The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (38 page)

Conyers’s decision to hire Parks engendered some outcry. “People called her a troublemaker,” Conyers recalled.
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More than a decade after her bus stand, Parks continued to receive hate mail. This harassment increased after Conyers hired her, and her name was publicized. People sent rotten watermelons, voodoo dolls, and hateful cards and letters to the office. Many seemed to come from fellow Detroiters, as a rising white resistance had flowered in the city. They were “quite threatening,” but she would listen and say, “Have a nice day,” according to Atchison. “She was cool—and didn’t seem stressed about it.”
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A May 19, 1969, letter from Detroit read:

A March 8, 1971, letter carped, “People seldom complain but inside their hearts they are fully aware that it was YOU, Rosa, who is chiefly responsible for the unholy racial mess this nation is in today. By rights, you ought to be shot at sunrise, or otherwise appropriately taken care of, for your dastardly deed in Montgomery Alabama, and all the subsequent riots etc. You sure started a war, Rosa. Shame on you. Perhaps you are now getting what you deserve.”
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A 1972 letter from Indiana made clear the writer’s objections to her move north, “Why didn’t you stay down South? The North sure doesn’t want you up here. You are the biggest woman troublemaker ever.”
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Thus, fifteen years after her bus stand, many whites outside the South regarded Rosa Parks as a “dastardly” troublemaker.

Some attacked Parks as a Communist. An April 1966 article in the Shreveport newspaper the
Councilor
featured the infamous photo of King, Parks, and Abner Berry at Highlander. The reporter began, “Here is proof that the secretary to a United States congressman hovered with top communists at a mountain retreat in Tennessee. She is Rosa Parks of Detroit. When I first heard that Rep. John J. Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) had hired Rosa, I could not believe he would be so brazen at a time when young Americans are fighting in Vietnam. I called Conyers’s office in Michigan and a woman on the other end identified herself as Rosa Parks.”
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The reporter then regaled readers with a minstrel version of his conversation with Parks:

While most Americans would not have sent hate mail to Rosa Parks, equating civil rights activism with Communist subversion was not a fringe position. Many Americans worried about the Communist influence on the civil rights movement and viewed the black freedom struggle with fear. In a Gallup poll in the days before the March on Washington, two-thirds of Americans surveyed viewed the march as “un-American,” and in a 1965 national poll, half responded that they thought Communists were involved “a lot” in the civil rights demonstrations.
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Support of open housing in the North was often attacked as a “Communist” attack on private property.

Regardless of the harassment, Conyers was awed by Parks’s presence in the office.
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Horwitz described Conyers and Parks’s partnership, “She was a . . . presence. John gave her a job and economic security. She gave John prestige and stature. When he was very junior, after a bitterly divided primary, he needed this.”
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According to the
Detroit Free Press
, “There were claims that Conyers added her to his staff merely for the free political advertising that she generated.” But Atchison, who was then in charge of Conyers’s Detroit office, says that’s only partially accurate. “There was that value there. But also there was a concern for her finances.”
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Over the next two decades, busloads of schoolchildren came to meet her, and her position over the twenty-three years she worked there became more ceremonial. Jamila Brathwaite, who joined the staff in the mid-1980s, in the last years of Parks’s work there, recalled, “Everything just stopped. We didn’t want to answer the phones . . . to get that time to really talk to her. She gave us that time. If you wanted to talk, she would talk to you.” Brathwaite recalled that one day, many weeks after a conversation they had had about the black freedom struggle, south and north, Mrs. Parks brought in a book for her. Brathwaite was surprised to see it was on Malcolm X.
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Still, in the late 1960s, according to Horwitz, Conyers’s white supporters who visited the Detroit office often didn’t know who Parks was. “There was an absolute racial divide,” Horwitz noted. “She was a heroine in the black community but not in the white community [at that point].”
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Many white liberals had fixated on King and didn’t necessarily know who Rosa Parks was.

Parks continued a busy community schedule—making public appearances and speeches at scores of church programs, women’s day events, and schools, traveling to political affairs and mobilizations, often apologizing to Conyers for having to leave the office. Calling her “a true activist,” Conyers recalled the variety of issues Mrs. Parks was involved in, particularly “ones that didn’t get the media attention.”
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However, she tended to underplay this work in interviews from the period. In a 1967 interview, Mrs. Parks was asked why she had chosen not to be active in the civil rights movement in Detroit, to which she responded, “I have considered myself as active as I could be. . . . But I haven’t been aggressive enough to try and take over any organization or be too much in the foreground. In fact, I wasn’t that way in Montgomery. . . . I worked quietly and tried to do whatever I could in the community without projecting myself. And as far as I am concerned, I haven’t changed. I’m just the same as I was in Montgomery.”
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While not directly challenging the interviewer, her quiet rejoinder attests to her continuing active role in Detroit. She had long been someone who did the behind-the-scenes work necessary for political mobilization—in Montgomery
and
Detroit.

Many of her associates attested to Parks’s radiant kindness and deep empathy with people’s suffering. Her commitment to meeting the socioeconomic needs of black Detroiters extended to her personal practice. By 1966, according to friend Mary Hays Carter, she had “a private charity going. . . . She engages the business people that she is acquainted with [to assist with] the problems of those that are without gas during the winter or without electricity. She does her own investigating—she seems to know whether these people are ‘putting her on,’ and I have never known her to call me up and ask me to cook food for some hungry family or to help her find clothing for some unfortunate family that they were not genuinely in need.”
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Parks took an active role in her block club, serving for a time in the 1960s as vice president. The block club worked on cultural and neighborhood improvement, sponsored a youth program providing recreation and job guidance to neighborhood teenagers, and held block festivals to build community.

In 1967, Conyers received the SCLC’s annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award for his contribution to civil rights. The first African American on the Judiciary Committee, he had cosponsored the Medicare bill, sought more funding for the War on Poverty, particularly for education and housing, and opposed the war in Vietnam. Conyers was one of seven in Congress to oppose military appropriations in 1965 and to call for a peaceful resolution to the United States’ role in the conflict—which led to considerable opposition from the UAW in his run for reelection in 1966.
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Parks helped present him the SCLC award.

One of Conyers’s central priorities was to get more black people elected to public office. According to Horwitz, Conyers belonged to a new generation of black politicians “calling our own shots”—not opposed to labor or the Democratic Party “but [affirming that] ‘we’re not going to be taken for granted.’” Parks similarly embodied this “independent” spirit.
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Many of Parks’s efforts on behalf of black candidates were centered in Detroit. She actively supported Coleman Young’s initial run for Common Council in 1960, worked on George Crockett’s run for Recorder’s Court in 1966, on Richard Austin’s unsuccessful campaign to become the city’s first black mayor in 1969 and Coleman Young’s successful one in 1973, and on behalf of Erma Henderson, who became the first black woman elected to Detroit’s City Council in 1972. “Rosa was Black. No question about that. She supported Black candidates,” observed Michigan State Representative Fred Durhal. Parks made appearances for the candidates, did mailings, made phone calls, and other office work. “One thing about Rosa Parks, she was an active participant, not a sideline person,” attested Durhal, who recalled all the nitty-gritty work Parks did on behalf of black candidates.
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According to Atchison, Parks had crossover appeal in those years, “You could take Rosa into the white community and nobody gets upset. But she would energize the black community, [exhorting] ‘now is the time.’”
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She also helped with the mayoral campaigns of Carl Stokes in Cleveland and Richard Hatcher in Gary, Indiana.

In April 1965, moved by the photos of marchers being beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Parks decided to return to Alabama to join the march herself. She had marched down Woodward with other Detroiters to show her solidarity with the Selma marchers. She could not afford the trip, but through the intervention of Louise Tappes, the UAW helped pay her way. Parks traveled with the UAW from Detroit to Atlanta and then by bus to Montgomery, spending the evening with her friend Bertha Butler.

The next morning, as the march entered its final stretch into Montgomery, Parks joined the last four-mile leg. The air reeked of stink bombs. White Citizens’ Council members had plastered the roads with huge billboards of the 1957 picture of her and King at Highlander, calling them Communists.
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Parks had not been given a vest to denote her as an official participant, and many of the young people did not know her. Because she did not have an official jacket, the police kept pulling her out and making her stand on the sidelines. Parks got shoved on the sidewalk. A marshal recognized her standing there. “I was in but they put me out,” she explained.
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“It seemed like such a short time that I had been out of Alabama, but so many young people had grown up in that time. They didn’t know who I was.”
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She marched for a bit with Dick Gregory’s wife, Lillian, and also for a time with blues-folk singer Odetta, but she could not keep up and would end up on the sidelines to wait for someone else to spot her and pull her back in.
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Indeed, this sense of being “put out of the march” would be the most indelible image of the experience for Parks.
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Nixon did not march, Parks recalled, but stood on the sidelines.
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A number of the whites in the crowd did recognize her, yelling, “You’ll get yours, Rosa.”

At the march’s conclusion, a huge crowd gathered on the hill next to the capitol. Coretta Scott King looked over at Mrs. Parks as the speeches began and thought to herself, “We had really come a long way from our start in the bus protest, when only a handful of people . . . were involved.”
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Parks—along with Dr. King and a number of other leaders—gave speeches that were broadcast nationally.
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Introduced as the “first lady of the movement,” she was coaxed to the podium by thunderous applause from the huge crowd—“the most enthusiastic” reception of all the speakers, according to the
New Yorker
, with calls of “Tell! Tell! Tell!”
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In her remarks, she spoke about her personal history growing up under racism and her fear of KKK attacks: “My family was deprived of the land they owned.” Telling the crowd, “I am handicapped in every way,” she publicly affirmed her connection to Highlander and tried to counter “the propaganda” being circulated about the school’s Communist ties. Refusing to be frightened by the billboards, she highlighted what she had learned from Highlander and disputed the idea that Dr. King was a Communist.
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As Horton recalled, she credited Highlander as the place where she learned “not to hate white people”
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and affirmed that she was “the one at Highlander, I was the one. I am the student, not Martin. He was just our speaker.”
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She concluded with customary modesty by saying others could say it better than her.
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Enjoying being back with old friends, Mrs. Parks felt Dr. King seemed “unusually shy” and “distracted.”
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She did not see either Myles Horton or Virginia Durr. The Durrs had a large gathering of movement people over to their house that night and were disappointed, as was Myles Horton, “that you did not get in touch with them, but understood the situation.”
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Returning to the hotel in Atlanta tired, Parks felt depressed.
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She had premonitions something bad was about to happen. That night she had a nightmare: standing in a field with a large billboard, she saw a man with a gun and was trying to warn her husband when the man with the gun aimed at her.
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She woke up shaken and was horrified to learn about the murder of Viola Liuzzo the night before. A white Detroiter who had journeyed south to join the march, Liuzzo was murdered as she drove marchers home. Members of the Klan, including an FBI informant, Gary Rowe, pulled up alongside Liuzzo’s car, trying to force her off the road. They shot at her and the other passenger, nineteen-year-old African American Leroy Moton, who played dead when the Klan searched the car.