The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks
Page 39
136. Cobb, interview, You Got to Move, LMP.
137. Virginia Foster Durr, Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr (Montgomery: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 279.
138. Clark, Ready from Within, 16–17.
139. Myles Horton, Rosa Parks, and Richard Stenhouse, radio interview, Alma John and the Homemakers Club, WWRL, May 8, 1956, UC 807A Highlander no. 3, HP.
140. Loop College excerpt, HP.
141. Wigginton, Refuse to Stand, 231.
142. Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 92.
143. Esau Jenkins, “What Started the Whole Thing,” in Quest for Human Rights: The Oral Recollections of Black South Carolinians, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC.
144. Handwritten notes from Highlander, Folder 2–18, RPP.
145. Parks, Horton, and Nixon, Terkel interview, MHP.
146. Parks, My Story, 124.
147. Clark, Ready from Within, 33–34.
148. McWhorter, Carry Me Home, 93.
149. Stewart Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1997), 82.
150. Parks, Horton, and Nixon, Terkel interview, MHP.
151. Parks, My Story, 124; Wigginton, Refuse to Stand, 240.
152. Clark, Ready from Within, 323.
153. Press release, Folder 2–18, RPP.
154. MB-NAACP minutes.
155. Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Free Press, 1986), 149.
156. Clark, Ready from Within, 34.
157. Olson, Freedom’s Daughters, 107.
158. Jackson, “Born in Montgomery,” 109.
159. Parks, interview, You Got to Move, LMP.
160. Document I-D-9, RPA.
161. L. C. Fortenberry, “The Sentinel Queries Rosa Parks,” Los Angeles Sentinel, August 17, 1958. In 1946, the NAACP tried unsuccessfully to pressure Montgomery Fair to rehire four black women elevator operators who had quit to protest being asked to pull double duties.
162. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” Poets.org.
163. Sullivan, Freedom Writer, 103–4.
164. “Rosa Parks: A Tribute to Her Quiet Strength,” tribute program, Orchestra Hall, November 28, 1999, 55, in author’s possession. Parks became friends with Mamie Till Bradley.
165. Parks, interview, Eyes on the Prize, 2.
166. Parks, interview by Brown, 16.
167. Mildred Roxborough, author phone interview, February 27, 2012.
168. Chicago Defender, May 26, 1956.
169. Sullivan, Freedom Writer, 108.
170. As quoted in Thornton, Dividing Lines, 57.
171. David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 138–39.
172. Parks, interview by Brown, 16.
173. Highlander workshop with Parks, May 27, 1960, Highlander UC 515A, tape 202, part 1, HP.
174. Parks, Horton, and Nixon, Terkel interview, MHP.
CHAPTER THREE: “I HAD BEEN PUSHED AS FAR AS I COULD STAND TO BE PUSHED”
1. George R. Metcalf, Black Profiles (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 259.
2. Ibid.
3. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.
4. Lamont Yeakey, “The Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott, 1955–1956,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1979, 197. Some buses may have had small signs.
5. Myles Horton, Rosa Parks, and Richard Stenhouse, radio interview, Alma John and the Homemakers Club, WWRL, May 8, 1956, UC 807A Highlander no. 3, HP.
6. Earl Selby and Miriam Selby, Odyssey: Journey through Black America (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), 53.
7. Rosa Parks, interview, June 19, 1981, You Got to Move research files, Folder 1, Box 11, LMP.
8. Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 36.
9. As quoted in David Garrow, ed., The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1989), 112.
10. Metcalf, Black Profiles, 259.
11. Rosa Parks, interview, April 4, 1956, KPFA, Pacifica Radio Archives, http://pacificaradioarchives.org/.
12. Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights 1919-1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 376–77.
13. Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks: My Story (New York: Dial Books, 1992), 169.
14. E. D. Nixon, interview conducted by Blackside, Inc., 1979, for Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954–1965), available at Washington University Digital Library, http://digital.wustl.edu/eyesontheprize/.
15. J. Mills Thornton III, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 33–36; McGuire, “At the Dark End of the Street,” 105.
16. “Two Negroes Face Bus Law Charge,” Montgomery Advertiser, June 29, 1949.
17. Donnie Williams with Wayne Greenshaw, The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2006), 11–12.
18. Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), 8–9.
19. Rosa Parks, interview by John H. Britton, September 28, 1967, CRDP, 15.
20. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, 22.
21. Ibid.
22. Judith Martin, “Rosa Parks Lives in Detroit and Doesn’t Mind the Back Seat Now,” Washington Post, June 3, 1968.
23. Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 62.
24. Troy Thomas Jackson, “Born in Montgomery: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Civil Rights Montgomery,” PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 2006, 33.
25. Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 24.
26. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, 16.
27. Ibid., 26.
28. Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996), 68.
29. Interview with Dave Birmingham, Box 3, Folder 13, VP.
30. Douglas Brinkley, Rosa Parks: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2000), 43.
31. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.
32. “Reorganized Black Women’s Political Congress Takes on Racism, Sexism,” New York Amsterdam News, October 9, 1993.
33. Parks, interview by Cynthia Stokes Brown, Southern Exposure (Spring 1981): 17.
34. Interview with Parks, Rosa Parks File, Box 2, File 2, GMP.
35. In Garrow, The Walking City, 556–57.
36. Lee Blackwell, “Off the Record,” Chicago Defender, April 5, 1956.
37. Emily Rovetch, ed., Like It Is: Arthur E. Thomas Interviews Leaders on Black America (New York: E. P Dutton, 1981), 50.
38. Mary Fair Burks, “Trailblazers: Women in the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965, Vicki Crawford et al., eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 78.
39. Ibid.
40. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, 23.
41. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.
42. Thornton, Dividing Lines, 32.
43. Frank Sikora, “Rosa Parks Visits a Different South,” Birmingham News, December 2, 1980.
44. Though the college stood behind Robinson’s organizing of the boycott, political pressures led her to resign in 1960. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, 16.
45. Yeakey, “Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott,” 188–89.
46. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.
47. Gregory Skwira, “The Rosa Parks Story: A Bus Ride, a Boycot
t, a New Beginning,” in Blacks in Detroit: A Reprint of Articles from the Detroit Free Press, Scott McGehee and Susan Watson, eds. (Detroit: Detroit Free Press, 1980), 15.
48. Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 30.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Gary Younge, “She Would Not Be Moved,” Guardian, December 16, 2000.
52. Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 31.
53. Garrow, The Walking City, 86.
54. Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 32. The police report lists her kicking and scratching (33).
55. Younge, “She Would Not Be Moved.”
56. Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 59.
57. Virginia Durr, interview by Stanley Smith, 1968, CRDP, 61–62.
58. Andrew Young and Kabir Sehgal, Walk in My Shoes: Conversations between a Civil Rights Legend and His Godson on the Journey Ahead (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 43.
59. Rosa Parks, Myles Horton, and E. D. Nixon, radio interview by Studs Terkel, June 8, 1973, transcript, Box 14, Folder 4, MHP.
60. Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 34.
61. Her case was instead tried under state law. Montgomery city code said no one could be convicted of failing to give up his or her seat unless another seat was available, but it was vague, asserting the law must be obeyed “at the request of any such employee in charge, if there is such a seat vacant”; state law had no such provision. Yeakey, “Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott,” 195.
62. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, 39.
63. Ibid., 40–42.
64. “Early Years in Montgomery, 1947–1950,” Vernon Johns Society website, www.vernonjohns.org.
65. Ralph E. Luker, “Murder and Biblical Memory: The Legend of Vernon Johns,” Best American History Essays 2006 (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 220; Jackson, “Born in Montgomery,” 32–44.
66. Aretha Watkins, “Mrs. Parks Recalls the First Time She Saw Dr. King,” Los Angeles Sentinel, April 11, 1968.
67. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 100; Watkins, “Mrs. Parks Recalls”
68. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 124.
69. MB-NAACP minutes, 1954–55, Box 1, Book 2, SC.
70. Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 41.
71. Ibid., 42.
72. MB-NAACP minutes.
73. Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 42.
74. MB-NAACP minutes.
75. Parks, My Story, 129. In the interview transcripts, Haskins was clearly a bit startled by Parks’s vehemence, asking, “Do you want me to say that?” She replies, “It’s up to you.” Parks, taped interview by James Haskins, December 28, 1988, JHC.
76. Metcalf, Black Profiles, 260.
77. Patricia Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years (New York: Routledge, 2003), 87.
78. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, 42.
79. Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 50.
80. Ibid., 51.
81. Yeakey, “Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott,” 270.
82. Ibid.
83. Branch, Parting the Waters, 123.
84. Leventhal, The Children Coming On, 41–42.
85. Parks, Horton, and Nixon, Terkel interview, June 8, 1973, Transcript Box 14, Folder 4, MHP.
86. Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 53.
87. Williams, Thunder of Angels.
88. Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 52.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid.
91. Durr, CRDP, 63.
92. Phillip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin provides more substantial evidence to dispute this misinterpretation. Parks in her autobiography also mixes up the timing (129–30).
93. Durr, CRDP, 63.
94. Eliot Wigginton, Refuse to Stand Silently By: An Oral History of Grassroots Social Activism in America, 1921–1964 (New York: Anchor, 1991), 230.
95. Rosalyn Oliver King, author phone interview, August 9, 2010.
96. Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 54.
97. Yeakey, “Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott,” 272.
98. Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 54.
99. Lewis Baldwin and Aprille Woodson, Freedom Is Never Free: A Biographical Portrait of Edgar Daniel Nixon (Tennessee General Assembly, 1992), in Rosa Parks File, BWOHP, 49.
100. Jo Ann Robinson, interview by Steven Millner, in Garrow, The Walking City, 571.
101. Parks, My Story, 127.
102. Rosa Parks, J. E. Pierce, and Robert Graetz, workshop discussion, August 21, 1956, tape, Integration Workshop/Highlander Series, UC 515A/173, HP. Black people in Montgomery referred to the boycott as “the protest” because one of the tactics the city used to try to break the movement was dredging up old laws about conspiracy and boycott.
103. Parks, Horton, and Nixon, Terkel interview, June 8, 1973, Transcript Box 14, Folder 4, MHP.
104. Interview with Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, August 22–23, 1978, BWOHP, 255.
105. Rovetch, Like It Is, 46.
106. Sylvia Dannett, Profiles of Negro Womanhood, Volume 2 (Yonkers, NY: Educational Heritage, 1966), 291.
107. Parks, My Story, 130. Bus 2857 would be saved from the scrap heap by mechanic Roy Hubert Summerford, restored, and displayed at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI.
108. Rosa Parks, interview conducted by Blackside, Inc., on November 14, 1985, for Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954–1965), available at Washington University Digital Library, http://digital.wustl.edu/eyesontheprize/.
109. Interview with Parks, Rosa Parks File, Box 2, File 7, GMP.
110. Wigginton, Refuse to Stand, 234.
111. Parks, CRDP, 8.
112. Document II-B-17, RPA.
113. Williams, Thunder of Angels, 47.
114. Dannett, Profiles of Negro Womanhood, 291.
115. “The Two-Way Squeeze,” Nation, December 24, 1955.
116. According to Virginia Durr, Blake, like other drivers, called out, “Niggers move back.” (Virginia Foster Durr, Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr [Montgomery: University of Alabama Press, 1985], 279.) Herb Boyd also says this in “Rosa Parks Remembers: Forty Years Later,” Crisis 103, no. 1 (January 1996). I have found no public interview where Rosa Parks narrates it this way, and I have found other events where Parks quotes other people using the word “nigger.”
117. Parks, CRDP, 4.
118. Rosa Parks, interview by Newsforum (video), 1990, SC
119. Mamie Till-Mobley says that Parks told her this when she met Parks in 1989. Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (New York: Random House, 2003), 257.
120. Parks, My Story, 132. Jo Ann Robinson reproduces the “tired” explanation in her autobiography and downplays Parks’s politics, stressing her “high morals and a strong character.” Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, 43.
121. Parks, CRDP, 4.
122. Horton, Parks, and Stenhouse, radio interview, HP.
123. Yeakey, “Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott,” 195.
124. Joseph Azbell, interview conducted by Blackside, Inc., on October 31, 1985, for Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954–1965), available at Washington University Digital Library, http://digital.wustl.edu/eyesontheprize/.
125. Rosa Parks, interview by Sidney Rogers, in Stewart Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1997), 83.
126. Document II-A-11, RPA.
127. Parks, interview, BWOHP, 254.
128. Metcalf, Black Profiles, 262.
129. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, 43.
130. “Story of Rosa Parks in Current Esquire,” Los Angeles Sentinel, November 19, 1964.
131. Interview with Parks, Box 4, Folder 13, VP.
132. Interview with A. W. West, Box 4, Folder 3, VP.
133. Paul Hendrickson, “Montgomery 1955: The Supporting Actors in the Historic Bus Boycott,” Washington Post, July 24, 1989.
134. Interview with Parks,
Box 4, Folder 13, VP.
135. Yia Eason, “Mrs. Rosa Parks: When She Sat Down the World Stood Up,” Chicago Tribune, June 7, 1973.
136. Parks, My Story, 133.
137. Doris Crenshaw, author phone interview, January 10, 2011.
138. Rovetch, Like It Is, 50.
139. Parks, CRDP, 20.
140. Sidney Rogers interview with Rosa Parks in Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom, 84.
141. Rosa Parks, interview by Newsforum (video), 1990, SC.
142. Randall Bush, “The Theological Ethics of Prophetic Acts,” PhD diss., Marquette University, 2003, 187. Bush describes Parks’s faith as the “most important influence” affecting her decision.
143. Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed, Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue with Today’s Youth (New York: Lee & Low Books, 1997), 42.
144. Blair Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy vs. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 11.
145. Travers Clement, “The Negroes Find Their Own Way,” Dissent (April 1957).
146. Sikora, “Rosa Parks Visits a Different South.”
147. Parks, Pierce, and Graetz, tape, August 21, 1956, HP.
148. Selby, Odyssey, 54.
149. Hendrickson, “Montgomery 1955.” Blake says in this interview that “niggers all up and around here were calling up my house for weeks after it happened, just any hour of the day or night, making the vilest threats to me and my wife and family you ever heard.”
150. Rovetch, Like It Is, 47.
151. Selby, Odyssey, 57.
152. Robert Graetz, A White Preacher’s Memoir: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Montgomery: Black Belt Press, 1998), 15.
153. Rovetch, Like It Is, 47.
154. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.
155. Parks, My Story, 134.
156. Document II-A-11, RPA.
157. Interview with Parks, Box 4, Folder 13, VP.
158. Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 40.
159. Interview with Rosa Parks, Box 4, Folder 13, VP.
160. Nixon, interview, Eyes on the Prize, 5.
161. “Obituary: James Blake,” Guardian, March 27, 2002.
162. Parks, interview, You Got to Move, LMP.
163. David Levering Lewis, King: A Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 47.