The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  The school for black children in Pine Level consisted of “a meager one-room, unpainted shack with wooden shutters and no windows” for children from first through sixth grade and operated on a shortened calendar to allow for agricultural work.29 Black children attended school for five or six months compared to the nine months for white children. Rosa realized “that we went to a different school than the white children and that the school we went to was not as good as theirs.”30 When Rosa was very young, the town built a new school for white children: “a nice brick building . . . built with public money, including taxes paid by both whites and blacks. Black people had to build and heat their own schools without the help of the town or county or state.”31 The school bus, publicly financed for white children, was not available for black children, so Rosa watched the bus pass by as she walked. This educational inequity laid the foundation for economic inequality, trapping black people in the worst jobs. “We could not compete,” Rosa Parks explained as an adult, “so when we had to finally leave school to take a job with poor education we could only get menial work to do for the most part.”32

  Her experiences growing up in a deeply segregated community dovetailed with those of other black children growing up in the South at this time. “Like millions of black children, before me and after me, I wondered if ‘White’ water tasted different from ‘Colored’ water. I wanted to know if ‘White’ water was white and if ‘Colored’ water came in different colors. It took me a while to understand that there was no difference in the water.”33 From a young age, Rosa McCauley questioned and saw the ways “coming up in a segregated society does something to you—not only to the oppressed but also to the oppressor.”34

  Like many black children, Rosa picked cotton as a child from “can to can’t”—from sunup until after it set. She recalled the ways the boss would ride his horse across the plantation “to see how his niggers were working to bring in the harvest for his wealth and comfort.” The material comforts of black subjugation for white families were apparent. As small children, they would sometimes chant while they played, “White folks in the parlor eatin’ cold ice cream. Niggers in the back yard eatin’ cold collard greens.”35 Rosa’s grandparents were in poor health, and due to financial struggles, she sometimes went without shoes. The McCauley family kept a regular garden and a number of fruit trees to supplement their small earnings and have enough to eat.

  Rosa Parks’s faith also emerged early on. Church was one of the “events that I could look forward to,” she explained. A lifelong member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, she gravitated to the hymns and prayers that filled the weekly service, moved by a God who sought justice on earth. She learned a theology of liberation that affirmed the equality of all people, laid forth a Christian responsibility to act, and provided sustenance to struggle against injustice. “And that’s sort of in my family background, too. The Lord’s power within me to do what I have done.”36

  Often sick with chronic tonsillitis, Rosa McCauley missed a lot of school and grew up with few friends. When she was nine, her mother was finally able to afford a tonsillectomy.37 Rosa’s mother traveled throughout the county teaching at black church schools. Rosa described the precarious nature of Leona McCauley’s work, as black schools often came under attack from white vigilantes. “Many times the children would want to take their books and belongings home in order that they wouldn’t be burned during the night by the KKK. However, the particular building that she used as a school house was never burned or molested in any way. But because it happened in other areas near by, there was always the threat that it might happen to us.”38 Then, for three years, Leona McCauley served as the teacher in the school Rosa attended.39

  At home, the McCauleys discussed the history of slavery, the situation of blacks in Alabama, and how “to survive, not getting into trouble by confrontation with white people who were not friendly to us”40 Rosa’s family sought to teach her a controlled anger, a survival strategy that balanced compliance and militancy. One of the lessons Leona McCauley imparted that lodged in young Rosa’s head was how “slaves had to fool the white people into thinking that they were happy. The white people would get angry if the slaves acted unhappy. They would also treat the slaves better if they thought the slaves liked white people.”41 As she became aware of the terms of white supremacy, the fact that acting happy produced better treatment stuck in her throat. She longed for ways to contest this treatment. She also well understood the punishment for resistance. Recollecting her life growing up in an interview in the late 1960s, Parks, wondered “how we have reached where we are, without things being worse. The only explanation I may have is that the most docile and accepting among us were permitted to survive. Occasionally there would be some who would retaliate, take a violent way of trying to express the resentment at being mistreated. He was called a bad nigger and was just killed outright and made an example of.”42 A young Rosa McCauley, much like a young Malcolm X, struggled with this miseducation, with how to express discontent and still survive.

  These were rough times to be black in Alabama. Daily interactions required a constant process of negotiation. Rosa McCauley on occasion stood up for herself and her younger brother: “Maybe the habit of protecting my little brother helped me learn to protect myself.”43 One childhood friend recalled, “Nobody ever bossed Rosa around and got away with it.”44 One time, a white young man named Franklin began taunting Rosa and Sylvester. “I picked up a brick,” she recalled, “and dared him to hit me. He thought better of the idea and went away.”45

  When she heard about this, Rosa’s grandmother reprimanded her, saying she was “too highstrung” and would be lynched before the age of twenty. “You didn’t retaliate if they did something to you,” her grandmother admonished her.

  “I got very upset about that,” Rosa recalled. “I felt that I was very much in my rights to try to defend myself if I could.”46 Her grandmother told her not to talk “biggety to white folks.” Sobbing, Rosa felt as if her beloved grandmother had “aligned with the hostile white race against me,” and told her, “I would be lynched rather than be run over by them. They could get the rope ready for me any time they wanted to do their lynching.”47 Rosa’s grandmother was trying to teach her a lesson about the cost and terms of survival. And Rosa would constantly have to balance these two forces: militancy could get a person killed and yet resistance, however dangerous, pushed back on the oppression and at times made it diminish.

  The most specific description of this brick incident comes in a series of notes she wrote on the back of NAACP stationery during the boycott, most likely for a public appearance she was making. Seeking to contextualize her bus stand within her experiences as a young person with a brick, Parks wrote, “While my neck was spared of the lynch rope and my body was never riddled by bullets or dragged by an auto, I felt that I was lynched many times in mind and spirit. I grew up in a world of white power used most cruelly and cunningly to suppress poor helpless black people.”48 The adult Rosa Parks often noted the impact growing up amidst this brutality and oppression had upon her.

  Rosa’s mother held firm to her desire that her daughter would receive a serious education. Because there was no more schooling available to black children after the sixth grade, she enrolled eleven-year-old Rosa at Miss White’s Montgomery Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery and sent her to live with an aunt. In 1922, a year or two before Rosa was sent to Miss White’s School, Leona Edwards married forty-six-year-old James Carlie, a timber cutter fourteen years her senior in Montgomery.49 Never did Rosa Parks publicly mention her mother’s second husband; and her cousin Barbara Alexander had “never heard of any other man . . . it was never mentioned in the family.”50 Leona and Jim Carlie appear to have been married at least eight years, and the 1930 census lists Rosa and Sylvester living with them.51

  Miss White’s school embodied Leona McCauley’s advice to her daughter to “take advantage of the opportunities, no matter how few they were.”52 Ho
wever, this schooling required a tremendous financial sacrifice by Rosa’s mother. After her first semester, Rosa received a scholarship to the school and would dust, sweep, and clean the classrooms after school.53 Run by white women for black girls, Miss White’s School adhered to the philosophy of industrial education and the domestic arts most prominently espoused by Booker T. Washington. Parks estimated about “300 or more” young women attended Miss White’s.54 Booker T. Washington himself praised the work of the school for “doing good, practical work in that city.”55 The white teachers emphasized the domestic arts—cooking, sewing, and taking care of the sick—in part because these were jobs open to black women. There was an emphasis on home economics. Rosa McCauley learned to use a sewing machine (they hadn’t had one at the rural school she attended) and gained the sewing skills that would serve as a source of income and personal pride throughout her life—“although I didn’t feel like I wanted to sew for a living.”56 She also learned stenography and office skills.57

  Teaching young black girls to be proper Christian women along with tutoring them in academic subjects such as English, science, and geography, the school stressed the dignity of all people. Teachers outlined the freedoms set forth in the Constitution, and the responsibilities of all citizens. Parks learned she “was a person with dignity and self-respect, and I should not set my sights lower than anybody else just because I was black. We were taught to be ambitious and to believe that we could do what we wanted in life,” reinforcing the message of pride she’d learned at home.58

  The lessons learned at Miss White’s impacted Parks’s schoolmates. Johnnie Carr became a life-long activist and joined the NAACP. Students were taught, as Carr explained, “that the color of your skin, the texture of your hair had nothing to do with your character.”59 Another classmate, Mary Fair Burks, attended college and graduate school and became a professor, later founding the Women’s Political Council, the organization that instigated the bus boycott. Both credited Miss White’s school for instilling in them and other students a firm pride and resolve.

  Her classmates viewed Rosa McCauley as a reserved young woman and model student who eschewed attention and was a bit of a Goody Two-shoes and a rule follower. Burks recalled a “quiet, self-composed girl who did not seek to outshine anyone in the classroom but was always prepared . . . never out of uniform, nor did she ever go on the boys’ side as some of us did.”60 Miss White was a strict disciplinarian with a tight moral code: no dancing, movies, makeup, jewelry, short hair, or alcohol. Carr recalled that Rosa was one of the few students who didn’t dance, characterizing her as “a straight Christian arrow.”

  Rosa also had a feisty side. One day, when she was coming home from school with her cousins who went to the public school, a white boy on roller skates tried to push her off the sidewalk. Rosa turned around and pushed him back. The boy’s mother threatened her with jail. “So I told her that he had pushed me and that I didn’t want to be pushed, seeing that I wasn’t bothering him at all.”61 Rosa noticed that standing up for herself with the boy’s mother meant that the woman and her son “didn’t bother me any further.”62 Fearing her daughter’s boldness could get her in trouble, Leona McCauley moved Rosa in with other cousins so she would not have to walk through white neighborhoods to get to school. “A lot of times white youngsters would approach us,” Parks remembered, “and threaten us in some way. We’d have to talk sort of rough to them so that we didn’t come to blows.”63 Despite her shyness, Rosa McCauley wasn’t afraid to confront white kids when the situation called for it.

  Around this time, her sixteen-year-old cousin Howard beat up a white kid and was spirited out of state for his own safety. Some white men came looking for him and almost took her cousin Thomas. Rosa witnessed this, and the experience, according to her cousin Carolyn, seared her. “Why do they treat us the way they treat us?” she grieved.64

  The school closed after Rosa completed the eighth grade. Miss White along with many of the teachers had grown elderly, and the Klan and other segregationists disapproved of their mission. “I guess running a school for black girls wasn’t a very attractive thing for white people to do,” Parks later noted.65 Some white people feared—and rightly so—that such a school would produce empowered young women. Local whites shunned Miss White and the other teachers for their work with black students. “She and the other teachers were completely isolated and not recognized in any way by the white community,” remembered Rosa.66 And the school was the victim of arson.

  Still, Miss White was no race radical. She never hired black women teachers, even graduates from the school. And Rosa recalled once, when the topic of slavery came up, Miss White said “if there had not been slavery, and our ancestors had not been brought from Africa, we would probably still be savages climbing trees, and eating bananas.”67 Rosa said nothing, but the message disturbed her.68

  Much to her mother’s disappointment, the school closed the year before Rosa would have graduated, so Rosa completed her last year at Booker T. Washington Junior High School. She was constrained by family responsibilities and the limited economic and educational options that many young black women confronted in the 1920s and 1930s. Because Montgomery did not provide high schools for black students, she attended the laboratory school at Alabama State College. Enjoying the school, Rosa was a serious student. One friend teased her about this seriousness in a letter: “I bet anything the boys in your class can’t get their lessons for looking at you. . . . You say you are only in love with books, but you can’t fool me. You mean with books & boys too.”69

  Rosa’s mother wanted her daughter to teach, though Rosa felt “the schools were just too segregated and oppressive.”70 Like other civil rights luminaries such as Ida B. Wells and Ella Baker, Rosa McCauley didn’t want to repeat her mother’s experience teaching in a segregated school system. “The humiliation and intimidation they’d have to take from the board of education and the officials just didn’t appeal to me then.”71 She wanted to be a nurse or a social worker and “help people to be relieved of suffering.”72

  Despite her professional ambitions, Rosa had to drop out in the eleventh grade to care for her sick grandmother. The family had little money for tuition, and her mother was also in poor health.73 “She wasn’t a very strong woman” and suffered from disabling migraines, so Parks did “all that she could . . . to make things light as I could for her [mother].”74 Rosa was “not happy” about dropping out, but “I did not complain; it was just something that had to be done.”75 Throughout her life, Rosa balanced family care responsibilities with her political goals and personal aspirations—cutting back on her political activities time and again to caretake, only to reemerge and continue with her own political goals.

  This was the Great Depression, and jobs were scarce. Rosa bore her lot the best she could, working on the family farm and laboring as a domestic in white people’s homes. She made about four dollars a week as a domestic, working seven full days and often at night as well. Doing domestic work was not only physically and psychically demanding, but it exposed black women to sexual harassment and assault—perils she documented in a short story. In this first-person account, one evening she looked after the baby while her employers went out. Having just put the baby down, she welcomed a bit of relaxation before the family returned. “Sam,” a black man who also worked at the house, came to the back door and said he had lost his coat. Rosa let him in and went to look for the coat.76 She was then greeted by a white neighbor, “Mr. Charlie,” and realized that the purpose of Sam’s visit was to bring Mr. Charlie into the house to give him access to Rosa. Mr. Charlie poured himself a glass of whiskey and attempted to put his arm around her waist. Rosa recoiled in fear and disgust. Mr. Charlie said not to worry, that he liked her and had money to give her. The small Rosa was no match for the heavyset Mr. Charlie and was trapped. Sam had set her up, and she felt tricked and betrayed by him, “stripped naked of every shred of decency . . . a commodity from Negro to white man.”


  Terrified, her mind turned to Psalm 27: “The lord is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear?” Recalling her great-grandmother’s abuse at the hands of her white master, Rosa found her fear replaced by a “steel determination to stand completely alone against this formidable foe.” She resolved that she would never “yield to this white man’s bestiality.” He might kill her or rape her, but she vowed to put up a fight. As she kept moving around the living room, trying to stay an arm’s length from him, Parks coolly began haranguing Mr. Charlie about the “white man’s inhuman treatment of the Negro. How I hated all white people, especially him. I said I would never stoop so low as to have anything to do with him. . . . I asked him if the white women were not good enough for him, and it was too bad if something was wrong with them.”

  On and on she went, determined to resist Mr. Charlie’s advances. “I taunted him about the supposed white supremacy. The white man’s law drawing the color line of segregation. I would stay within the law—on my side of the line.” Standing up for herself as a respectable young woman, she informed him she wouldn’t engage sexually with anyone she couldn’t marry, noting that interracial marriage was illegal in Alabama. When Mr. Charlie replied that color didn’t matter to him and that he had gotten permission from Sam to be with her, she informed him that Sam didn’t own her. She hated Sam as much as she hated Mr. Charlie. Mr. Charlie repeatedly offered her money and then volunteered to set her up with Sam. Rosa stated there was nothing he could do to get her consent—that “if he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body, he was welcome but he would have to kill me first.”77 The story finishes with Rosa sitting down and reading the paper, trying to ignore Mr. Charlie while he sits across from her. “I said he couldn’t pay me or fool me, or frighten me. At long last Mr. Charlie got the idea that I meant no, very definitely no.” With no clear-cut conclusion to the story, it is not evident what transpired.78