The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  The only account of this incident is found in Parks’s own hand, written sometime in the late 1950s or 1960s. She did not include it in her autobiography, in any of the oral histories she gave in the 1960s or 1970s, or in the interviews for Douglas Brinkley’s biography of her. There are elements in the story that indisputably correspond to Parks’s life; her great-grandmother had been sexually abused by her slave master, Parks herself did domestic work, Psalm 27 was a favorite, and she was a longtime believer in self-defense (and “telling people what you would do to them”). Whether fully or partially true, the piece is a remarkable elucidation of Parks’s political philosophy.

  Marking the danger of sexual violence that black women faced working in white homes, the story confirmed the importance of resistance and the narrator’s refusal to be cowed. “He need not think that because he was a low-down dirty dog of a white man and I was a poor defenseless, helpless colored girl, that he could run over me.” That Parks calls the man “Mr. Charlie” (a term used in this period by black people to put down white people and their arbitrary power) and the black man Sam (possibly for Sambo) suggests that Parks wrote this as an allegory to suggest larger themes of domination and resistance. It may be that, given that more than twenty-five years had passed before she wrote this down, she augmented what she said to Charlie that evening with all the points that she had wished to make as she resisted his advances. It may be that this incident was fictionalized or a composite of experiences, or that the incident happened but the ending turned out differently.

  Right around the time of this incident, in the spring of 1931, a friend introduced her to the politically active Raymond Parks. Initially Rosa wasn’t romantically interested because Raymond was more light-skinned than Rosa preferred and because she had had “some unhappy romantic experiences.”79 Raymond could “pass for white except he didn’t have white people’s hair.”80 Born in Wedowee, a small town in Randolph County, Alabama, on February 12, 1903, Raymond hadn’t attended school. There were few other blacks where his family lived, and the school for blacks “was too far away for him to get there.”81 Raymond taught himself how to read with the help of his mother. And like Rosa, he took care of his ailing mother and grandparents. When he was about ten, his grandfather and grandmother became ill. According to Rosa, Raymond’s childhood was difficult, growing up in a town surrounded by hostile white people and bearing heavy family responsibilities: “He had to do what he could, try to work to help them, cook for them . . . he didn’t have shoes, didn’t have food much of the time.” After his mother died, he moved in with a cousin and at the age of twenty-one was finally able to go to school, attending Tuskegee and ultimately picking up the barber trade. An avid reader of the black press as well as writers such as Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, Raymond Parks kept well abreast of the issues of the day. Many who met him assumed he had a college education, and his barber chair was often a space for wide-ranging political discussions.

  After meeting Rosa for the first time, Raymond came looking for her house. The first person he asked for her whereabouts wouldn’t tell him, perhaps “because he was so fair . . . they might have thought he was a member of the opposite race.”82 Then he stopped at the McCauley residence to inquire if they knew where he might find this Rosa McCauley. Leona McCauley invited him in “and that’s when we got acquainted.”83

  Raymond—whom she called “Parks”—was “the first real activist I ever met.”84 In all the iconography of Rosa Parks, there is little that pictures her romance with Raymond.85 Among the hundreds of media shots of her, there are very few public photos with him. But love it was. Raymond Parks came back to the McCauley house another time “and this time I wouldn’t go out to see him. I went to bed and covered up and wouldn’t go out.” And he came back again “and after that we started going on rides to different places” and talking about the world. It was the first time, outside of her family, that Rosa had discussed racial issues in depth with someone else.86 But she was impressed with his boldness. Raymond Parks had his own car, a red Nash with a rumble seat. To be a black man driving his own car in Alabama in the 1930s (not as a driver for a white family) was to be an audacious and proud man, and Raymond was “willing to defy the racists and stand up to the establishment.”87 What impressed her was “that he refused to be intimidated by white people—unlike many blacks, who figured they had no choice but to stay under ‘Mr. Charlie’s’ heel.”88 In light of Rosa’s experiences and feelings about white supremacy, these qualities of Raymond’s were especially precious.

  Fifty years later, writer Cynthia Stokes Brown would recall her first meeting with Rosa Parks in 1980. They had gone into the restroom so Mrs. Parks could freshen up before meeting with reporters. Parks removed her hat and hairpin.

  And her braids fell below her waist in a cascade of thick wavy hair that Rapunzel would have envied. When Mrs. Parks saw the astonishment on my face, she chuckled softly, “Well, many of my ancestors were Indians. I never cut my hair because my husband liked it this way. It’s a lot of trouble, and he’s been dead a number of years, but I still can’t bring myself to cut it.”89

  Alice Walker tells a similar story of attending an event with Parks in Mississippi. They went into the bathroom and Parks took down her hair. Walker was “stunned.” As she put back her bun, Parks explained “my hair was something that my husband dearly, dearly loved about me. . . . I never wear it down in public.”90 Aware of the racial politics of hair and appearance, Parks kept her hair long in an act of love and affection (even after Raymond died) but tucked away in a series of braids and buns—maintaining a clear division between her public presentation and her private person.

  Raymond talked to Rosa about the Scottsboro case and other racial matters. “I just enjoyed listening to him. I didn’t talk a great deal . . . He was a very gentle person, very polite. I didn’t know exactly what to say, I guess because I hadn’t been [with many boys].”91 Rosa felt shy and inexperienced, but Raymond had taken an immediate liking to her, and she was attracted to his spirit and strength of character. Raymond, according to Rosa, “expected to be treated as a man”—to get along if possible “but whenever white people accosted him, he always wanted to let them know he could take care of business if he had to. They didn’t bother you so much back then if you just spoke right up. But as soon as you acted like you were afraid, they’d have fun with you.”92 Like Rosa’s grandfather, Raymond was not afraid to speak back to white people. Like many black people in Alabama, Raymond Parks had a gun and would carry it when necessary. The appreciation for race pride and activism that she had learned at home came to fruition in her relationship with Raymond Parks. He was the love of her life.

  They married on December 18, 1932, at her mother’s house with a small gathering of family and close friends. Their wedding happened “right in the middle of the campaign to save the Scottsboro Boys.”93 Raymond was actively organizing on behalf of the nine young men aged twelve to nineteen who had wrongfully been convicted and sentenced to death in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931. These young men had been riding the rails on a train in Alabama and gotten in a scuffle with several young white men also riding for free and forced them from the train. At the next stop, the police boarded the train and arrested the nine black boys. But when two young white women were also discovered stowed away on the train, the charge quickly changed to rape. Less than two weeks after their arrest, eight of them (all but twelve-year-old Roy Wright) had been found guilty and sentenced to death. The eight were scheduled to be executed July 10, 1931. While the NAACP initially stood at arm’s length from the case (and most cases in this period involving issues or allegations of sex), the American Communist Party took immediate interest in the case and began organizing to protest the verdicts. The International Legal Defense (ILD) took up the case, and a grassroots movement of Alabamians grew to save the young men.

  Raymond Parks sprang into action. “Not many men were activists in those days either, because if it was known that they
were meeting, they would be wiped right out. But it didn’t bother me being married to Parks. He was doing the same thing before we got married; and I knew how dangerous it was.” Every time Raymond went out to a Scottsboro meeting, Rosa wondered if he would come back alive.94 This organizing was clandestine: “I would stand in front of a certain street light,” explained Raymond, “and lean over and tie my shoe a certain way to give a signal as to where we would meet and the day and the time.”95 Raymond told Rosa that for security reasons, everyone in the group was simply known to the others as Larry.96 One person Raymond did tell Rosa about was “a lady he used to call Captola” [sic]—Capitola Tasker, an Alabama sharecropper, leader in the Share Croppers Union and active in the Communist Party (CP). Capitola and Charles Tasker produced leaflets from their home that CP organizer Al Jackson distributed from his Montgomery barbershop.97

  For the first years of their partnership, Rosa did more of the worrying about Raymond’s safety, given his political activities. Later in their marriage, that would reverse. The committee would meet at odd hours—before daybreak and in the middle of the night. Raymond began holding secret meetings at the Parks’s home, which Rosa would sometimes attend. Raymond didn’t want her to be active “because it was hard enough if he had to run[;] he couldn’t leave me and I couldn’t run as fast.”98 She recalled their kitchen table “covered with guns,”99 further testament to the long history of armed self-defense in Southern black communities that historian Timothy Tyson has documented.100

  Raymond brought food to the Scottsboro boys in jail and told Rosa that he would “never sleep well until they’re free.”101 They both attended meetings. As the Scottsboro organizing increased, the police looked for people to intimidate. Two of Raymond’s associates had been killed a few weeks earlier. One day, two cops on motorcycles drove back and forth in front of the Parks home. Rosa and a friend were sitting out on the porch swing. “I was so frightened, . . . I was shaking so much that I was making the swing tremble.” Raymond made it safely back home, coming in through the back door. She was enormously relieved. “At least they didn’t get him that time.”102

  Raymond was a longtime member of the Montgomery branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Begun in 1909 after a vicious lynching in Springfield, Illinois, the NAACP sought to realize the rights guaranteed to black people in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments. By the 1930s, and in particular in the wake of local organizing around the Scottsboro case, the organization started to build a grassroots base. Raymond attended branch meetings but in time grew disillusioned with the organization’s cautiousness and elitism. According to historian Dorothy Autrey, the Montgomery branch was middle-class dominated and lacked effective leadership in the 1930s.103

  Black left activist Esther Cooper Jackson recalls meeting Raymond in the early 1940s. Esther Cooper Jackson and her husband, the American Communist Party leader James Jackson, had just moved to Birmingham and Esther began working with the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Her impression was that Raymond Parks was one of the “more advanced political activists in the union movement.” Decades later, after Rosa Parks became famous, Cooper Jackson would tell friends of meeting Raymond and describe his activism. They would be surprised, some remarking that they “didn’t even know she had a husband.”104 Raymond Parks’s politics helped provide fertile soil over the years for Rosa’s to grow. According to scholar and former SNCC activist Gwen Patton, he was a “revolutionary in his own right,” who decisively impacted Rosa’s political development.105

  On Raymond’s urging, Rosa followed her desire to return to school and earned her high school degree in 1933. In 1940, according to Parks, “only 7 of every 100 black people had a high school diploma,” and she was extremely proud of the accomplishment.106 She never attended college, even though it was one of her “greatest desires.”107 Parks struggled to find work commensurate with her skills and education. Office work and secretarial jobs were almost nonexistent for black women in the South. While 8,491 whites were employed in 1940 as typists or stenographers in Alabama, only 140 black people had these jobs.108 Rosa thus scrounged to find employment—as a nurse’s assistant at Saint Margaret’s Hospital, as a presser at a tailor shop, and, during World War II, at Maxwell Air Force Base.

  Rosa hated the ways some black people kowtowed to white authority. One time, while seeing some friends off at the train station, she was threatened and pushed by a white policeman. Another black woman was also treated rudely by the same officer but responded by flirting with him. “To me she showed a lack of respect for herself as a woman, and especially as a black woman.”109 Parks hated the ways black women had to use their sexuality to protect themselves from white power. She increasingly looked for outlets to contest that disrespect and to encourage others to do the same. Her own activist sensibility was growing.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “It Was Very Difficult to Keep Going When All Our Work Seemed to Be in Vain”

  The Civil Rights Movement before the Bus Boycott

  IN DECEMBER 1943, ROSA PARKS decided to go to a meeting of the Montgomery NAACP. Raymond had been an active member of the branch in the 1930s but had grown disenchanted with its cautiousness and elitism, which led some to look down on working-class men like himself, and had long since stopped going. Rosa initially had thought the NAACP was an organization open only to men. She had wanted to attend meetings with Raymond but he had initially discouraged her participation, saying it was too dangerous, particularly in the years around the Scottsboro case.1 But in 1943, she saw a picture in a black newspaper of Mrs. Johnnie Carr, her former classmate from Miss White’s School, attending an NAACP meeting. Parks had grown increasingly frustrated with the paradoxes of American democracy, further highlighted by U.S. participation in World War II. Black people like her brother were serving in the army to defend the United States and its freedoms but not granted that equality and freedom at home. “I had always been taught that this was America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. . . . I felt that it should be actual, in action rather than just something we hear and talk about.”2

  Carr had also been active in the Scottsboro case, raising money for the young men’s defense and then joining the NAACP. Parks attended the December meeting, but Carr had not come that day. As the only woman there among a dozen men, Mrs. Parks was asked to take notes and then, because it was election day, to serve as branch secretary.3 “Too timid to say no,” she was then elected secretary of the chapter.4 She and Carr were typically the only women at the meetings.5 Her mother would follow her lead, becoming one of just a few women to actively join the local branch, though many Montgomery women were members of the national NAACP. Parks shortly met E. D. Nixon, a Pullman porter active in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the NAACP who was spearheading a campaign to get blacks in Montgomery to attempt to register to vote. Nixon’s wife, Arlet, sometimes came to meetings as well.

  Working with a handful of committed local leaders in Montgomery, Rosa Parks joined the cadre of Montgomery activists that would lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement in the decade before the Brown decision. This decade of activism is often glossed over in standard accounts of the civil rights movement because it stands at odds with a more triumphalist narrative of civil rights. This was a difficult, dangerous, and ultimately demoralizing period for civil rights activists, as a growing black militancy stemming in part from the experiences of World War II met unyielding and increasingly aggressive white resistance and violence. Civil rights activism was often a lonely venture for people like Parks who toiled in relative obscurity because most of their fellow citizens, white and black, steered clear of the dangers of civil rights advocacy. The fortitude and faith it took to be an activist in Alabama in this decade is too often overshadowed by the events of the late 1950s and 1960s.

  Popular narratives of the civil rights era often move briskly through the 1940s and early 1950s. The power and drama of the mas
s movement that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s—the boycotts and sit-ins, Freedom Rides and voter registration campaigns—are more alluring, the legislative and community successes more clear. And so it becomes all too easy not to linger in this earlier decade and rush ahead to the good parts. But there was nothing inevitable about the mass movement of the mid-1950s and early 1960s, which would not have been possible without this arduous spadework.

  To be an activist for racial justice in the 1940s meant working without any indication that your efforts would be realized in your lifetime. It meant struggling against the fear and nihilism that white supremacy produced in order to continue tilling the soil for a mass movement to be able to flower. For a person like Rosa Parks, whose stand on the bus would come to be seen as ushering in a glorious new chapter of civil rights history, it first meant imagining that there could be a story, finding others who agreed, and then painstakingly writing it, word by word, for more than a decade to get to the good part.

  The first real meeting between Rosa Parks and E. D. Nixon—a partnership that would change the course of American history—took place at Parks’s apartment. Nixon came to her home to speak to her about registering to vote and, seeing her interest, left a book on the subject for her to read.6 So began a working collaboration that would span more than a decade.

  Born July 12, 1899, Edgar Daniel Nixon grew up just outside Montgomery in a family of eight kids. Nixon’s father was an itinerant preacher, and his mother died when he was a boy. Leaving home at the age of fourteen and largely self-taught, Nixon went to school for “only about 18 months in my entire life.” He worked a variety of hard physical jobs till he landed a job working in baggage for the Pullman Company, eventually earning a promotion to Pullman porter.7 Reminiscent of the antebellum South, the Pullman Company only hired black men to serve customers on overnight trains. Because the work was steady and the pay regular, the job was a sought-after position within the black community, though it required porters to attend meticulously to passenger needs, plumping pillows, taking orders, making the ride comfortable for white—and only white—passengers. For Nixon, at this juncture in his life, it was “the best thing in the world that ever happened to me.”8 A fiercely determined man, Nixon used the job to improve his reading and writing skills, partly by reading the newspapers and books people left on the train. He wrote down all the words he did not know in a small notebook and looked them up when he got back to his room.