The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  GOING SOUTH

  In April 1965, moved by the photos of marchers being beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Parks decided to return to Alabama to join the march herself. She had marched down Woodward with other Detroiters to show her solidarity with the Selma marchers. She could not afford the trip, but through the intervention of Louise Tappes, the UAW helped pay her way. Parks traveled with the UAW from Detroit to Atlanta and then by bus to Montgomery, spending the evening with her friend Bertha Butler.

  The next morning, as the march entered its final stretch into Montgomery, Parks joined the last four-mile leg. The air reeked of stink bombs. White Citizens’ Council members had plastered the roads with huge billboards of the 1957 picture of her and King at Highlander, calling them Communists.129 Parks had not been given a vest to denote her as an official participant, and many of the young people did not know her. Because she did not have an official jacket, the police kept pulling her out and making her stand on the sidelines. Parks got shoved on the sidewalk. A marshal recognized her standing there. “I was in but they put me out,” she explained.130 “It seemed like such a short time that I had been out of Alabama, but so many young people had grown up in that time. They didn’t know who I was.”131 She marched for a bit with Dick Gregory’s wife, Lillian, and also for a time with blues-folk singer Odetta, but she could not keep up and would end up on the sidelines to wait for someone else to spot her and pull her back in.132 Indeed, this sense of being “put out of the march” would be the most indelible image of the experience for Parks.133 Nixon did not march, Parks recalled, but stood on the sidelines.134 A number of the whites in the crowd did recognize her, yelling, “You’ll get yours, Rosa.”

  At the march’s conclusion, a huge crowd gathered on the hill next to the capitol. Coretta Scott King looked over at Mrs. Parks as the speeches began and thought to herself, “We had really come a long way from our start in the bus protest, when only a handful of people . . . were involved.”135 Parks—along with Dr. King and a number of other leaders—gave speeches that were broadcast nationally.136 Introduced as the “first lady of the movement,” she was coaxed to the podium by thunderous applause from the huge crowd—“the most enthusiastic” reception of all the speakers, according to the New Yorker, with calls of “Tell! Tell! Tell!”137 In her remarks, she spoke about her personal history growing up under racism and her fear of KKK attacks: “My family was deprived of the land they owned.” Telling the crowd, “I am handicapped in every way,” she publicly affirmed her connection to Highlander and tried to counter “the propaganda” being circulated about the school’s Communist ties. Refusing to be frightened by the billboards, she highlighted what she had learned from Highlander and disputed the idea that Dr. King was a Communist.138 As Horton recalled, she credited Highlander as the place where she learned “not to hate white people”139 and affirmed that she was “the one at Highlander, I was the one. I am the student, not Martin. He was just our speaker.”140 She concluded with customary modesty by saying others could say it better than her.141

  Enjoying being back with old friends, Mrs. Parks felt Dr. King seemed “unusually shy” and “distracted.”142 She did not see either Myles Horton or Virginia Durr. The Durrs had a large gathering of movement people over to their house that night and were disappointed, as was Myles Horton, “that you did not get in touch with them, but understood the situation.”143 Returning to the hotel in Atlanta tired, Parks felt depressed.144 She had premonitions something bad was about to happen. That night she had a nightmare: standing in a field with a large billboard, she saw a man with a gun and was trying to warn her husband when the man with the gun aimed at her.145 She woke up shaken and was horrified to learn about the murder of Viola Liuzzo the night before. A white Detroiter who had journeyed south to join the march, Liuzzo was murdered as she drove marchers home. Members of the Klan, including an FBI informant, Gary Rowe, pulled up alongside Liuzzo’s car, trying to force her off the road. They shot at her and the other passenger, nineteen-year-old African American Leroy Moton, who played dead when the Klan searched the car.

  Back in Detroit, Parks visited the funeral home, attending the memorial service at the People’s Community Church. At a mass meeting the night before the funeral, 1,500 people gathered to show their outrage over Liuzzo’s murder. The crowd gave Parks a standing ovation.146 Sickened by the killing, Parks saw the need for further pressure on Johnson. “This was no time to be dormant,” she declared in a testimonial dinner for the Women’s Public Affairs Committee (WPAC).147 Following the murder investigation closely, she became disgusted by how Liuzzo was labeled immoral and a Communist to draw attention away from the killing. The Klansmen who killed Liuzzo were never convicted of murder—likely because of the FBI’s involvement in the killing and their desire to protect informant Rowe.

  Liuzzo’s murder spurred Parks to be even more politically active, particularly in the WPAC, a black women’s community and political action group headed by her friend Louise Tappes, and also in Detroit’s Friends of SNCC.

  FRIENDS OF SNCC

  Mrs. Parks had been thrilled by the unfolding freedom struggle in the South, particularly the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In the early 1960s, she became active in the Friends of SNCC (FOS) organization in Detroit. To Mrs. Parks, the 1960 student sit-ins picked up the bus boycott spirit. “Really it’s the youth,” she told a reporter in 1965, “keeping the civil rights movement going.” Younger activists in Detroit, SNCC worker Martha Norman Noonan explained, were “conscious of how much she was with us. . . . We didn’t have any sense of her as an icon. Just a fellow freedom fighter. . . . [We saw her] more like a comrade. We viewed her as a heroine but we were surrounded by heroines. . . . It wasn’t like, ‘Oh this is Mrs. Parks.’”148

  The Northern FOS organizations provided fund-raising and support infrastructure for SNCC’s Southern work and helped Northern young people who wanted to be part of the movement also take on issues closer to home. The FOS served several functions, as fund-raising entities for the work being carried on throughout the South, information centers for spreading word of the Southern activities in the North, and independent organizing centers for protest campaigns to bring national pressure on the federal government.149 Indeed, by 1966, Parks and Dorothy Dewberry were basically a two-person operation running the Detroit FOS.150 Dewberry was a Detroit native, a former NAACP youth chapter member, a Northern Student Movement worker, and student at the Detroit Institute of Technology. Now key to maintaining SNCC’s presence in Detroit, Dewberry later married Detroit activist Dan Aldridge. At the Detroit FOS office, Parks did mailings, collated goods to be sent south, and performed other office tasks.

  From 1965 to 1967, Detroit FOS focused on supporting the independent political movement that had grown in Lowndes County, Alabama. Disillusioned by the Democratic Party’s capitulation to segregationist interests at its national convention in August 1964, SNCC moved toward creating an independent political party. SNCC workers like Stokely Carmichael joined forces with a burgeoning local movement in Lowndes County, known for its racial hostility. At the beginning of 1965 none of the 5,122 voting-age African Americans there was successfully registered to vote. Black people made up the majority of the county, nearly twelve thousand of the fifteen thousand county residents, and fraud and corruption were so extreme that there were more white voters on the rolls than there were voting-age whites in the county.151 Black Lowndes residents began to build a movement to break the racial and economic caste system. When the Selma-to-Montgomery march traveled through the county, Carmichael and other SNCC activists built connections to these local activists and decided to come back to help organize. They helped local residents build an independent black political party separate from the Democratic Party, much like Detroit’s Freedom Now Party, and ran their own black candidates for local office.

  The Lowndes diaspora—many of whom had migrated to Detroit—responded with help and support.152 Detroit FOS helped to pr
ovide an important ballast to the Lowndes movement. Parks joined the Detroit Lowndes Christian Community for Human Rights. With FOS, she raised money and collected clothes, returning to Alabama in support of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization on a couple of different occasions.

  On March 27, 1966, in the backwoods of Lowndes, five hundred county citizens and one hundred SNCC workers gathered for a mass meeting and “first anniversary” service of the Lowndes movement entitled “No More Chains or Sorrow.” Hand-lettered programs listed the “mother of the civil rights movement” at the beginning of the program. Following the opening songs and introductions, Mrs. Parks praised the crowd gathered that night for their valiant organizing in this remote, oppressive part of her former home state. Loudspeakers broadcast her words to the overflow crowd outside.153

  Parks’s legendary calm was in evidence despite the danger of these trips. Lowndes was a violent place. A white volunteer, Jonathan Daniels, had been killed in 1965. “We were always conscious of danger,” Gloria House, a SNCC worker explained.154 Dorothy Dewberry Aldridge, who accompanied Parks on these trips to Lowndes, recalled the importance of these visits for local activists—Parks wanted to “lend her support . . . [and] everybody was so honored to have her.” They would canvass, visit people’s homes, and bring goods. According to Aldridge, on one of their trips to Lowndes, they were riding with Stokely Carmichael, who was notorious for his fast driving. Alarmed, Aldridge started to panic, thinking, “We’re going to kill the mother of the civil rights movement.” But Mrs. Parks was “as calm as can be. She had the effect of being able to calm people [by her composure].”155 Parks had been down this way before—not this particular road, but for decades now she had faced the fear to keep on organizing.

  In October 1966, Carmichael came to Detroit for an address at Central Congregational. Thirteen hundred blacks and about fifty whites packed into Cleage’s church to hear Carmichael talk about Black Power. From the podium, Carmichael began by singling Mrs. Parks out in the audience and calling her his “hero.” Interrupted at almost every sentence by applause, Carmichael spoke of the need for independent black economic advancement, decried educational inequality, saying we should “sue the country for segregated schools,” and lambasted American involvement in Vietnam. He called on people to set aside individualism and be “black people first,” rather than Democrats or Republicans, and spoke on the need for black pride. “We have to learn to love black and it isn’t easy,” Carmichael explained, decrying the use of hair straighteners and processes.156

  THE 1967 UPRISING

  In 1967, the Parkses were still residing on the ground floor of a brick flat on Wildermere and Virginia Park. Raymond barbered around the corner at the Wildermere Barber Shop. The Parkses’ flat functioned as a bit of a salon in Virginia Park, filled with robust discussion and debate. Many of the young men who came by greatly admired Malcolm X, like the Parkses did, and shared their feelings of the importance of continued struggle.157

  The Parkses were frequent visitors to Edward Vaughn’s bookstore, the only black bookstore in Detroit. Opened in 1959 and devoted to African American studies, Vaughn’s soon became an epicenter of black militant activity. It was one of the only places in the city to buy books written by black authors, and activists would often meet to debate and strategize. Rosa and Raymond regularly went to Vaughn’s to browse and discuss. “One of my best customers,” Vaughn recalled, Mrs. Parks was “always very conscientious on issues of race.”158 Vaughn remembered them as a “great couple,” who “together were two of the quietest people you ever see.” According to Rosa’s cousin Barbara Alexander, Raymond was even “quieter than Rosie.”159 It was Rosa, not Raymond, who tended to get involved in things, taking part periodically in the various discussion groups that met at the bookstore.160

  Presaging the development of a vibrant black arts movement in Detroit, these groups—called Forum 65, Forum 66, and Forum 67—were led by people like Albert Cleage and the Henry brothers. Many of these activists saw how urban renewal had wreaked havoc on black housing and commerce. The Parkses’ neighborhood, Virginia Park, had been compromised by urban renewal and highway construction. One of the most attractive neighborhoods in the city, with beautiful homes and trees and high rates of home ownership, Virginia Park had grown increasingly crowded as more people, particularly poorer people involved in the underground economy, were pushed there because of highway construction in the Hastings area.161 Given the realities of Detroit’s segregated housing market, landlords proceeded to subdivide properties into smaller apartments, and many families had to double or triple up.

  Most black Detroiters faced similar conditions with overcrowding, inferior city services, unresponsive city government, and repressive policing. As in Montgomery, political and class tensions fissured Detroit’s black community, as some benefited from the new political and economic opportunities of the city while most did not. Detroit’s housing was still extremely segregated. Blacks were often met with violent reprisals by police and white vigilantes if they moved into some of Detroit’s all-white suburbs or white sections of the city—while the majority of black people were crowded into underserved inner-city neighborhoods. Urban renewal had meant black removal, the disruption of neighborhoods, and increased tensions within the black community. The new interstate system sliced through the black community, isolating certain neighborhoods from the rest of the city. The civil rights movement in Detroit, as in most Northern cities, had garnered few substantive successes. This frustration with the lack of response to black grievances combined with persistent social and economic inequality triggered riots in nearly every major American city between 1964 and 1968. Many of the social issues, which Parks knew intimately from her own experiences in the city and her work with constituents, came to a head that July.

  The force enabling this structural inequality was police repression. In Detroit, the demographics of the police did not reflect the city’s population. Though the city was 35 percent black, there were only 217 black officers in a police force of 4,709. Three of the 220 lieutenants were black, and only one of the city’s sixty-five inspectors. Patterns of police harassment and brutality by white officers on black Detroiters had been publicized for years. Many black Detroiters saw the police as an arm of state repression and harassment rather than a protective force. Police were often disrespectful and regularly took money and other items of value from black people they stopped. Any note of protest was likely to lead to a beating and a trumped-up charge of drunkenness, disorderly conduct, or resisting arrest.162 Indeed, police had expanded the practice of arresting black people simply on “investigation,” constituting about a third of their arrestees.163

  Some of the tinder for the uprising came from the self-satisfaction of many whites who believed Detroit was place of robust opportunity for blacks. That Northern liberalism had become too much to bear as many black residents still experienced second-class citizenship. While activists had long called for state remedies to Detroit’s segregated schools and housing, reform in police practice, and the opening up of job possibilities, little had changed. There had been little enforcement in Detroit of the Brown decision and little substantive adherence to the spirit of the Civil Rights Act. Indeed, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act only after its liberal Northern sponsors deliberately exempted northern schools by stipulating that “desegregation shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.” Detroit would not be forced to desegregate its persistently separate and unequal schools.

  Still, many in the city, including the city’s white political leadership, believed they could avoid the urban unrest that had swept Harlem in 1964 and Los Angeles in 1965. They saw the city as the apex of racial progress, with two black congressmen, a strong NAACP, a liberal mayor, and a prosperous auto industry that appeared to offer black and white workers economic security and opportunity. Detroit’s riot, the Washington Post later lamented, was “the greatest tragedy” of all
the uprisings because the city had been “the American model of intelligence and courage.”164 But many of Detroit’s civic leaders in the years before the 1967 riot had turned a blind eye to mounting protest in the city, similar to Montgomery’s white officials who had believed blacks were satisfied.

  At 4 a.m. on July 23, 1967, police raided an illegal after-hours bar or “blind pig” at 9125 Twelfth Street, about a mile from the Parkses’ apartment. Because many Detroit entertainment venues and restaurants had barred blacks, and black business owners had difficulty securing the capital and paperwork for an official establishment, many working-class black people socialized in such venues. Detroit bars closed at 4 a.m., so blind pigs also provided recreational spaces for factory workers who worked late shifts. In April 1967, a Department of Justice representative visiting Detroit cited police raids on blind pigs as “one of the chief sources of complaint.”165