The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (33 page)

By the spring of 1961, Parks’s health had improved, and she and Raymond had found more steady employment. They had moved into a downstairs flat on Wildermere and Virginia Park in the Virginia Park neighborhood. Raymond was working around the corner at the Wildermere Barber Shop. Vonzie Whitlow, who apprenticed for Raymond there from 1961 to 1963, recalled long hours at a shop filled with talk, from baseball to politics, and Raymond’s “excellent” skills: “Raymond bragged on his razor—‘It could shave a baby’s face’ he would say.”
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Rosa had found a job at the Stockton Sewing Company, a storefront factory crowded with sewing machines and ironing boards. The work was difficult and exhausting but steady. She made seventy-five cents a piece and worked ten hours a day.

Typical of her understated political edge, she told Septima Clark she was sending “several pieces of clothing to the ‘victims of eviction’ in Tennessee” (Highlander had just been evicted from its buildings in Monteagle).
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In 1962, Parks displayed her time-tested resolve when she agreed to be a Highlander sponsor, as did Reinhold Niebuhr. Faced with the repressive atmosphere of the Cold War and the direct targeting of Highlander, many people were unwilling to associate their name publicly with a “red” organization. But she wrote Horton that she was “very willing and also happy to be asked.”
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The coverage of Parks ricocheted through the black press. In December 1961, the
Baltimore Afro-American
ran an article entitled “Alabama Bus Boycott Heroine Now Living Quietly in Detroit.” Underplaying her political commitments, the piece claimed Parks was living “a quiet and practically secluded life” and briefly mentioned that work for her was “scarce.”
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A recurring sense of shame also ran through the coverage of Parks’s situation in the black press. In 1963,
Chicago Defender
columnist Al Duckett described a recent collection taken for Mrs. Parks. “I do not know whether the collection taken for Mrs. Parks was an appreciation, gesture, or aid to her in time of need. All I can say is that if this race of mine is so ungrateful as to allow a Rosa Parks to be in need, then we don’t deserve freedom.”
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Still Parks’s meager situation and simple life underlined her righteousness—and by extension the movement’s—and so over the years, Parks’s overlooked difficult situation almost became a trope in the black press to demonstrate the purity of the struggle. And perhaps for Parks herself, this became a catch-22, her own righteousness linked to her quiet suffering.

Over the years, Parks came to gloss over this difficult decade. All her autobiography mentions is work for a seamstress friend and then later in a clothing factory—and moving to a lower apartment on Virginia Park. But she included nothing of the deep suffering of this period. Following Parks’s lead, historian Doug Brinkley claims that upon returning from Hampton, “Parks had little trouble finding a job . . . [and] was grateful for the grueling job [at Stockton’s] and the steady income it provided to support her husband and mother.”
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Allowing her troubles to be seen in public ran counter to her sense of decorum. The attitude evidenced in the NAACP’s dealings with her—as they sought to contain the damage of the
Jet
article to the organization and manage her case—likely hurt and embarrassed her. While she might have been compelled to speak about her situation when her family’s need had been so dire, there was no point in revisiting it.

The Parks family’s suffering occurred against the backdrop of a growing mass movement. Indeed, as her family struggled to regain its economic and psychic footing, the movement she loved and had helped to cultivate was growing in size and stature. In the spring of 1963, the campaign by King and the SCLC against downtown segregation and white violence in Birmingham had successfully drawn action from the Kennedy administration. In May, Kennedy sent a civil rights bill to Congress. The SCLC considered Parks an honorary member and called on her periodically to aid in their work or attend their events. By 1963, the SCLC had also named an award in Parks’s honor. According to Diane McWhorter, Parks “had moved into the secure haven of ‘legend,’ her actual service as a Movement figure having been abridged by the Big Boys in the Montgomery Improvement Association.”
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Despite the regard it showed for Parks, this award didn’t actually help with her difficult financial situation or recognize her considerable political and organizing talents. (Parks herself would not be awarded the Rosa Parks Award until its tenth year in 1972.)
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Parks was also asked to come to Washington, DC, in August to be part of the March on Washington. Seventy-three-year-old A. Phillip Randolph had put out the call for the march to commemorate the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the social and economic inequities that still wracked the nation. Randolph enlisted longtime organizer Bayard Rustin to help him organize this march for jobs and justice, which called for the passage of the Civil Rights Act, integration of public schools, a fair employment practices bill, and job training—and massive civil disobedience. The choice of Rustin as organizer was a controversial one. A gay socialist and pacifist, Rustin had briefly been involved in the Young Communist League in the 1930s (quitting in 1941), gone to jail in opposition to military service in World War II, and been arrested with a male lover on a “morals charge” in the 1950s. He was under scrutiny from the FBI and criticized by other civil rights leaders. Still, Randolph refused to bow to pressure to get rid of Rustin.

In order to get the National Urban League and the NAACP to join, Randolph and Rustin gave up their plans for civil disobedience. President Kennedy feared that the march would be too radical and too critical of the federal government and that his civil rights bill wouldn’t pass. He began putting pressure on the march’s organizers to cancel it, and when they refused, Kennedy began lobbying for them to soften the message and succeeded in getting the march’s themes changed to unity and racial harmony, a cry to “pass the bill,” and no civil disobedience. Many in SNCC disagreed with this shift. According to SNCC chairman John Lewis, “a protest against government neglect was being turned into a propaganda tool to show the government as just and supportive.” Not all civil rights activists accepted these compromises; Malcolm X was in DC during the march but termed it a “farce on Washington” for the concessions the leadership had made to placate the Kennedys.

The march itself now is remembered in a nostalgic glow as an inspirational and quintessentially American event, but at the time, it was dreaded and feared by many white Americans. In a
Wall Street Journal
poll taken in the days leading up to the march, two-thirds denounced the idea as “un-American.” Most newspapers, as well as many politicians, predicted violence, and Washington, DC, police were on highest alert. NAACP president Roy Wilkins remembered that Washington “seemed paralyzed with fear of black Americans” and the Kennedy administration “had the army preparing for the march as if it were World War II.” Even when the fears of violence proved unfounded, the
Wall Street Journal
remained critical: “This nation is based on representative Government not on Government run by street mobs, disciplined or otherwise.”
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Despite public disapproval, the march was glorious and peaceful. On August 28, 1963, over 250,000 people came on freedom buses, cars, and trains to participate—some estimated the crowd numbered as many as 400,000 people. A coalition of religious, civil rights, and labor groups, black and white, packed the Mall that day. Dressed formally in a white jacket, black dress, gloves, and hat, Rosa Parks sat up on the dais that August afternoon. Her niece recalled staying up the night before Parks left working on the outfit.
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As magnificent as the day was, the lack of recognition for women’s roles was readily apparent, and Parks was increasingly disillusioned by it. No women had been asked to speak. Seeing how the program had emerged, Pauli Murray had written A. Phillip Randolph criticizing the sexism. Anna Arnold Hedgeman had also objected, asserting that the march should really be called “Rosa Parks Day” since Parks had started it all.
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Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, pressed for a more substantive inclusion of women in the program.
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Their criticisms were rebuffed as demands for inappropriate, sex-specific recognition, at odds with the spirit of the event. Plus, march organizers worried about how to pick one woman; the idea that multiple women might speak was too far-fetched to contemplate.

As a result, a memo was circulated, explaining Rustin and Randolph’s proposed resolution to the problem:

This “Tribute to Women” would highlight six women—Rosa Parks, Gloria Richardson, Diane Nash, Myrlie Evers, Mrs. Herbert Lee, and Daisy Bates—who would be asked to stand up and be recognized by the crowd. No woman would give an address to the crowd.

Led by men, the main march, with Randolph at the head and King and others a few paces behind, processed down Constitution Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial; the wives of the leaders were not allowed to march with them. The five women honored (Myrlie Evers had made a previous commitment to be in Detroit) led a small side march along Independence Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial. They sat silently on the dais. Fellow activist Gloria Richardson recalled that the gendered treatment began before the event began. The NAACP had called Richardson beforehand, instructing her not to wear jeans but instead a hat, gloves, and a dress. Richardson did not appreciate the dress code requirements and scoured the Eastern Shore of Maryland till she found a jean skirt. Then, on the actual day of the march, Richardson got left behind in the march tent, and her seat in the front row was taken.
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Daisy Bates introduced the tribute to women, a 142-word introduction written by John Morsell that provided an awkwardly brief recognition of women’s roles in the struggle for civil rights. She began, “Mr. Randolph, the women of this country pledge to you, Mr. Randolph, to Martin Luther King, to Roy Wilkins, and all of you fighting for civil liberties, that we will join hands with you, as women of this country.”
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Randolph himself seemed flummoxed during this portion of the program, at one point forgetting which women were actually being recognized.

“Uh, who else? Will the . . .”

[Someone says, “Rosa Parks”]

Randolph continues, “Miss Rosa Parks . . . will they all stand.”
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Parks stood up and offered eight words of acknowledgment: “Hello, friends of freedom, it’s a wonderful day.” Right before King was about to speak, Richardson found herself put in a cab along with Lena Horne and sent back to the hotel. March organizers claimed that they were worried the two would get crushed. No one else was sent back to the hotel. “They did this,” Richardson believed, “because Lena Horne had had Rosa Parks by the hand and had been taking her to satellite broadcasts, saying, ‘This is who started the Civil Rights Movement, not Martin Luther King. This is the woman you need to interview.’” Richardson started helping Horne bring reporters to talk with Mrs. Parks. “We got several people to interview Rosa Parks. The march organizers must have found that out.”
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After the rally’s completion, no women got to be part of the delegation that met with members of the Kennedy administration. Dorothy Height observed, “I’ve never seen a more immovable force. We could not get women’s participation taken seriously.”
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Mabel Williams, wife of the militant Robert Williams and herself a radical, recalled the outrage many felt that while King was being promoted as the great leader, Mrs. Parks was not getting her due. “I don’t think she was too concerned about that. But people who were concerned about history were. . . . A lot of the male chauvinism that went on, we talked about that. But she was not bitter. . . . She wasn’t fighting anyway for credit.”
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Given the iconic view of Parks, there is a tendency to believe that she was simply happy to stand on the dais that August day and did not notice the ways women were being relegated to a lesser role. But Parks did notice the way women were being marginalized, telling Bates that day how she hoped for a “better day coming.” And in her autobiography, Parks describes the March as “a great occasion, but women were not allowed to play much of a role.” Parks, according to Brinkley, “couldn’t believe that she and Septima Clark were being treated like hostesses and was downright floored that dancer Josephine Baker was not even asked to speak.”
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Coretta Scott King too highlighted how “not enough attention” was focused on women’s roles in the movement in a feature article in 1966, making clear to the reporter that “it was a woman who triggered the whole movement.” Scott King mailed an autographed copy of the piece to Parks.
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The SCLC still sought Parks’s participation in their ongoing work. But when Martin Luther King won the Nobel Prize in the 1964, though many in the SCLC journeyed to Oslo for the award, Parks did not, unable to afford the trip. Clark thought “they should have really offered Rosa Parks her transportation and everything over there, but you know, they didn’t.” King accepted the award on behalf of “those devotees of nonviolence who have moved so courageously against the ramparts of racial injustice. . . . These are the real heroes of the freedom struggle: they are the noble people for whom I accept the Nobel Peace Prize.” One of those heroes certainly was Rosa Parks.