The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (27 page)

The bus protest left many casualties and required constant vigilance. Raymond Parks slept with his gun during this period.
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So did Jo Ann Robinson. “I was afraid to shoot the pistol, but it was a comfort to have it there. . . . If anybody had attempted to break in, I am sure I would have used the gun.”
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Living with the very real possibility of white violence, many in the black community worried tremendously and had their guns nearby for self-protection during the yearlong struggle.

Throughout 1956, Mrs. Parks traveled throughout the country making appearances on behalf of the bus protest and the NAACP. Crucial to sustaining the protest, these appearances raised money and brought national attention to their efforts and to the repression black Montgomerians faced, turning a local movement into a national struggle.

In March, Parks returned to Highlander to speak at a workshop. She described the dramatic change the boycott had brought to the city. “Montgomery . . . [is] just a different place altogether since we demonstrated.”
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Being asked to give up her seat was “too much. . . . it meant that I didn’t have a right to do anything but get on the bus, give them my fare and then be pushed wherever they wanted me.” She also highlighted how others in Montgomery “had experienced something of the same” humiliating treatment that had spurred the protest.
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The public role of the ministers, Parks felt, was as an important new development in Montgomery. Laced throughout Parks’s remarks was her surprise and delight at the movement that had emerged in Montgomery. Horton echoed Parks’s incredulity, curiously referring to Parks’s stand as a “very little thing.”

In a letter to Horton in April, Parks described the uncertainty many felt “never know[ing] what to expect, however, we are keeping on no matter what may happen.”
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She spent most of the spring traveling, crisscrossing the country from Detroit to Seattle, Los Angeles to New York to San Francisco on behalf of the movement. Raymond was “concerned for my safety,” but it was a “wonderful trip” with “no unpleasant experiences.”
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In speeches she gave that year, Parks talked about the boycott as just the beginning of a broader struggle and asked that people pray for her as she returned to Montgomery.
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Parks’s desire to have people praying for her reveals the fear she was living with that year and the sustenance she derived through collective support. Having organized in relative loneliness for a decade previous to the bus protest, she drew tremendous strength from the outpouring of support for their movement.

In March, Parks flew to Detroit—her first airplane flight. She saw her brother, raised money for the MIA in a number of churches, and spoke to Local 600, a militant Detroit UAW local. Demonstrating her willingness to separate herself from the agenda of the NAACP, who frowned on this association with radical trade unionists, Parks maintained alliances with the black left. She did not distance herself from those “reds” who, by the mid-1950s, had been blacklisted and whom those in some civil rights circles had excommunicated for fear of being red-baited themselves. In June, she sent union activist Ernie Thompson of the radical National Negro Labor Council a letter of thanks, evoking the need for struggle over empty sentiments: “It awakens within our mind the fact that there are people of good will in America who are deeply concerned about justice and freedom for all people, and who are willing to make the noble precepts of Democracy living facts lifted out of the dusty files of unimplemented and forgotten court decisions.”
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The decision to maintain these alliances with the Left, particularly during the boycott and the vicious anti-Communism infecting Alabama, evidenced her political independence.

While frowning on such alliances, the NAACP found Parks to be a popular speaker and membership recruiter. She spoke to the Seattle and Los Angeles branches, her talk at the latter entitled “When I Rebelled Against Second Class Citizenship.”
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While visiting Oakland, she met Durr’s good friend the writer and Communist Party member Jessica Mitford. Durr later wrote Mitford that Parks’s travels were “like a fairy tale, orchids, flowers, presents, banquets, and speaking to audiences of 3000 people” though Parks had not appreciated that there were also “snoopers” who were trying to cause trouble for Mitford.
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In early May, Parks journeyed to Anderson College in Indiana, then spoke at an NAACP event in Pittsburgh, followed by two weeks of events in New York on behalf of the NAACP and the Highlander Folk School (though the NAACP did not endorse this support of Highlander).
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She stayed with Stewart and Charlotte Meacham, white Methodists and later anti–Vietnam War activists, and then lived in a small room at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side.
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The scope of Parks’s visit to New York demonstrates her involvement in a network of seasoned organizers. The trip proved personally thrilling. Parks toured Harlem with Ella Baker, went to meetings with Dr. Kenneth Clark and Reverend James Robinson, and got to meet two of her heroes, labor leader A. Phillip Randolph and NAACP leader Roy Wilkins. She spent an evening with Thurgood Marshall and his wife, Cecilia, staying out with them and the King family until 1:30 in the morning.
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She also visited the Statue of Liberty. “We went to the top of it, 22 stories,” she wrote her mother.
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Amazed by this whirlwind of events, she made many notable acquaintances and had encounters far beyond what she could have ever imagined six months earlier.

On May 24, In Friendship, along with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, held a massive civil rights rally and fund-raiser at Madison Square Garden in New York. Ella Baker and others had worked for six weeks to pull off this “Heroes of the South” event.
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Sixteen thousand people packed the Garden—much to the surprise of the
Pittsburgh Courier
, which noted that the Garden was rarely used for political events given its difficulty to fill.
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King was originally supposed to headline the event but had to pull out. Parks and Nixon represented the boycott, though the posters advertising the event never listed Parks. Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Phillip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Adam Clayton Powell, E. D. Nixon, and Autherine Lucy all spoke.

Mrs. Parks also addressed the crowd, declaring that if she had the choice, she would refuse to give up her seat again. A star-studded array of celebrities—Sammy Davis Jr., Cab Calloway, Pearl Bailey, and Tallulah Bankhead—participated in the festivities. Bankhead kissed Parks and Autherine Lucy onstage, emphatically declaring, “There have been generations of Bankheads in Alabama, but I’m not proud of what’s happening there today.”
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The rally raised $6,000.
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Parks wrote home calling the event a “tremendous affair.”
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She also rode the bus in New York, prominently taking a seat in the front. The whole event was photographed by the
New York
Amsterdam News
, which wrote that Mrs. Parks sat where she chose and was well treated by
black
bus driver Delbert Bradley. While in New York, she also received a plaque from the Committee for Better Human Relations, at the Savoy Ballroom. Accepting the award, she teared up, explaining it was the first one she had ever received. Such accolades for her activism were new for Mrs. Parks, as was all the travel and attention. She vowed to keep going until “all our demands are met.”
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Keeping a full schedule, still she worried that she was “needed in Montgomery.”
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Parks also attended two meetings for Highlander. After the NAACP’s invitation to speak at the New York branch, according to Horton, “they ignored her.”
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Horton arranged for her to meet Ralph Bunche and Eleanor Roosevelt, introducing the “first lady of the land to the first lady of the South.”
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Versed in the perils of taking bold stands in 1950s America, the First Lady asked Mrs. Parks if she had been accused of being a Communist. When Parks said yes, Roosevelt replied that she expected Horton had warned Parks about this. Parks said no. As Horton recalled,

Parks told Roosevelt that after the boycott began, Horton traveled to Montgomery to tell her what was in store for her.
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The former first lady well understood the price that Parks would pay for her stand.

Meeting Parks became the subject of Roosevelt’s “My Day” newspaper column. Describing Parks as “a very quiet, gentle persona,” Roosevelt wrote it was “difficult to imagine how she could take such a positive and independent stand.” Still she challenged the idea that Parks’s stand just happened out of the blue. “These things do not happen all of a sudden. They grow out of feelings that have been developing over many years. Human beings reach a point . . . ‘This is as far as I can go,’ and from then on it may be passive resistance, but it will be resistance.”
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Two days later Parks journeyed on to Washington, DC, to address the National Council of Negro Women with Septima Clark. Parks returned home glowing with excitement over her trip to New York, talking about the “wonderful reception” she had received.
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Nonetheless, Parks’s health suffered during this period. The stress of the public scrutiny, the economic and personal troubles her family faced, and the constant threat of violence had given her acute insomnia and ulcers.
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Exhausted and sick, she still continued her travels. In early June, she flew to San Francisco for the forty-seventh annual NAACP national convention. She was met by a reporter who “announced arrogantly that he was going ‘to take me apart and see what made me tick.’”
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He peppered her with a series of aggressive questions accusing her of seeking publicity, impugning her morality, and referring to her as a prostitute. Parks grew upset and began shaking, her teacup rattling. Overwhelmed by the onslaught, she “couldn’t stand him any longer” and broke down in “hysterics. . . . I mean I started screaming—I’ll kill you—I just cried[.] [T]that’s the only time I had done that in a press conference.”
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Pleased he had gotten under her skin, the reporter left. Parks remained crying.

“I don’t know what made me go off like that,” Parks would write later in her autobiography. This was one of the only times in her history of activism that Parks describes crying in public. Indeed, in all of Parks’s public appearances, this is the only time she seems to have lost her composure. Given how much stress Parks faced for decades (before, during, and after the boycott), and the thousands of appearances she made, her public equanimity was remarkable. According to her niece Rhea, both her Aunt Rosa and father had learned “not to display their emotions, to always be in control of their faculties.”
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Parks likely internalized the stress, as her struggles with insomnia and ulcers attested.

Parks compared the difficulties maintaining her composure to those Autherine Lucy faced. Lucy had also struggled not to let the endless harassment get to her when she attempted to integrate the University of Alabama as a graduate student on February 3, 1956. The public scrutiny was endless for both women; explained Parks, “I was not accustomed to so much attention.”
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Parks gave a brief, moving account of her experiences in Montgomery at the NAACP convention, which, according to the
Philadelphia Tribune
, bolstered the fund-raising efforts and led to $10,000 being raised for the Fight for Freedom Fund.
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Besides writing Horton at Highlander, Durr had reached out to friends and political associates across the country about the Parks family’s economic troubles. Through these efforts over the winter, she raised $500 for the Parks family. Faced with mounting debt, a worsening ulcer, a sick mother, and a husband who was depressed and drinking, Parks reluctantly accepted the money. “So reserved and proud,” Durr would write an associate, “if it were not by necessity, she wouldn’t take a nickel in contributions.”
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This provided some temporary stability for the family. But by July, Durr wrote a friend, this money had run out. “I wish all those fine people who liked her so much and sent her orchids would get together and send her some dough as she really needs it. She can’t get a job anywhere here and can’t leave as both her Mother and Husband are sick. . . . For her to have to go back to sewing for little or nothing is sad, sort of like Cinderella.”
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Durr raised another $350 over the summer.

Despite the toll on her personally, Parks publicly urged perseverance. At a talk to the National Council of Negro Women in June in Washington, DC, she promised to “continue in every way I can” and urged people not to “give up faith, and one day we will have the Democracy we are hoping for.”
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Here and in other speeches that year Parks made clear the boycott was aimed at something much bigger than a seat on the bus—the promise of full citizenship. At an NAACP mass meeting in Baltimore in September, Parks told the crowd it might “take plenty of sacrifice” but she felt “sure that we will win in the end.”
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In interviews, Parks often contextualized her own stamina as having grown within the years of difficult organizing before there was a mass movement. For Parks, despite the tremendous hardship the boycott imposed, this was, in some ways, an easier period for her given the solidarity within Montgomery’s black community. “Because there were so many people involved . . . it was not discouraging as it had been before the incidents and before others joined in.”