The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  Additionally, Mrs. Parks did not have a college education at a time when the NAACP and other black organizations often required one for salaried positions. And she was a woman when much of the prominent civil rights leadership consisted of men. All this may have blinded many black leaders to Parks’s employment needs and the skills she would have brought to any organization. Correspondence between the Detroit chapter of the NAACP and the national office reveals Parks’s dire situation (and organizing talents) were simultaneously acknowledged and erased. In late 1957, Herbert Wright of the national office requested that Detroit organizers invite Parks for the youth conference being planned by the Detroit branch.206 The NAACP leadership was thus not only aware that the Parks family had moved to Detroit but also cognizant of her background organizing young people. In the years following the Parks’s move, the Detroit NAACP did not sponsor an event in her honor or help secure employment for her or Raymond, though they did make inquiries for other NAACP stalwarts or Southern civil rights exiles. Even though her troubled situation became the focus of a Chronicle article in May 1959, it would be another eighteen months, late in 1960, before the NAACP stepped in to help.

  By the winter of 1960, Parks’s health had deteriorated, though Raymond was feeling better, working at the Magby Barber Shop and moonlighting at another shop, usually earning between fifteen and twenty dollars a week.207 “He is much stronger and taking the family responsibility since my illness is so prolonged,” Parks wrote to Clark. “He does not earn much money but does the best he can under existing conditions.”208 Rosa had lost thirty pounds. Hospitalized in December at the Lakeside Medical Center, she had an operation for the ulcer that had been plaguing her since the boycott. But they did not have the money to pay the $560 medical bill, and a large portion went into collection.209 They slowly chipped away at the bill, $10 a month.210 Moreover, Parks had a tumor on her throat that needed to be surgically removed. This was a bleak time.

  In March 1960, hearing of King’s arrest on tax charges, Parks wrote him a letter praising his continued efforts in spite of segregationist attempts to “intimidate and embarrass you.” She explained that she was “not well but better than I was sometime ago.”211 King seems to have alerted the MIA because the organization sent her a donation in March. Surprised at the severity of Parks’s situation, the MIA’s September newsletter noted, “All freedom fighters should know that temporary relief will not meet the great need of Mrs. Parks. There must be some long-term planning.”212 It also pointedly observed, “there was no person more loyal to the NAACP than Mrs. Parks while it operated in the State of Alabama”—the implication being that her plight was the responsibility of the NAACP, not the MIA, which the NAACP took note of in private correspondence between Gloster Current and Roy Wilkins.213

  In May, Parks wrote Clark to tell her that she was feeling better. Keeping “very busy,” she was “quite confined here at the place where I live” but still planned to attend the upcoming workshop at Highlander at month’s end.214 Highlander had announced a May meeting focused around the black student sit-ins rippling through the South. The point of this workshop—entitled “Are White Southerners Wanted in the Negroes’ Current Struggle for Justice?”—was to discuss the position of whites, as well as black adults, in the burgeoning sit-in movement. The student lunch counter sit-in movement had been ignited on February 1, 1960, when four college freshmen in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter and asked to be served. Within days and weeks, these sit-ins, spearheaded by black college students, grew and rippled across the South. Many made the connection between Parks’s action and these direct-action protests.

  Parks attended the Highlander meeting in May 1960, explaining the inspiration the student sit-inners provided: “We decided with these setbacks and reprisals, we still cannot afford to give up . . . we couldn’t consider it a lost cause because out of [these difficulties] . . . there comes a new and young fresh group of people who have taken this action in the sit-in demonstrations and [it] seems that they have put more pressure to bear than many of us have done in the past.”215 Like Ella Baker, Mrs. Parks found the militancy of these young people refreshing.

  Parks repeatedly stressed perseverance and highlighted the importance of reaching out to the mainstream (white) press so they “will not have the excuse of saying that you never complained or you never told us what you want and therefore we took for granted that you were satisfied.” By this point, Parks had been doing this sort of press work for more fifteen years, laboring to get a white media to take white brutality against blacks and the violation of black rights seriously. “No cause is lost” she explained to those gathered, if it “destroy[s] the myth of the validity of segregation in South.”216 But she did not think they should expect to win immediately. “We’ll have to keep on going back again and again and again.” Certainly her talk of perseverance was laced with her own troubles and her determination to persist in the midst of them.

  She also spoke about the backlash against these efforts, referring to the tendency to call civil rights activists socialists as a way to silence them. Parks also stressed that eventually everyone should “[work] together for peace, world peace and disarmament and do away with war.”217 Parks continued to be undeterred by the charges of Communism that followed people who advocated desegregation and disarmament in 1960. After the workshop, Clark sent her a check, clearly aware of the Parks’s financial situation.218 Like Durr, Clark also tried to help raise money and call attention to Parks’s financial situation.219

  Since the fall, the Parkses had been living at the Progressive Civic League apartment. That spring, the PCL held a program to call attention to Parks’s recent medical costs, raising $153.20 for Parks and her family. Parks’s precarious situation began to draw coverage in the black press. Given how private Parks was, this media attention to her personal troubles must have been embarrassing and saddening. It speaks to her sense of desperation regarding their situation that she gave specifics in these interviews. Perhaps also she took pleasure in the ways others were outraged on her behalf. Having always found it easier to have others advocate for her, telling her story and letting others draw the conclusions and express the indignation may have been the only way she was comfortable testifying to her imperiled situation.

  Jet magazine ran a vivid and damning article in July 1960 on the “bus boycott’s forgotten woman.” They described Parks, whom they’d interviewed earlier, during the boycott, and now again in Detroit, as a “tattered rag of her former self—penniless, debt-ridden, ailing with stomach ulcers and a throat tumor, compressed into two rooms with her husband and mother.”220 The article detailed the poverty the Parkses were facing, while noting that she had helped raise thousands of dollars for churches and the NAACP during the boycott. “If I had it to do all over again,” Parks explained to the reporter, “I would still do it even though I know what I know now.”221 Parks had written to tell Clark that Jet was doing this piece on her situation and “need of financial help.”222 She certainly understood that a piece in Jet, the most widely read black magazine of the time, was a powerful act—and perhaps she was glad for the ways she could speak her own truth.

  In July 1960, the Pittsburgh Courier ran an article entitled “Rosa Parks Forgotten by Negroes: Montgomery Heroine in ‘Great Need.’” The piece asked people to send money to Parks directly or to the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) run by Ann and Carl Braden.223 During this period, SCEF, like Highlander, was red-baited by the federal government, termed “a communist transmission belt for the South.” Still, it is revealing that it was left organizations (in part through Durr’s influence), rather than the SCLC or NAACP, that put out a broader call regarding the Parks’s need. The call was picked up in the Los Angeles Sentinel and the Los Angeles Tribune, which explained that she had been “hospitalized for long and expensive treatment” and “has not recovered her strength sufficiently enough to work.”224 Subsequent articles in the Sentinel
and Tribune self-servingly praised local efforts at fund-raising for Mrs. Parks.225 She received $200 from a Southern Patriot article. In July 1960, the King Solomon Church in Detroit honored Parks as “The Forgotten Woman” in an event with representatives from twenty other churches around Detroit.226 A series of big and small donations rolled in. Parks’s situation had drawn the concern of many ordinary people throughout the country. As compassionate as this help was, it still did not result in stable employment.

  Over the summer, union activists of the more militant River Rouge-Ecorse NAACP branch wrote the national NAACP office of their plans to co-sponsor a fund-raiser for Mrs. Parks. River Rouge-Ecorse was a bedroom community of Detroit, abutting the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge complex. The branch, which counted numerous autoworkers and other members who lived in Southwest Detroit, wanted to raise money for Mrs. Parks as part of a fund-raiser for Local 600’s Carl Stellato’s bid for Congress. The September rally at Ecorse High School stadium, which honored Parks, drew two hundred people and collected $387.21 (with $100 from Local 600 itself). There, Parks gave a moving account of the boycott.227

  River Rouge NAACP branch president Lasker Smith (also of Local 600) explained to Gloster Current, director of branches, that Parks was “experiencing acute financial hardships stemming from her sparking the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott,” that she had been of service to the branch, and that they felt “an organized effort to aid Mrs. Parks is a responsibility which cannot be evaded.”228 Indeed, it was the militant trade unionists of this little branch that forced the Detroit and national NAACP offices to address Mrs. Parks’s plight.

  The River Rouge-Ecorse NAACP branch under Smith’s leadership had cut a far different path from the larger, more middle-class Detroit branch. The branch had drawn controversy in 1959 for boycotting the River Rouge Savings Bank because of its refusal to hire black people. The national office disapproved of the boycott.229 Smith, a self-described militant autoworker, was elected branch president in 1960. Under his leadership, the branch invited militant NAACP leader Robert F. Williams to speak and—to the chagrin of the national office, which asked them to retract—sponsored a resolution decrying the assassination of Congo prime minister Patrice Lumumba and calling on the national NAACP to condemn the murder.230 Smith alludes to Parks’s participation in various branch events, though it is unclear from public records which ones she attended. However, River Rouge’s activism likely corresponded more to her political sensibility than the Detroit branch did in this period.

  In November 1960, long after Mrs. Parks had been hospitalized with ulcers, after numerous articles had run in the black press about her situation, and after the hospital bill had gone into collection, the national NAACP finally responded to her need. Current asked Smith to look into Parks’s situation. Smith wrote that Parks was seeking employment, “however, at present, her health is a definite threat to her ability to undertake any type of permanent employment,” and concluded, “Mrs. Parks is experiencing a number of anxieties, but she has a great reticence for making a major issue of her needs; she is reluctant to become the ‘charge’ of any group or agency. . . . Because of her reservations to discuss these things we did not get into matters such as the present extent of her indebtednesses or estimates of the cost of her present medical needs.”231 Smith finished his report, dutifully adding that Parks thanked Current for his concern.

  Current followed up, asking Smith to arrange a meeting with Parks to talk about her situation in person. Dismayed by Parks’s troubled situation and angered by the media coverage, Current wrote privately to Wilkins after seeing the Jet article, “This case may well plague us in the future.”232 For his convenience, Current met Parks at Detroit’s Metro Airport, avoiding going out to her apartment. There he assured Mrs. Parks “that the NAACP was interested in her welfare and that of her husband; that we have always been interested in those who have worked with us, and who because of no fault of their own were victimized by experiences such as her own.”233 Current sought to avoid future scandal, and apprised Wilkins that he had informed Parks that the NAACP wanted to hear from her directly if she experienced financial difficulties so they could be helpful. Having communicated to Parks that the organization was not happy with the publicity, Current wrote Wilkins:

  She agreed that the publicity had not been helpful, but it grew out of the desire on the part of some individuals to raise money to help her. . . . She did not in any manner wish to cause the NAACP any embarrassment, but the newspaper reporters and Jet, which picked up the story from the Chronicle, had made more of it than perhaps they should have. Mrs. Parks is not a mean or vicious individual, but I suspect that the reporters led her on to making assertions which, in cold objectivity, can reflect upon the Montgomery Improvement Association, and even upon the Association.234

  To counter Current’s displeasure at this publicity, Parks seems to have invoked the distress of others over her situation as the justification for these articles; once again she articulated her own need through other people’s attention, perhaps implicitly noting the lack of urgency or care over her situation by the national NAACP office.

  Current appears more concerned with protecting the NAACP’s reputation than for Parks herself. Skipping over her decade of able service as the secretary of the Montgomery and Alabama chapters and the considerable fund-raising that Parks had done for the organization in 1956 and 1957, Current acknowledged her “useful qualities as a receptionist, insurance agent or worker,” noting “of course she cannot actually go out in the field and sell insurance because of her health.”235 He also sent a letter to the executive secretary of the Detroit branch, Arthur Johnson, about Parks’s need and mentioned that she “would appreciate” steady employment.236 Current informed Johnson that the national office would pay the rest of the hospital bill “so that Mrs. Parks will not have this matter to worry her” and arrange dental visits for her and Raymond.237 But the local branch was supposed to look after her employment needs—either, Current suggested, a sewing job or an office job. Curiously, there was no suggestion that the NAACP could hire her. While records reveal that Current (who hailed from Detroit himself) sought jobs for people in need in Detroit—for other activists fleeing Southern tyranny or for those who had performed invaluable service for the organization—the Parkses seemingly were never beneficiaries.238

  By the spring of 1961, Parks’s health had improved, and she and Raymond had found more steady employment. They had moved into a downstairs flat on Wildermere and Virginia Park in the Virginia Park neighborhood. Raymond was working around the corner at the Wildermere Barber Shop. Vonzie Whitlow, who apprenticed for Raymond there from 1961 to 1963, recalled long hours at a shop filled with talk, from baseball to politics, and Raymond’s “excellent” skills: “Raymond bragged on his razor—‘It could shave a baby’s face’ he would say.”239 Rosa had found a job at the Stockton Sewing Company, a storefront factory crowded with sewing machines and ironing boards. The work was difficult and exhausting but steady. She made seventy-five cents a piece and worked ten hours a day.

  Typical of her understated political edge, she told Septima Clark she was sending “several pieces of clothing to the ‘victims of eviction’ in Tennessee” (Highlander had just been evicted from its buildings in Monteagle).240 In 1962, Parks displayed her time-tested resolve when she agreed to be a Highlander sponsor, as did Reinhold Niebuhr. Faced with the repressive atmosphere of the Cold War and the direct targeting of Highlander, many people were unwilling to associate their name publicly with a “red” organization. But she wrote Horton that she was “very willing and also happy to be asked.”241

  The coverage of Parks ricocheted through the black press. In December 1961, the Baltimore Afro-American ran an article entitled “Alabama Bus Boycott Heroine Now Living Quietly in Detroit.” Underplaying her political commitments, the piece claimed Parks was living “a quiet and practically secluded life” and briefly mentioned that work for her was “scarce.”242 A recurring sense
of shame also ran through the coverage of Parks’s situation in the black press. In 1963, Chicago Defender columnist Al Duckett described a recent collection taken for Mrs. Parks. “I do not know whether the collection taken for Mrs. Parks was an appreciation, gesture, or aid to her in time of need. All I can say is that if this race of mine is so ungrateful as to allow a Rosa Parks to be in need, then we don’t deserve freedom.”243 Still Parks’s meager situation and simple life underlined her righteousness—and by extension the movement’s—and so over the years, Parks’s overlooked difficult situation almost became a trope in the black press to demonstrate the purity of the struggle. And perhaps for Parks herself, this became a catch-22, her own righteousness linked to her quiet suffering.

  Over the years, Parks came to gloss over this difficult decade. All her autobiography mentions is work for a seamstress friend and then later in a clothing factory—and moving to a lower apartment on Virginia Park. But she included nothing of the deep suffering of this period. Following Parks’s lead, historian Doug Brinkley claims that upon returning from Hampton, “Parks had little trouble finding a job . . . [and] was grateful for the grueling job [at Stockton’s] and the steady income it provided to support her husband and mother.”244 Allowing her troubles to be seen in public ran counter to her sense of decorum. The attitude evidenced in the NAACP’s dealings with her—as they sought to contain the damage of the Jet article to the organization and manage her case—likely hurt and embarrassed her. While she might have been compelled to speak about her situation when her family’s need had been so dire, there was no point in revisiting it.