The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks
Page 36
Parks saw black history as an activist tool to challenge injustice in the present and continued to do events, large and small. “My problem,” she told Myles Horton in a 1981 oral history interview, “is—I don’t particularly enjoy talking about anything.”25 And yet over and over she talked about her bus stand, feeling she had a responsibility to do so. Throughout her life, if she was asked to do something for the good of the race—even if she might have preferred not to—she usually did it. Parks told another reporter in 1988, “I’ve always tried to be helpful to people in need but I could live without the publicity.”26 Indeed many interviews Parks did in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s expressed her discomfort with how she had become a symbol—both because of what it had done to her private life but also because of the limited ways that people had come to understand her action and the movement more broadly. While her own notions of decorum and race work made it impossible for her to refuse these interviews or lash out at the questions, she noted, “it has been very taxing on me physically and mentally.”27
Increasingly in her older age, Parks seemed to come to some peace with her public role. In 1988 she explained to an Ebony reporter, “There was a time when it bothered me that I was always identified with that one incidence.”28 She achieved this partly by focusing on what still needed to be done. “I find that if I’m thinking too much of my own problems and the fact that at times things are not just like I want them to be, I don’t make any progress at all. But if I look around and see what I can do, and go on with that, then I move on.”29 Perpetually committed to advancing the struggle, Parks accepted the role of “mother of the civil rights movement” in order to carry its history to students. In an interview in 1990, she lamented the fact that so many young people weren’t familiar with key civil rights activists like Fred Gray or Fannie Lou Hamer and hadn’t been “taught of the suffering we have went through.”30 But that was changing; she was “encouraged that many young people . . . are interested in what happened.” To her, the teaching of black history had to begin “as early as they can learn anything else.”31 And so she answered thousands of letters and attended hundreds of school and youth programs held in her honor.
With the help of Jim Haskins, she wrote an autobiography geared for young people. Mrs. Parks had grown tired of public versions of her story that bore little relationship to her own life and wanted to set the record straight: “I cannot reach everybody personally . . . I think the story would give them much information that they may not get just reading what other people have written. Many people have written their own versions of my life and how they view it. But when I tell my own story, then I know that is my own life.”32
Parks drew pleasure from young people’s performances of her 1955 arrest. “They have their own interpretation of what it was like. Sometimes it can be quite interesting, and sometimes amusing,” she observed.33 Yet she often became trapped as symbol of a movement long since over. “They equate me along with Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and ask if I knew them.”34 Though Parks often participated in public events as a way to keep the struggle going, these commemorations increasingly confined the movement to the past. Regardless of her intentions, her iconic image began to take on a life of its own. Contrary to Parks’s own philosophy, the process of Parks’s iconization, Rosa Parks Museum director Georgette Norman observed, often had the effect of distancing young people, leaving them feeling “you cannot be an icon . . . [you’re] nothing like me.”35
“PUTTING YOUR BAD IMAGES IN A MUSEUM”
Committed to honoring the history of the movement, Parks had labored with Coretta Scott King, John Conyers, and many of King’s other associates since the assassination to get a holiday in his honor. Resistance ran high, and Parks traveled throughout the country to support various statewide efforts for the holiday.36 In 1983, that fifteen-year effort paid off, and President Reagan reluctantly signed the King holiday into law. But one of the paradoxes of the holiday was that almost as soon as it was institutionalized it began to get coopted by those who saw the civil rights struggle as a thing of the past. The King honored on the third Monday of January was a pale version of the friend and comrade that Parks had known. Having worked hard to get this national holiday, Parks was critical of the ways King was now being whitewashed, “He was more than a dreamer. He was an activist who believed in acting as well as speaking out against oppression.”37 The King who had decried U.S. militarism, the structures of economic inequality, and the complacency of American liberalism was hardly to be found in the public celebrations.
At the same time, in the decades after the boycott, outcry grew among black activists and the black press that Parks hadn’t received her due. An article on the tenth anniversary of her bus stand quoted friends and supporters who hoped “some national organization will have the genius, with some planning to give this woman the acclaim she deserves for what she means to America.”38 Time and again, articles would be written about the “forgotten” Rosa Parks, many noting how “most Americans don’t know her name.”39 In 1978, Los Angeles Sentinel writer Jim Cleaver noted, “It is rather strange that her name cannot be found in the Encyclopedia Britannica or even the Ebony Handbook. Yet she stands head and shoulders above the so-called leaders of this century, whose names grace the various reference books.”40
Many black leaders and citizens looked for ways to give Parks her due. As she grew older, the honors flowed in. Streets were named after her, stained-glass windows made in her honor. In 1991, a bust of Parks was unveiled at the Smithsonian. Coretta Scott King, Joseph Lowery, Dorothy Height, John Conyers, and John Lewis all attended the unveiling. Parks called it “the high point of my life.”41
This national attention amplified in the wake of her mugging; Parks now was the right kind of black person to be honoring, implicitly contrasted with angry black activists and nihilist black youths. In 1999, Parks received the nation’s highest recognition, a Congressional Gold Medal. Representative Julia Carson of Indiana spearheaded the effort and explained the importance of Parks receiving the honor “while she can still feel it.”42 Carson enlisted Tavis Smiley’s help to win support for the bill. Tavis put out the word to his listeners to “call, fax, email, carrier pigeon” their representatives about Parks getting the Congressional Gold Medal.43 Giving Parks this tribute became a cause in and of itself. All but one congressman, Texas Republican Ron Paul, ultimately voted to bestow the award on Parks; the Senate vote was unanimous.
On June 15, 1999, President Clinton presented Parks with the medal. Calling Parks’s action and the resulting movement “the quintessential story of the 20th Century . . . the triumph of freedom,” President Clinton honored Parks as a “living American hero” and compared Parks’s bus stand to the battle for freedom waged on the beaches of Normandy and behind the Iron Curtain. “For us what has always been at stake is whether we could keep moving on that stony road, closer to the ideals of our Founders—whether we really could be a country where we are all equal.” In a curious rewriting of the Founding Fathers, Clinton conceded that “people who have no position or money and have only the power of their courage and character are always there before the political leaders.”44
Brinkley noted the irony of these tributes. “Now that Rosa Parks’s body was too feeble to march and her voice had faded to a whisper, politicians lauded her as a patriotic icon. She had grown . . . harmless and safe to exalt.”45 One headline in the Los Angeles Sentinel tellingly proclaimed, “Rosa Parks Inspires Without Speaking at Museum Dedication, 45 Years Later.”46 Historian Mike Marquesee has written about a similar process of turning Muhammad Ali into an icon exactly at the moment when Ali was silenced by Parkinson’s. “The man who had defied the American establishment was taken into its bosom. There he was lavished with an affection which had been strikingly absent thirty years earlier.”47 The tributes to Parks evidenced a “patronizing attitude towards older people,” according to nonagenarian activist Esther Cooper Jackson, “the way the whole movement is erased, t
he heroes are just names without relating it to society and the significance of their lives.”48 Increasingly, civil rights activists were honored to show America as a beacon of opportunity, by people who believed the United States had become a postracial society.
With the increasing popularity of heritage tourism, civil rights memorials and other movement-related tributes have gathered increasing cachet. At least fifteen museums have opened since 1990 commemorating civil rights activism—the King memorial on the Mall in Washington, DC, opened in 2011, and more are in the works across the South. “The civil rights movement is the new World War II,” according to Doug Shipman, CEO for the National Center for Civil and Human Rights set to open in Atlanta in 2014.49 Civil rights tourism is the product of an unusual marriage between movement veterans and their allies who seek to preserve the history of the civil rights struggles, and political and corporate interests that see heritage tourism as a lucrative way to attract state and federal resources and tourism dollars. According to historian Glenn Eskew, these new civil rights museums have ushered in a “new civic religion that celebrates the triumph of racial tolerance and the assimilation of blacks into the existing political and capitalist world system.”50 Explained former Birmingham mayor David Vann, “the best way to put your bad images to rest is to declare them history and put them in a museum.”51
At the very site of Parks’s bus stand stands Troy University’s Rosa Parks Museum. Dedicated in 2000, the three-story, fifty-five-thousand-square-foot state-of-the-art museum and library surprised Parks, who commented at the opening festivities, “In 1955, when I was arrested . . . I certainly never thought I would be remembered in such a grand manner.”52 Buses have been indispensable to the historical memory of Parks and the boycott. The Troy Museum boasts a high-tech bus that reenacts the scene that December evening. Dearborn’s Henry Ford Museum boasts the “actual bus” where it all began. The National Civil Rights Museum features a bus visitors can board with a recording telling them to “move to the back . . . If you don’t move out of that seat, I’ll have you arrested.” Viewers often leave convinced that today is nothing like the bad old days of segregation.
Georgette Norman, the director of the Rosa Parks Museum, worries that the ways that Parks has been memorialized “distracts” from the ongoing task of social justice that Parks herself was committed to.53 Curiously, even though brass plaques grace the former homes of many bus boycott activists in Montgomery, at the Cleveland Courts projects where Parks actually lived, there is a less auspicious green sign. The Parks’ apartment is no longer rented and has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places. But there has not been sufficient political will to upgrade the Cleveland Courts projects, where hundreds of working poor people still reside, which may explain the rather shabby sign there for one of Montgomery’s famous. The less pretty parts of history and enduring social inequity are not as amenable to profit and thus easier to cast aside. The reality of Parks’s class background sits at odds with the ways her image and legacy have been stripped of working-class markers—yet such reference might make her more identifiable for a younger generation.
LYING IN HONOR
She wasn’t a symbol, she was the real thing. . . . I think that most people were not interested in knowing the full story of Mrs. Parks’s life . . . the concept that there are among us people who dedicate their lives to racial and economic justice gets completely lost.54
—Martha Norman Noonan
This depoliticized exaltation held tenfold when Parks died. An avalanche of congressmen, senators, and presidents rushed to honor Parks, hoping perhaps that “a tired old woman” lying in the Capitol building would cover up the federal travesty of inaction around Hurricane Katrina two months earlier. Her funeral provided a political opportunity for a new set of images to paper over those unsettling ones. By casting her as the nonthreatening heroine of a movement that had run its course, the memorialization of Rosa Parks proved useful in constructing a view of America as a postracial society. “Everyone wanted to speak,” explained longtime friend Judge Damon Keith, who helped coordinate the funeral.55
By honoring Parks apart from her life history of struggle, by celebrating the movement but consigning it to the past of the old South, by reducing it to buses, soft voices, and accidental acts and by feting the dignitaries over the grassroots people who sought to honor her, Parks’s public memorial exposed the saliency of this narrow, gendered vision of movement history in American public life. The fable of the “not-angry” Parks would be used to place the movement firmly in the past, celebrating Parks as a proper heroine with a legitimate grievance, compared with the demands of others, which could then be marginalized. Overlooked were the forces and people who had long kept Rosa Parks quiet and the reality of Parks’s long-standing anger at social injustice.
Rosa Parks may be the most widely known American woman of the twentieth century. In 2004, high school students were asked to name their top ten “most famous Americans in history” (excluding presidents) from “Columbus to the present day.” Sixty percent listed Rosa Parks, who was second in frequency only to King.56 Parks’s iconization thus provides an important window onto public investment in particular histories of the civil rights movement.
Scholars such as David Blight, John Hope Franklin, and Eric Foner have examined the political investments in the distorted histories of slavery and Reconstruction that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century.57 A popular history arose during that period that took a benign view of slavery and cast Reconstruction as a despotic and debauched period in American history. Serving political interests that sought to entrench segregation and economic inequity, decimate black voting power, and solidify national economic interests in cotton production, this history proved crucial to the task of Southern redemption and national unification. By legitimizing the various forms of segregation and exclusion that took root throughout the country at the opening of the twentieth century, these “histories” proved useful in framing the problem not as how to undo the legacies of slavery and Northern exclusion but on the task of national reconciliation and the need to control black people.
Looking at Parks’s funeral reveals the “memory wars,” to use Blight’s terminology, now at play around the civil rights movement.58 As with the history of Reconstruction, a mythic history of the civil rights movement developed at the turn of the twenty-first century to serve contemporary political needs. According to this new popular story—and essential to the framing of Parks’s memorial—the civil rights movement demonstrated the resiliency and redemptive power of American democracy. This nonviolent revolution proved the power of American dissent and self-correction.59 Parks’s funeral communicated a lesson on the history of American progress and the end of racism, proclaiming a once and final end to the Second Reconstruction. In this narrative, racism was cast as an aberrant flaw rather than a constitutive element of American democracy—that, once recognized, had been eliminated.
National histories give comfort; they promote civic pride and communicate national values. They explain—and thereby justify—present-day action and inaction. Promoting reconciliation and national unity, those turn-of-the-century histories of Reconstruction explained why further federal government intervention was no longer needed. By portraying former slaves as angry, sexually promiscuous and reckless individuals who illegitimately sought special rights, these mis-histories cast black people as responsible for their own problems and undeserving of full rights.
The other side of the same coin, the celebration of the quiet Rosa Parks and the distorted popular histories of the civil rights movement at play today are also used to demonstrate how America cured itself of its previous history of discrimination. With the legacy of racial discrimination now vanquished, the problems people of color face can once again be cast as the product of their own values and poor character. Images of a debauched and violent black underclass, similar to those that had peopled the old histories of Reconstruction, were the backdrop of t
he Parks fable.
Of course, those histories are different. Woodrow Wilson’s showing of Birth of a Nation at the White House is, in key respects, a world apart from Rosa Parks lying in honor in the Capitol. Yet aspects of these mythologies operate similarly. Just as early histories of Reconstruction explained why no further action from the federal government was needed and allowed for the criminalization of black people and a cheapened labor supply, so too does the fable of Rosa Parks and the successful end to the Second Reconstruction. Just as turn-of-the-century Reconstruction histories held up good black people as deferential and happy, so too does the incessant celebration of Parks as “quiet” and “not angry.” A tribute to a quiet national heroine proves that good values and individual acts are rewarded—that once revealed, real injustice is eradicated in a democracy like America without people having to get aggressive about it. The national honor for Rosa Parks also became a way to mark the death of racism, a form of national self-congratulation that Parks spent her life fighting against. Persistent educational inequality, widening economic disparities, skyrocketing incarceration rates for people of color, unending wars, and rampant racial and religious profiling—these contemporary injustices were implicitly rendered as so very different from the clear wrong that Parks had protested, despite the fact that the actual Rosa Parks and many of her colleagues had spent a lifetime trying to address them.