The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (43 page)

There at Ford Auditorium in downtown Detroit, with Rosa Parks sitting in the front row, Malcolm X gave a powerful speech, often referred to as his “Last Message” because it occurred a week before his assassination. The week before, Parks had turned fifty-four. Malcolm X had reflected on his own birthday with Alex Haley. “A lot of water had gone under the bridge in those years. In some ways, I had had more experiences than a dozen men.”
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As she sat in the audience that February evening, Rosa Parks too had had more experiences than a dozen men. She had gotten her political start with her grandfather’s Garveyism and in her newlywed work with Raymond on the Scottsboro case. She found her own political footing in the lonely activism of the NAACP in the 1940s, encouraging youth activism, black voter registration, and legal challenges to white brutality. Her spirit was nourished in the interracial populism of Highlander Folk School. Used to all-black political organizing with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the Progressive Democratic League, she had helped spur and sustain a yearlong black bus boycott in Montgomery and had traveled the country raising money and attention for it. She watched the sea of humanity gather in DC for the March on Washington and had met many of the great civil rights luminaries of the twentieth century: A. Phillip Randolph, Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall—the list went on. She knew most of Motown’s emerging black leadership, from Reverend Cleage to the Henry brothers, and had just been hired to work in John Conyers’s Detroit office.

That February evening was a difficult one for Malcolm X. His Queens home had been firebombed that morning, but he came to Detroit anyway and was heavily protected that night.
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The crowd gathered that evening was sparse.
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In his speech, Malcolm X cautioned those gathered about the ways that the media was trying to determine the black agenda,

Malcolm zeroed in on an issue that had troubled Parks for decades: the public perception that blacks were satisfied with their situation and the ways black people were induced constantly to affirm their contentment in American society.

He acknowledged the power of an organized black vote. Similar to the voter education and registration projects Parks had worked on in the 1940s and 1950s, Malcolm wanted black people to know “what a vote is supposed to produce . . . to utilize this united voting power so that you can control the politics of your own community, and the politicians that represent that community.” Black self-determination required empowered and enfranchised black people, he explained that February evening, echoing what Mrs. Parks had told her NAACP youth a decade earlier. Like Malcolm, Parks had developed an increasingly international vision. She had always been an avid reader of the black press, which was covering anticolonial struggles across the globe. Back in 1960 at a Highlander meeting, Parks had linked discrimination at home to the increasing militarization of the Cold War. “As we eliminate legal segregation and discrimination . . . [we] should then begin working together for peace, world peace and disarmament and do away with war.”
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By 1965, she was reading all she could on the antinuclear peace movement and on the geopolitical situation in Vietnam. Like Malcolm X, she was an early opponent of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and watched the unfolding anticolonial movements across Africa and Asia with great interest.

Afterward Parks got Malcolm X to sign her program and spoke with him privately.
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Malcolm was likely as delighted as Mrs. Parks by this meeting. In his last years, as he began charting his own political and religious path, founding the Muslim Mosque and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, he took counsel from a number of black women leaders including Gloria Richardson, Maya Angelou, Vicki Garvin, and Queen Mother Moore, who had long histories of organizing experience to impart. OAAU member Peter Bailey recalled conversations where Malcolm praised courageous people in the civil rights movement, singling out both Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks.
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Parks would cherish that program and their conversation even more when the devastating news came seven days later that Malcolm X had been assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.

Self-defense to Rosa Parks was self-protection. This was a variation of Malcolm’s argument in the “Ballot or the Bullet” speech when he explained, “I’m nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me. But when you drop that violence on me, then you’ve made me go insane, and I’m not responsible for what I do.”
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For both of them, nonviolence required a commitment to decency on both sides, and without that it could not be sustained indefinitely. In an interview in 1967, two months after the Detroit riot, Parks talked extensively about the power of nonviolence and the necessity of self-defense. Parks had grown increasingly disillusioned with the ways that nonviolent direct action over the past decade had repeatedly been met with white violence.

Parks steadfastly put the onus of the problem—“the kind of treatment that would provoke violence”—on white action.

The virulence and persistence of racial inequality took its toll on her on many different levels. In 1965, Parks explained to George Metcalf the trying situation black people were facing: “There is no longer the encouragement to endure it as it is. There is not enough strength to conquer it. Just the bitterness to lash out with whatever the impulse is to do.”
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Discouraged by the vehemence of white resistance and the pace of change, Parks felt a kinship to the young people in the growing Black Power movement who “don’t believe in absorbing this abuse, physically and otherwise; now that there are so many who are really in the belief that you have to meet violence with violence, it leaves me almost without any explanation of what is best, in a way.”
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Shortly after the devastating news of King’s assassination, Parks told a reporter that she was unsure she could be “as strong, forgiving and Christian-like as Dr. King. Sometimes I think it’s asking too much, in the face of all the oppression and abuse we have to bear. We shouldn’t be expected not to react to violence. It’s a human reaction and that’s what we are, human beings.”
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For Rosa Parks, who had long practiced Christian forbearance toward the endless harassment of her and her family, there still came a time when the abuse became too much to tolerate, when the assertion of one’s humanity necessitated self-protection.

Parks had long admired Robert F. Williams’s commitment to building a militant working-class NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina, in the 1950s, and they may have met or spoken shortly after the boycott.
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Williams advocated “armed self reliance” alongside nonviolent direct action and, like Nixon and Parks in their work for the NAACP, took up a series of legal cases aimed at addressing white brutality and legal malfeasance. But his leadership drew attention from the FBI and the criticism of the national NAACP. He was ousted as Monroe NAACP president in 1959 for controversial remarks asserting the right of blacks to defend themselves. In 1961, following a riot in Monroe around the Freedom Rides, Williams gave a white couple shelter in his home, fearing the anger of the crowd. He was subsequently charged with kidnapping by the North Carolina police, and the FBI issued a “most wanted” warrant for his arrest. The Williamses chose to go into exile, first settling in Cuba and then China. While in Cuba, Williams published a pivotal book,
Negroes with Guns
, and broadcast a radio program called
Radio Free Dixie
that could be heard back in the United States.

When Robert and Mabel Williams returned from exile in China, they became friends with Rosa Parks and her young companion, Elaine Eason. Parks had met Eason in 1961 working at the Stockton Sewing Company sewing aprons. The sixteen-year-old Eason was a spirited young woman. While their days of sewing alongside each other were short-lived, their friendship spanned the next four decades.
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Eason, whose family also hailed from Alabama, had many questions for Mrs. Parks, eager to learn from this experienced activist. Later, after Parks began working for Conyers, Elaine worked in the same building downtown, and their friendship deepened.
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Having long delighted in the militancy of young people and looking to them to carry the movement forward, Rosa admired Elaine’s passion and commitment. Over the decades Rosa and Elaine grew as close as family, and certainly part of that bond stemmed from a shared political spirit. Elaine’s activism grew over the course of the 1960s, as she joined the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) and became romantically involved with Wesley Steele. Steele was one of the bodyguards protecting the Williams family upon their return to the United States.

It was through these RNA connections that the Williamses got to know Rosa Parks.
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Parks came to admire Robert and Mabel Williams even more “as we worked together,” and they all gathered for Elaine’s wedding to Wesley.
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Robert Williams came by Conyers’ office, where Parks worked. During this period, an organized campaign emerged to prevent the extradition of Williams to North Carolina, which wanted him to stand trial. Parks joined the petition drive and the defense committee, and donations for Williams’s extradition fight in 1969 were sent to Conyers’s office. Conyers himself urged the Detroit NAACP to “express to the Governor its outrage at the prospect of Mr. Williams being extradited.”
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Meanwhile, according to Mabel Williams, her husband was so disturbed by the ways Parks’s contributions to the black struggle were overlooked that in the midst of fighting his extradition, Williams took time in his speeches to highlight the fact that Rosa Parks was living in Detroit, and yet people did not seem to understand her importance.
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Three decades later, on October 22, 1996, Parks, in turn, mounted the pulpit in Monroe, North Carolina, to pay tribute to Williams following his passing. After seeing many comrades assassinated or die prematurely, she remarked on the good fortune of attending a funeral for a black leader who had lived a full life. She explained how she had “always admired Robert Williams for his courage and his commitment to freedom.”
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In the long roster of her most treasured encounters and friendships, Mrs. Parks thus counted many of the period’s most fearless black voices as friends and comrades.

Since he joined the movement in Montgomery in 1955, Martin Luther King’s life had been repeatedly threatened. By 1968, he was routinely receiving multiple death threats. Lambasted for his stand against U.S. militarism abroad and for his attempts to build a movement for economic justice at home, King remained committed to these efforts. On April 3, he returned to Memphis, where he joined the struggle of striking sanitation workers and met with local leaders to prepare for an April 8 march. Just as the SCLC had faced in Albany, Birmingham, and Selma, the court issued an injunction to prevent the march. The organizers vowed to fight it. Angered, King told the crowd gathered that night, “All we say to America is: Be true to what you said on paper. . . . Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.”
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That evening, King called home to arrange his upcoming Sunday sermon, entitling it “Why America Is Going to Hell.”

On the evening of April 4, after a day of meetings, King walked out onto the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel and was shot by a single .30 caliber bullet. He was rushed to the hospital. Calls began to come in to the Parks home that King had been shot. “He can’t die, I said to myself, he can’t die,”
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she said. King did not survive. According to the legal case, the sniper was James Earl Ray, who acted on his own. Ray died in prison in 1998 with significant questions (including from the King family itself) remaining about his guilt and the role of others in the assassination.

The news of King’s death devastated the Parks family and ripped through the nation. Rosa “just went numb,” playing Sam Cooke’s “Long Time Coming” over and over. “I was lost. How else can I describe it?”
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Raymond could not eat for days. The day after the assassination, Stokely Carmichael declared, “White America made its biggest mistake because she killed the one man of our race that this country’s older generations, the militants and the revolutionaries and the masses of black people would still listen to.”
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Angry and disillusioned, people took to the streets. Riots broke out in 110 cities across the country.

Rosa Parks and Louise Tappes journeyed south.
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Parks first went to Memphis to join the march that King was to have led. But after speaking for a few hours with a number of the striking sanitation workers, she was overcome by grief and accepted Harry Belafonte’s invitation to ride on his plane to Atlanta with the King and Abernathy families for the funeral. At the funeral, she was seated on the platform next to Ossie Davis, who began the memorial speeches.