The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (26 page)

Horton wrote back to Parks and committed to paying her expenses so she could come to the March Highlander meeting. He subsequently wrote Durr celebrating Parks as “a symbol of the thing we all believe in.” Recognizing the importance of white support in the midst of this struggle, he telegrammed Parks the night after the mass indictments came down: “The passive resistance movement your calm and courageous action set in motion there in Montgomery deserves the backing of all who seek justice. Highlander is proud of you.”
¹⁹

In late February, King prepared a memorandum to Abernathy concerned about Parks’s desperate financial situation “because of her tremendous self respect she has not already revealed this to the organization.” King recommended that “$250 be given to her from the Relief Fund. Ordinarily, I would not recommend this much to any one individual, but I think her situation demands it, and the Montgomery Improvement Association owes this to Mrs. Parks above any other. Actually you may make it three hundred dollars ($300.00) if you feel so disposed. Please check with the committee and get this to Mrs. Parks immediately.”
²⁰
Three hundred dollars was subsequently disbursed from the MIA treasury to Parks.

The economic toll of the boycott was certainly not limited to the Parks family; it reached across the black community. Working with the MIA Welfare Committee, Parks sought to find employment for laid-off workers because a “lot of people lost their jobs.”
²¹
Faced with the host of reprisals, the MIA became a broad-based social service agency. According to financial secretary Erma Dungee Allen, they bought food and paid people’s rent, gas, water, and doctor bills; sometimes they even bought washing machines and other household goods. In many ways, Dungee Allen felt that some of these were “free rides as far as I was concerned. But they [the MIA leadership] seemed to think this is what we had to do.” Dungee Allen explained that King was “real sympathetic” to people’s needs and “usually the poorest ones” came to the MIA.
²²
The MIA understood that meeting people’s basic needs would allow for a more engaged movement.

Parks was doing a great deal of speaking and numerous appearances for the MIA—a “tremendous hit,” according to Clifford Durr, as one of the MIA’s most able speakers and fund-raisers.
²³
While she regularly turned over the money to the MIA, not all the ministers did the same. Some kept a portion as an honorarium for their time and energy. Reverend Graetz, who, like Parks, fastidiously turned over his speaking money to the organization, recalled someone in the MIA asking, “Did you keep enough out for yourself?”
²⁴
Shocked, Graetz learned others kept a portion for themselves as compensation for their effort. More than the ministers, Parks did need a portion of the money raised from her public appearances but, like Graetz, never engaged in this practice. Parks also did numerous speaking engagements for the NAACP, some of which garnered her a modest stipend. (On one ten-day tour, the NAACP split the money fund-raised from her events between the local branch and the national office, while giving her twenty-five dollars a talk.)

Financial issues in the MIA grew controversial. Some of the ministers—and occasionally Nixon himself—took part of the funds for their own needs, when hosting organizations thought all of the money was going to the boycott itself. “We had a whole lot of money at that time,” Nixon admitted, “and some of it we handled unwisely.”
²⁵
In June of 1956, Reverend Uriah Fields, the former secretary of the organization, accused the MIA’s leaders of “misappropriation of funds.” Days later, after meeting with King, Fields recanted, though he never fully took back his criticisms.
²⁶
In June, Reverend Simms assumed the leadership of the transportation committee, which had grown to require “full time supervision” and established a precise system of record-keeping.
²⁷

Along with suffering economic hardship, the Parks home received regular hate mail and constant death threats. This harassment took a significant toll on Parks’s mother and husband in particular; since she traveled a lot during the boycott year, they often answered the phone. The suffering of her husband took its toll on Rosa, too; as he grew more depressed, she worried. Yet, while scholars have begun to foreground the crucial support that wives of civil rights leaders made, in a troubling gender omission, there has been almost no discussion of the role of husbands. Raymond’s support in helping Rosa achieve what she did that year and beyond and the impact their fearsome situation had on him rarely figure into the story. Too often, when Raymond does make a brief cameo in the popular narrative, he is viewed as not sufficiently admirable because he stayed behind the scenes. Rosa considered Raymond a partner and felt he facilitated her activism during the boycott and in the following decades when she continued her public role. The respect he had for her and her work sustained her.
²⁸
While worrying about her safety, he was willing to prioritize her political work—a shift from the early years of their marriage when he was the more prominent activist.

As poet and friend Nikki Giovanni observed, “Nobody would say that Coretta wasn’t courageous because she worried about Martin. So why say it about Raymond?”
²⁹
Indeed, Giovanni saw Rosa and Raymond Parks as “of one mind,” committed in partnership to the same political struggle.
Jet
magazine would later describe them as a “modern day power couple” in reference to their shared political commitments.
³⁰
According to friends, Rosa was good at finding ways to do what she believed necessary and skirt around Raymond’s fears for her safety. According to Reverend Graetz, “She was more firm than her husband wanted her to be. He . . . worried she would be attacked. He didn’t want her to be so active.” His wife, Jean Graetz, elaborated: “She knew how to get around what he was keeping her from doing. She knew how to get things by going around the opposition. Mrs. Parks wasn’t in your face. . . . She had other ways of convincing people.”
³¹

In describing Rosa and Raymond’s partnership, Giovanni recalled the first time she met Rosa Parks, which was in the early 1980s. “Black love is Black wealth,” Parks said when Giovanni introduced herself—quoting a line from Giovanni’s poem “Nikki-Rosa.” Surprised, Giovanni was touched that Parks knew her poetry. That poem criticized the ways the outside white world often did not understand the value of the black family, concluding with the stanza:

Far beyond the difficulties, to Rosa Parks this love and a shared vision of justice were crucial. And Raymond’s love and support was foundational. In many ways, what Raymond did behind the scenes for her over the next decades—backing her up, helping her make travel arrangements, keeping their household functioning, sharing her political outrage—kept her going and enabled her political activities.
³³

The inauguration of the bus protest meant war to segregationists. This put visible black activists like the Parkses, the Kings, the Nixons, Jo Ann Robinson and Fred Gray, in the line of fire. Leona McCauley talked on the phone for hours with friends to keep Raymond from having to answer those hate calls. Rosa increasingly found herself able to keep the terror at bay, later explaining, “I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.”
³⁴
Part of this stemmed from her faith and reliance on prayer. “There were times when people asked, How did I do it. . . . I prayed hard not to give in and not to fall by the wayside. I believe prayer changes things.”
³⁵
But Raymond did not find any such peace.

The impact of living with this racial terror, relentless harassment, and economic insecurity overwhelmed his spirit. Besieged by death threats, unable to find steady work, and worried about their security, Raymond began drinking heavily and chain-smoking. Unnerved, he suffered a nervous breakdown during the boycott.
³⁶
Virginia Durr prodded Rosa to take Raymond to a psychiatrist at Maxwell Air Force Base. Durr claims that the psychiatrist felt Raymond “had no identity” and felt that “if Mrs. Parks had been a more yielding, soft and a kind of helpless woman, he might have found his identity in being a husband but since she was such a strong, brave, intelligent woman that she further made him feel the loss of identity. Anyway, he thought Mrs. Parks ought to give up all her civil rights work and go back to being a little sweet housewife,” a suggestion Durr found “absurd.”
³⁷

There is no record from Rosa Parks of this doctor’s visit or her reaction to it.
³⁸
But she did not give up her civil rights work. She was always quick to note Raymond’s support of her, which may suggest he didn’t buy into this thinking either. Rosa contextualized Raymond’s difficulties as akin to the psychological impact of living in a war zone, analogous to the trauma of battle. Troubled that he was regarded as peculiar or weak, she stressed how bad their situation was, how most people were torn up by such acute stress.
³⁹

While Raymond may have manifested his pain more visibly, the stress also took an increasing toll on her health. She developed painful stomach ulcers and a heart condition that would plague her for many years. She had chronic insomnia, a problem she had developed even as a young child when the Klan would ride through Pine Level.
⁴⁰
Her mother was also sick a great deal the boycott year.
⁴¹
And E. D. Nixon would develop high blood pressure in the wake of all the stress. The battle exacted its price. But Mrs. Parks didn’t talk about that cost. As a longtime Detroit friend later observed, she “never got into it much. You really have to pull things out of her.”
⁴²
In Parks’s interviews with Jim Haskins in the late 1980s, however, they talked about the burden this work and the accompanying fear had on many other civil rights activists they knew throughout the South and how many of those activists drank a lot “to be able to sleep at night.”
⁴³

The harassment—and the personal toll it took—was not restricted to black activists. Nor was the sense of living in a war zone. Across town, city librarian Juliette Morgan was one of the few whites supporting the boycott. Her public solidarity with the protest led to unceasing harassment at the hands of segregationists.
⁴⁴
Long committed to civil rights, Morgan had written a letter to the
Montgomery Advertiser
in the first days of the boycott, describing how “history was being made” by Montgomery’s black community. She linked the bus protest to the moral imperatives Gandhi and Thoreau had laid out. “It is hard to imagine a soul so dead, a heart so hard, a vision so blinded and provincial,” Morgan wrote, “as not to be moved with admiration, at the quiet dignity, discipline and dedication with which the Negroes have conducted their boycott.”
⁴⁵
Morgan also wrote about her embarrassment at witnessing black passengers being mistreated on the bus.

While dozens of white Montgomerians privately wrote to affirm Morgan’s message, publicly she came under attack. Many writers called for her dismissal. Morgan lamented the “silent liberals” who “want to say something but are afraid to speak out.” The library initially backed her but insisted she not write anything further or engage in any civil rights work.
⁴⁶
After the riot following Autherine Lucy’s admission to the University of Alabama, Morgan wrote another letter, this time praising the editor of the
Tuscaloosa News
for his stand against the White Citizens’ Council; she criticized “cowardly Southern white men” for their harassment of the boycott and of Lucy. A shower of mental and physical harassment followed, as Morgan became a target of white vigilantism. The harassment, according to Jo Ann Robinson, was “unending”—phone calls, prowlers, rocks thrown at her windows for a year.
⁴⁷
The White Citizens’ Council distributed leaflets about her and succeeded in getting the library to compel her to resign, pressuring the mayor to withhold its funding. Morgan lived with her mother, who harangued her for taking such a stand and felt Juliette was ruining her life.
⁴⁸
Subsequently, Morgan had a “nervous breakdown,” according to Parks. A year and a half after the boycott began, Morgan took her own life.
⁴⁹
No black Montgomerians were allowed to attend her funeral.

As the boycott moved the ground beneath the city’s feet, violence, harassment, and economic intimidation were time-tested and effective tactics to put civil rights workers back in “their place.” Systems of racial distinction require constant reassertion. Those who stepped over those boundaries, like Rosa Parks or Juliette Morgan, were in effect calling the whole system into question. Virginia Durr captured the importance and the cost of such stances, writing to a friend, “Thank God for the exceptions—but they do have a hard time.”
⁵⁰
The Montgomery bus boycott profoundly asserted a social order where black and white people were civic, political, and social equals, threatening the assumptions of the existing socioeconomic structure, which was inextricably wedded to white supremacy. A community of black people and a smattering of white allies looked the old order, that terror, in the eye day after day.

What makes this difficult to fully appreciate is that certain core precepts of the boycott have subsequently been adopted as common sense: that segregation was a systematic apparatus of social and economic power and that resistance to it was possible. Most Americans now look back in the glow of that new truth, assuming they too would have remained seated, written letters to the local paper, risked their jobs to print thirty-five thousand leaflets, or spoken out in favor of boycotting the buses. But as Nikki Giovanni captured in her poem “Harvest”: