The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Read online

  Finding and hearing Rosa Parks has not been easy. The idea of the “quiet” Rosa Parks has obscured much of what she said and did. It has made it all too easy to be satisfied with a narrow sense of her contributions, which rest on a gendered caricature of a quiet NAACP secretary who kept her seat on the bus. Despite a voluminous number of articles about and interviews with her, most reporters asked similar questions. They tended to see her without hearing her, without listening for the political sensibility of the real actor behind the idea of Rosa Parks. Mrs. Parks’s words were slow and measured, and interviewers often missed what she was actually saying, impatiently plowing ahead with the story they wanted to tell.11 The history of the boycott, of what led up to it and what happened during it, has become the stuff of legend—and numerous mistakes and misimpressions have been canonized in the historical record, creating another set of blinders. Memories fade, distort, and bend—and the invaluable oral histories of the period offer different, sometimes contradictory accounts of the boycott and its pre-history. Moreover, as her friends and colleagues make amply clear, Mrs. Parks never volunteered information that wasn’t directly asked for. She was a political activist and a Southern black woman—both of which called for the judicious use of stories, the masking of unpleasant or unnecessary details, and the tendency to background the individual to put forth the interests of the group. Her political activism was born in the viciousness of the 1930s Jim Crow South and the anti-Communist hysteria that attended it—and this would indelibly shape how she obscured her own political sensibility and activities. While maintaining her activism over decades, she remained circumspect about it. Finally, for the second half of her life, Rosa Parks yearned for privacy and found her fame hard to bear, yet she simultaneously believed in her responsibility to continue telling the story of the movement as a way to keep it going. Wanting the history of black struggle to be preserved but disliking the spotlight, she often sought to endure the interviews, rather than use them to tell a different story.

  Thus, identifying her frame of these events—her philosophy and narrative voice—has required listening around the margins of those scores of interviews to excavate a more substantive account of what was happening and how she saw it. She chose her words with care, and so, particularly in the sections related to her bus stand and the boycott, I have stitched together many, many quotes from dozens of interviews so that we might hear her insights and understand the events as she saw them. The black press has proven invaluable to this work, providing some record of her activities, particularly in the years after she left Montgomery. In addition to combing the archives for mentions of her activities, letters, meeting records, newsletters, and other documents, I have interviewed many of her friends, family, and political associates to round out this picture.

  Unfortunately, many of Parks’s personal effects—dresses, awards, sewing basket, eyeglasses, and papers—have been caught up in an extended legal dispute over her estate between the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute, which she cofounded with Elaine Steele, and her family. This led a Michigan probate judge to give Guernsey’s, a celebrity auction house in New York City, the responsibility of selling all of it, with the profits to be distributed between her institute and family. Guernsey’s has been attempting to sell the Rosa Parks Archive for five years, steadfastly unwilling to let any scholar make even a cursory examination. The auction house prepared an inventory of materials, a sixty-four-page list and companion sampling of interesting documents12—a task that would be unthinkable without a scholar to contextualize the significance of the documents if Parks was considered a serious political thinker like Thomas Jefferson or Martin Luther King Jr.

  The legacy of Rosa Parks over the past decade has been besieged by controversies around profit, control, and the use of her image. This treatment is at odds with how Parks lived and her commitment to the preservation and dissemination of African American history. Parks had donated the “first” installment of her papers to Wayne State University in 1976. “I do hope that my contribution can be made use of,” she told a Wayne student reporter.13 Yet a vast trove of her papers, letters, and other ephemera sits in a storage facility in Manhattan, of use to no one, priced at $6 million to $10 million. Institutions such as Wayne State University, Alabama State University, and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture would be logical homes for Parks’s papers, but they cannot compete in such an auction. And so Parks’s ideas and life’s work sit idly in a New York warehouse, waiting to be purchased. When that archive is finally opened to researchers, a far more nuanced and detailed record of Parks’s political ties and perspectives will be available, no doubt deepening and challenging aspects of this book.

  All of this provides certain challenges for a biographer. In attempting to find Rosa Parks I have tried to go beyond the symbol to excavate the political actor, to hear her amidst the bells and whistles. Although I believe I have come to understand some of her political sensibility and to contextualize its roots and historical landscape, there is much still unknown. This is fundamentally a political biography; it does not fully capture her community of friends and family ties, her faith and church life, her marriage, her daily activities. That is a task for others.

  What I have endeavored to do is to begin the job of going behind the icon of Rosa Parks to excavate and examine the scope of her political life. In the process, I have used her history to retell and reexamine the span of the black freedom struggle, and to critique the many mythologies that surround much of the popular history of the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks’s life is already employed to tell a story of the United States. And so what I do here is tell a different story—showing the much broader truths about race in America, the struggle for black freedom, and the nature of individual courage to be gained from a fuller accounting of her life, a “life history of being rebellious” as she put it. It is a story with far greater lessons on how we might work for social justice today—how a person makes change in a moment and over a lifetime, and what is entailed in the struggle for justice.

  A word on naming: I refer to Rosa Parks throughout the book both as Parks and Mrs. Parks. Most people, even young schoolchildren, recognize the name “Rosa Parks.” Using Parks and Mrs. Parks—less familiar ways of naming her—signals the need to look at her more carefully. I predominantly use “Parks” (despite the fact that this was how she and others referred to her husband) to follow the custom in scholarly biographies of referring to the subject by her last name. But I interchange this with “Mrs. Parks,” the title a form of respect that white people of the era routinely denied black women and the way many people who respected her referred to her. Using the honorific, then, does more than assert Parks’s marital and family status; it also adds a degree of dignity, distance, and formality to mark that she is not fully ours as a nation to appropriate. And through the title’s juxtaposition of “Mrs. Rosa Parks” and “rebellious,” I hope to get at the complex and significant ways she moved through the world.

  It is a rare gift as a scholar to get to deconstruct the popular narrative and demythologize an historical figure, and, in the process, discover a more impressive and substantive person underneath. I have been greatly fortunate in this task. Rosa Parks’s political history spans most of the twentieth century, providing an exceptional glimpse into the scope and steadfastness of the struggle for racial justice in America over the past century.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “A Life History of Being Rebellious”

  The Early Years of Rosa McCauley Parks

  WHEN ASKED WHAT GAVE HER the strength and commitment to refuse segregation, Parks credited her mother and grandfather “for giving me the spirit of freedom. . . that I should not feel because of my race or color, inferior to any person. That I should do my very best to be a respectable person, to respect myself, to expect respect from others, and to learn what I possibly could for self improvement.”1 This learned sense of rectitude and race pride made Rosa Parks a wo
man who insisted on respect and found ways over the course of her life to fight for justice and freedom.

  Parks’s life reveals “a life history of being rebellious,” as she liked to explain it.2 She also learned that society did not take kindly to black rebels. Survival thus necessitated “treading the tightrope of Jim Crow,” a complex daily negotiation.3 From an early age, respectability for Parks meant not just the image she presented to the world but the respect she expected—and would demand—from society around her.

  Nevertheless, Parks long struggled with the idea of recounting her life story—approached to do one since the boycott began. On a scrap of paper written in the late 1950s, she wondered “Is it worthwhile to reveal the intimacies of the past life? Would the people be sympathetic or disillusioned when the facts of my life are told?”4 On another scrap from this period, she notes, “Hurt, harm and danger. The dark closet of my mind. So much to remember.”5 For the second half of her adult life, Parks was bombarded with interviews. This continual questioning weighed heavily on her, particularly having to tell and retell painful incidents. In 1980, she asked a reporter, “Have you ever been hurt and a place tries to heal a little bit, and then you just pull that scab off it over and over again? So some things I don’t mention and some things I do. . . . there’s plenty I have never told.”6 At two substantive junctures—the writing of her autobiography with civil rights colleague and children’s book author Jim Haskins and her collaboration with celebrated historian Douglas Brinkley on his Penguin Lives short biography—she safeguarded a modicum of privacy, limiting which aspects of her political and personal biography she reported. The fear of people being disillusioned may have still weighed on her decades later.

  Born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, “halfway between the Emancipation Proclamation and the new era of freedom,”7 Rosa Louise McCauley was named for her mother’s mother, Rose, and her father’s mother, Louisa. Her audacity and political sensibility emerged early, influenced by her mother’s firm determination. “Instead of saying, ‘Yes sir,’” Rosa recalled, her mother “was always saying ‘No, you won’t do this.’”8 Given the racial climate of early twentieth-century Alabama, saying no required a deep sense of courage. Elaine Steele, Rosa’s longtime friend and caretaker, made a similar observation about Rosa: “She can very quietly say ‘no’ or ‘I prefer not,’ and you know instinctively that that is the bottom line.”9

  Rosa’s mother, Leona Edwards, had been born on April 2, 1887, in Pine Level, Alabama, and attended Payne University in Selma, though she didn’t earn a degree.10 Leona became a schoolteacher and met Rosa’s father, James McCauley, a skilled carpenter and stonemason. James, who had been born in Abbeville, Alabama, the second of twelve children born to Anderson and Louisa McCauley, built houses and did masonry work. Rosa’s parents were accomplished and driven, and that motivation transferred to their children.

  James and Leona married on April 12, 1912, in Pine Level. Leona, who quit teaching when she became pregnant, was unprepared for being a parent and felt isolated and lonely. “She always talked about how unhappy she was,” Rosa recalled.11 Rosa was a frail infant and required a great deal of care. James’s brother Robert had come to stay with them, and James left often to find work. Alone and with little financial support, Leona first lived with her in-laws and then moved into her parents’ home in Pine Level when Rosa was two.

  For stability and access to education for their children, Leona wanted James to find work at Tuskegee Institute but he resisted.12 James’s vocation as a skilled craftsman and his wandering eye took him in search of work across the South and on to New York and Ohio. This left Leona on her own to raise Rosa and her younger brother Sylvester, who was born two and half years after Rosa, on August 20, 1915. Except for a visit when she was five, Rosa did not see her father while she was growing up; he “wasn’t stable enough to settle for a long time in one place.”13 After she became an adult, her father reached out to make amends. “I kept thinking of writing you and still putting it off,” he wrote her in 1950. “It was in view of the fact that I was over shadowed. With open shame that I and I alone allowled [sic] the Evil spirit to lead me completely out of myself for these many years in grose [sic] desertion of a good wife and two of the sweetest children ever lived.”14 So Rosa Parks was raised by a single mother—in a home full of love with her grandparents, great-grandfather, mother, and brother.

  Because the Pine Level school had a teacher, Leona McCauley got a job teaching in the village of Spring Hill and was gone during the week, leaving the children in her parents’ care. This was hard on Rosa. She once argued with her grandmother, who wanted to punish Sylvester, telling her not to “whip brother and I said he’s just a little baby and he doesn’t have no mamma and no papa either.”15

  Her grandparents had been enslaved. The product of a union between his mother and the slave owner’s son, Rosa’s grandfather had “no discernible features of black people,” but Sylvester Edwards was a committed race man.16 Because he had been regularly beaten and nearly starved as a slave boy, he had, according to Rosa, a “somewhat belligerent attitude towards white people” and “liked to laugh at whites behind their backs.” He took advantage of his light skin to say and do things that would “embarrass and agitate white people.”17 He didn’t let his daughters work in white houses or want his grandchildren playing with white children—and took pleasure in resisting the racial customs of the day.

  At six, Rosa saw black soldiers returning from World War I, acting “as if they deserved equal rights because they had served their country” and being shown that this was not the case.18 Indeed, the summer of 1919 became known as Red Summer, as whites rioted and reasserted their power and position in the wake of the changes brought by the war. A staunch believer in self-defense, Rosa’s grandfather became a supporter of Marcus Garvey and his pan-Africanist Universal Negro Improvement Association. Though often associated with New York and the urban North, Garvey had a large and supple base of supporters in the rural South, who were drawn to his bold message of economic self-sufficiency, black-nationalist pride, and self-determination. Klan violence worsened in Pine Level after World War I. They burned churches, and, as Rosa remembered, “people were often flogged or found dead.”19 Garvey’s message resonated even more. In the face of this growing violence, Sylvester Edwards would often sit out at night on the porch with his rifle. Rosa recalled that he almost dared the Klan to come onto their property because he was ready to meet them head on. She stayed awake with him some nights, keeping vigil with him. “I wanted to see him kill a Ku Kluxer,” she explained.20 Sometimes they would sleep with their clothes on in fear of being attacked in their sleep.

  According to Garvey historian Mary Rolinson, Marcus Garvey came to Alabama in November 1923, meeting with ministers in Birmingham and giving an address in Tuskegee.21 Parks’s grandfather attended a meeting “but he was rejected because of his white appearance. That ended our talking about our going to Africa. . . . [T]hey wouldn’t accept him and I can remember that very well.”22 Rosa’s grandfather, who was disabled from arthritis, died when she was ten.

  Steeped in political thought from an early age, Rosa’s family exposed her to a sense of black pride. From an early age, she knew “we were not free.” Her mother admired Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. A schoolteacher by profession, Leona McCauley taught Rosa her alphabet and figures before she went to school. “In fact I don’t even remember [a time] when I didn’t read,” Parks explained.23 She extolled her mother’s skill and commitment to education: “she believed in teaching anybody . . . and she could teach them.”24

  Rosa would grow to be a lifelong devoted reader, but this also exposed her to racist texts. Her early introduction to the philosophy of white supremacy came around age eight when she stumbled upon William Gallo Schell’s Is the Negro a Beast? A Reply to Chas. Carroll’s Book Entitled “The Negro a Beast”; Proving That the Negro Is Human from Biblical, Scientific, and Historical Standpoints.
While seeking to counter the argument that black people were akin to beasts and therefore only fit for slavery, Schell’s 1901 book still maintained the idea of black inferiority. After reading the book, Rosa felt “awful” as she realized that black people were “not considered complete human beings.”25 “When I learned that we, my family, were Negroes, it caused me to think that throughout my life I’d have to prove myself as something other than a beast.”26 The impact of the book on young Rosa was immense and devastating as she “didn’t have any idea that there would ever be a way to protest this.” Thus, her discovery of black history in high school was transformative: “I read everything I could, first in school and then later in magazines.”27

  The revelation of black history would indelibly shape Rosa McCauley Parks’s life. She saw the history of black survival, accomplishment, and rebellion as the ultimate weapon against white supremacy. To imagine rebellion was not crazy, a comforting lesson to the adolescent Rosa. As an adult, Parks articulated the ways that the segregated education black children like her received “educate[d] the Negro into believing that he is happier segregated, discriminated against, mistreated and humiliated. Such a good job of brainwashing was done on the Negro that a militant Negro was almost a freak of nature to them, many times ridiculed by others of his group.”28 Education for liberation, reclaiming the history of black resistance, would thus become a driving passion of her adult life. Like other black families, the Edwards family regarded education as a precious commodity that could not be taken away no matter the unequal or dehumanizing treatment. Rosa read voraciously and, upon becoming a public figure, would do everything she could to promote and preserve black history.