The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (41 page)

In 1969, Parks’s friend Louise Tappes succeeded in getting Twelfth Street—“where the civil disturbances began”—changed to Rosa Parks Boulevard.
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The city council rescinded a law forbidding the naming of streets for living persons in order to honor Parks. The symbolic meaning of Twelfth Street would forever be linked to, if also transformed by, Rosa Parks.

The last time Mrs. Parks saw Dr. King was in a place where most whites continued to fight to maintain their racial privilege—the exclusive Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. On March 14, three weeks before his assassination, King came to speak at Grosse Pointe South High School, and Parks and a friend went out to hear him. The school board had debated for months whether to allow the event to be held there and relented only after organizers took out an extra $1 million insurance policy. “There was a horrible mess when he tried to speak out there,” she explained. “They disrupted the meeting. . . . It was an all-white city.”
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Fearing assassination, the police chief actually sat on King’s lap as they drove up to the school. In the press conference afterward, King observed that it was the most disruption he ever faced in an indoor meeting.
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Parks was unsure, however, that King even knew she was there. “I got close enough to wave but I don’t think he saw me. . . . It was just so crowded,” she recalled.
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King’s speech, “The Other America,” focused on the economic inequalities corroding American society. He put Detroit’s recent uprising in the broader context of racial inequality in the city and throughout the nation.

Like Parks, King saw the roots of the riots lying in white indifference and intransigence to black demands for justice, equality, and real economic opportunity and challenged the blinders of Northern liberalism. Like King and many of her comrades in Detroit, Rosa Parks had grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of fundamental change. Fresh energy and strategies were needed—and Mrs. Parks welcomed a new generation of freedom fighters to the struggle.

STANDING UP TO WHITE TERROR
and intimidation from Scottsboro to the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks “always felt it was my right to defend myself if I could.”
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Having long believed in self-defense, she was a steadfast critic of racism in the criminal justice system and a proponent of the far-reaching social change necessary to ensure real black equality. “I’m in favor of any move to show that we are dissatisfied,” she told an interviewer in 1964. “We still haven’t received our rights as citizens.”
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To her, black demands often got mired in delay to give the appearance of progress without committing to actual change. “As long as we formed little committees,” Parks recalled, “and went to the bus company and asked to be treated like human beings and continued to travel on the bus nothing happened.”
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Increasingly frustrated by the languid pace of change, she chafed under the regular admonitions from white moderates that black people were demanding too much. In 1967 she told an interviewer, “I don’t believe in gradualism or that whatever should be done for the better should take forever to do.”
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Parks’s lifetime of political work ran the gamut of approaches. A longtime admirer of Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, Septima Clark,
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Robert F. Williams, she embraced multiple approaches, given the systematic and pervasive character of American racism. Working alongside the Left from the Scottsboro case to E. D. Nixon’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to the Highlander Folk School to her association with the National Negro Labor Council, Parks refused to be intimidated by the red-baiting of the era. She also knew that registering to vote and taking her youth group to see the Freedom Train exhibit—let alone galvanizing an organized bus boycott—were revolutionary acts in the postwar South. To her, a united front was key to black struggle. Rosa Parks’s enduring commitment to racial justice and human rights formed a bridge between the civil rights struggle in Montgomery and black liberation in Detroit. Like many younger activists, Rosa Parks had grown frustrated with white intransigence toward black demands for equality in jobs, housing, schools, public services, and policing. Looking at her activities during this era provides a wider view of the Black Power era, its antecedents in past struggles, and the ways seasoned activists like Parks traversed its diverse currents.

In a 1970 interview, Parks sought to put the growing Black Power movement in context. She reminded the interviewer about the tremendous resistance and public criticism civil rights activists had faced in Montgomery and across the South from many white citizens and public officials, even though they were nonviolent.

She contextualized rising black militancy as a response to the illegal and violent acts civil rights activists had endured at the hands of whites in the 1950s and early 1960s, observing, “And of course when it didn’t [produce change], they gave up the philosophy of nonviolence and Christianity as the answer to the problems.”
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Parks was quick to provide a broader historical view; even though Black Power advocates were criticized for not being like Reverend King, the minister himself had been similarly attacked for his militancy. The antagonism to Black Power was rooted in opposition to demands for substantive, systemic change and in many ways, Parks pointed out, similar to the attacks on King.

On numerous occasions, Parks explicitly observed that the increase in black militancy derived from white obstructionism. “If segregationists had realized . . . when the law had passed that there would be no more segregation, legally, because of race,” she firmly explained, “if they had accepted it a bit more graciously instead of following this hard-core resistance and organizing White Citizen’s Councils [and] all of these things they did to resist . . ., there wouldn’t have been developed this new element that realized that with the nonviolent movement, what they had hoped had not been accomplished.”
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Unending white resistance to racial equality, as Mrs. Parks was quick to note, had produced the terrain for black militancy to grow.

Time and again, she sought to show the roots—the legitimacy—of black rebellion. It galled her that black people were often told to wait, to be patient and not angry. She had long hated the ways black rebels were seen as freaks or demonized for their refusal to submit. Mrs. Parks was a kind, unassuming woman, raised in the church and in the Southern traditions of good manners and public dissemblance. She possessed a reserved demeanor, an enormously caring and gentle spirit, and a wealth of patience and forbearance. But that didn’t mean she was not angry at the depth and breadth of American racism—and it did not mean she approved of the distinctions commentators now often tried to make between her “good” (though previously “dangerous”) bus action and the “‘bad” and “dangerous” Black Power movement. As Septima Clark had noted more than a decade earlier, Mrs. Parks didn’t broadcast her militancy, but she certainly had a steely determination and progressive politics at her core. Parks didn’t appreciate attempts to try to divide the black community by demonizing its more militant elements. And like the younger people she described, Mrs. Parks’s own frustration had heightened over the decades of white terror, obstruction, and indifference that greeted black protest.

Mrs. Parks’s political activities and associations in 1960s and 1970s Detroit illustrate the continuities and connections between the civil rights and Black Power movements. Indeed, as she worked in Conyers’s office attending to the socioeconomic needs of their Detroit constituents, Mrs. Parks continued her activities with the SCLC and NAACP
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took part in a variety of Black Power events. Many underlying tenets of the Black Power movement were not new to her. A set of political commitments that had run through her work for decades—self-defense, demands for more black history in the curriculum, justice for black people within the criminal justice system, independent black political power, economic justice—intersected with key aspects of these new militancies.

Parks’s beliefs and activities thus challenge the sharp line often drawn between the civil rights and Black Power struggles. The fable of Rosa Parks is so compelling because it exemplifies the heroic success of a grassroots struggle—a local boycott triggers a mass movement that ripples across the South and results in the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights acts, thereby correcting the legacy of racial discrimination in the South. Mrs. Parks herself had been invited to the White House on August 6, 1965, to watch President Johnson sign the Voting Rights Act into law to mark that victory. Seeing Parks at Black Power events in the late 1960s and 1970s demonstrates the limits of those successes and the larger goals of earlier struggles still unmet.

Moreover, the proper and quiet Rosa Parks is typically pictured in contrast to angry and violent black militants who ostensibly perverted the civil rights movement and sent the nation spiraling into the morass of 1960s rebellion. Conversely, within the emerging literature on Black Power, Mrs. Parks, like many other middle-aged black women, is implicitly treated as too proper, staid, and integrationist to have been compelled by—let alone helped nurture—Black Power. Thus, many people react uncomfortably with the idea of a Rosa Parks who stood with black radical trade unionists, cultural nationalists, antiwar activists, and prisoners’ rights advocates. There is a tendency to see racial militants as hard or angry or filled with hate—and miss the love of humanity that undergirded many people’s activism. Parks could love humanity and, through that love, be outraged by injustice and impatient with the lack of fundamental social change. That impatience was rooted in a tenderness toward people’s suffering that made it impossible for her and many others in the Black Power movement to rest easy in the face of continuing injustice. To be thrilled by the growing assertion “Black Is Beautiful” and the increased emphasis on black culture and history was part of that love. It was not about hating other people, as Parks made clear; it was about loving yourself.
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Parks continued to remind the nation that the struggle was not over. For her, carrying on the struggle in the late 1960s and 1970s meant supporting a new crop of black activists. Revolutionary Action Movement founder Max Stanford, now Muhammad Ahmad, described Mrs. Parks and a number of women elders as “more progressive than the men.”
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According to Ahmad, Parks was a long-distance runner who “didn’t let anything deter her.” These elders might not have agreed with every direction the new activists took, but they saw the importance of supporting these young freedom fighters. Nonetheless, there is often a tendency, born in part from the sectarian impulses of the era, to try to pigeonhole Parks’s ideology—was she a Communist? A nationalist? A revolutionary trade unionist? A peace activist? While she admired and consorted with many people who claimed these ideologies, there is little indication that she adopted one for herself. Mrs. Parks was a race woman. She possessed a deep activist sensibility, and like many others, particularly women of the era, she went where people were organizing. Similar to her mentor Ella Baker, Parks saw the point of radicalism as getting to the root of the problem. The bus boycott had not been an end in itself but part of an ongoing struggle. Refusing to cast the Black Power movement as a perversion of the civil rights movement, Parks was not afraid of ruining her reputation or getting in trouble, as some black leaders of her generation would feel about associating with these young militants.

Many revisionist histories of Rosa Parks and the bus boycott, which attempt to “set the story straight,” detail her pre-boycott political activities, yet nearly all of these accounts end with the boycott and almost never show her ongoing political commitments in the Black Power era. The fable of Parks is so powerful that even those who seek to challenge it often inadvertently hew to its contours. The focus on Parks’s respectability has unconsciously made it easy not to investigate her activities in these later decades. People have assumed that there was not a story to tell in these later years, and indeed Mrs. Parks was not one to disrupt that assumption. As Julian Bond ruefully admitted, “I met her numerous times over her lifetime. . . . I just talked to her about innocuous things, never delved deeper. . . . I thought I knew everything there was to know about her.”
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Parks didn’t tend to volunteer information, and interviewers rarely asked. Even with friends, she was often quiet about her political work. Her friend and physician William Anderson (who had taken part in the Albany Movement before moving to Detroit) explained that she would answer questions if asked directly but would never volunteer her ideas about political issues or events. “You would have to drag it out of her,” journalist Herb Boyd recalled.
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Numerous friends and colleagues agreed with this assessment; Conyers’s aides Larry Horwitz and Leon Atchison recalled that they would often read in the paper that Parks had attended some political event (many times “radical ones”), and often, neither knew she was going.
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Beginning with the Scottsboro case, Rosa Parks had learned to be discreet about her political activities. She kept her political opinions to herself and was never one to debate or recruit anybody. Indeed, part of her political philosophy flowed from the idea that people had to figure out the right direction for themselves: “It’s very difficult for me to tell somebody else what they ought to do.”
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