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, and 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.
Dr. King was criticized because he tried to bring about change through the nonviolent movement. It didn’t accomplish what it should have because the white Establishment would not accept his philosophy of nonviolence and respond to it positively. When the resistance grew, it created a hostility and bitterness among the younger people, who worked with him in the early days, when there was some hope that change could be accomplished through his means.
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.”5 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.”6 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 and 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.7
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.”8 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 sensibil
ity, 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.”9
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.10 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.11 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.”12
Reflecting her reserve about such details, her autobiography contains little information on these activities, perhaps because she wanted to keep them obscured. As Conyers noted, Parks was “a progressive but she did not wear her political philosophy on her sleeve.”13 In addition, because Jim Haskins was less familiar with the Detroit political community, he asked fewer questions, shaping the arc of her autobiography. Perhaps, also, she did not believe people would approve.
Parks’s unassuming personality stood in contrast to the brash manner of many radicals. As Chokwe Lumumba noted, “We were emulating really powerful people. King, Malcolm, Paul Robeson—those pan-Africanists, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Sekou Toure. . . . [Many activists] were genuine, but had their own ego, and were high profile. Whereas Rosa was just unassuming. . . . Sometimes you would not notice she was there, or her contribution.”14 In many ways, Rosa Parks was hidden in plain sight in the Black Power era. But as Northern Student Movement activist Frank Joyce recalled, “Everybody knew that she did have radical politics.”15
Never one to seek public recognition, she had found her public fame around the boycott hard to bear. She chafed at the ways journalists continued to seek her out, telling an interviewer in 1973, “There are times when I’d like to get to be quiet and have some time to be like an ordinary person who nothing special ever happened to. I hope I won’t be having to tell people that story for the rest of my life.”16 In the late 1960s and 1970s, she still preferred to blend in—and often, in this era, she could. Many times she simply wanted to listen and participate, to do what she could and try not to attract attention. And if she used her stature, it would be for the promotion of the event or issue.
Conyers also attributed the omission of Parks’s radicalism from the narrative of the civil rights era in part to the “discongruity” of it—“she had a heavy progressive streak about her that was uncharacteristic for a neat, religious, demure, churchgoing lady.”17 Indeed, standard notions of Black Power leave little room for the quiet militant. In the popular imagination, black militants do not speak softly, dress conservatively, attend church regularly, get nervous, or work behind the scenes. Fundamentally, they are the opposite of a middle-aged seamstress who spoke softly and slowly. And yet there were many militants like Mrs. Parks who did just those things. As her cousin Carolyn Green explained, Parks made clear when she thought something was wrong or untruthful. “Her voice never went up. . . . But she would let you know.”18
She was “quiet and sweet,” black nationalist Ed Vaughn explained, “but strong as acid.”19 Friend Roberta Hughes Wright noted, “She’s quiet—the way steel is quiet. . . . She seems almost meek, but we already know the truth of that, don’t we?”20 “Fearless,” Leon Atchison stated.21 Indeed, in interviews with her political associates from 1960s-era Detroit, even from some of the era’s most prominent Black militants, numerous people attest to the gentleness of her spirit and her fearlessness—how unintimidated she was in her post-Montgomery political activities. This circumspect fearlessness was nothing new. In 1975, Vernon Jarrett, a black reporter for the Chicago Tribune, did a twenty-year retrospective series on the bus boycott. Jarrett had been warned by E. D. Nixon before he interviewed Mrs. Parks that she “ain’t gonna talk much because she’s a doer, not a bragger. But that woman is one of the most courageous citizens this country has ever known.” Jarrett too was struck by this quality. “The contradictory personality that is Rosa Parks, that subdued thunder in her Southern country-woman’s voice—did not prepare her listener for the little verbal bombs that she exploded.”22
Understanding Rosa Parks’s militancy widens the lens on the work of radicalism more broadly. Part of what Mrs. Parks did in the years of Black Power was show up. She “spoke with her presence,” as Conyers put it.23 And in the popular portrayals of Black Power, there has been a tendency to miss the saliency of this role. To understand Black Power as a constellation of movements means seeing the numbers of people who turned out for lectures, sold newspapers, attended rallies, built independent black cultural organizations, and joined defense committees for black political prisoners. Rosa Parks “was everywhere,” according to bookstore owner Ed Vaughn.24 Able to keep herself above the ideological fray, she listened and learned, attending rallies and speeches and public mass meetings. She signed petitions, came out for lectures, and immersed herself in all the black history she could find. She protested police brutality, spoke out on behalf of black prisoners, let groups use her name, and helped found local prisoner-defense committees. She didn’t necessarily join groups or agree with everything that was said, but it was important to take part. Above all, she wanted to be helpful—and if her presence allowed more people to see the issue, then by all means she would try to come. “She had a lot of guts to lend her name to left-wing causes,” Conyers’s aide Larry Horwitz explained, “things that people thought were scary.”25 By the late 1960s, a new generation had come of age. She took heart in the pride and boldness of these young people, and they found sustenance in her support.
ROSA, MALCOLM, ROBERT, AND THE POLITICS OF SELF-DEFENSE
In the 1990s, Parks shocked black-nationalist lawyer Chokwe Lumumba when she told him that her hero was Malcolm X. Lumumba had assumed that her work and close personal relationship with King meant that he would be her personal inspiration. No, she clarified, she had certainly loved and admired King greatly, but Malcolm’s boldness and clarity, his affirmation of what needed to be done for black people, made him her champion.26 Parks saw no contradiction in her deep admiration for both King and Malcolm X. Describing Malcolm as “a very brilliant man,” she had read all she could on his ministry and political program by the mi
d-1960s. “Full of conviction and pride in his race,” she noted, Malcolm X reminded Mrs. Parks of her own grandfather: “The way he stood up and voiced himself showed that he was a man to be respected.”27 Having imbibed this tradition of self-defense from her grandfather, Rosa Parks had put it to use as a young person. “We always felt that if you talked violently and said what you would do if they did something to you,” she explained in her autobiography, “that did more good than nonviolence.”28
Rosa and Raymond had been raised to be “proud” and learned they would have to speak up and act decisively for self-protection. “I just couldn’t accept being pushed even at the cost of my life,” she explained. Nonviolence on the individual level “could be mistaken for cowardice.” Rosa’s belief in self-defense and collective action stemmed as well from her Christian faith. “From my upbringing and the Bible I learned people should stand up for rights just as the children of Israel stood up to the Pharaoh.”29
Like many blacks and whites of that period, Mrs. Parks found the use of mass nonviolent action new and “refreshing,” calling the boycott “more successful, I believe, than it would have been if violence had been used.” Still, she found it “hard to say that she was completely converted to it.” Her thinking coupled nonviolence with self-defense. For her, collective power could be found in organized nonviolence, while self-respect, at times, required self-defense: “As far back as I remember, I could never think in terms of accepting physical abuse without some form of retaliation if possible.”30 Indeed, the Parks family, like many black Southerners, had long kept a gun in their home, even as they participated in the nonviolent movement.31
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Page 31