In 1961, the Parkses were able to leave their two rooms in the Progressive Civil League building. They moved to the ground floor of a brick flat in the Virginia Park neighborhood—a segregated neighborhood, as Parks described it to an interviewer, “almost 100% Negro with the exception of about two families in the block where I live. In fact I suppose you’d call it just about the heart of the ghetto.”14 Virginia Park boasted a wide cross-section of black people—union activists, schoolteachers, families on AFDC, and some militants, according to resident Ollie Foster.15 The area, which would later become the epicenter of the 1967 rebellion, had grown increasingly crowded as black migrants were corralled into certain neighborhoods on the west side due to urban renewal and highway construction.
For the next four decades, Rosa Parks made Detroit’s near west-side her home. Referring to the city as “the northern promised land that wasn’t,” Parks saw that racism in Detroit was “almost as widespread as Montgomery.”16 Because the apparatus of racial inequality in Detroit was more covert, the daily humiliation of separate drinking fountains, elevators, buses, movie theaters, and lunch counters was thankfully gone. Still, Parks did not find “too much difference” between race relations in Detroit and Montgomery.17 Like Montgomery, the city offered a decidedly second-class citizenship for blacks. The systems of racial caste and power in Detroit denied people of color equitable education, safe policing, real job opportunities, a responsive city government, regular quality sanitation and health services, and due process under the law.
Segregation operated somewhat differently in Detroit than Montgomery. While she cherished Detroit’s more integrated public spaces and a lessening of daily fear, Parks found “problems here . . . especially in the school system. The schools would be overcrowded. The job situation wouldn’t be none too good.”18 Housing was acutely segregated, and the differences in public services and policing that followed those boundaries made that segregation even more vicious. And many public spaces, while not explicitly marked “for whites only”—like Detroit’s hotels, restaurants, and hospitals—practiced that just the same.19
Looking at Rosa Parks’s life in the North provides a different view of the racial landscape of postwar America and her direct experiences of Northern, as well as Southern, racism. Parks is so associated with Montgomery, so intertwined in the public memory with the racism and segregation of the Deep South, that the fact she spent more than half her life in an also-segregated Detroit hardly enters into our understanding of her life and legacy. Her description of the city as “the promised land that wasn’t” is a palpable reminder that Northern migration didn’t necessarily produce salvation and that racial inequality was a national plague, not a Southern malady. The civil rights movement was not simply a struggle between the liberal North and a redneck South, as the fable of Rosa Parks too often suggests.
In many of the memorials and descriptions of her life, Parks’s migration north and her work in Conyers’s office is treated like a postscript—the happy ending to a difficult life in the South and a respite from Montgomery’s racial injustice. But the racial inequality that characterized Montgomery—jobs, housing, and school segregation, police brutality, negligible protection for black people under the law, limited black political power—was also endemic in Detroit. And thus Parks’s own activism was not limited to the Cradle of the Confederacy. A decade before the 1967 riot and the black militancy that would make Detroit famous in the racial imagination, Parks moved to the city and joined a burgeoning civil rights movement there. She would spend the rest of her life, nearly fifty years, in Detroit—as a churchgoer and an aunt to her thirteen nieces and nephews, as a staff member for liberal congressman John Conyers and a political activist drawing attention to the racial inequalities of the liberal North. Yet her sustained critique of Northern racism and her half century of political work and community life in Detroit are largely unexplored.
The historical connotations of black freedom in the “promised land” (runaway slaves, the Harlem Renaissance, and black migration during the two world wars) have made it difficult to envision Rosa Parks as part of a struggle for black freedom in the North. America’s race problem is often framed as a relic of a premodern system entrenched in the South and embodied in the form of bus driver James Blake, Montgomery’s intransigent city leaders, and its burgeoning White Citizen’s Council. The idea that Southern civil rights workers might also become Northern activists disturbs the easy oppositions embedded in these popular notions. Yet both Parks and King stressed the national character of racism. “The racial issue that we confront in America,” declared King in a 1960 speech in New York, “is not a sectional but a national problem. . . . There is a pressing need for a liberalism in the North that is truly liberal, that firmly believes in integration in its own community as well as in the deep South.” Parks too questioned the hypocritical silences of Northern liberalism, seeing Detroit’s 1967 riot as “the result of resistance to change that was needed long beforehand.”20
The depth of racial injustice in the North combined with the feign of Northern innocence proved frustrating for the “mother of the movement.” Parks continued to receive hate mail and menacing phone calls well into the 1970s in Detroit. She and King were called Communists, not only for their work in the South but also for their support of open housing and desegregated schools in the North. As Gunnar Myrdal had observed in American Dilemma, “The social paradox of the North is exactly this, that almost everybody is against discrimination in general but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs.” The terming of Northern segregation as “de facto” was a misnomer to appeal to Northern sensibilities, according to historian Matthew Lassiter, “despite ample historical evidence of comprehensive state action in producing deeply entrenched patterns of residential and educational segregation.”21
While offering them the opportunity to get away from the difficulties of Montgomery and a chance to be near family, Motown was not a land of milk and honey for the Parks.22 There was the blessing of extended family. Residing in Southwest Detroit, Sylvester and his wife, Daisy, had thirteen children, whom the Parks family now got to watch grow up. And her cousins Thomas Williamson and Annie Cruse and their families lived there. She saw them regularly. “They would make us clothes all the time,” cousin Carolyn Green recalled. “I loved going over,” niece Rhea McCauley concurred.23
But the family still struggled economically. Being a notorious black woman did little to improve her job prospects in Detroit. Its racially segregated employment structure created financial problems similar to those in Montgomery, and steady, well-paid work proved elusive. In the years before Conyers hired her, Mrs. Parks took in piecework, sewed in the home of a seamstress friend, and then got a job sewing aprons and skirts ten hours a day at the Stockton Sewing Company.
In many ways, the fable of Rosa Parks with its much simpler tale of good guys (moral, upstanding Southern blacks and their Northern white allies) and bad guys (racist Southern whites and alienated Northern blacks) has obscured this history of Northern struggle. The treatment of the race problem as a Southern—not national—issue was a strategic formulation of that era, meant to appease Northern sensibilities and Cold War imperatives. To acknowledge Parks’s comparison of Northern and Southern racial inequality would have disrupted this politically convenient binary. Framing racism as a Southern relic, Northern liberal politicians held up the Southern movement as proof of the perfectibility of American democracy and treated Northern movements and activists as dangerous and deviant. The media followed suit. In the liberal imagination, as the Southern civil rights movement increasingly captured national attention, a Southern sharecropper activist could be endowed with a righteousness that a protesting Detroit autoworker or public housing resident could not. And so, to associate Mrs. Parks with Northern militancy and ghetto struggle appears to put a blemish on the mother of the movement.
As with many Southern migrants, Parks’s political
activities did not end when she left the South. But the image of Parks on the bus in 1955 is fixed in the popular imagination partly because she left the South as the civil rights movement she helped spur was blossoming. As her comrades in Montgomery and across the South fomented a nonviolent revolution increasingly captured by the national media, Parks had a new political base. Though she remained personally close to many Southern movement people and attended some events, she wasn’t a daily participant—and so became frozen in time, heralded for starting it all but largely unrecognized as an ongoing political actor. Simultaneously, with the nation’s eyes focused on the South, Mrs. Parks’s political activities and those of her comrades in Detroit were treated differently than parallel movements evolving in the South.
Many of the interviews with Parks—including more extensive oral histories on the civil rights movement—took place in her home or in Representative John Conyers’s Detroit office. Despite sitting with her in Motown, interviewers barely asked about her Northern activism or the racial landscape of the city (except for a question or two on the riot). They hardly seemed to notice her continuing involvement in the struggle for racial justice in Detroit. Much of the corresponding media attention to her in the 1960s and 1970s focused on Southern-based events—Mrs. Parks attending the Selma-to-Montgomery march, or the anniversary of the bus boycott, or King’s funeral. On the tenth anniversary of the boycott, reporters descended on Mrs. Parks. In numerous interviews, she made clear she “would do it again,” but she also noted, “I can’t say we like Detroit any better than Montgomery.”24 No one cared to probe that response, and Mrs. Parks didn’t elaborate.
The Southern focus of Mrs. Parks’s interviewers reflected a broader blindness among liberal commentators and subsequent historians to the parallels between Southern and Northern racism and anti-racism struggles. By the early 1960s, the national media (based outside of the South) had grown increasingly sympathetic to the nonviolent Southern struggle. Conversely, while Northern protests often made front-page news, they were not framed through the same righteous lens used for the Southern movement.25 In cities like Detroit, public officials regularly refuted black demands with the charge that “this is not the South” and repeatedly expressed their shock at rising militancy and the uprisings of the late 1960s—willfully forgetting that decades of black struggle had produced negligible change. Detroit’s white officials thought they had solved the city’s racial problems with interracial commissions, liberal proclamations, nominal desegregation, and token hires. And the media picked it up wholesale, particularly after the 1967 uprising, when few stories looked back on this decade of frustrated activism that had laid the foundation for the anger that would explode. Time and again, news articles expressed “surprise” over the riots.
Even when interviewers in the 1960s and 1970s asked her questions on contemporary race relations, they often inquired about the current racial situation in the South. Parks was almost never asked about whether things in Detroit had changed, about the Kerner Commission report, Northern school segregation, Nixon’s welfare policies, police brutality, or the war in Vietnam—despite her considerable attention to these matters. In an interview in 1970 in Conyers’s office, when asked about her decision to leave the South and her civil rights work there, Mrs. Parks pushed back. “I don’t know whether I could have been more effective as a worker for freedom in the South than I am here in Detroit. Really the same thing that has occurred in the South is existing here to a certain degree. We do have the same problems.”26
Notably, this interview took place inside Congressman Conyers’s office at a time when the office was a hotbed of local and national black political organizing. Parks was intimately involved in this push to elect more black public officials and cognizant of the needs of black Detroiters, yet few interviewers valued her insights about contemporary Northern black politics. Had Parks been a male civil rights pioneer turned congressman’s staff assistant, it seems inconceivable that these interviewers would not have probed for insights into Detroit’s race relations and directions for the congressman’s agenda. A related omission occurred as Parks worked on her autobiography with Jim Haskins in the late 1980s. Haskins had family roots and activist connections in Alabama, having been a student at Alabama State during the boycott, so much of their detailed conversation was spun out from this shared background. Moreover, Haskins brought numerous articles and other memorabilia to help jar Mrs. Parks’s memory and push her to clarify and nuance these accounts. But those articles tended to replicate a Southern focus—on the boycott, the political landscape of Alabama, and the various movements that led up to it. So Haskins and Parks concentrated on correcting and improving those accounts. However inadvertently, Haskins’s Southern focus indelibly shaped the structure of Rosa Parks: My Life and the extant historical record.
Despite these interviewers’ blinders, Rosa Parks recognized that the “same problems” beset her new hometown and, as she had for decades, set about seeing what she could do to challenge them. Parks was thus in on the ground level as a rising black politics—of grassroots activism and black electoral strategies—took hold in Detroit.
AN AMERICAN DILEMMA: RACIAL INEQUALITY IN THE ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY
Black migration to Detroit swelled in the twentieth century. Half a million Southerners came to the city during World War II, most of them black, and the numbers of black migrants continued to swell in the decades after the war. Indeed, Detroit’s black population doubled between 1940 and 1950.27 The Parks family thus joined a heavy stream of black migrants to the North. By the 1960s, the majority of black people would live in the North. As historian Hasan Jeffries has documented, people who had moved from Alabama’s Black Belt to Detroit formed a key source of information and support for Motown’s migrant pool: “It was possible for a Detroit factory worker to earn ten times as much as a Lowndes County [the neighboring county to Montgomery] farmhand. At the same time, they were always the last hired and the first fired, and housing was just as cramped and crowded as it was in southern cities.”28 As in Montgomery, black women in Detroit were largely trapped in low-wage service labor.
Another demographic shift was afoot. Armed with home loans and new highways, white Detroiters migrated to the suburbs. Between 1950 and 1960, while the black population grew by 60 percent, the white population of the city shrank by 23 percent, or 350,000 people.29 A rating system developed in the 1930s by the Home Owners Loan Corporation and continued by the Federal Housing Authority to reassure banks and promote home ownership gave the best ratings to racially homogenous white neighborhoods still prime for development. Detroit’s expanding suburbs were given high ratings, which spurred this white migration, whereas 50 percent of all city homes were “redlined” and deemed unsafe for investment, even in solidly middle-class black neighborhoods.30 This sped up the decline of the city as federal home loan programs made investment in the city’s inner core sparse. With plentiful GI Bill loans significantly more accessible to returning white GIs than their black counterparts and millions of dollars for federal highway construction, Detroit’s suburbs proliferated with white families, while black neighborhoods within the city grew more crowded. Many white suburbs were hostile to black people moving in. Thus, the twin weapons of state bureaucracy and white vigilantism conspired to keep most black families jammed into increasingly crowded city neighborhoods while rewarding white families moving to Detroit’s white suburbs.
In 1948, the Supreme Court took up four cases of black homeowners, including Detroiters Orsel and Minnie McGhee, to rule unanimously in Shelley v. Kraemer that courts could not enforce restrictive covenants, which proscribed home owners from selling their property to certain groups of people. Indicative of how entrenched such discriminatory practices were in American society, three Supreme Court justices recused themselves from the case likely because they had restrictive covenants on their own properties. The Supreme Court’s decision did not prohibit the covenants, just the court’s enforcement of them—which p
rovided an ample loophole for homeowners, public officials, and realtors to maintain such practices. And so Northern metro areas continued to be as segregated in 1960 as in 1940, in part because the FHA continued to support racially restrictive development.31
Despite the jubilation in the black community over the Court’s decision, Detroit authorities refused to enforce it and developed strategies, along with banks and realtors, to maintain these discriminatory practices, as white officials and businesspeople did across the country. “Detroit newspapers,” according to Detroit’s NAACP executive secretary, Arthur Johnson, “wrote detailed articles instructing and encouraging white homeowners to circumvent the law and keep blacks out. This was indicative of how the mainstream media in Detroit was but an extension of the white institutional power structure.”32 Between 1945 and 1955, about 100,000 private units were constructed on vacant city land, but only 2 percent of those were available to black people—and while the waiting list for public housing was six thousand deep for blacks, there was barely a wait for white families.33
Much like it was in Montgomery, state-funded urban renewal, slum clearance, and highway construction blazed through Detroit in the decades after World War II. The Detroit Plan crafted in 1946 promoted slum clearance, including razing 129 acres in the Black Bottom. Between 1949 and 1971, the state and city began twenty-seven urban renewal projects at a cost of $263 million.34 Detroit’s Paradise Valley fell prey to the Oakland-Hastings portion of the I-75 freeway (later renamed the Chrysler Freeway), as did the bustling Hastings Street with its black-owned businesses and music clubs. These urban renewal projects often resulted in black removal, and many community activists criticized them for focusing on attracting white suburbanites back to the city rather than improving housing for its black residents. Most black families forced out by renewal projects had difficulty finding other decent, affordable housing, and the city provided little assistance, often engaging in questionable removal practices. By 1962, almost 15 percent of the city had been cleared for urban renewal.35 In March 1963, the Detroit Commission on Community Relations reported that ten thousand structures had been razed or were scheduled for demolition, displacing 43,096 people, 70 percent of them black.36 The impact of urban renewal touched black life immeasurably.37
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Page 26