The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  JOHN CONYERS

  The Supreme Court’s 1962 decision on urban voter underrepresentation in Baker v. Carr led to the redrawing of Michigan’s congressional district boundaries. The creation of Michigan’s First Congressional District on Detroit’s north side opened up the possibility for Detroit to send a second black representative to Congress (Charles Diggs represented Detroit’s east side).82 Even before the boundaries were finalized, the firm of George Crockett and Maurice Sugar had encouraged a young civil rights attorney, John Conyers Jr., to enter the race against the incumbent, white congressman Lucien Nedzi.83 Conyers’s campaign thus commenced before that of his closest challenger, black Democrat Richard Austin.

  In early 1964, Rosa Parks took an interest in Conyers’s long-shot campaign.84 Having met Conyers through his work on behalf of voting rights in the South, she volunteered in his campaign for “Jobs, Justice, Peace.”85 Born on May 16, 1929, in Highland Park, the thirty-five-year-old Conyers had been educated in Detroit public schools and attended Wayne State University, where he obtained his undergraduate and law degrees. He served in the army during the Korean War. In 1963, Conyers had gone to Selma as a legal observer. Conyers’s father, John Conyers Sr., had been an official in the UAW until he was ousted by Walter Reuther along with Coleman Young, George Crockett, and Walter Hardin for ties to the CP and CP activists. Before running for Congress, John Conyers Jr. had served as a legislative assistant with Congressman John Dingell and worked for the Michigan workmen’s compensation department. Because of his work with Dingell and his father’s union work, Conyers was known politically throughout the state.86

  An early opponent of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Conyers had received support from the emerging antiwar movement, civil rights advocates, and portions of Detroit’s labor movement. Parks began attending campaign meetings, rarely saying anything but willing to help with campaign tasks. “Everyone was frozen in their tracks,” Conyers recalled. “Rosa Parks is supporting Conyers.”87 Many people, including the candidate himself and King’s nephews who lived in Detroit, wanted Dr. King, who had purposely chosen to steer clear of any political races, to come to Detroit on Conyers’s behalf and had reached out to him. But Conyers credited Parks’s efforts as the decisive factor in convincing King to come.88 Parks called King and implored: “You’ve got to come to Detroit and embrace Brother Conyers. We need you.”89 King could not say no.

  Over Easter weekend, King came to Detroit, where he gave a moving speech at Central United Methodist Church and then endorsed Conyers’s campaign, the only political endorsement he made. According to Conyers, “Boy that really zoomed me right up.”90 King’s visit “quadrupled my visibility in the black community. . . . Therefore, if it wasn’t for Rosa Parks, I never would have gotten elected.”91 Conyers faced considerable opposition in the crowded primary, particularly from Richard Austin. Older and more well known, Austin was an accountant with many influential white and black supporters as well as ample ties to the labor movement and the Democratic Party. According to Conyers, once Austin entered the race, “people were told to take my bumper sticker off their car.”92 Initially the UAW had come out for Conyers; when Austin entered the race, they equivocated, as did the Trade Union Leadership Council (TULC). Formed to be an independent voice for blacks in the UAW after Reuther purged militants, the TULC had played a crucial leadership role in black politics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, pivotal in the election of Jerome Cavanagh as mayor in 1962 and in various local efforts around school segregation and urban renewal. Conyers was legal counsel to the TULC, and his father had a long and strong relationship to the UAW.93 This decision to support Austin split the TULC’s leadership and membership and weakened relations between the pro-union Conyers and the UAW.94

  Conyers was seen as more progressive and more independent, making him the choice of many politically minded black people like Rosa Parks—and backed, according to the Los Angeles Sentinel, with the “largest volunteer organization ever seen in Michigan.”95 Thousands of volunteers—along with the candidate himself—stumped at churches, supermarkets, and block clubs.96 Women played a crucial role in this grassroots support; many felt, according to Ida Murray, that “John was a candidate of the people,” whereas “labor was picking your candidate” with Austin.97 Many saw the young Conyers as a David going up against the Goliath of the Democratic Party and union establishment. One lucky break for the campaign was that Detroit’s two main newspapers were on strike; had they not been, Conyers believed, they certainly would not have supported his upstart candidacy and Austin might have benefited.

  In September, Conyers won the Democratic primary in a field of eight candidates by a slim margin and the recount narrowed the win to forty-three votes ahead of Austin.98 The September 1964 election was not a mandate for progressivism, however. Faced with a rising open-housing movement pushing to end the right of homeowners and realtors to discriminate, Detroit voters approved an anti-open-housing referendum allowing homeowners and realtors to “accept or reject any prospective buyer or tenant for his own reasons.”99 California voters followed suit in November, passing Proposition 14, which repealed the recently passed Rumford Fair Housing Act. Most white people in Detroit and L.A. wanted to retain their right to discriminate in the sale and rental of their property. Thus, the white backlash against civil rights typically associated with the period after the riots in these cities was actually a frontlash that sought to thwart any real Northern desegregation years before the riots.100

  In the general election, Conyers ran against attorney Milton Henry (who lived in Pontiac, not in the district) of the Freedom Now Party and Robert Blackwell of the Republican Party and executive secretary of the Michigan Labor Mediation Board (who later became the first black mayor of Highland Park in 1968).101 Because the First District was about half black and two-thirds Democratic, Conyers won handily.102 Conyers became the sixth black in the House of Representatives and the first black person ever to serve on the House Judiciary Committee.

  On March 1, 1965, Conyers hired Parks for a position in his Detroit office, where she would work till she retired in 1988. Tellingly, after more than twenty years of dedicated political work, this was the first time Parks had held a paid political position. She would remain within a gender-appropriate role, answering phones, handling constituent needs, welcoming visitors, and coordinating the office. But her work was invaluable to the new congressman. Conyers would spend a great deal of the time in DC, so Parks helped hold down the fort in Detroit in an office on the third floor of the Michigan State Building. Indeed, for a time, Parks was Conyers’s surrogate in the city, doing community work, keeping a pulse on the most pressing issues, and demonstrating the congressman’s commitment to community struggles.103

  Traveling all over the city, she visited constituents at schools, hospitals, and senior citizen homes, attended community meetings and rallies, and kept Conyers grounded in community activism. Taking up various urban social issues, Mrs. Parks heard people’s problems, gathered information about their concerns, and filled in for Conyers at public functions. Her job often focused on addressing constituent needs, particularly around welfare benefits, education, job discrimination, Social Security, and affordable housing.104 She sat in with the congressman in numerous meetings in Detroit, particularly in the first years. Adam Shakoor recalled that when he met with the Conyers in the early 1970s on alternative treatments and community initiatives for addressing heroin addiction, Parks joined them.105

  She also traveled with Conyers to national black events and to support black candidates and often joined the congressman in meetings with community activists in Detroit. Conyers aides Leon Atchison and Larry Horwitz were adamant in later interviews, however, that Mrs. Parks made her own political agenda, and that she attended many black political events because of her own beliefs and moral compass, not because the congressman sent her or she was representing him.

  The office was a busy place, filled with the cultural politics of the era.
Above the desks, for instance, was a mimeographed poster, done by graphic artist Ron Cobb, of an older black man with a hoe bearing the caption: “Remember, Uncle Tom says—‘Only you can prevent ghetto fires.’”106 People often came to Conyers with incidences of discrimination, particularly numerous complaints of race-based job bias. At some workplaces, Atchison recalled, they were able to get redress. At the IRS, black women were being discriminated against and not promoted. They went over and interviewed people on the spot. The office put pressure on them to get rid of the director of the local office. They had similar success at the Army Tank Automotive Command.107

  Thus, Parks was well acquainted with the needs of Detroit’s black poor and working class. Housing, and particularly public housing, were among the issues closest to her heart.108 Housing for blacks in Detroit by the mid-1960s was decrepit, deeply overcrowded, unsanitary, and unequal. The density in black neighborhoods was often more than twice that in white neighborhoods.109 Having lived in public housing herself in Montgomery, she worked to get money for public housing in Detroit. Particularly as President Johnson’s Great Society programs opened up funding for city needs, Parks tried to get a piece of that money for Detroit. Part of her job was to listen to what people needed and then report this back to the congressman.

  Conyers’s decision to hire Parks engendered some outcry. “People called her a troublemaker,” Conyers recalled.110 More than a decade after her bus stand, Parks continued to receive hate mail. This harassment increased after Conyers hired her, and her name was publicized. People sent rotten watermelons, voodoo dolls, and hateful cards and letters to the office. Many seemed to come from fellow Detroiters, as a rising white resistance had flowered in the city. They were “quite threatening,” but she would listen and say, “Have a nice day,” according to Atchison. “She was cool—and didn’t seem stressed about it.”111 A May 19, 1969, letter from Detroit read:

  We don’t think John Conyers should be hiring a person of your low caliber Rosa, to work in his office. Maybe in his private home for purpose of scrubbing the floors as a domestic maid, perhaps—but certainly not doing office work. . . . John Conyers is a bad enough senator as it is, without his adding fuel to the fire by hiring an evil dame in his office to help him. Your two brains probably dig up plenty of bad ideas to bug us lawabiding serious minded hardworking taxpayers.112

  A March 8, 1971, letter carped, “People seldom complain but inside their hearts they are fully aware that it was YOU, Rosa, who is chiefly responsible for the unholy racial mess this nation is in today. By rights, you ought to be shot at sunrise, or otherwise appropriately taken care of, for your dastardly deed in Montgomery Alabama, and all the subsequent riots etc. You sure started a war, Rosa. Shame on you. Perhaps you are now getting what you deserve.”113 A 1972 letter from Indiana made clear the writer’s objections to her move north, “Why didn’t you stay down South? The North sure doesn’t want you up here. You are the biggest woman troublemaker ever.”114 Thus, fifteen years after her bus stand, many whites outside the South regarded Rosa Parks as a “dastardly” troublemaker.

  Some attacked Parks as a Communist. An April 1966 article in the Shreveport newspaper the Councilor featured the infamous photo of King, Parks, and Abner Berry at Highlander. The reporter began, “Here is proof that the secretary to a United States congressman hovered with top communists at a mountain retreat in Tennessee. She is Rosa Parks of Detroit. When I first heard that Rep. John J. Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) had hired Rosa, I could not believe he would be so brazen at a time when young Americans are fighting in Vietnam. I called Conyers’s office in Michigan and a woman on the other end identified herself as Rosa Parks.”115 The reporter then regaled readers with a minstrel version of his conversation with Parks:

  She denied, however, that it was a Communist school.

  “Then, why were top level communist officials present in such numbers, Rosa?”

  “I jes don’t know, Mr. Touchstone, you’ll have to ask Mr. Myles Horton who run the school,” she replied.

  While most Americans would not have sent hate mail to Rosa Parks, equating civil rights activism with Communist subversion was not a fringe position. Many Americans worried about the Communist influence on the civil rights movement and viewed the black freedom struggle with fear. In a Gallup poll in the days before the March on Washington, two-thirds of Americans surveyed viewed the march as “un-American,” and in a 1965 national poll, half responded that they thought Communists were involved “a lot” in the civil rights demonstrations.116 Support of open housing in the North was often attacked as a “Communist” attack on private property.

  Regardless of the harassment, Conyers was awed by Parks’s presence in the office.117 Horwitz described Conyers and Parks’s partnership, “She was a . . . presence. John gave her a job and economic security. She gave John prestige and stature. When he was very junior, after a bitterly divided primary, he needed this.”118 According to the Detroit Free Press, “There were claims that Conyers added her to his staff merely for the free political advertising that she generated.” But Atchison, who was then in charge of Conyers’s Detroit office, says that’s only partially accurate. “There was that value there. But also there was a concern for her finances.”119 Over the next two decades, busloads of schoolchildren came to meet her, and her position over the twenty-three years she worked there became more ceremonial. Jamila Brathwaite, who joined the staff in the mid-1980s, in the last years of Parks’s work there, recalled, “Everything just stopped. We didn’t want to answer the phones . . . to get that time to really talk to her. She gave us that time. If you wanted to talk, she would talk to you.” Brathwaite recalled that one day, many weeks after a conversation they had had about the black freedom struggle, south and north, Mrs. Parks brought in a book for her. Brathwaite was surprised to see it was on Malcolm X.120

  Still, in the late 1960s, according to Horwitz, Conyers’s white supporters who visited the Detroit office often didn’t know who Parks was. “There was an absolute racial divide,” Horwitz noted. “She was a heroine in the black community but not in the white community [at that point].”121 Many white liberals had fixated on King and didn’t necessarily know who Rosa Parks was.

  Parks continued a busy community schedule—making public appearances and speeches at scores of church programs, women’s day events, and schools, traveling to political affairs and mobilizations, often apologizing to Conyers for having to leave the office. Calling her “a true activist,” Conyers recalled the variety of issues Mrs. Parks was involved in, particularly “ones that didn’t get the media attention.”122 However, she tended to underplay this work in interviews from the period. In a 1967 interview, Mrs. Parks was asked why she had chosen not to be active in the civil rights movement in Detroit, to which she responded, “I have considered myself as active as I could be. . . . But I haven’t been aggressive enough to try and take over any organization or be too much in the foreground. In fact, I wasn’t that way in Montgomery. . . . I worked quietly and tried to do whatever I could in the community without projecting myself. And as far as I am concerned, I haven’t changed. I’m just the same as I was in Montgomery.”123 While not directly challenging the interviewer, her quiet rejoinder attests to her continuing active role in Detroit. She had long been someone who did the behind-the-scenes work necessary for political mobilization—in Montgomery and Detroit.

  Many of her associates attested to Parks’s radiant kindness and deep empathy with people’s suffering. Her commitment to meeting the socioeconomic needs of black Detroiters extended to her personal practice. By 1966, according to friend Mary Hays Carter, she had “a private charity going. . . . She engages the business people that she is acquainted with [to assist with] the problems of those that are without gas during the winter or without electricity. She does her own investigating—she seems to know whether these people are ‘putting her on,’ and I have never known her to call me up and ask me to cook food for some hungry family or to help her find clot
hing for some unfortunate family that they were not genuinely in need.”124 Parks took an active role in her block club, serving for a time in the 1960s as vice president. The block club worked on cultural and neighborhood improvement, sponsored a youth program providing recreation and job guidance to neighborhood teenagers, and held block festivals to build community.

  In 1967, Conyers received the SCLC’s annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award for his contribution to civil rights. The first African American on the Judiciary Committee, he had cosponsored the Medicare bill, sought more funding for the War on Poverty, particularly for education and housing, and opposed the war in Vietnam. Conyers was one of seven in Congress to oppose military appropriations in 1965 and to call for a peaceful resolution to the United States’ role in the conflict—which led to considerable opposition from the UAW in his run for reelection in 1966.125 Parks helped present him the SCLC award.

  One of Conyers’s central priorities was to get more black people elected to public office. According to Horwitz, Conyers belonged to a new generation of black politicians “calling our own shots”—not opposed to labor or the Democratic Party “but [affirming that] ‘we’re not going to be taken for granted.’” Parks similarly embodied this “independent” spirit.126 Many of Parks’s efforts on behalf of black candidates were centered in Detroit. She actively supported Coleman Young’s initial run for Common Council in 1960, worked on George Crockett’s run for Recorder’s Court in 1966, on Richard Austin’s unsuccessful campaign to become the city’s first black mayor in 1969 and Coleman Young’s successful one in 1973, and on behalf of Erma Henderson, who became the first black woman elected to Detroit’s City Council in 1972. “Rosa was Black. No question about that. She supported Black candidates,” observed Michigan State Representative Fred Durhal. Parks made appearances for the candidates, did mailings, made phone calls, and other office work. “One thing about Rosa Parks, she was an active participant, not a sideline person,” attested Durhal, who recalled all the nitty-gritty work Parks did on behalf of black candidates.127 According to Atchison, Parks had crossover appeal in those years, “You could take Rosa into the white community and nobody gets upset. But she would energize the black community, [exhorting] ‘now is the time.’”128 She also helped with the mayoral campaigns of Carl Stokes in Cleveland and Richard Hatcher in Gary, Indiana.