The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  The MIA did have money in its treasury. According to conservative estimates quoted in the Pittsburgh Courier, the MIA had raised $200,000—with Nixon acting as the treasurer.125 Though the MIA paid a number of people—$62.50 for a private secretary for King, $5,000 a year to its executive secretary as well as salaries to other staff workers—Parks was not offered a position. King historian David Garrow noted that “dissension developed over the organization’s continued refusal to put Mrs. Parks, a Nixon ally . . . on the payroll.”126 Birmingham author Diane McWhorter contends that SCLC cofounder Fred Shuttlesworth also criticized the MIA leadership for not taking care of Parks.127 Still everyone sought to keep the schisms behind closed doors. King later reflected, “Some people never knew the suffering she was facing.”128 King knew about Parks’s suffering, but his sympathies are unclear, since he seemingly could have assisted her. Many decades later, Robert and Jean Graetz talked about how “the world blamed all of us in Montgomery for not finding her a living” but said the community did not have the resources to do this for Parks or anyone else suffering from white retribution.129 Still, the Graetzes had no insight into why certain other people were hired by the MIA but not Mrs. Parks.

  Gender had played a role in the organizational and leadership structure of the boycott. While women “really were the ones who carried out the actions,” Erma Dungee Allen explained, the visible leadership was male.130 King, according to Septima Clark, “didn’t respect women too much” and “never felt that women should have much of anything.”131 This may have contributed to the MIA’s blindness to Parks’s substantial need and to the decision within the organization not to offer Parks a position, despite her political experience and administrative skills. There were women employed by the MIA as office workers. But Parks did not have ties to any of the ministers, nor could she have simply been relegated to the role of acolyte. Mrs. Parks had a husband and no children, so given the gender conventions of the time, the ministers might not have seen her need. Moreover, on top of the more general gender biases, the construction of Parks as a symbol—a simple, tired heroine—made it difficult to see her as either a capable organizer or a martyr who had sacrificed much for the sake of the struggle. Parks’s reserve and unwillingness to ask for help only furthered this omission. Finally, Reverend Fields’s accusations of cronyism and mismanagement had scared and saddened King. Some of those charges had come indirectly from Nixon (MIA’s treasurer), even though Nixon distanced himself from Fields. Relations between King and Nixon became strained after that. In some ways, for King to change course and hire Parks might have admitted to the cronyism in not hiring her a year prior.

  The most compelling evidence of Parks’s view that she was mistreated is an early outline of her autobiography, prepared with Jim Haskins in the late 1980s, that included an extra chapter entitled “In the Shadows,” which suggests how slighted she felt. The description for the proposed chapter notes,

  Jealousy and dissension within the Montgomery Improvement Association—Rosa Parks has lost her job at Montgomery Fair department store over the incident that sparked the boycott and feels that she should be given a job with the Montgomery Improvement Association—but King refuses, and Rosa feels angry—she goes through extreme financial difficulties—by the time Rosa is offered a job in the voter registration drive that King decides to start, she has accepted a job at Hampton.132

  Since no such chapter appears in the book, it may be that Parks ultimately felt this was better left in the past.

  Little assistance was forthcoming. Parks went back to Highlander in February for another “Public School Integration” workshop. In March, Septima Clark wrote to Myles Horton that she had just answered a letter (from an undisclosed writer) that expressed distress regarding Parks’s situation and anger at Highlander’s inaction. Clark had apprised the writer that Horton “felt that the only way to do anything for Rosa in Montgomery was to work through the M.I.A., and in that meeting you held while they were here you told them that a separate fund raising would back fire. . . . I further told them of the conversation I had with Rosa about not feeling like doing anything and that she had an offer to publish a book on the protest if she could take time out to write down the facts. I feel that the whole thing is largely emotional and not to be taken too seriously.”133 The author of the letter was likely the white Southern liberal Aubrey Williams. According to Durr, Williams’s dismay resulted in Highlander giving Parks $50 a month, “but it took them a long time to get around to it and only after Aubrey really blew his top. Myles took in over $69,000 last year and I think he can afford it very well.”134 A couple months later, Durr wrote again, saying the Highlander money had only constituted one payment of $50 to Parks and that Aubrey Williams had again gotten angry with Horton for exaggerating the help Highlander was providing her.135

  Tensions mounted. A few months later, Nixon resigned from the MIA, writing to King, “I do not expect to be treated as a child.”136 Despite his advocacy for her within the MIA, Nixon had also grown increasingly frustrated with Parks’s national stature, seeing his own role go largely unacknowledged. When the national NAACP called inviting Parks to speak in DC, Nixon volunteered himself but was told they wanted “Sister Rosa.”137 He exploded in anger at this slight. Later in 1957, Nixon was able to get some money to fund voter efforts through the MIA, but at this point Parks was no longer involved in the project.138

  The stress took its toll on Parks and her health suffered, though she continued to travel. Raymond’s lack of steady work and drinking continued. Durr wrote a friend in April that she found Rosa and her mother ill and worried about her ability to withstand the pressure: “I am afraid she [Rosa Parks] is having some slight heart attacks and had one in Trenton, or nervous attacks or something.” Unwell herself, Leona McCauley grew worried about her daughter’s safety. According to a friend interviewed years later, Rosa’s mother became “very suspicious because of the very underhanded things that have happened to her and her family since Rosa sat on that bus and refused to move.”139 Her family urged Rosa to leave, according to the friend, “because they could see that Mrs. Parks never quit trying to help the NAACP or [stopped] any of her activity.”140 Wanting to spend more time with Sylvester, Rosa’s mother began to pressure Rosa and Raymond to move with her to Detroit.

  Still Parks continued to make appearances for the movement. In May, billed as the “plucky woman . . . who refused to follow the usual handkerchief head,” she embarked on another NAACP fund-raising tour to Missouri and Kansas as a featured speaker to build local membership and raise money for the national organization.141 Then she journeyed on to Philadelphia where she spoke at a mass meeting with A. Phillip Randolph and on to Washington, DC, where she made a short speech at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. Nearly twenty-five thousand people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial on May 17, 1957, to commemorate the third anniversary of the Brown decision. The protest, organized by Randolph and Rustin, drew attention to Eisenhower’s lack of leadership and to rising white violence. Initially, Rustin had stressed that King focus on “economic and social changes” but after reporters began to claim that the planning had been infiltrated by Communists, they tempered the message.142 Rustin urged Parks to emphasize the national character of the civil rights struggle and the importance of the vote and ending segregation—points that Parks was all too cognizant of.

  By the summer, Rosa was in poor health and financial trouble and worried about Raymond’s physical and mental health. White businesses were still unwilling to hire them, and sewing for black families brought in little money. With few economic prospects in the city and still receiving constant death threats, the Parkses decided to move to Detroit at the urging of her brother, Sylvester. Given the conditions the family now faced in Montgomery, Raymond was much more amenable to leaving Alabama. “I always felt that I wanted to go somewhere else to live. But I probably couldn’t have convinced my husband” until after the problems in Montgomery.143

  The decision also
came partly from the unfriendly reception Rosa was receiving from certain members within Montgomery’s civil rights community. Many had grown jealous of Parks’s national stature and made disparaging remarks about both Rosa and Raymond. Even Nixon had grown resentful of her public profile. One minister referred to her as “an adornment of the movement,” while Reverend Abernathy called Rosa a “tool” and referred to Raymond as a “frightened lush.”144 The women plaintiffs of Browder v. Gayle resented how much attention Parks had received compared to them, as did Jo Ann Robinson, whose own boycott leadership was not fully recognized.145 Rosa was bewildered by the animosity and frustrated with the schisms in the MIA and her spirit had plummeted.

  According to Brinkley, “Much of the resentment sprang from male chauvinism [from many of the ministers and E. D. Nixon].”146 That summer, Parks tacitly acknowledged the impact this bitterness had upon her in an interview with the Pittsburgh Courier. “I can’t exactly say that the reaction from what happened in the boycott made me leave. I really had been thinking about leaving for a long time. But I guess something did have a part in our deciding to go, or rather my husband’s deciding for us.”147 In an interview in 1980, Virginia Durr noted, “I know people who have treated her very badly. . . . I could tell you a lot more that I’m not telling, because I wouldn’t say anything that would embarrass Mrs. Parks.”148

  Parks was a woman of action, but one who did not favor direct confrontation. Their decision to leave Montgomery in August 1957, eight months after the boycott ended, after having lived there together for twenty-five years, is revealing of her discontent—and it drew the attention of the black press. Calling her a “spunky little woman,” Chester Higgins’s article in the Pittsburgh Courier asked whether Parks was leaving “by choice”: “Mrs. Parks was seldom mentioned as the real and true leader of this struggle. Others more learned—not to take a thing from Dr. King—were ushered into the leadership and hogged the show. . . . Perhaps as a proud and sensitive personality, she resented standing in the wings while others received the huzzahs. She wouldn’t talk about this.”149 What Parks was willing to say was, “After I was arrested on this charge, the white trade began to fall off. I simply didn’t have enough work to keep me busy and I was politely laid off. The Negroes couldn’t furnish me with enough work. My husband worked, it is true, but I have been working at my profession for years. I couldn’t just sit and idle away.”150

  Parks’s comment is telling because she asserts her desire to work as not solely about needing the money but as part of her identity. Like civil rights pioneer Ida B. Wells a half century earlier, Parks had consciously decided not to go into teaching, despite her love of young people, because she found the conditions too degrading. And like Wells, who was run out of Memphis for her bold journalism around lynching, Parks found herself exiled from her hometown of more than thirty years because of her stand against segregation.

  The black press began to take notice of the trouble and these divisions. “She got no part of the money being paid out by the MIA—of which she was the direct cause!” Trezzvant Anderson, a reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier, wrote incredulously in November.151 He spent a day with Parks as she prepared to move to Detroit. Explaining how Parks was an “expert seamstress” with some of the “city’s very best among her steady customers,” Anderson wrote that Parks “paid the price” for her refusal on the bus. Describing her with “dimmed tears in her eyes,” “disillusioned,” and “sick at heart,” Anderson wrote that “not once did Rosa Parks grumble or complain.”152

  The MIA newsletter of November 18 challenged the Courier’s account, claiming that “Mrs. Parks was not ‘asked’ but ‘begged’ by Dr. King to accept a job from the MIA office. She refused on the grounds that she was away from the city on speaking engagements too often.”153 Parks had been employed for a month in March 1956 as a dispatcher.154 The MIA’s rebuttal, however, was revealing. If true, then Mrs. Parks ultimately turned down a paid position with the MIA because she was doing too much public speaking on behalf of the boycott to be a responsible office assistant. This tendency corresponds to a similar situation that Congressman John Conyers recalled having with Parks decades later when she was working in his office. She had come in to talk to him about a wage reduction—“the only wage reduction conversation I’ve ever had” with any staff member, Conyers noted—because she felt she was away from the office too often on public appearances.155 He scoffed, telling her that he was honored to have her working in his office and doing public speaking. But years earlier, the MIA appears to have had a much different reaction to Mrs. Parks’s concerns, raising the question of why they didn’t create a position incorporating public appearances and office work.

  The slightly critical tone Anderson took in the article must have drawn controversy. Both he and the Courier published statements to “set the record straight—the MIA gave her one $30 paycheck, a gift of $500 on the eve of her departure for Detroit, plus a donation of $300 during the boycott.”156

  When interviewers touched on these subjects, Parks tended toward long pauses and halting statements. Some interviewers didn’t inquire. In Parks’s 1985 interview for Eyes on the Prize, when asked about how she got to work during the boycott, she noted being “discharged from my job after the first in January.”157 The interviewer didn’t pursue the issue. In Nixon’s Eyes on the Prize interview, when he explained that Parks had to move to Detroit because “nobody would hire her,” the interviewer said he thought Parks was working for him. Nixon grew flustered. “She wasn’t working directly for me, she was workin’ . . . at a clothes store when this thing happened.” Then Nixon turned the conversation back to the arrest and there was no further discussion in this interview, or others, about any responsibility Nixon had for her situation.158

  Yet, in a 1970 interview, Nixon, while sidestepping his own responsibility, explained his frustration with the black community, and the ministers in particular, for not standing up for her.

  Mrs. Parks stood up for the black community. But the community didn’t stand up for her, not by a long shot. The whites wouldn’t give her a job, and the Negroes wouldn’t support her. One day I said to Reverend King, “With all the money we got here, Mrs. Parks ought to have a job—and we could give her $100 a month whether she got a job or not.” He said, “I don’t know, brother Nixon, we can’t hardly do that.” But when they bombed the Reverend King’s parsonage, the Montgomery Improvement Association paid a guard $30 a week to be in the door and read the funny papers every night until it was morning. I know, because as the treasurer I signed the checks. When Mrs. Parks finally left Montgomery, the MIA had about $400,000. They could have taken $100,000 and set up a trust fund for Mrs. Parks, and with the $5000 a year interest she could have stayed here. But we done the same thing the white man wanted. After the whites made it hard for her to get a job, all the doors closed on her, and the Negroes kept them closed. . . . But everybody just forgot everything, went wild over King. I respect King, but I’m for Mrs. Parks, too. The point is that she should never have had to leave. But nobody would give a dime.159

  Nixon’s frustration with how the ministers treated Parks dovetailed with his own disenchantment over the ways he’d been treated by King and the MIA and his role in the boycott ignored.

  Militant blacks like Parks who publicly defied segregation were taught a lesson through economic intimidation. Particularly because Montgomery prided itself on its sophistication, getting a person fired was a more civilized way to maintain the racial status quo than physical violence. This tactic was widely used against civil rights activists. Historian Charles Payne has documented that every single woman voting rights activist he interviewed in Mississippi lost her job.160 To Nixon, the ministers’ unwillingness to give Parks a stable position had served white interests. Other comrades echoed these sentiments. In a 1976 interview, Septima Clark criticized the boycott leadership’s disregard for Parks. “I thought they should have put her down for a certain amount each year until she coul
d find something to do.”161

  Over the years, Mrs. Parks remained evasive on the subject. Resolutely self-sufficient, Parks said in a 1970 interview that she did not want to “place any blame on the community, because I do feel it was my responsibility to do whatever I could for myself and not to look to the community or to Dr. King or anyone else for my support or livelihood. I felt as long as I was well and could move around, I should be on my own, rather than looking to anyone to reimburse me or reward me for what I might have done.”162 For a middle-aged, respectable race woman, asking directly for help or being publicly angry about the lack of help contradicted her sense of dignity. Parks was tender toward the suffering of others and, understanding the structures that produced such suffering and inequality, saw no shame in people needing help. But she was less able to publicly acknowledge her own need. Historian John Bracey has theorized that a race woman of Parks’s era and temperament would have felt, “I should not have to ask for things. . . . You know what I did, who I am. If I have to go ask for it, I don’t want it. You should keep me from suffering.”163

  In deciding to pursue her bus case, Parks had committed herself to maintaining a certain comportment. The importance of furthering the struggle meant she would keep many of her personal difficulties to herself.