The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  RED-BAITED

  The trouble Parks encountered in finding work was not an isolated case but rather the result of a systematic effort to economically incapacitate anyone who pressed for civil rights, in part achieved by terming them subversives. “They always accused of being communists,” Parks observed, “any body who stood up for their rights.”164 As Eleanor Roosevelt had warned her, Parks’s political activities and connections led quickly to charges of Communism.

  By the 1950s, the United States’ Cold War with the Soviet Union had a rabid domestic side. Communists were feared to be infiltrating the fabric of American values and institutions, and Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and a phalanx of politicians vowed to root them out at every turn. Civil rights activists became one of the prime targets. One of the curious features of civil rights red-baiting was how it had everything and nothing to do with Communism. From the 1930s, the Communist Party USA had been one of the few groups pursuing many of these racial cases; thus many current and former CP members, black and white, were part of the backbone of the struggle for racial justice. Nonetheless, vigorously advocating racial equality was one of the easiest ways to get labeled a Communist, regardless if you did it from a church pulpit, purged Communist sympathizers from your organization, were a WWII veteran and patriot, feared Communism yourself, or had no connections to anyone related to or sympathetic with the CP.

  Flowering during the first days of the boycott, the red-baiting of Rosa Parks continued long afterward. Amid her attempts to maintain a low profile, Parks had not shied away from people on the Left. That continued even after she was targeted. She and Raymond had worked on the Scottsboro and Recy Taylor cases alongside CP members and affiliates. During the boycott, she had willingly associated with the National Negro Labor Council and Local 600, even as these groups were home to many black Communists. She personally knew a number of current and former black Communists and corresponded with them over the course of her life. In the spring of 1957, she was asked to speak to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (run by Durr’s friends Corliss Lamont and Clark Foreman which formed in 1951 to defend political activists, including some Communists, from charges by the House Committee on Un-American Activities). NAACP director of branches Gloster Current warned her “of the “leftist slant” of the organization, and to “think it over carefully before accepting an engagement.” Parks did not directly challenge Current but foregrounded the group’s help in the boycott, redirecting how the conversation played out, and remained committed to giving the speech.165

  Parks understood the ways that challenges to the racial status quo led to claims of Communist subversion. Her longtime work with the NAACP had rendered her suspect, and she had given up her position in the organization to protect the boycott and “not have it said . . . [it] was organized by ‘outside agitators.’”166 Indeed, in the wake of the Brown decision, the bus boycott, and Autherine Lucy’s attempt to integrate the University of Alabama, the NAACP (despite its own internal red-baiting) was banned in Alabama, and in many other states, as a foreign corporation. Governor Patterson saw the organization “pos[ing] a threat to our citizens who have no recourse at law for injury done by the corporation to them,” charging that the NAACP’s actions “resulted in violations of our laws and end in many instances of breaches of the peace.”167 Its membership records—which the NAACP refused to turn over—were demanded by the state, and the organization was fined $100,000.168

  Parks’s ties to Highlander made her particularly suspect. On Labor Day weekend of 1957, Parks returned to Highlander for the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration of the school. Celebrated in Highlander’s press release as a featured speaker and leader, she described Montgomery as an “integration beachhead.”169 Reverends King and Abernathy joined her there. During his keynote on the last day of the anniversary celebration, King affirmed the sentiment of those gathered: “You would not have had a Montgomery Story without Rosa Parks.”170

  Abner Berry, a black writer for the Communist paper the Daily Worker, also attended the events, as did an undercover agent from the state of Georgia, Edwin Friend, who took a series of photographs, including a picture of King, Parks, and Berry sitting in the audience.171 That photograph was subsequently displayed throughout the South as proof that King had attended “a Communist training center.” When King came under attack for attending this Highlander celebration, photos revealed Parks visible by his side.172 Indeed, Parks would periodically remind people that she was the one who had actually attended Highlander’s workshops and meetings, not King. “I had been there several times,” Parks explained to Studs Terkel in 1973. “He only accepted an invitation to be the guest speaker when they had the 25th anniversary. He stayed just long enough to make a speech and to be on his way.”173 Her clarification reflected Parks’s core feistiness; if there was going to be red-baiting, she wanted accuracy in terms of who did what.

  The school’s commitment to interracialism signaled subversion to state authorities. Georgia’s governor, Marvin Griffin, claimed Communist infiltration: “The leaders of every major race incident in the South” had all been to Highlander. In 1957, making liberal use of Friend’s photographs, the Georgia Commission on Education published a broadside entitled Highlander Folk School: Communist Training School, Monteagle, Tenn.: Every American Has the Right to Know the Truth. The commission printed 250,000 copies, and factoring in reprints made by White Citizens’ Councils and Klan groups, over one million copies of the brochure were distributed by 1959.174

  Preserved in the papers that Parks donated to the Wayne State library twenty years later was an original copy of the pamphlet. The broadside began,

  On the preceding pages you have seen pictures of the leaders of every major race incident in the South from May 1954 until the time of this meeting, Labor Day, 1957 Weekend. . . . It has been our purpose, as rapidly as possible, to identify the leaders and participants of the Communist training school and disseminate this information to the general public. This Commission would appreciate you furnishing to us any further identifications you can make . . . Only through information and knowledge can we combat this alien menace to Constitutional government.

  It unfolds to feature fifteen pictures with captions. Five have Rosa Parks plainly visible (though captions only mention her in four). Curiously, there is no mention of her in the caption of the photo of King, Berry, Horton, and Parks, though she is clearly visible. By the mid-1960s, this picture would be plastered on billboards across the South accusing King of attending a “Communist training school.” For someone who eschewed the limelight as much as Parks, such attention was agonizing.

  Covered up in the national fable, Rosa Parks was actually viewed as a subversive threat for the better part of two decades. The brochure’s captions identify her as “one of the original leaders of the Montgomery bus boycott” and “the central figure in the agitation which resulted in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.” Another description disparages the ability of Montgomerians to have independently executed the successful boycott, which called for “planning and direction beyond the ability or capacity of local people.”175 Within the racial imagination of the brochure’s writers, the effectiveness of the boycott could only be possible with the involvement of the Communist Party.

  When Pittsburgh Courier reporter Trezzvant Anderson investigated the brochure’s allegations of Communist infiltration, commission head T. V. Williams coyly equivocated—“I didn’t say Rosa Parks was a Communist”—but maintained these race leaders had convened at Highlander under Communist auspices. When asked for proof of Parks’s Communist affiliations, Williams insisted to Anderson there was a file, but that he simply could not find it at the moment.176

  Regarding Parks as a dangerous leader and powerful instigator, white officials saw nothing random or accidental about her protest. Aware of some of the “trouble” she had caused long before the boycott, they knew “what she was after”—and it was not just a seat on the bus. White officials and citizens harass
ed her accordingly. For much of the 1950s and 1960s, Parks’s address was often included in the media coverage about her, and much of the hate mail she received excoriated her as a traitor.

  However frightening this harassment was, Parks did not shy away from her connection to Highlander even as the school got red-baited by state authorities. In 1959, local police, on the orders of the state attorney general, raided Highlander. Parks wrote Clark in August 1959 “anxious” to know what happened and offering “to do what ever I can.”177 She longed to start a local Highlander support group but did not have the “strength and energy” to make the contacts. Having read that the court was trying to close Highlander, she observed, “It seems so hopeless at times, but with so many taking a stand, something will have to happen.”178

  MOVING ON

  Besides her brother Sylvester, Rosa’s first cousins Thomas Williamson and Annie Cruse had also moved to Detroit. The hate calls to the Parks’s home in Montgomery had continued unabated, and their incessancy bespoke a credible threat. Rosa was deeply shaken—and ready to leave Alabama. So was Raymond.179 Hearing this and fearing for their lives, Williamson quickly cobbled together $300 to wire the family so they could make the trip.180 Parks explained the decision as “the best thing I could do at the time.”181

  Chagrined by Rosa’s decision to leave, local activists rallied. Ralph Abernathy went to her home to apologize and asked her to stay. As a going-away present, the MIA raised $500 through donations solicited at churches around Montgomery and on an evening in late August hosted a service for the couple, crowded with well-wishers, at St. Paul’s AME Church. According to Durr, Parks gave a “wonderful” speech in which she “told them that they could never win unless they fought for the right of everyone to have opportunities, and not just themselves.”182

  A decade later, Nixon recalled his own speech that evening: “Here we forgot about this woman who’s responsible for all that’s happened in Montgomery and throughout the South and glorified a man who was made because of her. . . . I told the women, ‘At least I’d expect you to help fight to see that Mrs. Parks don’t leave town.’”183 Nixon criticized those gathered for “raising a little pitiful seven or eight hundred dollars and . . . then stick your chest out and think you’ve done something.”184 It is not clear whether Nixon actually made such a critical speech that night, or just wished he had. The money raised that evening, according to her family, accounted for nearly all the resources the Parks family had when they arrived in Detroit.185

  And so in August 1957, the Parks family bade a bittersweet goodbye to Alabama. The transition to Detroit was not easy, though they welcomed the chance to be near family. Shortly after arriving in Detroit, she wrote King a letter thanking him and the MIA for the “kindness and generosity shown us before our departure from Montgomery.” She had “no words of expression of gratitude for what has been done to help us. It will always be among my most cherished memories.” She was “sorry to leave at this time” but “perhaps it was best” since her mother was happy to be near Sylvester, and Raymond was working and “improving in every way.”186

  Still, Parks missed “the people I had been seeing. Going to the various meetings. Something to think about.”187 Right around the time the family moved to Detroit in August, she had gone to visit Hampton Institute in Virginia.188 Alonzo Moron, the head of Hampton, whom Parks knew from Highlander, offered her a job as hostess at the Holy Tree Inn, a guest house on campus. In September, she headed out for another NAACP fund-raising tour and in October moved to Hampton. “After so much turbulence, ill-will, heartache and uprooting,” Parks told a reporter, “I am looking forward with great pleasure to my work on this serene beautiful college campus.”189 It is a testament to the dire economic situation that her family was facing—and her own sense of autonomy—that she went by herself to work at Hampton.

  Her time there was somewhat difficult. The job was quite “confining and at times boring.” She missed Raymond and wrote to her mother about being lonely “because none of the people here are concerned about me except for my service on the job.” She knew her family needed the money. The job came with a yearly salary of $3,600, and she was resolved to stay. Parks’s ulcer was bothering her; she was having trouble eating solid food and had lost much weight. Most of her clothes no longer fit, but she did not have the time to alter them. She was being looked after by a doctor for free, she wrote her mother, because “I am the Rosa Parks of the Montgomery Bus Protest.” Over the year Rosa spent at Hampton, her mother wrote numerous times about the financial difficulties the family was having back in Detroit, asking occasionally for money. In one painful letter, Leona McCauley describes how Sylvester was working but had not gotten paid and how his wife and children were crying because they had no food.190 Raymond was hospitalized in July 1958 for pneumonia. This worried Parks greatly, particularly because she was so far away and the hospital care that black people received in Detroit was meager, the facilities inferior to those of whites.

  Mrs. Parks appreciated the Hampton students and took heart in their energy. In 1958, she returned to Montgomery for a visit and “found the bus situation much improved.”191 Durr urged her to move back. Rosa had gone alone to Hampton, with the expectation that the college would soon provide housing so Raymond and her mother could join her. The college did not—and so after finishing out the fall semester in 1958, Mrs. Parks returned home to Detroit for the holidays and stayed.

  In the aftermath of the boycott, many people’s roles had been overlooked as the lion’s share of public attention had focused on King. According to E. D. Nixon, neither he nor Mrs. Parks had been invited to the third anniversary celebration of the Montgomery bus boycott’s victory.192 The coverage Parks received in the black press during this period began to highlight how she had been “forgotten” and not given her due. In April 1958, announcing a talk she was giving in Pittsburgh, the reporter observed, “While the remarkable leadership ability of the Reverend Martin Luther King has been hailed throughout the world, there are many of us who have lost sight of the fact that it was the quiet unassuming seamstress whose courage set the boycott in motion.”193 In a curious way, being forgotten had become part of Parks’s appeal, demonstrating her modesty and humility.

  JOBLESS IN DETROIT

  The period after her return to Detroit from Hampton was a difficult one for Parks. She saved $1,300 while at Hampton, but that was quickly spent. Her nieces and nephews dubbed her “Recycling Queen” and “Mrs. Thrifty” because she conserved everything.194 No food was ever wasted, and Rosa’s mother “knew how to prepare a meal from nothing.”195 Having been ill in January and February, Parks wrote Septima Clark in May that she was feeling better now, but Raymond was out of work and “unhappy and wants to leave here.” She was sewing for a shop and doing piecework at home. “I hope things will get better, or I don’t know what we will do.”196 After decades of barbering in Alabama (which didn’t require barbering licenses), Raymond found Michigan’s training and licensing requirements dispiriting and remained unemployed for most of 1959, but ineligible for unemployment compensation.197 Physically unwell and worried about money, Parks was making do with clothes donated to her, having not bought material for a new dress since March 1957. They tried to buy a new refrigerator only to be told their credit “hadn’t gone through.”198 They supplemented with food grown in Sylvester’s garden, and her cousins also pitched in to help.

  In May 1959, the Michigan Chronicle published an article on Parks’s difficult economic situation, entitled “Alabama Boycott Heroine Can’t Find a Job!” “We’re not sorry” about the move, Parks told the interviewer. “It’s just that work is hard to find.”199 In her understated way, Parks highlighted the discriminatory job situation blacks faced in Detroit—which, in her case, was compounded by the ways her own activism certainly did not make her a sought-after employee. Indeed, black women migrants tended to fare less well economically than black men in the North.200 And there had been no welcome wagon from white li
berals for a woman activist fleeing the South.

  Upon moving to the city, the Parkses had lived with various family members before renting an apartment on Euclid. In June of 1959, Parks wrote to Clark that she needed to “move to a cheaper place but rent is so expensive if a house is fit to live in. I can not pay the down payment on a house because I do not earn enough to pay for just living expenses.”201 Housing segregation in Detroit drove up rents for black families compared to white families and drove down upkeep by landlords, as black people continued to be crowded into certain neighborhoods. Clark wrote Parks in September urging fortitude: “Rosa, a leader must have personal strength to withstand all the destructive . . . Things are hard at times but just keep working and something is bound to give.”202

  Forced to give up their seventy-dollar-a-month apartment in October 1959 because they could not afford it, the family moved into two rooms at the Progressive Civic League meeting hall. The PCL was a west-side Detroit group comprised largely of black professionals, and a forerunner to the more active civil rights groups in the city that sprang up in the 1960s. The rent was forty dollars, with Raymond serving as the caretaker and Rosa the treasurer manager of the PCL’s credit union and house manager for the owner.203

  As in Montgomery, the civil rights community (white and black) didn’t offer her any employment. “I didn’t get any work,” Parks noted, “but I went to a lot of meetings and sometimes . . . they would take up contributions, but that was never high.”204 Disregarded by many white employers and unknown to many white liberals who had become transfixed with King’s leadership, Mrs. Parks found a relatively closed labor market in her new Northern home. She also sat at the fissures of class, education, and age within the black community. With decades of political experience and administrative skill, the middle-aged Parks was no acolyte. Given her long political history and her fame from the boycott, and even despite her reserved personality, she would not blend into the background of an organization. She had been one of the MIA’s best speaker/fund raisers and had brought in considerable money and membership for the NAACP. Yet curiously, in the first years following their move to Detroit, Parks seemingly was never asked to address the Detroit NAACP. Daisy Bates came in May 1958 and spoke to an overflow crowd of more than 1,800 people.205