The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

by Jeanne Theoharis

  31. Ibid., 33.

  32. Interview with Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks File, Box 2, File 7, GMP.

  33. Parks, My Story, 53–54.

  34. “Race Urged to Keep Faith in its Fight,” Chicago Defender, June 9, 1956.

  35. Document, II-A-14, RPA.

  36. Ibid.

  37. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.

  38. Interview with Parks, Rosa Parks File, Box 2, File 7, GMP.

  39. Wigginton, Refuse to Stand, 163.

  40. Selby, Odyssey, 55–56.

  41. Parks, My Story, 33–34.

  42. Selby, Odyssey, 56.

  43. Parks, My Story, 26.

  44. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 28.

  45. Parks, My Story, 26.

  46. Ibid., 27.

  47. Scanned handwritten document ca. 1956, Document II-A-14, RPA.

  48. Ibid.

  49. “Ancestors of Rosa (McCauley) Parks,” census documents, Ancestry.com and Progenealogists.com.

  50. Barbara Alexander, author phone interview, May 23, 2012.

  51. Records describe Leona as divorced but do not suggest that Jim Carlie had been previously married.

  52. Janell McGrew, “Parks’s Quiet Courage Helped Change the World,” Montgomery Advertiser, October 25, 2005.

  53. Parks, interview, You Got to Move, LMP.

  54. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.

  55. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 29.

  56. Parks interview, BWOHP, 249.

  57. J. Mills Thornton III, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 58.

  58. Parks, My Story, 56.

  59. Willy S. Leventhal, The Children Coming On: A Retrospective of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Montgomery, AL: Black Belt Press, 1998), 52.

  60. Mary Fair Burks, “Trailblazers: Women in the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965, Vicki Crawford et al., eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 72.

  61. Parks, My Story, 54.

  62. Interview with Parks, Rosa Parks File Box 2, File 7, GMP.

  63. Parks, My Story, 55.

  64. Carolyn Green, author phone interview, May 29, 2012.

  65. Ibid., 57.

  66. Wigginton, Refuse to Stand, 163.

  67. Ibid., 165.

  68. Parks, interview, You Got to Move, LMP.

  69. Scanned letter, “Galatas” to Parks, April 3, 1929, I-G-35, RPA.

  70. Garrow, The Walking City, 553, 558.

  71. Wigginton, Refuse to Stand, 165.

  72. Parks, interview, You Got to Move, LMP.

  73. Document I-D-22, RPA.

  74. Parks, interview, BWOHP, 248.

  75. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 36.

  76. I am calling the unnamed narrator Rosa because the piece is written in the first person.

  77. Scanned handwritten document c. 1950s or early 1960s, Document II-A-1, RPA.

  78. Parks’s story resembles Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, whose author, Harriet Jacobs, managed to outwit her slave master and refused to consent to a sexual relationship by using her own words and cunning.

  79. Parks, My Story, 62. Given that in other places she says she didn’t have a lot of romantic experience, this could be a veiled reference to Mr. Charlie.

  80. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.

  81. Parks, interview, BWOHP, 25.

  82. Ibid., 252.

  83. Parks, My Story, 63.

  84. Ibid., 68.

  85. One exception is Angela Bassett’s portrayal of Rosa and Peter Francis James’s as Raymond in Julie Dash’s 2002 film The Rosa Parks Story.

  86. Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed, Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope, and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994), 46.

  87. Vernon Jarrett, “The Forgotten Heroes of the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” series, Chicago Tribune, December 1975.

  88. Parks, Quiet Strength, 46.

  89. Septima Clark with Cynthia Stokes Brown, Ready from Within (Navarro, CA: Wild Trees Press, 1986), 16.

  90. Alice Walker, The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker (New York: New Press, 2010), 271–72.

  91. Garrow, The Walking City, 557; “Reminiscences,” BWOHP, 252.

  92. Parks, My Story, 67–68.

  93. Ibid., 74–75.

  94. Ibid., 80–81.

  95. Jarrett, “Forgotten Heroes.”

  96. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC; see also Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 125.

  97. Pamela Brooks, Boycotts, Buses, and Passes: Black Women’s Resistance in the U.S. South and South Africa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 125.

  98. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.

  99. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 40; Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.

  100. Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

  101. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 39.

  102. Parks, My Story, 81.

  103. Dorothy Autrey, “The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Alabama, 1913–1952,” PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 1985; Wigginton, Refuse to Stand, 167.

  104. Esther Cooper Jackson, author interview, December 15, 2009.

  105. Gwen Patton, author phone interview, April 19, 2012.

  106. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 42.

  107. Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed, Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue with Today’s Youth (New York: Lee & Low Books, 1997), 25.

  108. Thornton, Dividing Lines, 59.

  109. Parks, My Story, 82.

  CHAPTER TWO: “IT WAS VERY DIFFICULT TO KEEP GOING WHEN ALL OUR WORK SEEMED TO BE IN VAIN”

  1. Rosa Parks, interview, June 19, 1981, You Got to Move research files, Folder 1, Box 11, LMP.

  2. Rosa Parks, Myles Horton, and E. D. Nixon, radio interview by Studs Terkel, June 8, 1973, transcript, Box 14, Folder 4, MHP; Willy S. Leventhal, The Children Coming On: A Retrospective of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Montgomery, AL: Black Belt Press, 1998), 54.

  3. Rosa Parks, taped interview by Jim Haskins, December 28, 1988, JHC.

  4. Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York: Scribner, 2002), 97.

  5. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.

  6. Eliot Wigginton, Refuse to Stand Silently By: An Oral History of Grassroots Social Activism in America, 1921–1964 (New York: Anchor, 1991), 69.

  7. Vernon Jarrett, “The Forgotten Heroes of the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” series, Chicago Tribune, December 1975.

  8. E. D. Nixon, interview, You Got to Move research files, Folder 1, Box 11, LMP.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Donnie Williams with Wayne Greenshaw, The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2006), 21–33.

  11. Douglas Brinkley, Rosa Parks: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2000), 51.

  12. Rosa Parks, interview conducted by Blackside, Inc., on November 14, 1985, for Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954–1965), available at Washington University Digital Library, http://digital.wustl.edu/eyesontheprize/.

  13. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 51.

  14. Dorothy Autrey, “The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Alabama, 1913–1952,” PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 1985, 242.

  15. Voting form, Box 4, Folder 8, VP.

  16. Wigginton, Refuse to Stand, 168.

  17. Autrey, “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Alabama,” 245.

  18. Parks, Horton, Nixon, Terkel interview, June 8, 1973,
Transcript Box 14, Folder 4, MHP.

  19. Wigginton, Refuse to Stand, 169.

  20. Interview with Parks, Rosa Parks File, Box 2, File 7, GMP.

  21. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 56.

  22. Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks: My Story (New York: Dial Books, 1992), 75. In some accounts, she passed on her third try; in others, on her fourth.

  23. George R. Metcalf, Black Profiles (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 259.

  24. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 60–61.

  25. Patricia Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years (New York: Routledge, 2003), 27.

  26. Parks, interview, You Got to Move, LMP.

  27. Wigginton, Refuse to Stand, 168–69.

  28. Jarrett, “Forgotten Heroes.”

  29. Parks, taped Haskins interview, December 28, 1988, JHC.

  30. Parks, My Story, 108.

  31. Earl Selby and Miriam Selby, Odyssey: Journey through Black America (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), 51.

  32. Robert and Jean Graetz, author interview, July 21, 2010.

  33. Parks, My Story, 97.

  34. For further description of this case, see Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Knopf, 2010).

  35. Ibid., 6.

  36. Parks, My Story, 97-98; Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC. Parks was judicious about the detail she provided about her political activities but not deceptive; it is hard to think of a reason why Parks would independently mention Taylor’s case and the Abbeville sheriff to Jim Haskins and describe an incident between Bellin and the sheriff—and not mention a run-in with him, if she also had one.

  37. See also Danielle McGuire, “‘At the Dark End of the Street’: Sexualized Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle,” PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2007; Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 70.

  38. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 44–45.

  39. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 26.

  40. Ibid., 36.

  41. Autrey, “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Alabama,” 245; Box II: C4, Folder 2, NAACP.

  42. McGuire, “Dark End of the Street,” 67–68.

  43. Listed in Guernsey’s inventory as W-D364 and W-D367, RPA.

  44. As cited in Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003),167.

  45. Ibid. The NAACP records for the 1950 meeting, however, do not list Lorch or Parks attending. Perhaps they did—or perhaps Lorch is recalling Parks’s opposition to red-baiting from another time, even leading up to this annual meeting (Box II: A40, NAACP).

  46. Sullivan, Freedom Writer, 86.

  47. Autrey, “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Alabama,” 245–46.

  48. Branch reports, Box II: C4, Folder 1, NAACP.

  49. Parks, interview, You Got to Move, LMP.

  50. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 141–43. Parks later told Baker that this trip was the first time she had left Alabama, and it had a significant impression on her. The NAACP’s files contain a March 11, 1946, letter from Parks on the meeting at Jacksonville, saying she was pleased to have met “Miss Baker and Mr. Carter. I met Mr. Jones when he was here last year” (Box II: C4, Folder 2, NAACP). However it seems conceivable that Parks could have attended the Atlanta meeting but not personally have met Baker until Jacksonville.

  51. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 67; RP to NAACP, March 11, 1946, Box II: C4, Folder 2, NAACP.

  52. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 68–69.

  53. Ransby, Ella Baker, 142.

  54. Extensive correspondence between Montgomery branch and national office found in, Box II: C4, Folder 2, and Box II: C390, Folder 4, NAACP.

  55. Ibid.

  56. A pamphlet from Nixon’s 1945 reelection does not list Parks on the campaign committee. Box II: C4, Folder 2, NAACP.

  57. Williams, The Thunder of Angels, 44.

  58. See annual meeting lists in Box II: A35 and Box II: A37, NAACP. I am unable to corroborate who actually attended these meetings.

  59. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 69.

  60. Ibid.

  61. Fred Powledge, Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (New York: Little, Brown, 1991), 74.

  62. Autrey, “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Alabama,” 254–55.

  63. Lamont Yeakey, “The Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott, 1955–1956,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1979, 118.

  64. Wigginton, Refuse to Stand,169

  65. Parks, My Story, 102.

  66. J. Mills Thornton III, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 33–35.

  67. Williams, Thunder of Angels, 41.

  68. David Garrow, ed., The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1989), 445–46.

  69. Parks, My Story, 100–101.

  70. E. D. Nixon, interview conducted by Blackside, Inc., 1979, for Eyes on the Prize.

  71. Olson, Freedom’s Daughters, 97.

  72. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.

  73. Williams, Thunder of Angels, 45.

  74. Laurie Boush Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 128–29.

  75. Septima Clark, interview (UC 525A), May 23, 1973, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison.

  76. Interview with Parks, Rosa Parks, Box 2, File 2, GMP.

  77. Autrey, “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Alabama,” 249.

  78. Thornton, Dividing Lines, 31.

  79. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 73.

  80. Autrey, “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Alabama,” 257–58.

  81. Roxanne Brown, “Mother of the Movement: Nation Honors Rosa Parks with Birthday Observance,” Ebony, February 1988,

  82. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.

  83. Parks, interview, You Got to Move, LMP; Parks, My Story, 116.

  84. Virginia Durr corroborated this in a 1957 letter. Sullivan, Freedom Writer, 148.

  85. “Jazz Drummer Dies in Electric Chair,” Jet, April 10, 1958, 48.

  86. Yeakey, “The Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott,” 183.

  87. Parks, My Story, 98.

  88. Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), 23–24.

  89. Folder 1958–1964, Oversize Box, RPP.

  90. Parks, My Story, 99.

  91. Ibid.

  92. Wigginton, Refuse to Stand, 229.

  93. Emily Rovetch, ed., Like It Is: Arthur E. Thomas Interviews Leaders on Black America (New York: E. P Dutton, 1981), 51.

  94. Parks, interview, You Got to Move, LMP.

  95. When Cleveland Courts was built, some black residences were destroyed, pushing people out of their homes or rentals. The reliability of the government as a landlord over the years diminished.

  96. Joe Azbell, “City Limits” column, Montgomery Advertiser, March 1, 1955; Troy Thomas Jackson, “Born in Montgomery: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Civil Rights Montgomery,” PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 2006, 109.

  97. Interview with Robert Hughes, Box 3, Folder 12, VP.

  98. Interview with Reverend Palmer, Box 3, Folder 12, VP.

  99. Herb Boyd, “Rosa Parks Remembers: Forty Years Later,” Crisis 103, no. 1 (January 1996).

  100. Rosalyn Oliver King, author phone interview, August 9, 2010.

  101. Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 52.

  102. Cassandra Spratling, “Catch the Bus,” Detroit Free Press, Sep
tember 30, 2001.

  103. Rochelle Riley, “Two Women Work So Their Lives Are Worth Parks’s Efforts,” Detroit Free Press, November 2, 2005.

  104. Interview with Mary Hays Carter, Rosa Parks File, Box 2, File 2, GMP.

  105. Parks, interview, You Got to Move, LMP.

  106. Ibid.

  107. Thornton, Dividing Lines, 54.

  108. Leventhal, The Children Coming On, 45–46.

  109. Selby, Odyssey, 57.

  110. Leventhal, The Children Coming On, 14.

  111. Thornton, Dividing Lines, 40.

  112. Rosa Parks, interview, Eyes on the Prize, 1–2; MB-NAACP minutes, 1954–55, Box 1, Book 2, SC.

  113. Parks, Horton, and Nixon, Terkel interview, MHP.

  114. Jackson, “Born in Montgomery,” 87.

  115. Ibid.

  116. Parks, Horton, and Nixon, Terkel interview, MHP.

  117. Rosa Parks, interview by John H. Britton, September 28, 1967, CRDP, 16–17. Parks observed, “[A] few times we would get a better decision, I think, because we were working through the NAACP. . . . It was better to have the branch there than not have it” (17).

  118. Wigginton, Refuse to Stand, 170.

  119. As quoted in Williams, Thunder of Angels, 41.

  120. Given the racial strictures of the time, it’s not clear how comfortable and open Rosa Parks would have felt with Virginia Durr, despite the white Southerner’s fierce civil rights commitments. Certainly, she greatly valued her relationship with Durr, and the two grew into friends, but it’s unclear how at ease she felt with her during the 1950s.

  121. Septima Clark with Cynthia Stokes Brown, Ready from Within (Navarro, CA: Wild Trees Press, 1986), 32.

  122. Williams, Thunder of Angels, 45.

  123. Loop College Community Workshop short excerpt, Box 22, Folder 22, HP.

  124. Clark, Ready from Within, 17.

  125. Ibid.

  126. Loop College excerpt, Box 22, Folder 22, HP.

  127. Brinkley, Rosa Parks, 94.

  128. Parks, My Story, 118.

  129. Parks, Horton, and Nixon, Terkel interview, MHP.

  130. Wigginton, Refuse to Stand, 240.

  131. Roas Parks, interview by Cynthia Stokes Brown, Southern Exposure (Spring 1981): 7.

  132. Ibid.

  133. Parks, My Story, 124.

  134. Alice Cobb, interview, You Got to Move research files, Folder 1, Box 7, LMP.

  135. Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 222.