While many of the eulogies sought to put Parks’s protest firmly in the past, Parks herself had continued to insist on the enduring need for racial justice in the present. Parks had kept on speaking her mind on the ways “racism is still alive”—reminding Americans “not [to] become comfortable with the gains we have made in the last forty years.”60 Indeed, she ended her autobiography observing, “Sometimes I do feel pretty sad about some of the events that have taken place recently. I try to keep hope alive anyway, but that’s not always the easiest thing to do.”61
As King had before his death, Rosa Parks spoke in 1995 about how she wanted to be remembered. “I’d like people to say I’m a person who always wanted to be free and wanted it not only for myself.”62 A full accounting of Parks’s life and politics thus offers a different set of reasons for the nation to honor her. Laboring for decades in relative obscurity, Parks and her colleagues faced white terror to challenge racial injustice and till the ground for a movement, determined at the very least to register their dissent, even if they could deal no significant blow to white supremacy. When her courageous stand galvanized a mass movement, she did what she could to cultivate and sustain it. And when it gained certain success, despite the considerable sacrifice it had entailed for her and her family, she did not rest but joined with new and old comrades in the late 1960s and 1970s and onward to keep fighting for social justice and racial equality. That combination of steadfastness and outrage, tenacity and courage is what deserves national veneration.
Doing justice to Parks’s legacy requires something much harder for the nation than a simple casket lying in the Capitol. It means acknowledging that the roots of racial and social injustice in American society are deep and manifest. It entails a profound recommitment to the goals she had spent her lifetime fighting for—real justice under the law, community empowerment and voting rights, educational access and equity, economic justice, and black history in all parts of the curriculum. It calls for dedicated, persistent action, year after year, decade after decade, as she did, to create systemic social change. Finally, it means heeding her advice to Spelman College students: “Don’t give up and don’t say the movement is dead.”63
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THERE IS NO WAY TO write a book like this without the help of a community of people. My first thanks goes to Julian Bond. When I was an undergraduate and then subsequently as his teaching fellow, Julian Bond taught me how to tell this story. More recently, he has been steadfast in his efforts to get the Rosa Parks Archive opened to scholars and in his support of this research.
A host of friends and colleagues made this book possible. Irva Adams, Gaston Alonso, Caroline Arnold, Beth Bates, Jennifer Bernstein, Chris Bonastia, Herb Boyd, John Bracey, Naomi Braine, Doug Brinkley, Brenda Cardenas, Julie Cooper, Matthew Countryman, Emilye Crosby, Paisley Currah, Angela Dillard, Tilla Durr, Jason Elias, Johanna Fernandez, Melissa Harris-Perry, David Garrow, Henry Louis Gates, Brenna Greer, David Goldberg, Stephanie Melnick Goldstein, Laurie Green, Joshua Guild, Gwendolyn Hall, Roderick Harrison, Wes Hogan, Hasan Jeffries, Amy Schmidt Jones, Peniel Joseph, Ira Katznelson, Robin Kelley, Steve Lang, Chana Kai Lee, Laura Liu, Eric McDuffie, Mojúbàolú Okome, Annelise Orleck, Kimberly Phillips, John Ramirez, Barbara Ransby, Russell Rickford, Dinky Romilly, James Smethurst, Irene Sosa, Robyn Spencer, Kelly Stupple, Celina Su, Patricia Sullivan, Heather Thompson, Patricia Turner, Stephen Ward, Jocelyn Wills, Barbara Winslow, Craig Wilder, and Gary Younge all provided key assistance, inspiration, and support. There would be no book without them.
Numerous archivists assisted with this endeavor. I am particularly grateful to the research staffs at the Library of Congress; Wayne State’s Reuther Library; the Amistad Center at Tulane; the State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Boston University, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe; the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; and Alabama State College. An AAUW American Fellowship helped fund my research sabbatical, and a Tow Travel Grant enabled me to visit various archives. The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics seminar and a PSC-CUNY grant helped me finish.
In Detroit and Montgomery, many people enabled me to do this research. Thanks go to Dorothy Aldridge, David Ashenfelter, Eleanor Blackwell, Carol Carter, John Entenman, Sherrie Farrell, Alfonzo Hunter, Judge Damon Keith, Keenan Keller, Georgette Norman, Gregory Reed, Howard Robinson, Elaine Steele, Mills Thornton, Penny Weaver, and Danton Wilson. My aunt Susan Artinian provided wonderful support and hospitality.
Numerous people gave generously in interviews, committed to the belief that the political life of the great Rosa Parks merits substantive, scholarly research. I am immeasurably grateful to Barbara Alexander, Leon Atchison, Muhammad Ahmad, William Anderson, Dan Aldridge, Dorothy Dewberry Aldridge, Peter Bailey, General Baker, Julian Bond, Herb Boyd, John Bracey, Jamila Brathwaite, Candie Carawan, John Conyers, Doris Crenshaw, Fred Durhal, Willis Edwards, Nikki Giovanni, Robert and Jean Graetz, Carolyn Green, Nathan Hare, Larry Horwitz, Ericka Huggins, Alfonzo Hunter, Esther Cooper Jackson, Frank Joyce, Judge Damon Keith, Roslyn King, Marian Kramer, Chokwe Lumumba, Rhea McCauley, Martha Prescott Norman Noonan, Jack O’Dell, Gwendolyn Patton, Quill Pettway, Judy Richardson, Howard Robinson, Mildred Roxborough, Adam Shakoor, Sue Thrasher, Ed Vaughn, JoAnn Watson, Loretta White, Vonzie Whitlow, Mabel Williams, and Thomas Williamson.
My students at Brooklyn College supplied tremendous enthusiasm for this project and remind me continually of the importance of this research. A number of student research assistants provided key assistance over the course of the project: Alexander Perkins, Dane Peters, Khalina Houston, Darryl Barney, and Marwa Amer. It is hard to imagine this book without Marwa Amer, who was unstinting in energy, unflagging in insight, and the best research companion a scholar could hope for.
My editor, Gayatri Patnaik, is the definition of excellence—committed to the political biography I wanted to write and to the grace of its prose, and with a font of enthusiasm for this project. This book is vastly better for her efforts, those of the amazing Rachael Marks, Rosalie Wieder, Susan Lumenello, Marcy Barnes, and the careful work of the rest of the staff at Beacon, as well as my wonderful indexer Tara James and proofreaders Athan and Nancy Theoharis.
During the writing of this book, I have been engaged in a contemporary struggle for justice, which began with the case of my former student Fahad Hashmi, challenging the rights violations occurring in the federal judicial system post-9/11. Like Mrs. Parks, my friends and comrades in that struggle demonstrate what it means to be steadfast and undaunted in speaking truth to power. I am particularly grateful to—and thankful for—the Hashmi family, Sally Eberhardt, Laura Rovner, Pardiss Kebriaei, Rawad Guneid, Brian Pickett, Shane Kadidal, Suzanne Hayes, Saadia Toor, Leili Kashani, Sean Maher, Farah Khan, Bill Quigley, Amna Akbar, Vikki Law, and the people who attended the vigils outside the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York for their work for justice. That struggle profoundly shaped how I would see and reflect the history I tell here.
I am blessed by the remarkable gift of friendship—of friends who read chapters, reminded me time and again of the importance of telling a new history of Rosa Parks, carried on about the world with me, and sustained me over the years this book took. Prudence Cumberbatch, Dayo Gore, Karen Miller, and Brian Purnell discussed each twist and turn of this research, and cared tremendously about me and this project. Komozi Woodard was immeasurably supportive from this project’s inception and unwavering in his belief that the bigger story of the radical Rosa needed to be told. Arnold Franklin endured endless conversations about the book and my spirits. Alejandra Marchevsky is a “friend of my mind.”
And finally, like for Mrs. Parks, this all begins with my family, who taught me to love justice and practice kindness—and inspire me with theirs—and to whom this work is dedicated.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
BWOHP Black Women Oral History Project, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA
CRDP Civil Rights Documentation Proje
ct, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC
GMP George Metcalf Papers, Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture of the New York Public Library, New York, NY
HP Highlander Folk School Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, WI
JHC James Haskins Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Boston, MA
JMC Jessica Mitford Collection, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
LMP Lucy Massie Phenix Collection, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, WI
MB-NAACP Montgomery Branch, NAACP files (limited), Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture of the New York Public Library, New York, NY
MHP Myles Horton Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, WI
NAACP NAACP Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
PMP Pauli Murray Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA
RPA Rosa Parks Archive inventory list and sample documents, created by Guernsey’s Auction House, New York, NY
RPP Rosa Parks Papers, Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
SC Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY
SOHP Southern Oral History Program, Center for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
VDP Virginia Durr Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA
VP Preston and Bonita Valien Papers, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA
INTRODUCTION
1. The first African American honored was Jacob J. Chestnut, one of two Capitol police officers fatally shot in 1998. Michael Janofsky, “Thousands Gather at the Capitol to Remember a Hero,” New York Times, October 31, 2005; Judge Damon Keith, author interview, Detroit, MI, June 14, 2007; Willis Edwards, author phone interview, November 17, 2010.
2. Keith, author interview.
3. “US Capitol Honors Civil Rights Leader Parks,” ABCNews.com, October 30, 2005.
4. Peter Slevin, “A Quiet Woman’s Resonant Farewell,” Washington Post, November 2, 2005. In November 2006, the postal service changed its policy to reduce the wait from ten to five years after a person has died before he or she can be honored with a postage stamp, partially due to the pressure for a Parks stamp; on July 4, 2007, Senator Barack Obama introduced a bill authorizing a Parks stamp.
5. “President Signs H.R. 4145 to Place Statue of Rosa Parks in U.S. Capitol,” press release, White House, December 1, 2005, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/.
6. Frank Joyce, author phone interview, March 28, 2012.
7. Described as “unassuming seamstress” in Maria Newman, “Thousands Pay Final Respects to Rosa Parks in Detroit,” New York Times, November 2, 2005; “accidental matriarch” in Janofsky, “Thousands Gather”; “quiet” and “humble” in “US Civil Rights Icon Dies,” BBC.com, October 25, 2005, and “Parks Remembered for Her Courage, Humility,” CNN.com, October 20, 2005; “humble” in “Thousands Attend Rosa Parks Funeral in Detroit,” USA Today, November 2, 2005; “quiet” in Slevin, “A Quiet Woman’s Resonant Farewell”; as “mild-mannered” and a “gentle giant” in Cassandra Spratling, “Goodbye Mrs. Parks,” Detroit Free Press, October 25, 2005. While challenging a number of the myths surrounding Parks’s life, E. R. Shipp eulogizes Parks in a way that contributes to the idea of her as a nonpolitical actor. Shipp, “Rosa Parks, 92, Founding Symbol of Civil Rights Movement, Dies,” New York Times, October 25, 2005.
8. Douglas Brinkley, Rosa Parks: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2000), 118.
9. The Detroit Free Press would go so far as to write, “When Rosa Parks refused to get up, an entire race of people began to stand up for their rights. . . . It was a time when racial discrimination was so common, many blacks never questioned it. At least not out loud.” Spratling, “Goodbye Mrs. Parks.”
10. Taylor Branch lauded Parks in his Pulitzer Prize–winning Parting the Waters, as “one of those rare people of whom everyone agreed that she gave more than she got. Her character represented one of the isolated high blips on the graph of human nature, offsetting a dozen or so sociopaths.” Yet all Branch included about Parks’s political work in his nearly one-thousand-page book was the fact that she had been secretary of the local NAACP chapter (but nothing about what she actually did with the chapter) and a mention of her 1955 visit to the Highlander Folk School on the urging of white Montgomerian Virginia Durr. Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 125.
11. Historian Komozi Woodard recounts being at Blackside Productions during the editing of Eyes on the Prize and witnessing how nearly all of Parks’s interview ended up on the cutting-room floor because she spoke too slowly.
12. Guernsey’s auction house compiled an inventory of all of the papers and effects, scanned a handful of documents, and prepared a short summary of a small number of other documents, which they made public to enable the sale. I have used this in limited ways in the book, cited as the Rosa Parks Archive (RPA). Documents downloaded April 18, 2010.
13. Debra Johnson, “Civil Rights Leader Donates Papers to Archives,” South End, Wayne State University student newspaper, clip undated, in Box 41, Folder 1, JHC. Approached to donate her papers to the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State, she gave a portion covering her political activities up to 1976 to them, but not the entirety of them. Her quote in the Wayne student newspaper makes it seem as if she anticipated making a second donation at a later date. There are some notable papers at the Reuther Library, including all of her notes from her first visit to Highlander, but very few personal letters from friends or political allies, notes from her speeches or other personal writings, or any form of diary. Given how many radical publications and newsletters she donated to the library in 1976, it is clear that Parks wanted to leave a record of her own politics and preserve the contributions of these more militant organizations to the black struggle.
CHAPTER ONE: “A LIFE HISTORY OF BEING REBELLIOUS”
1. Rosa Parks, Myles Horton, and E. D. Nixon, radio interview by Studs Terkel, June 8, 1973, transcript, Box 14, Folder 4, MHP.
2. Stewart Burns, To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King’s Sacred Mission to Save America 1955–1968 (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 18.
3. Document II-C-3, RPA.
4. Document II-A-8, RPA.
5. Document II-A-13, RPA.
6. Gregory Skwira, “The Rosa Parks Story: A Bus Ride, a Boycott, a New Beginning,” in Blacks in Detroit: A Reprint of Articles from the Detroit Free Press, Scott McGehee and Susan Watson, eds. (Detroit: Detroit Free Press, 1980), 12.
7. “‘I’d Do It Again,’ Says Rights Action Initiator,” Los Angeles Times, December 16, 1965.
8. Rosa Parks, interview by Cynthia Stokes Brown, Southern Exposure (Spring 1981): 16.
9. Roxanne Brown, “Mother of the Movement: Nation Honors Rosa Parks with Birthday Observance,” Ebony, February 1988, 70, 72.
10. Leona had three sisters; her sister Fannie was the oldest and had a different mother. Leona was the middle daughter, between Bessie and Cora, of Sylvester and Rose Edwards. Leona also had a much younger brother, Sonny, who also had a different mother. Census records downloaded at ProGenealogists.com; Barbara Alexander, author phone interview, May 23, 2012.
11. Douglas Brinkley, Rosa Parks: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2000), 15.
12. Rosa Parks, transcripts of interviews with Jim Haskins, 1988, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC. In the James Haskins Collection, on file at Boston University, there are portions of unedited interview transcripts and one tape from his interviews with Parks. This is only a portion of the interviews he did with her and it is unclear whether the transcripts cover the whole interview from that day. Portions (sometimes jumbled) include interviews from July 7, August 22, August 24, August 25, and May 18, 1988. In time, it is hoped that the rest of the transcripts and all the tapes of Haskins’s
interviews with Parks will be found and opened to the public.
13. Interview with Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, Marcia Greenlee, August 22–23, 1978, BWOHP, Volume 8, 248.
14. Listed in inventory as D304 and D306, RPA. He signed his letter “James.”
15. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.
16. Eliot Wigginton, Refuse to Stand Silently By: An Oral History of Grassroots Social Activism in America, 1921–1964 (New York: Anchor, 1991), 159.
17. Rosa Parks, interview, June 19, 1981, You Got to Move research files, Folder 1, Box 11, LMP; Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 22.
18. Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks: My Story (New York: Dial Books, 1992), 30.
19. Parks, interview, You Got to Move, LMP.
20. Document II-A-6, RPA.
21. Mary Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 88, 89, 197–202.
22. In David Garrow, ed., The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955–1956 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1989), 554.
23. Ibid.
24. Wigginton, Refuse to Stand, 161.
25. Parks, interview, You Got to Move, LMP.
26. Ibid.
27. Earl Selby and Miriam Selby, Odyssey: Journey through Black America (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), 56.
28. Document II-A-4, RPA.
29. Parks, interview, You Got to Move, LMP.
30. Parks, My Story, 34.
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Page 37
