The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  164. Burks, “Trailblazers,” 72.

  165. Conyers recalled conversations in which she said she hadn’t planned her action but “knew one day she would resist the law and pay the consequences.” Cooper, “Husband Gave Fire to Reluctant Leader,” Detroit Free Press, October 26, 2005.

  166. Williams, Thunder of Angels, 48.

  167. Parks, interview, Eyes on the Prize, 8.

  168. David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 12.

  169. Nikki Giovanni, author phone interview, March 16, 2010.

  170. Patrick L. Cooney, “Martin Luther King Jr. and Vernon Johns,” in Cooney, The Life and Times of the Prophet Vernon Johns: Father of the Civil Rights Movement, Vernon Johns Society website, http://www.vernonjohns.org/.

  171. Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed, Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope, and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994), 24.

  172. Parks, My Story, 133.

  173. Parks, interview, BWOHP, 254–55.

  174. Parks, CRDP, 7.

  175. Rovetch, Like It Is, 51.

  176. Parks, interview, BWOHP, 253.

  177. “Local NAACP Rolls Up Big Membership,” Los Angeles Sentinel, April 12, 1956 (emphasis added).

  178. Rovetch, Like It Is, 52.

  179. Burns, Daybreak of Freedom, 84.

  180. “Tribute to Mrs. Rosa L. Parks,” Box 88, Folder 1530, PMP.

  181. Parks, Quiet Strength, 22.

  182. “Keep On Fighting, Says Mrs. Parks,” Baltimore Afro-American, May 24, 1958.

  183. Mildred Roxborough, author phone interview, February 27, 2012.

  184. Parks, Quiet Strength, 77.

  185. “Rosa Parks Receives MLK Peace Prize,” Afro-American, January 26, 1980.

  186. Parks, CRDP, 6.

  187. Herb Boyd, author interview, June 11, 2011.

  188. Selby, Odyssey, 66.

  189. Parks, Pierce, and Graetz, tape, August 21, 1956, HP.

  190. “Keep On Fighting,” Baltimore Afro-American.

  191. “1,000 Hear Heroine of Alabama,” Afro-American, October 6, 1956.

  192. Morris, Origins, 51.

  193. Jonathan Rieder, The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 177. See also Eric Sundquist, King’s Dream (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

  194. Burns, Daybreak of Freedom, 221.

  195. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 31.

  196. 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.

  197. Sullivan, Freedom Writer, 103–4.

  198. Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 235.

  199. Parks, Horton, and Nixon, Terkel interview, June 8, 1973, Transcript Box 14, Folder 4, MHP.

  CHAPTER FOUR: “THERE LIVED A GREAT PEOPLE”

  1. Earl Selby and Miriam Selby, Odyssey: Journey through Black America (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), 57.

  2. Douglas Brinkley, Rosa Parks: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2000), 113.

  3. “E. D. Nixon, Civil Rights Leader, Dies,” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 5, 1987.

  4. 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/.

  5. Herb Boyd, “In Memoriam: Rosa Parks,” Black Scholar 35, no. 4 (2006).

  6. Lewis Baldwin and Aprille Woodson, Freedom Is Never Free: A Biographical Portrait of Edgar Daniel Nixon (Tennessee General Assembly, 1992)50, in Parks File, BWOHP.

  7. Vernon Jarrett, “Forgotten Heroes of the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” series,” Chicago Tribune, December 1975.

  8. Marisa Chappell, Jenny Hutchinson, and Brian Ward, “‘Dress modestly, neatly . . . as if you were going to church’: Respectability, Class and Gender in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” in Gender and the Civil Rights Movement, Peter Ling and Sharon Monteith, eds. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 86.

  9. Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 31.

  10. “Interview with a Domestic around 40,” Box 4, Folder 3, VP.

  11. Interview with Willie Mae Wallace, Box 4, Folder 3, VP.

  12. “Race Urged to Keep Faith in Its Fight,” Chicago Defender, June 9, 1956.

  13. James Pierce, interview by Norman Lumpkin, April 23, 1973, Alabama Center for Higher Education Statewide Oral History Project, Alabama State University Archives.

  14. Lamont Yeakey, “The Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott, 1955–1956,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1979, 343.

  15. 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.

  16. Willy S. Leventhal, The Children Coming On: A Retrospective of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Montgomery, AL: Black Belt Press, 1998), 13.

  17. Yolanda Woodlee, “I Was Just One of Many,” Detroit News, January 31, 1988.

  18. Eliot Wigginton, Refuse to Stand Silently By: An Oral History of Grassroots Social Activism in America, 1921–1964 (New York: Anchor, 1991), 222.

  19. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 110.

  20. Document I-D-2, RPA.

  21. Interview with Parks, Box 4, Folder 3, VP.

  22. Interview with Parks, Rosa Parks File, Box 2, File 7, GMP.

  23. Rosa Parks, interview by Newsforum (video), 1990, SC.

  24. Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks: My Story (New York: Dial Books, 1992), 138.

  25. George R. Metcalf, Black Profiles (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 263.

  26. Rosa Parks, interview, August 22-23, 1978, BWOHP, 254–55.

  27. Parks, My Story, 145.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Nixon was proud about getting Rosa out of jail before Raymond did. E. D. Nixon, interview, by Stanley Smith, February 1968, CRDP, 10. Nixon also claims that he got the clerk to set her trial for Monday rather than Saturday morning, “to give us time” (Selby, Odyssey, 58–59).

  30. Virginia Durr oral history, SC, 283.

  31. “Pride, Not Money, Rewarded Her Refusal to Stand,” Atlanta Journal, December 1980.

  32. 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), 52.

  33. Parks, My Story, 141.

  34. Williams, Thunder of Angels, 52.

  35. Durr’s tone toward Raymond in some interviews is quite hostile. She describes him as “the most pathetic thing I’d ever seen in my life and he is a confirmed alcoholic and she stuck by him all these years.” Durr attributes part of his “pathetic” quality to him being “neither white nor black, where he neither belongs any where.” Durr, interview by Stanley Smith, 1968, CRDP, 58–65.

  36. Rosemarie Tyler, “Woman Who Triggered Revolution Very Quiet,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 7, 1963.

  37. Mighty Times: The Children’s March (documentary short film), directed by Robert Houston, Southern Poverty Law Center, 2004.

  38. Sullivan, Freedom Writer, 94.

  39. Durr to Foreman, October 24, 1956, Box 2, VDP.

  40. Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 43.

  41. Selby, Odyssey, 267.

  42. Fred Gray, Bus Ride to Justice: The Life and Works of Fred Gray (Montgomery, AL: NewSouth, 2002), 51–52.

  43. Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed, Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope, and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994), 38.

 
44. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 31.

  45. Ibid., 37–38.

  46. Rosa Parks, Myles Horton, and E. D. Nixon, radio interview by Studs Terkel, June 8, 1973, transcript, Box 14, Folder 4, MHP.

  47. 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), 72.

  48. Ibid.

  49. Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), 61.

  50. Ibid., 104.

  51. Parks, interview by John H. Britton, September 28, 1967, CRDP, 9–10.

  52. Interview with Sarah Coleman, Box 4, Folder 1, VP.

  53. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 22–23.

  54. Document I-D-9, RPA.

  55. Davis Houck and David Dixon, Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965 (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2009), 83.

  56. Troy Thomas Jackson, “Born in Montgomery: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Civil Rights Montgomery,” PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 2006, 34.

  57. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 21–22.

  58. Parks, CRDP, 10.

  59. Leventhal, The Children Coming On, 54–55.

  60. Robert J. Walker, Let My People Go: The Miracle of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Langham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2007), 152.

  61. Williams, Thunder of Angels, 58.

  62. E. D. Nixon, in some interviews, claimed the boycott was “my idea . . . everybody in town knows it. If I hadn’t decided that there had been a bus boycott, there wouldn’t have been one.” Wigginton, Refuse to Stand, 222–23.

  63. 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), 44.

  64. Ibid., 45–46.

  65. Ibid., 45.

  66. Ibid., 46.

  67. Ibid., 45–46.

  68. David Garrow, ed., The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1989), 570.

  69. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, 49–50.

  70. Williams, Thunder of Angels, 60.

  71. Baldwin, Freedom Is Never Free, 48.

  72. Parks, Quiet Strength, 27. There are numerous interviews and speeches, both during the boycott and until the end of her life, in which Parks mentions that she wasn’t the first—that others had been arrested before her.

  73. Azbell was not a racial liberal like the Durrs or Graetzes. In 1968, he served as the public relations advisor for George Wallace’s third presidential campaign (Williams, Thunder of Angels, xxi).

  74. Jarrett, “Forgotten Heroes.”

  75. Interview with Parks, Rosa Parks File, Box 2, File 7, GMP.

  76. In Garrow, The Walking City, 562.

  77. Interview with Parks, Rosa Parks File, Box 2, File 7, GMP.

  78. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 120.

  79. Garrow, The Walking City, 563.

  80. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 126.

  81. Garrow, The Walking City, 563.

  82. Selby, Odyssey, 59.

  83. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 128.

  84. King also identified Parks’s work with the NAACP, and particularly their lack of success, as key to her decision. Charles Denby, Indignant Heart: A Black Worker’s Journal (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 181.

  85. Kevin Chappell, “Remembering Rosa Parks: The Life and Legacy of ‘The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement,’” Ebony, January, 2006.

  86. Chappell, “‘Dress modestly.’”

  87. I am grateful to Brenna Greer for her insights on the construction of Parks’s image.

  88. See letter of invitation, File 27, Box 135, Anne Braden Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

  89. Chappell, “‘Dress modestly,’” 89.

  90. Ibid.

  91. Garrow, The Walking City, 86.

  92. Ibid., 571.

  93. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 31.

  94. Garrow, The Walking City, 70.

  95. Lee Blackwell, “Off the Record,” Chicago Defender, March 28, 1956.

  96. Material on September 23, 1956, program found in the Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. Collection, Civil Rights History Project: Survey of Collections and Repositories, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/; Current to Parks, August 23, 1956, Box III: C-76, NAACP. Thanks to Prudence Cumberbatch for finding this.

  97. Horton, Parks, and Stenhouse, radio interview, HP. Myles Horton interrupted John to point out “she’s a dressmaker, she should look good.”

  98. Rosalyn Oliver King, author phone interview, August 9, 2010.

  99. Tyler, “Woman Who Triggered Revolution.”

  100. Horton, Parks, and Stenhouse, radio interview, HP.

  101. As quoted in Jackson,“Born in Montgomery,” 125.

  102. Robert Graetz, A White Preacher’s Memoir: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Montgomery: Black Belt Press, 1998).

  103. Williams, Thunder of Angels, 142.

  104. Georgia Gilmore, interview conducted by Blackside, Inc., on February 7, 1986, for Eyes on the Prize: American’s Civil Rights Years (1954–1965), available at Washington University Digital Library, http://digital.wustl.edu/eyesontheprize/.

  105. L. C. Fortenberry, “The Sentinel Queries Rosa Parks,” Los Angeles Sentinel, August 17, 1958; Metcalf, Black Profiles, 266.

  106. Rosa Parks, interview by the Academy of Achievement, June 2, 1995, 4.

  107. Interview of Parks, Rosa Parks File, Box 2, File 7, GMP.

  108. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, 19.

  109. Sullivan, Freedom Writer, 95.

  110. As cited in Yeakey, “Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott,” 305.

  111. Parks, My Story, 149.

  112. Gray, Bus Ride to Justice, 55.

  113. Parks, My Story, 149.

  114. Zynobia Tatum recalled how “serious” Parks was. Herb Boyd, “Rosa Parks Remembers: Forty Years Later,” Crisis 103, no. 1 (January 1996): 34.

  115. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 132.

  116. E. D. Nixon, interview, You Got to Move research files, Folder 1, Box 11, LMP.

  117. Baldwin, Freedom Is Never Free, 52.

  118. Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York: Scribner, 2002), 115.

  119. Leventhal, The Children Coming On, 100.

  120. Yeakey, “Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott,” 310.

  121. Selby, Odyssey, 60.

  122. Nixon, interview, You Got to Move, LMP.

  123. Interview of Parks, Rosa Parks File, Box 2, File 7, GMP.

  124. Parks, Horton, and Nixon, Terkel interview, June 8, 1973, Transcript Box 14, Folder 4, MHP.

  125. Parks, taped Haskins interview, December 28, 1988, JHC; Gray, Bus Ride to Justice.

  126. Parks, Millner interview, in Garrow, The Walking City, 562–63.

  127. Baldwin, Freedom Is Never Free, 54.

  128. Williams, Thunder of Angels, 66.

  129. Nixon, CRDP, 13–14.

  130. Yeakey, “Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott,” 328.

  131. Parks, CRDP, 13.

  132. As quoted in Jackson, “Born in Montgomery,” 133.

  133. 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/.

  134. Gilmore, interview, Eyes on the Prize, 6.

  135. Stewart Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1997), 90.

  136. Janet Stevenson, “Rosa Parks Wouldn’t Budge,” American Heritage, February 1972.

  137. As quoted in Jackson, “Born in Montgomery,” 133.

  138. Full text of King’s speech is at “MIA Mass Meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church,” Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Educa
tion Institute website, http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/.

  139. Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 49.

  140. As cited in Danielle McGuire, “‘At the Dark End of the Street’: Sexualized Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle,” PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2007, 152.

  141. As cited in Chappell,“‘Dress modestly,’” 88.

  142. Garrow, The Walking City, 124.

  143. Mighty Times, Southern Poverty Law Center.

  144. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 49.

  145. Parks, Millner interview, in Garrow, The Walking City, 563.

  146. Interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.

  147. Parks, interview, You Got to Move, LMP.

  148. Robert and Jean Graetz, author interview, July 21, 2010.

  149. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 142–43.

  150. Horton, Parks, and Stenhouse, radio interview, HP.

  151. FBI (Montgomery, AL), “Racial Situation, Alabama,” file no. 100–135–61. I made Freedom of Information Act requests for Rosa and Raymond Parks’s FBI files, but the FBI said they had no files on either. In February 2006, the Detroit News reported that the FBI claimed they had only one file on Rosa Parks, from the Detroit field office, which had been destroyed (“FBI Says Only 1 File on Rosa Parks,” February 6, 2006). I have found FBI documents from the Alabama years relating to the boycott that have Parks’s name in capital letters, usually a signal that they considered the individual a person of interest and would have kept a file.

  152. Interview with Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, August 22–23, 1978, BWOHP, 255.

  153. Shapiro to Parks, undated, Folder 1–5, RPA.

  154. Ibid.

  155. Garrow, The Walking City, 594. This is often misattributed to an encounter between Dr. King and an elderly walker.

  156. Martin Luther King, “Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March,” March 25, 1965.

  157. Jarrett, “The Forgotten Heroes.”

  158. Description of mass meetings, Box 4, Folder 2, VP. This chant comes from March 1, 1956.

  159. Interview with Joe Azbell, Box 3, Folder 14, VP.

  160. Ibid.

  161. Interview with Sarah Coleman, Box 4, Folder 1, VP.

  162. I am greatly indebted to Andrew Salinas at Tulane University’s Amistad Research Center, who apprised me of Valien’s research, which provides an unparalleled view of the protest from January to April 1956.