The emotional toll was accompanied by economic insecurity. Various friends stepped in to try to raise money again. In 1976, a six-hundred-person fund-raiser was held to build a “shrine” for her in Detroit, a museum-residence where she would live and people could visit and learn the history of her life in the struggle. Articles ran in the black press about these fund-raising efforts. At the same time, Durr, Horton, and Terkel hoped to raise money for a home and steady income for Parks to move back to Alabama. Durr wrote to Horton in 1979, “She tells me she has no money, that she wants to come back to Alabama where it is warm and I have no idea what her Federal pension will be. . . . When Congressman Conyers was here last spring I tried to talk to him about it, but he evidently misconstrued my remarks and got on the defensive and said he had done his best for Mrs. Parks and very abruptly ended the conversation.”132 None of these efforts came to fruition.
BLACK POLITICS IN THE REAGAN ERA
Even the depths of her personal loss did not stop her political activities. As she regained her physical and mental strength, Mrs. Parks carried on her political commitments. “I don’t plan as long as any effort is being made to be discouraged,” she told a reporter in 1983.133 Like many of her civil rights comrades, Parks had long followed the movement to oppose apartheid in South Africa and joined efforts to challenge U.S. support of South Africa’s all-white government. Alongside other activists in the Free South Africa Movement, she walked the picket lines in Washington, DC. On December 10, 1984, the seventy-one-year-old Parks made headlines, carrying a sign that read, “Freedom Yes Apartheid No!” She told the crowd how grateful she was to be there with them.134 Mrs. Parks patiently explained to one reporter who seemed incredulous as to why she had come out, “I am concerned about that [South Africa’s apartheid], and I am concerned about any discrimination or denial of any people regardless of their race.”135 Arthur Featherstone, who worked alongside Parks on Conyers’s staff, described Parks’s “special concern for what’s going on in South Africa . . . it really hurts her to see people being killed, as they were in Alabama, Mississippi and other states in the 1950s and ’60s.”136 In April 1985, she flew to Berkeley as part of coordinated anti-apartheid demonstrations to mark the anniversary of King’s assassination.137 And in January 1986, she journeyed back to Ebenezer Baptist Church for the National Conference Against Apartheid, where Bishop Desmond Tutu gave the keynote.
Parks had difficulty saying no to causes she found important. She helped lead a march in Philadelphia in 1976 to prevent the closure of Philadelphia General Hospital, which served many black and poor residents.138 Concerned with the U.S. military role in Central America and the Caribbean, in 1984 she served as a judge, along with Judge Bruce Wright, Reverend William Sloan Coffin, and Ben Chavis, in a war-crimes tribunal sponsored by the National Lawyers Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Conference of Black Lawyers, and La Raza Legal Alliance. The tribunal sought to examine and expose U.S. military activities and covert operations in Central America and the Caribbean and help spur antiwar activism against U.S. military interventions across the Americas.139
She supported Jesse Jackson’s bid for the Democratic nomination for president, headlining a fund-raiser for Jackson at Howard University in April 1984.140 In 1988, she came to the Democratic Convention in Atlanta to support him. Called onstage to cheers of “Rosa, Rosa, Rosa,” the seventy-five-year-old Parks joined Jackson at the podium.141 Honored in Philadelphia, Parks explained to the thousand people gathered, “At some point we should step aside and let the younger ones take over. But we first must take care of our young people to make sure that they have the rights of first-class citizens. . . . And when we see so little done by so many, we just will not give up.”142
Closer to home was the nearly all-white suburb of Dearborn, home of the Ford Motor Company. The mayor had pledged to keep “Detroit’s trash out,” and in 1978 only a few blacks lived in Dearborn—many of those women serving as live-in domestics.143 The city then passed an ordinance forbidding “nonresidents” from using its parks. “Its mayor said the ordinance would keep the city clean. That was a metaphor for keeping it all white,” NAACP activist Joseph Madison explained. In 1985, he and Parks began to make plans for a boycott of the entire city. To Parks, the Dearborn ordinance “was like many of the intimidating tactics we had to fight against in the civil rights movement. . . . I could not bear to see it happening again.”144 The slogan for the boycott became “If you can’t play, don’t pay.” On the eve of the boycott, the city rescinded the ordinance.145
Madison and Parks continued working together. “People have a difficult time thinking of Rosa Parks as a fighter,” Madison explained.146 But fight she did. In August of 1987, Madison and Parks joined forces to call for a boycott of a local retain chain they saw discriminating against black employees. As Madison explained in 1988, “If there’s anything you write about Rosa Parks, you ought to try to dispel the myth that she is an old, frail woman. She is active, very forceful in a gentle way and extremely committed to the progress of young people.” Madison decided to run for president and asked Parks to run for vice president of the Detroit NAACP in 1985. “We were basically battling against the old guard,” explained Madison, “reaching out to the young people, becoming more active.”147 The slate lost.
At a gala celebrating Parks’s seventy-seventh birthday at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in 1990, Lou Rawls, Dick Gregory, Sister Sledge, Dionne Warwick, Cicely Tyson, and Melissa Manchester performed tributes to Parks. While always gracious, Parks did not seem to be in a love-song sort of mood and was one of the few on the program to highlight contemporary political issues, telling the star-studded crowd to “fight for the freedom of Nelson Mandela and those in South Africa.”148 In her brief speech she told those gathered “not to give in or give up our struggle to peace, justice, goodwill, and freedom for all oppressed people,” ending with the reminder that “many of us are oppressed today.”149
Four months after Nelson Mandela was released from Robben Island prison, he came to Detroit as part of a U.S. trip to promote sanctions against the South African government. Somehow Parks had initially not been invited to meet him, but Judge Damon Keith insisted on getting her a place in the receiving line, despite Parks’s embarrassment.150 Mandela came off the plane amidst the cheering crowd of dignitaries and well-wishers, and froze when he saw Mrs. Parks. Slowly he began walking toward her, chanting “RO-SA PARKS! RO-SA PARKS!”151 The two seasoned freedom fighters embraced.
Conyers, Dick Gregory, and Rosa Parks all were supporters of reparations. By the late 1980s, calls for reparations had coalesced into the founding of N’COBRA, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. According to its founding statements, three centuries of chattel slavery and another century of government-sanctioned segregation and inequality meant both the American government and businesses owed black people reparations. In 1994, N’COBRA held its annual meeting in Detroit. Both Rosa Parks and Jesse Jackson attended, Parks sitting in the front row next to Queen Mother Moore.152
The next year, on October 16, 1995, Mrs. Parks and Queen Mother Moore journeyed to Washington to take part in the Million Man March, along with Dorothy Height, Maya Angelou, and Betty Shabazz. Parks received many calls from friends, particularly women friends, urging her not to go. Despite the “criticism and controversy [that] have been focused on in the media,” Parks felt it was a “new day in America.” As she had for decades, Mrs. Parks went where people were committed to doing good work; whether she supported the entire message or how it might look to other people were not her primary consideration. And so at the age of eighty-two, she accepted Louis Farrakhan’s invitation to come to Washington, DC, to address the march. Greeted with an extraordinary ovation from the crowd, she spoke about Raymond’s role in the struggle and how she was “honored that young men respect me and have invited me as an elder.”153
CONCLUSION
“Racism Is Still Alive”
Negotiating the Politics of Being a Symbol
ROSA PARKS’S MOST HISTORIC HOUR may have occurred on the bus in December 1955, but a moment that perhaps revealed more of her strength of character came forty years later. On August 30, 1994, at the age of eighty-one, Parks was mugged in her own home by a young black man, Joseph Skipper. Skipper broke down her back door and then claimed he had chased away an intruder. He asked for a tip. When Parks went upstairs to get her pocketbook, he followed her. She gave him the three dollars he initially asked for, but he demanded more. When she refused, he proceeded to hit her. “I tried to defend myself and grabbed his shirt,” she explained. “Even at eighty-one years of age, I felt it was my right to defend myself.”1 He hit her again, punching her in the face and shaking her hard, and threatened to hurt her further. She relented and gave him all her money—$103. Hurt and badly shaken, she called Elaine Steele, who lived across the street and had become a key source of support. Steele called the police, who took fifty minutes to arrive. Meanwhile, the word went out that someone had mugged Parks. “All of the thugs on the west side went looking for him,” Ed Vaughn recalled, “and they beat the hell out of him.”2
Commentators seized on the news of Parks’s assault to bemoan the decline of a new generation of black youth. “Things are not likely to get much worse,” lamented liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. “We are in the dark night of the post-civil rights era. The wars against segregation have been won, but we are lost. With the violence and degradation into which so many of our people have fallen, we have disgraced the legacy of Rosa Parks.”3 The editors of the Detroit Free Press similarly intoned, “It is impossible to escape the cruel irony of the attack on Rosa Parks, beaten and robbed in her Detroit home Tuesday night by an assailant described as an African-American male. How could the woman credited with sparking the nation’s civil rights movement to obtain equality for black people be assaulted by a black man?” With the nation eagerly consuming news of a black underclass, Parks’s mugging served as a convenient metaphor for the degraded values of a new generation.
While saddened by the attack, Mrs. Parks did not see it as a sign of community dysfunction, rejecting the idea that the biggest problem facing the black community was now black people themselves. Rather, she urged people not to read too much into it.4 “Many gains have been made. . . . But as you can see, at this time we still have a long way to go.”5 Rejecting the media’s characterization of Skipper as representative of a new, degenerate cohort of black youth (a view held by many black people of her generation), she prayed for him “and the conditions that have made him this way.”6 Her approach at eighty drew from her lifelong commitment to young people. “I hope to someday see an end to the conditions in our country that would make people want to hurt others.”7 Mrs. Parks still believed, as she had with regard to the 1967 riot, that the way to stanch individual acts of violence was to transform the structures of inequity that provided the ground in which they grew. Even as she regularly reminded young people of the importance of good character, hard work, and motivation, Parks remained concentrated on changing the conditions that limited their ability to flourish. “She adored kids,” her cousin Carolyn Green, who became one of her caretakers, noted. “Worst child in the world and [she] always saw some good in everybody. That’s her philosophy.”8
To the end, Parks placed her hope in cultivating youth leadership. Worried that adults had become “too complacent,” Parks founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development with Elaine Eason Steele in 1987, seeking also to honor Raymond and his political commitment. According to Steele, “It always bothered her that he was kicked to the curb and never thought of. He, in fact, was her rock.”9 The institute, like the youth wing of the Montgomery NAACP she had founded four decades earlier, sought to develop leadership skills in young people to bring them into the struggle for civil rights. A cross between Miss White’s and Highlander, the institute stressed the importance of self-respect, comportment, and education for liberation to Detroit students. Black history for Rosa Parks had been one of the great transforming discoveries of her life, so the institute focused on exposing young people to African American history and encouraging them recover their own family’s past. “When students come to class and demand to be educated,” Parks observed, “education will take place.”10 The institute sent young people both south and north through its “Pathways to Freedom” program to engage students in field research and immerse them in black history, including the opportunity to retrace the path of the Underground Railroad. Raymond had always regretted the lack of opportunity to get an education, so one key aspect of the institute’s work was to provide college assistance. Parks saw a curriculum that stressed black pride and self-knowledge as a way to address the dropout problem affecting many black youth.11
Parks was clear that the movement was not over, nor was it limited to the public’s narrow view of civil rights as color-blindness or the end of legalized segregation. “Our struggle will never go away so I just have to keep on going on,” she told a reporter in 1985. Critical of Reagan’s policies and his “watering-down” of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Parks asserted that Reagan “didn’t understand the struggle” because he “never had to struggle.”12 She well understood the “forces at work to destroy what gains have been made” and warned of “taking too much time out to just sit down and not do anything, [or] that’ll soon be reversed.”13 And she remained steadfast about the need to “rededicate and reunite ourselves into a movement. I don’t think it’s time to stop or slow down or become complacent of what may be ahead.”14 Throughout the 1990s, even as her health waned, Parks spoke against many forms of social and racial injustice. She condemned Governor George W. Bush’s use of the death penalty in Texas. And, on September 19, 2001, a week after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, she joined with Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Gloria Steinem, and other human rights leaders to speak out against a “military response” to the attacks and to call on the United States to act “cooperatively as part of a community of nations within the framework of international law.”15 Refusing the terms of post–civil rights racial politics, Parks continued to see the struggle for racial justice as urgent and ongoing.
“I UNDERSTAND THAT I AM A SYMBOL”: BEING ROSA PARKS
As time has gone by, people have made my place in the history of the civil-rights movement bigger and bigger. They call me the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement. . . . Interviewers still only want to talk about that one evening in 1955 when I refused to give up my seat on the bus. Organizations still want to give me awards for that one act more than thirty years ago . . . I understand that I am a symbol.16
—Rosa Parks
In 1980, an episode of the television game show To Tell the Truth featured three “Rosa Parkses.” The weekly show presented three contestants who played the same person and attempted to fool a celebrity panel. Contestants earned prize money for each vote they received. That week, the real Parks, Contestant Number 3, tried to convince the celebrity judges that she was the person who had refused to give up her seat on the bus. She spoke characteristically thoughtfully and in great detail about the events of 1955. Yet two of the three celebrity judges voting chose Contestant Number 2, a demure lady wearing a lovely church hat and pearls who claimed she spontaneously decided one day just to make a stand, and who was actually Lois Alexander, director of the Harlem Institute of Fashion and the Black Fashion Museum.17 One judge explained her choice of Contestant Number 2 by citing the “gentleness” about her. The symbol of Rosa Parks had become more compelling than the reality.
As the years went by, Parks noted, people still “only want[ed] to talk about that one evening in 1955.” In an interview in the late 1960s, she chafed at the detail interviewers wanted—“It just seems so much.”18 In 1973, she told an interviewer, “I hope I won’t be having to tell people that story for the rest of my life.”19 In a 1978 interview, she explained that she was “somewhat resigned to whatever
contribution I can make.” She believed her public role and appearances were necessary to preserve the history of the struggle and help young people carry it forward, but she wished for personal space.
I always have to refer to something Dr. King once said. . . . He asked the question, “Why should I expect personal happiness when so much depends on any contribution that I can make?” But I find myself asking myself, “Why should I expect personal happiness, if people want to find out what, who I am or what I am or what I have done. . . . There are times when I feel I can hardly get up and go, and once I get there and see their [young people’s] reaction, I feel somewhat rewarded.20
Though Parks had not been included in the local commemorations of the Montgomery bus boycott in the first years, she returned to Montgomery for the twentieth anniversary commemoration in 1975.21 This time, Mrs. Parks spoke from the pulpit at Holt Street, where she reminded those gathered to “keep on” the struggle for justice and equality. However, it wouldn’t be until the twenty-fifth anniversary of the boycott—and particularly the thirtieth and thirty-fifth—that these commemorations garnered significant national attention.
Reporters descended on her in 1980. A Detroit Free Press reporter described Parks as “weary of telling the story, weary of the reporters, weary of the questions.” She informed him, “It’s very difficult, very painful, to go over the same things all the time.”22 She told the Los Angeles Times that she did “very well” left alone and didn’t “like being overinflated.” The reporter stressed how often Mrs. Parks “slips in and out of rooms almost soundlessly and prays not to be noticed.” Her friend Louise Tappes explained, “Rosa would rather just forget the whole thing.” Still faced with requests for interviews and appearances to talk about her actions twenty-five years earlier, Parks found it “difficult going back to that time. I don’t keep it in my mind if I can avoid it. I know that good came out of it for a lot of people, but it wasn’t the most pleasant experience I ever had.”23 In 1995, on the fortieth anniversary of the boycott, she embarked on a 381-day tour throughout the United States. An Ebony article noted that she had “logged more frequent flyer miles than a busy business executive. Perpetually on the go, she keeps up with a numbing schedule of events that would be daunting to a person half her age.”24
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Page 35
