Parks saw nonviolent direct action and self-defense as interlinked, both key to achieving black rights and maintaining black dignity. In regard to self-defense, she found herself closer in philosophy to Malcolm X than King. “Malcolm wasn’t a supporter of nonviolence either,” she noted.32 Still, she harbored tremendous respect for King’s organized program and deeply held philosophy of nonviolence. Organized nonviolence in Montgomery during the bus boycott had offered a powerful rebuke to white city leaders and local citizens who thought black people too undisciplined and emotional not to resort to violence when provoked. Parks had delighted in the power of it. In 1962, at the SCLC’s annual convention in Birmingham, a white man in the audience started hitting King, who did not defend himself. Instead King yelled, “Don’t touch him! We have to pray for him.” Parks witnessed the event, and saw this as “proof that Dr. King believed so completely in nonviolence that it was even stronger than his instinct to protect himself from attack.”33 After the attack, knowing King must be in pain, Parks went and got him a bottle of Coca-Cola and some aspirin.34 She was extremely proud: “His restraint was more powerful than a hundred fists.”
While Parks had a deep appreciation for nonviolent resistance, her resolute belief in self-defense continued amidst the growing momentum of the nonviolent movement. On a church program in 1964, she copied lines from Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die”:
If we must die—let it not be like hogs . . .
Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave . . .
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but—fighting back!35
Parks encountered Malcolm X three times in the mid-1960s, and they became a bit friendly.36 In 1963, when the Northern Christian Leadership Conference and the Grassroots Leadership Conference were both held in Detroit, Parks attended both. Black radicals had come from across the country, including Harlem’s Jesse Gray, Brooklyn’s Milton Galamison, Freedom Now Party founder William Worthy, and Cambridge, Maryland, leader Gloria Richardson. Malcolm X wanted to meet Parks, and they had a warm greeting.37 At King Solomon Baptist Church on Detroit’s near west side, Malcolm X preached his “Message to the Grassroots” to a crowd of three thousand. Linking black struggle in the United States to anticolonial movements internationally, he rebuked the civil rights movement: “The only kind of revolution that is nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution in which the goal is loving your enemy is the Negro revolution.”38 Still he affirmed the importance of a black united front and of nonviolent disruption aimed at the federal government in Washington—a vision of independent political action that dovetailed with the emerging Freedom Now Party in Detroit. Just a couple weeks before Kennedy’s assassination and Elijah Muhammad’s silencing of Malcolm, the speech provided a preview of the post–Nation of Islam, politically independent Malcolm X.
Parks was also in the audience on April 12, 1964, when Malcolm X reprised his famous “Ballot or the Bullet” speech at a GOAL Legal Fund rally at King Solomon Church. Malcolm X extolled the power black people held, referring to the deciding role that black voters played in Kennedy’s 1960 presidential election. Explaining that he was not an American but a “victim of Americanism,” he called on black people to use the ballot independently and in unity: “A vote for a Democrat is a vote for a Dixiecrat. . . . It’s time now for you and me to become more politically mature and realize what the ballot is for; what we’re supposed to get when we cast a ballot; and that if we don’t cast a ballot, it’s going to end up in a situation where we’re going to have to cast a bullet. It’s either a ballot or a bullet.”39
This GOAL event helped to launch the Freedom Now Party’s 1964 campaign. Founded in October 1963 by Reverend Albert Cleage, Milton Henry, Luke Tripp, and others, the Freedom Now Party aimed to be an independent third party that protected the interests of black people. “We understand that a Democrat represents Democrats, a Republican represents Republicans but a freedom-now party candidate represents Negroes!” ran their slogan. The Freedom Now Party sought to build a party that put the interests of black people before partisan loyalty and backroom compromises with black leaders. In 1963, Cleage had urged a “no” vote—“No Taxation for Discrimination”—on a city millage referendum asking voters to increase revenue for Detroit’s public schools. Though this stance put him at odds with some civil rights leaders, Cleage opposed the increase, believing that blacks should not give more money to a system that oppressed black children and refused to change its segregationist ways.
Rosa Parks had long seen the importance of independent black political power. Though she never put herself forward on the ballot of the Freedom Now Party, Mrs. Parks was a supporter, as were a number of her friends, including Mary Hays Carter.40 She began making appearances at Freedom Now Party rallies, read their newsletter, and followed their progress. In 1964, the Freedom Now Party ran a slate of candidates for Congress, governor, and other state offices. All lost.
Parks had also been heartened by Malcolm X’s reaching out to the civil rights movement and his journey to Selma in early 1965 at SNCC’s invitation to support the movement there.41 United front politics, Parks thought, were the key. Right before Malcolm X was assassinated, she got the chance to have a longer conversation with him. On February 14, 1965, Mrs. Parks received a Dignity “Overdue Award” from the Afro-American Broadcasting Company. Milton and Richard Henry, who had helped create the Freedom Now Party, understood the emerging power of the mass media. Recognizing the negative images of black people portrayed in public culture (if black people were portrayed at all) and the limited ways the media covered black protest, they had founded this black broadcasting company in Detroit to put forth programming for “spiritually free black people.”42 The Afro-American Broadcasting Company put out a two-hour radio show each Saturday on WGPR, which often featured Malcolm’s speeches in the program. In 1965, they held their first awards ceremony. Along with Mrs. Parks, those honored that evening included the Motown Record Company, Marian Anderson, Sidney Poitier, and Jackie Gleason. Perhaps because Malcolm X was slated to give the evening’s keynote, seven of the business honorees, including Hudson’s Department Store and the Chrysler Corporation, refused to accept their awards.43
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.”44 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.45 The crowd gathered that evening was sparse.46 In his speech, Malcolm X cautioned those gathered about th
e ways that the media was trying to determine the black agenda,
I read in a poll taken by Newsweek magazine this week, saying that Negroes are satisfied. . . .When they think that an explosive era is coming up, then they grab their press again and begin to shower the Negro public, to make it appear that all Negroes are satisfied. Because if you know that you’re dissatisfied all by yourself and ten others aren’t, you play it cool; but you know if all ten of you are dissatisfied, you get with it.47
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.”48 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.49 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.50 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.”51 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.
If [nonviolence] had been received for what it was it would still work. But my belief is that if we are going to have non-violence and love and all that, it should be on both sides; it should not be met with violence because you actually can’t remain nonviolent too long with the kind of treatment that would provoke violence. . . . If we can protect ourselves against violence it’s not actually violence on our part. That’s just self-protection, trying to keep from being victimized with violence.52
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.”53 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.”54
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.”55 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.56 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.57 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.58 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.59 Parks came to admire Robert and Mabel Williams even more “as we worked together,” and they all gathered for Elaine’s wedding to Wesley.60 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 pros
pect of Mr. Williams being extradited.”61 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.62
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.”63 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.
KING’S ASSASSINATION: ROSA PARKS MARCHES ON
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.”64 That evening, King called home to arrange his upcoming Sunday sermon, entitling it “Why America Is Going to Hell.”
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Page 32