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,”65 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?”66 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.”67 Angry and disillusioned, people took to the streets. Riots broke out in 110 cities across the country.
Rosa Parks and Louise Tappes journeyed south.68 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.
The process of distorting King’s legacy began even at his funeral. The funeral was packed with dignitaries and celebrities while many of the people who had worked alongside the civil rights leadr in the movement did not get in. Officials estimated that between thirty-five thousand and fifty thousand gathered in the streets around the church. Harry Belafonte recalled getting particularly angry at a prominent New York Times reporter standing next to him at the funeral. “I could not help but tell him that this grievous moment was in part the result of a climate of hate and distortion that the New York Times and other papers had helped create. . . . Just coming to grieve the loss was no cleansing of guilt.”69 King’s funeral would provide a preview of Parks’s own fancier memorialization—the presence of dignitaries crowding out the people who should have been there, and the public desire to lionize the heroes of the movement apart from their actual goals and the movements they took part in.
The next month, Parks journeyed to Washington, DC, to join Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy, and thousands of activists in carrying on the Poor People’s Campaign that King had been organizing before his assassination. A cross between the Bonus Marches of the 1930s and the 1963 March on Washington, this poor people’s movement aimed to organize a large contingent of poor people to descend on the nation’s capital to engage in civil disobedience and force the government to address widespread economic inequality. As Reverend Abernathy—now head of the SCLC—explained: “We used to sing a song in our church—‘Take Your Burdens to the Lord and Leave Them There.’ We have decided that we are going to take all our problems, our bodies, our children, the rats and the roaches and everything to the White House and leave them with LBJ.”70
A month after King’s assassination, poor people of all races from across the country set off for Washington in caravans, mule trains, buses, and on foot. They set up a tent city of plywood shanties on the Mall named Resurrection City. About 2,500 people stayed there, but heavy rain made the condition of the tent city hazardous, and Resurrection City was torn down by police on June 24. Perhaps the high point of the encampment came on June 19. Some 50,000 to 100,000 people who had joined the campaign gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for a Solidarity Day rally. Parks’s first stop in DC was Resurrection City, and then she joined the rally at the Lincoln Memorial. Though not feeling well, she was determined to be there and play her part in continuing the campaign. She too wanted to connect their bus protest thirteen years earlier to this campaign for economic justice. Introduced to the crowd, who gave her a standing ovation, Mrs. Parks choked up, telling those gathered that she was glad to be there but wished that King could have been there with them.71 Still she affirmed, “Today everyone knows what we want. We don’t plan to give up until freedom is attained for all persons, regardless of race.”72 Coretta Scott King gave a powerful speech that day calling on American women to “unite and form a solid block of women power” to fight racism, poverty, and war.73
It was an emotional and difficult trip for Parks. She told a Washington Post reporter, “My feelings are numb. I’ve been battered around too much.”74 King’s assassination had deepened her despair over the deep roots of racism in American society. The next year on July 3, 1969, bullhorn in hand, she returned to King’s tomb to address a crowd there on his untimely death. In many ways, by the late 1960s, Parks had become an elder stateswoman in the vast and diverse black freedom struggle. She, Coretta Scott King, and Betty Shabazz, along with artists like Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Burroughs, all came to play this role in the ensuing years. Indeed, these women elders largely kept themselves above the ideological fray to support a broad range of mobilizations. Even if they did not see eye to eye about everything being done or said, they admired the interconnections between race and class, domestic and foreign policy fearlessly asserted by these young activists.
These relationships—and the importance that these elders held for young militants—have largely been overlooked. Ericka Huggins of the Black Panther Party criticized the “myth that people in the BPP had no high regard for people [like Rosa Parks].”75 Indeed, for many activists, to have movement stalwarts like Mrs. Parks on their side brought encouragement, protection, and a broader historical scope to their work. Such cross-generational solidarity was precious and cherished. “You can’t minimize her validation,” historian John Bracey observed. Her backing lent legitimacy. “If Mrs. Parks is there, it must be okay” was the message her presence signaled. “She never gave up,” Bracey continued. “That’s important to young people. ‘Why are you tired? I’m not tired.’ . . . She was an example. She could have retired, said ‘I’m not in this, don’t talk to me.’ But she steadily kept coming out.”76
Parks often drove herself to events in a big old car; it had “the image of a tank,” according to Conyers aide Larry Horwitz, which contrasted sharply with the physically diminutive Parks.77 Mrs. Parks was in demand by many sectors of the black freedom struggle, including organized labor. On May 6, 1969, Reverend Abernathy telegrammed Parks about a strike of hospital workers seeking to form a union in Charleston that had been ongoing for six weeks; SCLC was issuing a national call for a Mother’s Day march to express national outrage. Parks flew to Charleston to join the protest.78 A militant black labor movement took shape in 1968 in Detroit after a wildcat strike at Chrysler resulted in the disproportionate punishing of black strikers. Parks supported the efforts, supporting black labor candidates and occasionally joining the pickets.
Shirley Chisholm had been elected as the first black congresswoman in 1968 from a newly drawn district in Brooklyn. On June 28, 1969, the Women’s Political Action Committee invited Chisholm for her first public appearance in Detroit. Parks gave the introduction, describing Chisholm as a “pepper pot.” Highlighting Chisholm’s family’s roots in the Garvey movement, Parks celebrated Chisholm’s “defiance and loyalty to her constituents . . . when she refused to sit on the assigned agriculture committee. Her aggressive and determined attitude landed her on the veteran’s committee where she fought hard to end segregation in the military.” Perhaps reflective of her own relationship with Raymond, Parks also highlighted the role Chisholm’s husband, Conrad, played as “her closest friend and advisor.”79 According to Fred Durhal, Parks also supported Chisholm’s bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 1972.80
Parks, like many of her civil rights comrades, had grown disillusioned with U.S. foreign policy and was an ea
rly opponent of America’s intervention in Vietnam. According to Atchison, Parks was “passionate” in her opposition to the war, willing to oppose it early on when it was dangerous to do so. She met with veterans’ groups and helped further the growing antiwar movement, attending numerous meetings, rallies, and teach-ins at Wayne State.81 According to Conyers, he and Parks had long been opposed to the war and wondered why King was taking so long to come out in opposition, later learning King had been warned to keep silent.82 Parks’s intense focus on Vietnam was reflected in her mailbox, which filled with antiwar materials from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American Friend’s Service Committee, the Wayne State’s student newspaper, South End, the international Viet Nam Solidarity Committee (attached to the Women’s International Democratic Federation), the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and a number of socialist groups and mobilizations.83
Sparked in part by revelations about the My Lai massacre, more than one hundred soldiers convened in Detroit from January 31 through February 2, 1971, to hold a hearing on the atrocities they had committed or witnessed in Vietnam. This event, sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), came to be referred to as the Winter Soldier hearings—and was held in downtown Detroit. Parks strongly supported the VVAW, as did Conyers, and may have been involved with the hearings.84 On the second day, Conyers, along with Senator George McGovern, called for full congressional hearings into the issues raised by the soldiers’ testimonies. Along with Coretta Scott King, Ella Baker, and Virginia Durr, Parks had been affiliated with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom for many years. With Scott King, she was listed as one of the sponsors of the Jeanette Rankin Brigade antiwar protest held in Washington, DC, on January 15, 1968, marching under the banner “We Oppose the Vietnam War and Racism and Poverty at Home.”85
Parks’s understated feistiness came through in June 1968 when she received the Capitol Press Club’s first Martin Luther King Jr. award. Accepting the honor, she sought to set the record straight, referring to the notion that her bus stand stemmed from tired feet as “something of a joke” and carefully explaining to the reporters gathered, “I didn’t move because I was tired of being pushed around.”86 Parks sometimes found all the fuss about her bus stand puzzling. To her, resistance was natural, as she reminded an interviewer following her Press Club award. “It’s always amazing to me that people thought it was [startling]. It seems to me it’s natural to want to be treated as a human being.”87
BLACK POWER: A NATIONAL MOVEMENT, A LOCAL STRUGGLE
Parks was keenly interested in building a movement to strengthen black voting and economic power nationally, provide support for local community mobilizations, and build black cultural institutions. Given her experience and influence, various activists and groups sought her involvement. While some civil rights leaders viewed the emerging Black Power movement with trepidation, Parks saw a number of continuities with previous political movements she had worked with.
Her political approach in many ways resembled her skills as a quilter. “Any good woman my age from Alabama definitely knows how to quilt,” she observed.88 Her respect for ancestry and her appreciation for conserving a black past—“the use of small scraps by making quilts”89—resonated with strands of Black Power and cultural nationalism in this period. Moreover, the faith that from small pieces would emerge a majestic whole, the ability to sew pieces from many places and to see the value in new materials for the color and texture of the quilt, informed her political life. Black Power did not, for Mrs. Parks, ruin the quilt of black protest. It enriched it. Nor did it require scrapping the previous pieces or reveal their irrelevance. This new swatch would be sewn into the existing whole because she could see how it came out of other designs and helped give added dimension to the emerging pattern. Above all, the need for people to work together and not be divided, for people to pitch in to assist the actions of others, was key to her philosophy: “In quilting maybe somebody would come in to visit, it might be a friend and would just join in and help.”90
Parks continued to read voraciously, keeping up with a number of newspapers and magazines each day and assiduously following local, national, and international issues.91 Arthur Featherstone, who worked alongside her at Conyers’s office, described Parks as “always reading” and having “collected thousands of newspaper clippings.”92 Subscribing to various black newspapers, including the Birmingham World and Michigan Chronicle, and militant publications from SCEF’s Southern Patriot and Now!, the Freedom Now paper, to Wayne State’s student newspaper, the South End, she kept abreast of racial politics in Alabama long after she left and closely followed local political struggles in Detroit.93 She saved scores of papers, from the Detroit Community Voice to The Ghetto Speaks to the Southern Patriot to Now! Vonzie Whitlow recalled the Parks’s living room stacked with piles of newspapers and magazines.94 Parks didn’t talk much about politics, her cousin Barbara Alexander remembered, but she kept all sorts of articles.95
Possessing an archivist sensibility, Parks kept an extensive clipping file which—along with many of the periodicals she received—is now preserved in her papers at Wayne State University. Many articles she kept for more than a decade were stories of black radicalism and Black Power. Looking through those files, which predominantly cover the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, reveals the scope of Mrs. Parks’s intellectual and political worldview. The issues that captured her attention were wide-ranging: reparations and the meanings of Black Power, emerging militant groups like the Black Panthers and the Republic of New Afrika, events like the Attica uprising and the Angela Davis case, the war in Vietnam, and free speech at home all sparked Mrs. Parks’s interest. She was affiliated with the work of dozens of Detroit groups, and her mailbox filled with announcements of antiwar rallies, black history symposia, Afrocentric programs, and community organizing meetings.
According to the Pittsburgh Courier, Rosa Parks was part of a “militant group” of blacks at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago that refused to back any presidential candidate. They held a meeting at the YMCA in downtown Chicago spearheaded by delegates Richard Hatcher, John Conyers, and Yvonne Braithwaite.96 Like Harry Belafonte and Lerone Bennett, Parks was not an official delegate but took an active part in the meeting. Named the National Committee of Inquiry, the group had formed in the months leading up to the Democratic Convention because many felt the Democratic Party wasn’t sufficiently committed to prioritizing black issues or encouraging black leadership. Finding the process of selecting delegates in both major parties “undemocratic . . . and a mockery of representative government,” they sought to nurture an independent black power base in national politics. Endorsed by Coretta Scott King, along with Belafonte, Bennett, Hatcher, and Conyers, this mobilization formed the seed that grew into the 1972 Gary Convention.
Rosa Parks attended the third national conference on Black Power in Philadelphia on August 29, 1968. Many of the leading Black Power advocates, like Amiri Baraka, Ron Karenga, Max Stanford (later Muhammad Ahmad), Richard Henry, Stokely Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown, were there along with nearly two thousand participants. Mrs. Parks kept her customary low profile and had no speaking role. As she would at many events, she sat, listened, and did her knitting (or some sort of handwork), according to Nathan Hare, who recalled her mingling with people, talking particularly with Queen Mother Moore.97 The conference—with its theme “Black Self-Determination and Black Unity through Direct Action”—garnered national attention from the media, the Philadelphia police, and the FBI. As Max Stanford was leaving, Hare pulled him aside to introduce him to someone he needed to meet. That person was Mrs. Parks. Stanford was “blown away. Here was the mother of the civil rights movement.”98
Continuing to work with activists throughout the country, Parks journeyed to Gary, Indiana, in March 1972 to attend the National Black Political Convention. That convention, convened by Amiri Baraka, Ron Karenga, and Richard Hatcher, brought together ten tho
usand black people from across the nation to outline an independent black political agenda during this presidential election year. Independent black politics was not new to Parks. She had been involved in independent black organizing two decades earlier with E. D. Nixon’s Progressive Democratic Party and had long been convinced of the power of an organized black vote—and she was not about to miss this historic gathering. Gwen Patton recalled Parks giving a short greeting at the Convention, conveying her “blessings” of the event.99
Asserting that both parties “had betrayed us” and protected white political interests, the Gary convention agenda focused on creating a black united front in order to harness black power nationally and support local initiatives. While some of the Michigan delegation, led by Coleman Young, who were more loyal to the Democratic Party and UAW, walked out partway through the convention, Parks did not. Perusing the book tables at the convention, Parks was captured on film by black photographer LeRoy Henderson. Henderson, who photographed numerous Black Power demonstrations and black caucuses in the 1960s and 1970s, spotted Mrs. Parks gazing admiringly at a poster of Malcolm X. “I was there with my camera watching, recognizing people, and grabbing candid shots of them . . . capturing this stuff for future generations. . . . Standing at this poster table was a lady nobody even seemed to know who she was. . . . I knew it was Rosa Parks.”100
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Page 33