The Real Rosa Parks Story Is Better Than the Fairy Tale
The way we talk about her covers up uncomfortable truths about American
racism.
ByJeanne Theoharis
Dr. Theoharis is a professor of political science and the author of
eleven books on the civil rights and Black Power movements including
“The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks” and “The Rebellious Life of
Mrs. Rosa Parks Young Readers’ Edition
<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/645637/the-rebellious-life-of-mrs-rosa-parks-young-readers-edition-by-jeanne-theoharis-and-brandy-colbert/>,”
co-adapted with Brandy Colbert.
* NYT, Feb. 1, 2021
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A booking photo of Rosa Parks taken on Feb. 22, 1956, at the county
sheriff’s office in Montgomery, Ala.
A booking photo of Rosa Parks taken on Feb. 22, 1956, at the county
sheriff’s office in Montgomery, Ala.Credit...Montgomery County Sheriff's
Office, via Associated Press
Mug shot No. 7053 is one of the most iconic images of Rosa Parks. But
the photo, often seen in museums and textbooks and on T-shirts and
websites, isn’t what it seems. Though it’s regularly misattributed as
such, it is/not/the mug shot taken at the time of Mrs. Parks’s arrest in
Montgomery, Ala., on Dec. 1, 1955, after she famously refused to give up
her seat on a bus to a white passenger. It was, in fact, taken when she
wasarrested in February 1956
<http://crdl.usg.edu/export/html/smokinggun/hotcrm/crdl_smokinggun_hotcrm_1103052mmugs100.html?Welcome&Welcome>after
she and 88 other “boycott leaders” were indicted by the city in an
attempt to end the boycott. The confusion around the image reveals
Americans’ overconfidence in what we think we know about Mrs. Parks and
about the civil rights movement.
Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks dominate the Civil Rights Movement
chapters of elementary and high school textbooks and Black History Month
celebrations. And yet much of what people learn about Mrs. Parks is
narrow, distorted, or just plain wrong. In our collective understanding,
she’s trapped in a single moment on a long-ago Montgomery bus, too often
cast as meek, tired, quiet and middle class. The boycott is seen as a
natural outgrowth of her bus stand. It’s inevitable, respectable and not
disruptive.
But that’s not who she was, and it’s not how change actually works.
“Over the years, I have been rebelling against second-class citizenship.
It didn’t begin when I was arrested,” Mrs. Parks reminded interviewers
time and again.
Born Feb. 4, 1913, she had been an activist for two decades before her
bus stand — beginning with her work alongside Raymond Parks in 1931,
whom she married the following year, to organize in defense of the
“Scottsboro Boys <https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog/scottsboro-boys>” (nine
Black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women).
Indeed, one of the issues that animated her six decades of activism was
the injustice of the criminal justice system — wrongful accusations
against Black men, disregard for Black women who had been sexually
assaulted, and police brutality. With a small group of other activists,
including E.D. Nixon, who would become branch president, she spent the
decade before her well-known bus stand working to transform the
Montgomery NAACP into a more activist chapter that focused on voter
registration, criminal justice and desegregation. This was dangerous,
tiring work and Mrs. Parks said it was “very difficult to keep going
when all our work seemed to be in vain.” But she persevered.
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Dispirited by the lack of change and what she called the “complacency”
of many peers, she reformed the NAACP Youth Council in 1954 and urged
her young charges to take greater stands against segregation. When
15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her
seat on a bus in March 1955, many Black Montgomerians were outraged by
Ms. Colvin’s arrest, but some came to decide that the teenager was too
feisty and emotional, and not the right test case. Mrs. Parks encouraged
the young woman’s membership in the Youth Council and was the only adult
leader, according to Ms. Colvin, to stay in touch with her the summer
after her arrest. Mrs. Parks put her hope in the spirit and militancy of
young people.
The day Mrs. Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, she
challenged the police officers arresting her: “Why do you push us
around?” There are no photos from the arrest — no sense this would be a
history-changing moment. But networks that had been built over years
sprang into action late that night when Mrs. Parks decided to pursue her
legal case and called Fred Gray, a young lawyer and fellow NAACP member,
to represent her. Mr. Gray called the head of the Women’s Political
Council, Jo Ann Robinson, who decided to call for a one-day boycott on
Monday, the day Mrs. Parks would be arraigned in court.
Braving danger, Ms. Robinson left her home in the middle of the night to
run off 50,000 leaflets with the help of a colleague and two trusted
students. In the early-morning hours, the women of the W.P.C. fanned out
across the city, leaving the leaflets in churches, barbershops and
schools. Mr. Nixon began calling the more political ministers to get
them on board. Buoyed by the boycott’s success that first day, the
community decided to continue. The boycott succeeded in part because the
Black community organized amassive car pool system
<https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/rosa-parks-in-her-own-words/about-this-exhibition/the-bus-boycott/carpool-notebook/>,
setting up some 40 pickup stations across town, serving about 30,000
riders a day, and in part because ofa federal legal case
<https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/browder-v-gayle-352-us-903>challenging
Montgomery’s bus segregation that Mr. Gray filed in February with
courageous teenagers, Ms. Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, serving as two
of the four plaintiffs.
The boycott seriously disrupted city life and bus company revenues. The
police harassed the car pools mercilessly, giving out hundreds of
tickets — and then, when that didn’t work, the city dredged up an old
anti-syndicalism law and indicted 89 boycott leaders. Refusing to be
cowed or to wait to be arrested, Mrs. Parks, along with others,
presented herself to the police while scores of community members
gathered outside. Mug shot No. 7053.
The Rosa Parks fable also erases the tremendous cost of her bus stand
and the decade of suffering that ensued for the Parks family. They
weren’t well-off. The Parkses lived in the Cleveland Court projects,
Mrs. Parks’s husband, Raymond, working as a barber at Maxwell Air Force
Base and Mrs. Parks spending her days in a stuffy back room at
Montgomery Fair department store altering white men’s suits. Five weeks
after her bus stand, she lost her job; then Raymond lost his. Receiving
regular death threats, they never found steady work in Montgomery again.
Eight months after the boycott’s successful end, the Parks family was
forced to leave Montgomery for Detroit, where her brother and cousins
lived. They continued to struggle to find work, and she was hospitalized
to treat ulcers in 1959, which led to a bill she couldn’t pay. It was
not until 1966, 11 years after her bus arrest, after she was hired to
work in U.S. Representative John Conyers’s new Detroit office, that the
Parks family registered an income comparable to what they’d made in
1955. (Mrs. Parks had supported Mr. Conyers’s long-shot bid for Congress
in 1964.)
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Mrs. Parks spent the next several decades of her life fighting the
racism of the North — “the Northern promised land that wasn’t,” she
called it — marching and organizing against housing discrimination,
school segregation, employment discrimination and police brutality. In
July 1967, on the fourth day of the Detroit uprising, police killed
three Black teenagers at the Algiers Motel. Justice against the officers
proved elusive (ultimately none of them were punished for murder or
conspiracy) and Detroit’s newspapers grew reluctant to press the issue.
At the request of young Black Power activists who refused to let these
deaths go unmarked and the police misconduct be swept under the rug,
Mrs. Parks agreed to serve as a juror on the “People’s Tribunal” to make
the facts of the case known.
ImageRosa Parks at her Detroit home in 1988.
Rosa Parks at her Detroit home in 1988.Credit...Michael J.
Samojeden/Associated Press
“I don’t believe in gradualism,”she made clear
<http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=5&bioid=42>,
“or that whatever is to be done for the better should take forever to
do.” In the 1960s and ’70s, she was part of a growing Black Power
movement in the city and across the country. DescribingMalcolm X
<https://www.vmfa.museum/piction/6027262-121931311/>as her personal
hero, she attended the 1968 Black Power convention in Philadelphia in
1968 and the1972 Gary Convention
<https://www.vmfa.museum/piction/6027262-121931311/>, worked for
reparations and against the war in Vietnam, served on prisoner defense
committees, and visited the Black Panthers’ school in 1980. “Freedom
fighters never retire,” she observed at a testimonial for a friend — and
she never did.
But this Rosa Parks is not the one most of us learned about in school or
hear about during Black History Month commemorations. Instead, we
partake in an American myth, as President George W. Bushput it
<https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2005/12/text/20051201-1.html#:~:text=By%20refusing%20to%20give%20in,candle%20can%20light%20the%20darkness.&text=By%20refusing%20to%20give%20in%2C%20Rosa%20Parks%20helped%20inspire%20a,equal%20justice%20under%20the%20law.>after
her death in 2005, that “one candle can light the darkness.” A simple
seamstress changes the course of history with a single act, decent
people did the right thing and the nation inexorably moved toward
justice. Mrs. Parks’s decades of work challenging racial injustice puts
the lie to this narrative. The nation didn’t move naturally toward
justice. It had to be pushed.
The boycott was a tremendous feat of organization that drew on networks
built over years. Understanding the demonization, death threats and
economic hardship Mrs. Parks endured for more than a decade underscores
the costs of such heroism. Most Americans did not support the civil
rights movement when it was happening; in a Gallup poll right before the
March on Washington in 1963, only23 percent
<https://news.gallup.com/poll/103828/civil-rights-progress-seen-more.aspx>of
Americans who were familiar with the proposed march felt favorably
toward it.
Reckoning with the fact that Mrs. Parks spent the second half of her
life fighting the racism of the North demonstrates that racism was not
some regional anachronism but a national cancer. And seeing how she
placed her greatest hope in the militant spirit of young people (finding
many adults “complacent”) gives the lie to the ways commentators today
have used the civil rights movement to chastise Black Lives Matter for
not going about change the right way. Learning about the real Rosa Parks
reveals how false those distinctions are, how criminal justice was key
to her freedom dreams, how disruptive and persevering the movement, and
where she would be standing today —an essential lesson young people
<https://rosaparksbiography.org/>, and indeed all Americans, need to
understand to grapple honestly with this country’s history and see the
road forward.
Jeanne Theoharis is a professor of political science and the author of
eleven books on the civil rights and Black Power movements including
“The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks” and “The Rebellious Life of
Mrs. Rosa Parks Young Readers’ Edition
<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/645637/the-rebellious-life-of-mrs-rosa-parks-young-readers-edition-by-jeanne-theoharis-and-brandy-colbert/>,”
co-adapted with Brandy Colbert.
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