and to have that stress significantly compromise her health and that of her husband—that was Rosa Parks’s experience during and after the boycott.

Historian Chana Kai Lee notes the importance of examining the difficulties women activists like Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer experienced: “It seems only fair and profitable to try to talk about her pain too, but not in a way in which we emphasize only her survival of that pain and those challenges.”
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Understanding the fullness of Parks’s political life requires looking at the economic insecurity, health issues, fear, and harassment she endured the year of the boycott and for the ensuing decade. Being a heroine was difficult.

The erasure of Parks’s hardships stems partly from the ways she was publicly cast as a tired seamstress, rather than a longtime political activist. Montgomery activists, including Parks herself, had realized the importance of a symbol to coalesce around; to do so, they separated and celebrated the courageous stand she made on the bus from her larger political and employment history. But the danger of symbols is that they get fixed in time. They require honor but not necessarily assistance, so the fact that the figure was a real woman with a real family who was suffering became difficult to see. Add Parks’s gender—and the ways that economic instability is often not understood to have the same impact on a woman as on a man of that era—and Parks’s sacrifice recedes further into the background. Moreover, symbols become the property of the whole movement. So who would claim responsibility for the quiet suffering of the “mother of the movement”?

In a larger sense, the boycott fable is the founding story—the golden goose—of the civil rights movement, with its untarnished happy ending and its ability to reflect the best possibilities of the United States. A classic American tale, it is the story of an ordinary citizen who with a simple act inspired the nation to make good on its ideals. To see the Parks family suffering for a decade after the boycott’s successful end—to confront the cost and complexity of that success and the economic retaliation that many civil rights activists endured—mars the legend. It many ways, that fable’s utility requires the now-classic photo finish, the ubiquitous image of Rosa Parks seated in profile on a desegregated bus.

Looking at Rosa Parks head on requires going beyond that picture and ultimately provides a more sobering view of the prolonged resistance to civil rights throughout the country. Parks’s politics and a deeply segregated and discriminatory job market left her without stable work in the Confederate South and the liberal North for nearly a decade. That decade of suffering occurred as the modern civil rights movement reached its apex, a decade now tinged in the rosy glow of nostalgia and redemptive suffering. But there was nothing foreordained about where the Rosa Parks story would end, no easy solace that Parks could claim to alleviate the fear or the poverty. Not all suffering led to change, as civil rights stalwarts like Parks knew well. In 1966, Parks sidestepped a question in an interview with New York state senator George Metcalf, who was writing a book profiling important black figures. Metcalf asked whether “all the tortures and everything you suffered were worth it?” Parks did
not
say an unequivocal yes, responding instead, “I didn’t think of it in just that way. I think I would have preferred if we would return to normal without segregation. It would have been better. I didn’t regret the fact that we had made at least this gain of ending segregation on the buses.”
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Having endeavored to conquer her fear in the decades of activism before the boycott, Parks had delighted in the community uprising. She worked to keep the terror of harassment and instability at bay as she played an active role in maintaining the boycott, and continued her political activities once it finished. She did not sugarcoat the costs of that work but often kept the difficulties to herself.

Parks was very reluctant to attribute her firing from the Montgomery Fair Department Store unequivocally to her bus stand: “I cannot say this is true. I do not like to form in my mind something I do not have any proof of.”
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As judicious as she was in her assessment, there can be little doubt that her bus stand cost her a position at the department store. After she was laid off, Parks redoubled her work for the boycott. She gave speeches, traveled on behalf of the NAACP and MIA, attended meetings, helped distribute clothes, food, and other necessities to people affected by the boycott, and served briefly as a dispatcher—all the while worrying about her own family’s economic well-being and doing whatever sewing work she could find on the side.

During the first weeks of the boycott, the MIA relied on local fund-raising but soon recognized the need to solicit outside support. In February, longtime New York–based organizers Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Stanley Levinson formed In Friendship. Heartened by this budding Southern militancy, the group sought to provide material support for the boycott and civil rights workers across the South facing reprisals for their activism.

Given the Cold War context—not to mention that civil rights activities had long been discredited as the work of “outsiders”—taking outside money put the movement at risk of charges of subversion and carpetbagging (with its Reconstruction-era overtones). However, the costs of sustaining the car pools were considerable, not to mention the numbers of people facing reprisals for their participation. The MIA needed outside financial support, beyond what Montgomerians could provide.

By the winter, friction had developed between King and NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins over how the NAACP was still keeping the boycott at arm’s length, even as its own fund-raising was benefiting from the protest’s inspiring example. The NAACP had maintained its distance from the boycott in its early days, in part because the boycott, with its initial limited demands, was not, at first, a full-on assault on segregation. Seeing it as too “mild,” Wilkins wrote Alabama field secretary W. C. Patton that the boycott sought to “improv[e] segregation by making it more polite.” Though this went unmentioned, the grassroots militancy of the boycott differed from the organization’s usual program of legalist strategies.
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James Peck (who later joined CORE’s Freedom Ride) wrote a letter criticizing the NAACP for its unwillingness to back the boycott. Indeed the national office of the NAACP blocked talk by some members urging a national boycott of the bus company.
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To Montgomery officials there was nothing mild about the boycott. As the protest continued, King continued to press the NAACP for help while expressing his concern that NAACP fund-raising was eclipsing the MIA’s. Wilkins pledged to cover the legal costs associated with Parks’s appeal and the indicted boycott organizers. Still, even when the boycott’s goals turned to full desegregation, the NAACP kept its distance from the boycott itself. While providing legal assistance, they waited to see the outcome of the mass trial that followed the February indictments before assessing the efficacy of passive resistance and economic suasion.
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At its June national convention, the NAACP continued this equivocation, passing a resolution saying that “we are not yet ready to take a position on [passive nonviolent resistance].”
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This friction and the rivalries between groups would have severe consequences for Parks. No civil rights group—not the NAACP she had worked for over the past decade nor the MIA she helped create—felt primarily responsible for Parks’s imperiled situation, even though she fund-raised for both during the year of the boycott.

Parks wrote on a slip of paper during the boycott, “I have no quarrel with MIA about being given or not given a job.”
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While certainly not feeling entitled to a job, this note demonstrates that she recognized the possibility of a job for her within the organization. The MIA hired four women to be its office staff: Erma Dungee as financial secretary, Maude Ballou as King’s personal secretary, Martha Johnson as the MIA’s secretary-clerk, and Hazel Gregory as the MIA’s general overseer. Jo Ann Robinson described the four as sophisticated, socially prominent, well-trained “young ladies” who were members of the WPC with professional husbands, which suggests that these women occupied a different social position than Parks.
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Meanwhile, no one would hire either Rosa or Raymond Parks.

One day, Virginia Durr had stopped by the Parks’s apartment. Leona McCauley had a hankering for sweet potatoes, but the family had no money for such luxuries. Recognizing the depth of the trouble the Parks family was facing, Durr set about to find some money or a job for Mrs. Parks. For Durr, who was an outcast in Montgomery because of her civil rights beliefs, this project provided a respite from her own isolation and a way to be useful. There is no record from Parks about how she felt or if she knew the extent of Durr’s outreach.

Durr threw herself into this cause, writing to friends across the country for assistance. To Myles Horton of Highlander, she explained, “It is fine to be a heroine but the price is high.”
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To another friend, she noted that Parks “has the heaviest burden to bear.”
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Horton wrote back hoping to “figure out a way to get some money somewhere to help her out” and asking whether Durr and Parks might come to a March meeting at Highlander. “It would be an inspiration to have her [Parks] here,” Horton explained.
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Horton subsequently wrote to Parks telling her how “proud we were of your courageous role in the boycott,” and offering his sympathies regarding her economic situation.
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Horton’s response would become the standard treatment for Parks over the next years and decades. Fame—even that imbued with the deepest admiration and respect—did not necessarily translate into security. People would honor her work and solicit her political participation, often without attending to her pressing economic needs.

Durr wrote Horton again two weeks later about Parks’s difficulties: “You would be amazed at the number of pictures, interviews etc that she had taken and all of that takes up time and then too all the meetings and then having to walk nearly everywhere she goes takes time too. . . . Most people want to contribute to the Boycott itself rather than to an individual, but that particular individual is to my mind very important.”
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Parks herself wrote to Horton a week later telling him of the termination of her job. “Mrs. Durr is very concerned about our welfare. I appreciate her friendship, especially at this trying time.”
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Parks cited Durr’s concern to invoke the urgency of her situation; as a respectable black woman, she sought to maintain her dignity. While Horton would grow into a friend, she had only met him once at this point and likely found it easier to mention the difficulties of her situation through the words of a white woman who was his friend.
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Historian Darlene Clark Hine has written about the culture of dissemblance, a politics of silence that developed among black women in response to the pressures of living with sexual and economic violence. “Only with secrecy, thus achieving a self-imposed invisibility could ordinary black women acquire the psychic space and gather the resources necessary to hold their own in their often one-sided and mismatched struggle against oppression.”
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As Hine argues, black women of this era purposely shielded their innermost feelings from public view. One imagines this was particularly acute for someone like Parks, who was reserved to begin with and then spent the second half of her life under constant public scrutiny. Committed to maintaining her dignified appearance to advance the movement, she kept many of her feelings and troubles to herself. Parks had long chafed at the ways black people had to subsume their needs to whites, but she, like many black women, was skilled at this survival strategy. She put this ability to different use in her public role as a boycott symbol, which required backgrounding her own needs and pain, at times, for the good of the movement. Even as she noticed and attended to the suffering of others, she often seemed determined to keep quiet about her own difficulties. Her own personal sense of dignity became linked to her ability to withstand the pressure.