The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (31 page)

Preserved in the papers that Parks donated to the Wayne State library twenty years later was an original copy of the pamphlet. The broadside began,

It unfolds to feature fifteen pictures with captions. Five have Rosa Parks plainly visible (though captions only mention her in four). Curiously, there is no mention of her in the caption of the photo of King, Berry, Horton, and Parks, though she is clearly visible. By the mid-1960s, this picture would be plastered on billboards across the South accusing King of attending a “Communist training school.” For someone who eschewed the limelight as much as Parks, such attention was agonizing.

Covered up in the national fable, Rosa Parks was actually viewed as a subversive threat for the better part of two decades. The brochure’s captions identify her as “one of the original leaders of the Montgomery bus boycott” and “the central figure in the agitation which resulted in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.” Another description disparages the ability of Montgomerians to have independently executed the successful boycott, which called for “planning and direction beyond the ability or capacity of local people.”
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Within the racial imagination of the brochure’s writers, the effectiveness of the boycott could only be possible with the involvement of the Communist Party.

When
Pittsburgh Courier
reporter Trezzvant Anderson investigated the brochure’s allegations of Communist infiltration, commission head T. V. Williams coyly equivocated—“I didn’t say Rosa Parks was a Communist”—but maintained these race leaders had convened at Highlander under Communist auspices. When asked for proof of Parks’s Communist affiliations, Williams insisted to Anderson there was a file, but that he simply could not find it at the moment.
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Regarding Parks as a dangerous leader and powerful instigator, white officials saw nothing random or accidental about her protest. Aware of some of the “trouble” she had caused long before the boycott, they knew “what she was after”—and it was not just a seat on the bus. White officials and citizens harassed her accordingly. For much of the 1950s and 1960s, Parks’s address was often included in the media coverage about her, and much of the hate mail she received excoriated her as a traitor.

However frightening this harassment was, Parks did not shy away from her connection to Highlander even as the school got red-baited by state authorities. In 1959, local police, on the orders of the state attorney general, raided Highlander. Parks wrote Clark in August 1959 “anxious” to know what happened and offering “to do what ever I can.”
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She longed to start a local Highlander support group but did not have the “strength and energy” to make the contacts. Having read that the court was trying to close Highlander, she observed, “It seems so hopeless at times, but with so many taking a stand, something will have to happen.”
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Besides her brother Sylvester, Rosa’s first cousins Thomas Williamson and Annie Cruse had also moved to Detroit. The hate calls to the Parks’s home in Montgomery had continued unabated, and their incessancy bespoke a credible threat. Rosa was deeply shaken—and ready to leave Alabama. So was Raymond.
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Hearing this and fearing for their lives, Williamson quickly cobbled together $300 to wire the family so they could make the trip.
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Parks explained the decision as “the best thing I could do at the time.”
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Chagrined by Rosa’s decision to leave, local activists rallied. Ralph Abernathy went to her home to apologize and asked her to stay. As a going-away present, the MIA raised $500 through donations solicited at churches around Montgomery and on an evening in late August hosted a service for the couple, crowded with well-wishers, at St. Paul’s AME Church. According to Durr, Parks gave a “wonderful” speech in which she “told them that they could never win unless they fought for the right of everyone to have opportunities, and not just themselves.”
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A decade later, Nixon recalled his own speech that evening: “Here we forgot about this woman who’s responsible for all that’s happened in Montgomery and throughout the South and glorified a man who was made because of her. . . . I told the women, ‘At least I’d expect you to help fight to see that Mrs. Parks don’t leave town.’”
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Nixon criticized those gathered for “raising a little pitiful seven or eight hundred dollars and . . . then stick your chest out and think you’ve done something.”
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It is not clear whether Nixon actually made such a critical speech that night, or just wished he had. The money raised that evening, according to her family, accounted for nearly all the resources the Parks family had when they arrived in Detroit.
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And so in August 1957, the Parks family bade a bittersweet goodbye to Alabama. The transition to Detroit was not easy, though they welcomed the chance to be near family. Shortly after arriving in Detroit, she wrote King a letter thanking him and the MIA for the “kindness and generosity shown us before our departure from Montgomery.” She had “no words of expression of gratitude for what has been done to help us. It will always be among my most cherished memories.” She was “sorry to leave at this time” but “perhaps it was best” since her mother was happy to be near Sylvester, and Raymond was working and “improving in every way.”
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Still, Parks missed “the people I had been seeing. Going to the various meetings. Something to think about.”
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Right around the time the family moved to Detroit in August, she had gone to visit Hampton Institute in Virginia.
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Alonzo Moron, the head of Hampton, whom Parks knew from Highlander, offered her a job as hostess at the Holy Tree Inn, a guest house on campus. In September, she headed out for another NAACP fund-raising tour and in October moved to Hampton. “After so much turbulence, ill-will, heartache and uprooting,” Parks told a reporter, “I am looking forward with great pleasure to my work on this serene beautiful college campus.”
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It is a testament to the dire economic situation that her family was facing—and her own sense of autonomy—that she went by herself to work at Hampton.

Her time there was somewhat difficult. The job was quite “confining and at times boring.” She missed Raymond and wrote to her mother about being lonely “because none of the people here are concerned about me except for my service on the job.” She knew her family needed the money. The job came with a yearly salary of $3,600, and she was resolved to stay. Parks’s ulcer was bothering her; she was having trouble eating solid food and had lost much weight. Most of her clothes no longer fit, but she did not have the time to alter them. She was being looked after by a doctor for free, she wrote her mother, because “I am the Rosa Parks of the Montgomery Bus Protest.” Over the year Rosa spent at Hampton, her mother wrote numerous times about the financial difficulties the family was having back in Detroit, asking occasionally for money. In one painful letter, Leona McCauley describes how Sylvester was working but had not gotten paid and how his wife and children were crying because they had no food.
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Raymond was hospitalized in July 1958 for pneumonia. This worried Parks greatly, particularly because she was so far away and the hospital care that black people received in Detroit was meager, the facilities inferior to those of whites.

Mrs. Parks appreciated the Hampton students and took heart in their energy. In 1958, she returned to Montgomery for a visit and “found the bus situation much improved.”
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Durr urged her to move back. Rosa had gone alone to Hampton, with the expectation that the college would soon provide housing so Raymond and her mother could join her. The college did not—and so after finishing out the fall semester in 1958, Mrs. Parks returned home to Detroit for the holidays and stayed.

In the aftermath of the boycott, many people’s roles had been overlooked as the lion’s share of public attention had focused on King. According to E. D. Nixon, neither he nor Mrs. Parks had been invited to the third anniversary celebration of the Montgomery bus boycott’s victory.
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The coverage Parks received in the black press during this period began to highlight how she had been “forgotten” and not given her due. In April 1958, announcing a talk she was giving in Pittsburgh, the reporter observed, “While the remarkable leadership ability of the Reverend Martin Luther King has been hailed throughout the world, there are many of us who have lost sight of the fact that it was the quiet unassuming seamstress whose courage set the boycott in motion.”
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In a curious way, being forgotten had become part of Parks’s appeal, demonstrating her modesty and humility.

The period after her return to Detroit from Hampton was a difficult one for Parks. She saved $1,300 while at Hampton, but that was quickly spent. Her nieces and nephews dubbed her “Recycling Queen” and “Mrs. Thrifty” because she conserved everything.
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No food was ever wasted, and Rosa’s mother “knew how to prepare a meal from nothing.”
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Having been ill in January and February, Parks wrote Septima Clark in May that she was feeling better now, but Raymond was out of work and “unhappy and wants to leave here.” She was sewing for a shop and doing piecework at home. “I hope things will get better, or I don’t know what we will do.”
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After decades of barbering in Alabama (which didn’t require barbering licenses), Raymond found Michigan’s training and licensing requirements dispiriting and remained unemployed for most of 1959, but ineligible for unemployment compensation.
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Physically unwell and worried about money, Parks was making do with clothes donated to her, having not bought material for a new dress since March 1957. They tried to buy a new refrigerator only to be told their credit “hadn’t gone through.”
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They supplemented with food grown in Sylvester’s garden, and her cousins also pitched in to help.

In May 1959, the
Michigan Chronicle
published an article on Parks’s difficult economic situation, entitled “Alabama Boycott Heroine Can’t Find a Job!” “We’re not sorry” about the move, Parks told the interviewer. “It’s just that work is hard to find.”
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In her understated way, Parks highlighted the discriminatory job situation blacks faced in Detroit—which, in her case, was compounded by the ways her own activism certainly did not make her a sought-after employee. Indeed, black women migrants tended to fare less well economically than black men in the North.
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And there had been no welcome wagon from white liberals for a woman activist fleeing the South.

Upon moving to the city, the Parkses had lived with various family members before renting an apartment on Euclid. In June of 1959, Parks wrote to Clark that she needed to “move to a cheaper place but rent is so expensive if a house is fit to live in. I can not pay the down payment on a house because I do not earn enough to pay for just living expenses.”
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Housing segregation in Detroit drove up rents for black families compared to white families and drove down upkeep by landlords, as black people continued to be crowded into certain neighborhoods. Clark wrote Parks in September urging fortitude: “Rosa, a leader must have personal strength to withstand all the destructive . . . Things are hard at times but just keep working and something is bound to give.”
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Forced to give up their seventy-dollar-a-month apartment in October 1959 because they could not afford it, the family moved into two rooms at the Progressive Civic League meeting hall. The PCL was a west-side Detroit group comprised largely of black professionals, and a forerunner to the more active civil rights groups in the city that sprang up in the 1960s. The rent was forty dollars, with Raymond serving as the caretaker and Rosa the treasurer manager of the PCL’s credit union and house manager for the owner.
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As in Montgomery, the civil rights community (white and black) didn’t offer her any employment. “I didn’t get any work,” Parks noted, “but I went to a lot of meetings and sometimes . . . they would take up contributions, but that was never high.”
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Disregarded by many white employers and unknown to many white liberals who had become transfixed with King’s leadership, Mrs. Parks found a relatively closed labor market in her new Northern home. She also sat at the fissures of class, education, and age within the black community. With decades of political experience and administrative skill, the middle-aged Parks was no acolyte. Given her long political history and her fame from the boycott, and even despite her reserved personality, she would not blend into the background of an organization. She had been one of the MIA’s best speaker/fund raisers and had brought in considerable money and membership for the NAACP. Yet curiously, in the first years following their move to Detroit, Parks seemingly was never asked to address the Detroit NAACP. Daisy Bates came in May 1958 and spoke to an overflow crowd of more than 1,800 people.
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Additionally, Mrs. Parks did not have a college education at a time when the NAACP and other black organizations often required one for salaried positions. And she was a woman when much of the prominent civil rights leadership consisted of men. All this may have blinded many black leaders to Parks’s employment needs and the skills she would have brought to any organization. Correspondence between the Detroit chapter of the NAACP and the national office reveals Parks’s dire situation (and organizing talents) were simultaneously acknowledged and erased. In late 1957, Herbert Wright of the national office requested that Detroit organizers invite Parks for the youth conference being planned by the Detroit branch.
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The NAACP leadership was thus not only aware that the Parks family had moved to Detroit but also cognizant of her background organizing young people. In the years following the Parks’s move, the Detroit NAACP did not sponsor an event in her honor or help secure employment for her or Raymond, though they did make inquiries for other NAACP stalwarts or Southern civil rights exiles. Even though her troubled situation became the focus of a
Chronicle
article in May 1959, it would be another eighteen months, late in 1960, before the NAACP stepped in to help.