Parks also found herself part of a growing, diverse Black Power scene back home in Detroit. “Honest to God, almost every meeting I went to, she was always there,” Ed Vaughn recalled. “She was so regular.”101 She began wearing “colorful African-inspired garb,” according to Brinkley, and took pleasure in new opportunities to learn about African cultural influences. The dissemination of black history to young people had long been one of her priorities, and in Detroit she supported after-school programs, independent black schools, Afrocentric educational initiatives, and black history curricula. Close to home, the Afrikan History Club at McFarlane Elementary School made Mrs. Parks its honorary secretary.
As much as her health and schedule allowed, she turned out for black events in the city. “Dang, that’s Rosa again,” Vaughn would note. Indeed, her schedule was so busy in the late 1960s that she convinced her brother, Sylvester, and his wife, Daisy, to allow her niece, fifteen-year-old Rhea, to come live with the Parkses to help look after her mother and Raymond. There were many meetings, functions, and out-of-town events that Rosa wanted to attend, and she wanted someone else at home because neither her mother nor Raymond was in good health.102 “She was always going somewhere,” cousin Carolyn Green recalled.103
But she was not always widely noticed. The combination of her unassuming presence and that her stature in the 1960s and 1970s was not what it would become by the 1990s meant that Parks’s political activities sometimes escaped broader attention. But the fact that she came out was important to many younger activists. While Mrs. Parks was not a street activist, if asked to do something, according to Dan Aldridge, she would. “People would be surprised at how she would come out,” he explained. “She was so ladylike and genteel. But she had a depth of political sensibilities.”104
Parks was in the midst of a growing black cultural and political nationalism in the city. With roots before the 1967 uprising, a Black Arts Movement emerged in the city. Long interested in black history, art and literature, Parks came to some of the Thursday evening biweekly forums at Vaughn’s bookstore and attended the Black Arts Convention in 1966, which brought Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Don Lee, and Nikki Giovanni and a host of young black writers and other nationalists to Cleage’s church. She tuned in to a new black radio station, WCHB, and saw shows at the Concept East Theater, a theater company founded to increase the opportunities for black artists to write, direct, produce, and act in Detroit’s fairly small theater scene.105
Other activists—including Rosa Parks’s friends Richard and Milton Henry—took up the call for reparations, believing that slavery and its legacies had fundamentally shaped the American political economy and required economic and political redress. The Henry brothers helped convene a five-hundred-person gathering on March 29, 1968, in Detroit to discuss the need for justice, reparations, and black autonomy—and the potential for creating a black nation within the United States. Two days later, one hundred people signed a document forming the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), outlining a doctrine for the black nation and naming a provisional leadership. Queen Mother Moore was the first to sign. Robert F. Williams was named president in absentia; Betty Shabazz was named the second vice president. The RNA advocated a separate state for African Americans to be formed in the five “black belt” states of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina as land due black people as reparations for the legacy of slavery. Parks closely followed and occasionally participated in the RNA’s activities, though it is difficult to document which events she attended. Many of her friends were deeply involved, and she was called on for help at key moments.
By most accounts, Parks did not attend the RNA’s second annual convention on March 29, 1969, which resulted in a historic confrontation between black radicals and the Detroit police. Three hundred people gathered at Reverend Franklin’s New Bethel Church. As the meeting finished, a shooting occurred outside the church. In response, the police broke down the doors of the church, poured hundreds of rounds into the church, and brutally arrested all the men, women, and children gathered. Police claimed self-defense, but an article in the Michigan Chronicle later revealed that members of the FBI, the CIA, and the Detroit police department’s “subversive squad” were in attendance who could have prevented the melee outside and identified who actually shot the officer, but instead, they stood by.106 Several convention members were wounded. One young policeman was killed and another wounded. The entire convention remaining at that point, 140 people, was arrested en masse.
Reverend Franklin (the pastor of the church) notified black judge George Crockett of the mass arrests. Parks, alongside a number of friends, had worked hard to see Crockett elected to Recorder’s Court in 1966. A bold legal advocate, Crockett had defended the eleven members of the Communist Party charged with violation of the Smith Act; represented Coleman Young and others before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC); and worked with the National Lawyers Guild in Mississippi. As a judge in Recorder’s Court, Crockett had been devoted to rooting out police misconduct and establishing firmer judicial oversight.
In the middle of the night, Judge Crockett proceeded to the police station, where he found legal disarray. The 140 people from the RNA convention were being held incommunicado. No one had been formally arrested, and in disregard of customary procedure, everyone was being treated as suspects—fingerprinted and given nitrate tests to determine if they had fired guns. An indignant Crockett set up court right in the station house, demanding the police either press charges or release people. He had handled about fifty cases, releasing most of the men, women, and children, when the Wayne County prosecutor, who had been called in by the police, interceded and promised a return to normal procedures.
Crockett came under tremendous criticism for this intervention. White politicians and citizens called for his impeachment; 200,000 people signed a petition spearheaded by the Detroit police officers’ association accusing Crockett of “gross misconduct.”107 In response, a Black United Front of nearly sixty organizations ranging from the NAACP to the RNA coalesced to support Judge Crockett. On April 3, 1969, they called for demonstrations in support of Crockett, and some three thousand people responded. Greatly disturbed by the police action at New Bethel, Parks was active in the campaign to defend Crockett. On a slip of paper for a speech for Detroit’s Alabama Club, she highlighted the similarities between police brutality in Montgomery and Detroit and then noted “my experiences with Judge Crockett,” perhaps suggesting some personal tie to the events at New Bethel or Crockett’s actions at the police station.108
Police brutality continued to escalate in Detroit. In 1971, the police department created a special undercover unit, “Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets” (STRESS). Using a decoy officer and usually two to three other officers, STRESS, in its first nine months, made 1,400 arrests and killed ten suspects (nine of whom were black). This tiny unit was responsible for 39 percent of Detroit Police Department deaths in its first year—and DPD topped the nation for civilian deaths. By September 1973, the number of STRESS fatalities had risen to twenty-two.109 Parks supported Coleman Young’s bid to be Detroit’s first black mayor in 1973; one key promise he made—and ultimately delivered on—was to end STRESS.
After the police roundup at New Bethel Church, a section of the RNA decided to move its operations to Mississippi. Richard Henry, now known as Imari Obadele, led a group south to begin acquiring land, settling on a farm in Jackson, Mississippi; Milton Henry, now Gaidi Obadele, stayed behind in Detroit. Following the New Bethel incident, the FBI stepped up its monitoring of the group.110 The Mississippi farm was threatened and raided, and in August 1971 RNA members engaged in a showdown with police. On that day, the FBI and the Jackson Police Department attacked the RNA farm with arms, tear gas, and a tank. A shoot-out between the RNA and the police ensued. One Jackson police officer was killed, and another patrolmen and an FBI agent were wounded. Eleven RNA members, including President Imari
Obadele (who was not at the farm during the shootout), were arrested, and the police began to brutalize the suspects, including one of the women who was pregnant. The defendants were paraded half-clothed through downtown Jackson.
A neighbor phoned RNA Minister of Justice Chokwe Lumumba back in Detroit. Fearing what would be done to the people in custody, Lumumba frantically called Representative Conyers’s office to ask the congressman to intervene. According to Lumumba, Conyers’s office “got back to us immediately” that they had gotten the assurances from the Justice Department that the suspects would be humanely treated. Lumumba found out later that it was Rosa Parks who had acted so quickly. “She intervened and really saved their lives. If they had gone on unabated, some people would have killed. That was her intervention. . . . She saved the lives of my comrades.”111
Conyers’s version of the story corresponds to Lumumba’s. When Obadele died, Conyers “vividly recall[ed] Dr. Obadele working with Rosa Parks from my Detroit office, in 1971, to secure his safety in the Jackson, Mississippi jail following the RNA’s confrontation with the police. He often told me that the actions of Rosa Parks saved his life in that Mississippi jail.”112 Eight members of the RNA were convicted of murder; a year later, Obadele was convicted of conspiracy and served more than five years of a twelve-year sentence. Detroit city councilwoman JoAnn Watson remembered Obadele saying that during his five years in prison Parks would periodically call the prison to check on his well-being, being clear that this was “Rosa Parks calling” and informing prison officials they were being watched.113
Mrs. Parks had long been critical of the ways black defendants were treated within the criminal justice system. The 1970s and 1980s saw a number of black activists face criminal prosecution. Parks joined the efforts to draw public attention to this political persecution. In 1971, Reverend Ben Chavis had been sent to Wilmington, North Carolina, by the United Church of Christ to help engage students in a boycott of city schools. Seen as militant troublemakers, he and nine others would be subsequently charged with arson and conspiracy in the firebombing of a white grocery. All were convicted. Outraged, defense committees were started across the country to press for their sentences to be overturned. Detroiters founded a local Wilmington 10 Defense Committee—its honorary chairpersons in 1976 included John Conyers, Judge Crockett, and Rosa Parks—which called for an appeal in the case and fund raising to support it.114 Parks followed the case closely from her home in Detroit, as she did with the case of UCLA professor Angela Davis. (Involved in the Free the Soledad Brothers campaign, Davis had been placed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list and charged with murder and kidnapping in connection with the death of Judge Harold Haley but was ultimately acquitted of all charges.)115 Davis came to Detroit two weeks after her acquittal for an SCLC event at the Coliseum. Parks introduced her to the crowd of twelve thousand as a “dear sister who has suffered so much persecution.”116
Long committed to criminal justice regarding sexual violence against women, Parks was one of the founders of the Joanne Little Defense Committee in Detroit. Little was charged with murder when she defended herself against the sexual advances of her jailer, Clarence Alligood. Little had been in jail for burglary and Alligood threatened her with an ice pick and forced her to perform oral sex. Little managed to grab the ice pick, stabbed Alligood, and escaped, turning herself in to police days later. Her case brought gender issues to the forefront of many Black Power groups—and a broad-based grassroots movement to defend Little grew across the country. The mission statement of the Detroit group affirmed the right of women to defend themselves against their sexual attackers and raised the interlocking issues of poverty and criminal defense—and the ways poor people could often not afford to mount an adequate defense.117 Parks was one of the people put in charge of soliciting help from other organizations. Little was eventually acquitted.
Parks also campaigned vigorously on behalf of Gary Tyler, a sixteen-year-old black teenager who had been wrongfully convicted for the killing of a thirteen-year-old white boy. As schools were desegregated in Louisiana, Tyler was riding a school bus attacked by a white mob angered by integration. Police boarded the bus and pulled Tyler off for allegedly shooting a boy outside the bus, even though no gun was found on the bus. In a five-day trial, after police pressured some of Tyler’s classmates (who would later recant) to testify, Tyler was sentenced to death. Parks gave the keynote at a packed meeting and rally of over three hundred people in Detroit on June 13, 1976, on behalf of Tyler.118 She attended meetings and continued to work to see his conviction overturned.119 In July 1976, the Supreme Court ruled Louisiana’s death penalty unconstitutional. However, Tyler, imprisoned at the notorious Angola prison, was never freed.
Throughout these years drawing attention to the political nature of these prosecutions remained a key priority for Parks. In 1981, a broad swath of activists from the Black Liberation Army, the RNA, the Weather Underground, and the May 19th Coalition were arrested in connection with the $1.6 million robbery of a Brink’s truck in Nanuet, New York. During the robbery and apprehension of the suspects, a security guard was killed, and a shoot-out between the activists and police left two Nyack officers dead. More than twenty people would be arrested in connection to the robbery—many of whom were known revolutionaries, though not all were part of the plot. (Members of these groups had also successfully helped Assata Shakur escape from prison in 1979, and law enforcement had become increasingly suspicious of these groups.) Chokwe Lumumba was defending RNA leaders Fulani Sunni Ali and Bilal Sunni Ali on conspiracy charges. Worried about radical high jinks and a politicized trial, the judge barred Lumumba from representing Fulani Sunni Ali, citing Lumumba’s behavior in the courtroom. Unwilling to acquiesce to this assault on civil liberties, Lumumba and others fought back and ultimately won back the right for Lumumba to represent the Alis in the case.
In the midst of the case, Lumumba returned home to Detroit to find a small note in the mail. The writer thanked Lumumba for all his efforts “standing up for your people. . . . For standing strong and not flinching.” Lumumba read the letter and thought, “This is a nice person who decided to write me. Really sweet. Then I put the letter down. A day later, I thought, ‘Rosa?!’ I went back and looked. The letter was from Rosa Parks.”120 At the age of seventy, Mrs. Parks, always the dedicated correspondent, had taken the time to write another letter—to tell one of the most prominent black nationalists in the city (whom she had not met in person at that point) that she was proud of his efforts.
NEW DIRECTIONS, CONTINUING STRUGGLE
Continuing her varied activism, Parks campaigned vigorously for George McGovern in 1972 and actively called for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. She addressed an overflowing crowd of fifteen thousand at the first Michigan Black Expo, sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation Breadbasket in July 1972, paying tribute to both King and Angela Davis.121 She appeared on a program with Reverend Charles Koen of the Cairo (Illinois) United Front. Formed in 1969 to counter white-vigilante and police violence in Cairo, the Cairo United Front led a years-long boycott of white businesses; Parks praised the “unity created by the new black awareness.”122
Feeling there was still much work to be done, she told Studs Terkel in 1973, “Even with much of what has happened to our dismay and to our unhappiness . . . I’ll continue to be hopeful that there will be a way for us to eventually know freedom, with all of its meaning.”123 In another interview from 1973, she expressed a similar sentiment: “A lot of things have happened and are still happening, that I wish would not have taken place. But you have to remain optimistic. When things get bad, you have to keep telling yourself that maybe it’s just a phase, one more thing we have to go through. Nothing comes easily. We have to keep on trying, as long as we are alive.”124
In 1975, Parks returned to Montgomery to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the boycott, telling the cheering crowd: “I’m very proud we’ve come from a voteless and a hopeless and a h
elpless people to a people who can and should hold the balance of the power politically.”125 From the pulpit at Holt Street (where the first mass meeting had taken place), Parks was firm in her belief that the struggle was not finished. “Don’t stop,” she insisted. “Keep on. Keep on keeping on.”126
During the 1979/1980 school year, Parks paid a visit to the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School, an independent black elementary school started to address the deficits in Oakland’s public education system and the Panther’s longest-running survival program.127 The students performed a play they had written in her honor, which included a reenactment of her bus stand, and then she answered questions. “It didn’t matter if they asked the question again and again, she answered them,” according to the school’s director, Ericka Huggins, who recalled how much Parks loved it. “She just kept thanking me and the instructors and the Black Panther Party for doing what we were doing.” The students and entire staff were “touched,” according to Huggins that Parks “came all the way” and talked about it for weeks afterward.128 Huggins recalled her own delight at Parks’s visit. “I consider Rosa Parks a radical woman, a revolutionary woman, showing up in real time at an elementary school run by the Black Panther Party.”129
The late 1970s were a difficult time for Parks personally. Her ulcers continued to plague her, and she developed heart trouble. The family still struggled economically. Even more upsetting, Raymond, her mother, and Sylvester all developed cancer. “There was a time,” Parks recalled, “when I was traveling every day to three hospitals to visit them.”130 This took a lot out of her. She cut her work at Conyers’s office to part-time. In 1977, after a five-year battle with throat cancer, Raymond died at the age of seventy-four, devastating the sixty-four-year-old Rosa. Three months later, Sylvester died. “My health wasn’t too good at that time either, but I kept on working,” she explained. “I couldn’t do everything I wanted to, but I did what I could.”131 And two years later, her mother passed away at the age of ninety-two. Within two years, Mrs. Parks’s closest family—and foundation of her support—had all passed away. This was an aching loss.
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Page 34
