The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  In a larger sense, the boycott fable is the founding story—the golden goose—of the civil rights movement, with its untarnished happy ending and its ability to reflect the best possibilities of the United States. A classic American tale, it is the story of an ordinary citizen who with a simple act inspired the nation to make good on its ideals. To see the Parks family suffering for a decade after the boycott’s successful end—to confront the cost and complexity of that success and the economic retaliation that many civil rights activists endured—mars the legend. It many ways, that fable’s utility requires the now-classic photo finish, the ubiquitous image of Rosa Parks seated in profile on a desegregated bus.

  Looking at Rosa Parks head on requires going beyond that picture and ultimately provides a more sobering view of the prolonged resistance to civil rights throughout the country. Parks’s politics and a deeply segregated and discriminatory job market left her without stable work in the Confederate South and the liberal North for nearly a decade. That decade of suffering occurred as the modern civil rights movement reached its apex, a decade now tinged in the rosy glow of nostalgia and redemptive suffering. But there was nothing foreordained about where the Rosa Parks story would end, no easy solace that Parks could claim to alleviate the fear or the poverty. Not all suffering led to change, as civil rights stalwarts like Parks knew well. In 1966, Parks sidestepped a question in an interview with New York state senator George Metcalf, who was writing a book profiling important black figures. Metcalf asked whether “all the tortures and everything you suffered were worth it?” Parks did not say an unequivocal yes, responding instead, “I didn’t think of it in just that way. I think I would have preferred if we would return to normal without segregation. It would have been better. I didn’t regret the fact that we had made at least this gain of ending segregation on the buses.”3 Having endeavored to conquer her fear in the decades of activism before the boycott, Parks had delighted in the community uprising. She worked to keep the terror of harassment and instability at bay as she played an active role in maintaining the boycott, and continued her political activities once it finished. She did not sugarcoat the costs of that work but often kept the difficulties to herself.

  FIRED

  Parks was very reluctant to attribute her firing from the Montgomery Fair Department Store unequivocally to her bus stand: “I cannot say this is true. I do not like to form in my mind something I do not have any proof of.”4 As judicious as she was in her assessment, there can be little doubt that her bus stand cost her a position at the department store. After she was laid off, Parks redoubled her work for the boycott. She gave speeches, traveled on behalf of the NAACP and MIA, attended meetings, helped distribute clothes, food, and other necessities to people affected by the boycott, and served briefly as a dispatcher—all the while worrying about her own family’s economic well-being and doing whatever sewing work she could find on the side.

  During the first weeks of the boycott, the MIA relied on local fund-raising but soon recognized the need to solicit outside support. In February, longtime New York–based organizers Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Stanley Levinson formed In Friendship. Heartened by this budding Southern militancy, the group sought to provide material support for the boycott and civil rights workers across the South facing reprisals for their activism.

  Given the Cold War context—not to mention that civil rights activities had long been discredited as the work of “outsiders”—taking outside money put the movement at risk of charges of subversion and carpetbagging (with its Reconstruction-era overtones). However, the costs of sustaining the car pools were considerable, not to mention the numbers of people facing reprisals for their participation. The MIA needed outside financial support, beyond what Montgomerians could provide.

  By the winter, friction had developed between King and NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins over how the NAACP was still keeping the boycott at arm’s length, even as its own fund-raising was benefiting from the protest’s inspiring example. The NAACP had maintained its distance from the boycott in its early days, in part because the boycott, with its initial limited demands, was not, at first, a full-on assault on segregation. Seeing it as too “mild,” Wilkins wrote Alabama field secretary W. C. Patton that the boycott sought to “improv[e] segregation by making it more polite.” Though this went unmentioned, the grassroots militancy of the boycott differed from the organization’s usual program of legalist strategies.5 James Peck (who later joined CORE’s Freedom Ride) wrote a letter criticizing the NAACP for its unwillingness to back the boycott. Indeed the national office of the NAACP blocked talk by some members urging a national boycott of the bus company.6

  To Montgomery officials there was nothing mild about the boycott. As the protest continued, King continued to press the NAACP for help while expressing his concern that NAACP fund-raising was eclipsing the MIA’s. Wilkins pledged to cover the legal costs associated with Parks’s appeal and the indicted boycott organizers. Still, even when the boycott’s goals turned to full desegregation, the NAACP kept its distance from the boycott itself. While providing legal assistance, they waited to see the outcome of the mass trial that followed the February indictments before assessing the efficacy of passive resistance and economic suasion.7 At its June national convention, the NAACP continued this equivocation, passing a resolution saying that “we are not yet ready to take a position on [passive nonviolent resistance].”8 This friction and the rivalries between groups would have severe consequences for Parks. No civil rights group—not the NAACP she had worked for over the past decade nor the MIA she helped create—felt primarily responsible for Parks’s imperiled situation, even though she fund-raised for both during the year of the boycott.

  Parks wrote on a slip of paper during the boycott, “I have no quarrel with MIA about being given or not given a job.”9 While certainly not feeling entitled to a job, this note demonstrates that she recognized the possibility of a job for her within the organization. The MIA hired four women to be its office staff: Erma Dungee as financial secretary, Maude Ballou as King’s personal secretary, Martha Johnson as the MIA’s secretary-clerk, and Hazel Gregory as the MIA’s general overseer. Jo Ann Robinson described the four as sophisticated, socially prominent, well-trained “young ladies” who were members of the WPC with professional husbands, which suggests that these women occupied a different social position than Parks.10 Meanwhile, no one would hire either Rosa or Raymond Parks.

  One day, Virginia Durr had stopped by the Parks’s apartment. Leona McCauley had a hankering for sweet potatoes, but the family had no money for such luxuries. Recognizing the depth of the trouble the Parks family was facing, Durr set about to find some money or a job for Mrs. Parks. For Durr, who was an outcast in Montgomery because of her civil rights beliefs, this project provided a respite from her own isolation and a way to be useful. There is no record from Parks about how she felt or if she knew the extent of Durr’s outreach.

  Durr threw herself into this cause, writing to friends across the country for assistance. To Myles Horton of Highlander, she explained, “It is fine to be a heroine but the price is high.”11 To another friend, she noted that Parks “has the heaviest burden to bear.”12 Horton wrote back hoping to “figure out a way to get some money somewhere to help her out” and asking whether Durr and Parks might come to a March meeting at Highlander. “It would be an inspiration to have her [Parks] here,” Horton explained.13 Horton subsequently wrote to Parks telling her how “proud we were of your courageous role in the boycott,” and offering his sympathies regarding her economic situation.14 Horton’s response would become the standard treatment for Parks over the next years and decades. Fame—even that imbued with the deepest admiration and respect—did not necessarily translate into security. People would honor her work and solicit her political participation, often without attending to her pressing economic needs.

  Durr wrote Horton again two weeks later about Parks’s difficulties: “You would be amazed at the number
of pictures, interviews etc that she had taken and all of that takes up time and then too all the meetings and then having to walk nearly everywhere she goes takes time too. . . . Most people want to contribute to the Boycott itself rather than to an individual, but that particular individual is to my mind very important.”15

  Parks herself wrote to Horton a week later telling him of the termination of her job. “Mrs. Durr is very concerned about our welfare. I appreciate her friendship, especially at this trying time.”16 Parks cited Durr’s concern to invoke the urgency of her situation; as a respectable black woman, she sought to maintain her dignity. While Horton would grow into a friend, she had only met him once at this point and likely found it easier to mention the difficulties of her situation through the words of a white woman who was his friend.17

  Historian Darlene Clark Hine has written about the culture of dissemblance, a politics of silence that developed among black women in response to the pressures of living with sexual and economic violence. “Only with secrecy, thus achieving a self-imposed invisibility could ordinary black women acquire the psychic space and gather the resources necessary to hold their own in their often one-sided and mismatched struggle against oppression.”18 As Hine argues, black women of this era purposely shielded their innermost feelings from public view. One imagines this was particularly acute for someone like Parks, who was reserved to begin with and then spent the second half of her life under constant public scrutiny. Committed to maintaining her dignified appearance to advance the movement, she kept many of her feelings and troubles to herself. Parks had long chafed at the ways black people had to subsume their needs to whites, but she, like many black women, was skilled at this survival strategy. She put this ability to different use in her public role as a boycott symbol, which required backgrounding her own needs and pain, at times, for the good of the movement. Even as she noticed and attended to the suffering of others, she often seemed determined to keep quiet about her own difficulties. Her own personal sense of dignity became linked to her ability to withstand the pressure.

  Horton wrote back to Parks and committed to paying her expenses so she could come to the March Highlander meeting. He subsequently wrote Durr celebrating Parks as “a symbol of the thing we all believe in.” Recognizing the importance of white support in the midst of this struggle, he telegrammed Parks the night after the mass indictments came down: “The passive resistance movement your calm and courageous action set in motion there in Montgomery deserves the backing of all who seek justice. Highlander is proud of you.”19

  In late February, King prepared a memorandum to Abernathy concerned about Parks’s desperate financial situation “because of her tremendous self respect she has not already revealed this to the organization.” King recommended that “$250 be given to her from the Relief Fund. Ordinarily, I would not recommend this much to any one individual, but I think her situation demands it, and the Montgomery Improvement Association owes this to Mrs. Parks above any other. Actually you may make it three hundred dollars ($300.00) if you feel so disposed. Please check with the committee and get this to Mrs. Parks immediately.”20 Three hundred dollars was subsequently disbursed from the MIA treasury to Parks.

  The economic toll of the boycott was certainly not limited to the Parks family; it reached across the black community. Working with the MIA Welfare Committee, Parks sought to find employment for laid-off workers because a “lot of people lost their jobs.”21 Faced with the host of reprisals, the MIA became a broad-based social service agency. According to financial secretary Erma Dungee Allen, they bought food and paid people’s rent, gas, water, and doctor bills; sometimes they even bought washing machines and other household goods. In many ways, Dungee Allen felt that some of these were “free rides as far as I was concerned. But they [the MIA leadership] seemed to think this is what we had to do.” Dungee Allen explained that King was “real sympathetic” to people’s needs and “usually the poorest ones” came to the MIA.22 The MIA understood that meeting people’s basic needs would allow for a more engaged movement.

  Parks was doing a great deal of speaking and numerous appearances for the MIA—a “tremendous hit,” according to Clifford Durr, as one of the MIA’s most able speakers and fund-raisers.23 While she regularly turned over the money to the MIA, not all the ministers did the same. Some kept a portion as an honorarium for their time and energy. Reverend Graetz, who, like Parks, fastidiously turned over his speaking money to the organization, recalled someone in the MIA asking, “Did you keep enough out for yourself?”24 Shocked, Graetz learned others kept a portion for themselves as compensation for their effort. More than the ministers, Parks did need a portion of the money raised from her public appearances but, like Graetz, never engaged in this practice. Parks also did numerous speaking engagements for the NAACP, some of which garnered her a modest stipend. (On one ten-day tour, the NAACP split the money fund-raised from her events between the local branch and the national office, while giving her twenty-five dollars a talk.)

  Financial issues in the MIA grew controversial. Some of the ministers—and occasionally Nixon himself—took part of the funds for their own needs, when hosting organizations thought all of the money was going to the boycott itself. “We had a whole lot of money at that time,” Nixon admitted, “and some of it we handled unwisely.”25 In June of 1956, Reverend Uriah Fields, the former secretary of the organization, accused the MIA’s leaders of “misappropriation of funds.” Days later, after meeting with King, Fields recanted, though he never fully took back his criticisms.26 In June, Reverend Simms assumed the leadership of the transportation committee, which had grown to require “full time supervision” and established a precise system of record-keeping.27

  Along with suffering economic hardship, the Parks home received regular hate mail and constant death threats. This harassment took a significant toll on Parks’s mother and husband in particular; since she traveled a lot during the boycott year, they often answered the phone. The suffering of her husband took its toll on Rosa, too; as he grew more depressed, she worried. Yet, while scholars have begun to foreground the crucial support that wives of civil rights leaders made, in a troubling gender omission, there has been almost no discussion of the role of husbands. Raymond’s support in helping Rosa achieve what she did that year and beyond and the impact their fearsome situation had on him rarely figure into the story. Too often, when Raymond does make a brief cameo in the popular narrative, he is viewed as not sufficiently admirable because he stayed behind the scenes. Rosa considered Raymond a partner and felt he facilitated her activism during the boycott and in the following decades when she continued her public role. The respect he had for her and her work sustained her.28 While worrying about her safety, he was willing to prioritize her political work—a shift from the early years of their marriage when he was the more prominent activist.

  As poet and friend Nikki Giovanni observed, “Nobody would say that Coretta wasn’t courageous because she worried about Martin. So why say it about Raymond?”29 Indeed, Giovanni saw Rosa and Raymond Parks as “of one mind,” committed in partnership to the same political struggle. Jet magazine would later describe them as a “modern day power couple” in reference to their shared political commitments.30 According to friends, Rosa was good at finding ways to do what she believed necessary and skirt around Raymond’s fears for her safety. According to Reverend Graetz, “She was more firm than her husband wanted her to be. He . . . worried she would be attacked. He didn’t want her to be so active.” His wife, Jean Graetz, elaborated: “She knew how to get around what he was keeping her from doing. She knew how to get things by going around the opposition. Mrs. Parks wasn’t in your face. . . . She had other ways of convincing people.”31

  In describing Rosa and Raymond’s partnership, Giovanni recalled the first time she met Rosa Parks, which was in the early 1980s. “Black love is Black wealth,” Parks said when Giovanni introduced herself—quoting a line from Giovanni’s poem “Nikki-Rosa.” Surprised, G
iovanni was touched that Parks knew her poetry. That poem criticized the ways the outside white world often did not understand the value of the black family, concluding with the stanza:

  and I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me because they never understand that Black love is Black wealth and they’ll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy.32

  Far beyond the difficulties, to Rosa Parks this love and a shared vision of justice were crucial. And Raymond’s love and support was foundational. In many ways, what Raymond did behind the scenes for her over the next decades—backing her up, helping her make travel arrangements, keeping their household functioning, sharing her political outrage—kept her going and enabled her political activities.33

  The inauguration of the bus protest meant war to segregationists. This put visible black activists like the Parkses, the Kings, the Nixons, Jo Ann Robinson and Fred Gray, in the line of fire. Leona McCauley talked on the phone for hours with friends to keep Raymond from having to answer those hate calls. Rosa increasingly found herself able to keep the terror at bay, later explaining, “I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.”34 Part of this stemmed from her faith and reliance on prayer. “There were times when people asked, How did I do it. . . . I prayed hard not to give in and not to fall by the wayside. I believe prayer changes things.”35 But Raymond did not find any such peace.

  The impact of living with this racial terror, relentless harassment, and economic insecurity overwhelmed his spirit. Besieged by death threats, unable to find steady work, and worried about their security, Raymond began drinking heavily and chain-smoking. Unnerved, he suffered a nervous breakdown during the boycott.36 Virginia Durr prodded Rosa to take Raymond to a psychiatrist at Maxwell Air Force Base. Durr claims that the psychiatrist felt Raymond “had no identity” and felt that “if Mrs. Parks had been a more yielding, soft and a kind of helpless woman, he might have found his identity in being a husband but since she was such a strong, brave, intelligent woman that she further made him feel the loss of identity. Anyway, he thought Mrs. Parks ought to give up all her civil rights work and go back to being a little sweet housewife,” a suggestion Durr found “absurd.”37