The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (42 page)

Reflecting her reserve about such details, her autobiography contains little information on these activities, perhaps because she wanted to keep them obscured. As Conyers noted, Parks was “a progressive but she did not wear her political philosophy on her sleeve.”
¹³
In addition, because Jim Haskins was less familiar with the Detroit political community, he asked fewer questions, shaping the arc of her autobiography. Perhaps, also, she did not believe people would approve.

Parks’s unassuming personality stood in contrast to the brash manner of many radicals. As Chokwe Lumumba noted, “We were emulating really powerful people. King, Malcolm, Paul Robeson—those pan-Africanists, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Sekou Toure. . . . [Many activists] were genuine, but had their own ego, and were high profile. Whereas Rosa was just unassuming. . . . Sometimes you would not notice she was there, or her contribution.”
¹⁴
In many ways, Rosa Parks was hidden in plain sight in the Black Power era. But as Northern Student Movement activist Frank Joyce recalled, “Everybody knew that she did have radical politics.”
¹⁵

Never one to seek public recognition, she had found her public fame around the boycott hard to bear. She chafed at the ways journalists continued to seek her out, telling an interviewer in 1973, “There are times when I’d like to get to be quiet and have some time to be like an ordinary person who nothing special ever happened to. I hope I won’t be having to tell people that story for the rest of my life.”
¹⁶
In the late 1960s and 1970s, she still preferred to blend in—and often, in this era, she could. Many times she simply wanted to listen and participate, to do what she could and try not to attract attention. And if she used her stature, it would be for the promotion of the event or issue.

Conyers also attributed the omission of Parks’s radicalism from the narrative of the civil rights era in part to the “discongruity” of it—“she had a heavy progressive streak about her that was uncharacteristic for a neat, religious, demure, churchgoing lady.”
¹⁷
Indeed, standard notions of Black Power leave little room for the quiet militant. In the popular imagination, black militants do not speak softly, dress conservatively, attend church regularly, get nervous, or work behind the scenes. Fundamentally, they are the opposite of a middle-aged seamstress who spoke softly and slowly. And yet there were many militants like Mrs. Parks who did just those things. As her cousin Carolyn Green explained, Parks made clear when she thought something was wrong or untruthful. “Her voice never went up. . . . But she would let you know.”
¹⁸

She was “quiet and sweet,” black nationalist Ed Vaughn explained, “but strong as acid.”
¹⁹
Friend Roberta Hughes Wright noted, “She’s quiet—the way steel is quiet. . . . She seems almost meek, but we already know the truth of that, don’t we?”
²⁰
“Fearless,” Leon Atchison stated.
²¹
Indeed, in interviews with her political associates from 1960s-era Detroit, even from some of the era’s most prominent Black militants, numerous people attest to the gentleness of her spirit
and
her fearlessness—how unintimidated she was in her post-Montgomery political activities. This circumspect fearlessness was nothing new. In 1975, Vernon Jarrett, a black reporter for the
Chicago Tribune
, did a twenty-year retrospective series on the bus boycott. Jarrett had been warned by E. D. Nixon before he interviewed Mrs. Parks that she “ain’t gonna talk much because she’s a doer, not a bragger. But that woman is one of the most courageous citizens this country has ever known.” Jarrett too was struck by this quality. “The contradictory personality that is Rosa Parks, that subdued thunder in her Southern country-woman’s voice—did not prepare her listener for the little verbal bombs that she exploded.”
²²

Understanding Rosa Parks’s militancy widens the lens on the work of radicalism more broadly. Part of what Mrs. Parks did in the years of Black Power was show up. She “spoke with her presence,” as Conyers put it.
²³
And in the popular portrayals of Black Power, there has been a tendency to miss the saliency of this role. To understand Black Power as a constellation of movements means seeing the numbers of people who turned out for lectures, sold newspapers, attended rallies, built independent black cultural organizations, and joined defense committees for black political prisoners. Rosa Parks “was everywhere,” according to bookstore owner Ed Vaughn.
²⁴
Able to keep herself above the ideological fray, she listened and learned, attending rallies and speeches and public mass meetings. She signed petitions, came out for lectures, and immersed herself in all the black history she could find. She protested police brutality, spoke out on behalf of black prisoners, let groups use her name, and helped found local prisoner-defense committees. She didn’t necessarily join groups or agree with everything that was said, but it was important to take part. Above all, she wanted to be helpful—and if her presence allowed more people to see the issue, then by all means she would try to come. “She had a lot of guts to lend her name to left-wing causes,” Conyers’s aide Larry Horwitz explained, “things that people thought were scary.”
²⁵
By the late 1960s, a new generation had come of age. She took heart in the pride and boldness of these young people, and they found sustenance in her support.

In the 1990s, Parks shocked black-nationalist lawyer Chokwe Lumumba when she told him that her hero was Malcolm X. Lumumba had assumed that her work and close personal relationship with King meant that he would be her personal inspiration. No, she clarified, she had certainly loved and admired King greatly, but Malcolm’s boldness and clarity, his affirmation of what needed to be done for black people, made him her champion.
²⁶
Parks saw no contradiction in her deep admiration for both King and Malcolm X. Describing Malcolm as “a very brilliant man,” she had read all she could on his ministry and political program by the mid-1960s. “Full of conviction and pride in his race,” she noted, Malcolm X reminded Mrs. Parks of her own grandfather: “The way he stood up and voiced himself showed that he was a man to be respected.”
²⁷
Having imbibed this tradition of self-defense from her grandfather, Rosa Parks had put it to use as a young person. “We always felt that if you talked violently and said what you would do if they did something to you,” she explained in her autobiography, “that did more good than nonviolence.”
²⁸

Rosa and Raymond had been raised to be “proud” and learned they would have to speak up and act decisively for self-protection. “I just couldn’t accept being pushed even at the cost of my life,” she explained. Nonviolence on the individual level “could be mistaken for cowardice.” Rosa’s belief in self-defense and collective action stemmed as well from her Christian faith. “From my upbringing and the Bible I learned people should stand up for rights just as the children of Israel stood up to the Pharaoh.”
²⁹

Like many blacks and whites of that period, Mrs. Parks found the use of mass nonviolent action new and “refreshing,” calling the boycott “more successful, I believe, than it would have been if violence had been used.” Still, she found it “hard to say that she was completely converted to it.” Her thinking coupled nonviolence with self-defense. For her, collective power could be found in organized nonviolence, while self-respect, at times, required self-defense: “As far back as I remember, I could never think in terms of accepting physical abuse without some form of retaliation if possible.”
³⁰
Indeed, the Parks family, like many black Southerners, had long kept a gun in their home, even as they participated in the nonviolent movement.
³¹

Parks saw nonviolent direct action and self-defense as interlinked, both key to achieving black rights and maintaining black dignity. In regard to self-defense, she found herself closer in philosophy to Malcolm X than King. “Malcolm wasn’t a supporter of nonviolence either,” she noted.
³²
Still, she harbored tremendous respect for King’s organized program and deeply held philosophy of nonviolence. Organized nonviolence in Montgomery during the bus boycott had offered a powerful rebuke to white city leaders and local citizens who thought black people too undisciplined and emotional not to resort to violence when provoked. Parks had delighted in the power of it. In 1962, at the SCLC’s annual convention in Birmingham, a white man in the audience started hitting King, who did not defend himself. Instead King yelled, “Don’t touch him! We have to pray for him.” Parks witnessed the event, and saw this as “proof that Dr. King believed so completely in nonviolence that it was even stronger than his instinct to protect himself from attack.”
³³
After the attack, knowing King must be in pain, Parks went and got him a bottle of Coca-Cola and some aspirin.
³⁴
She was extremely proud: “His restraint was more powerful than a hundred fists.”

While Parks had a deep appreciation for nonviolent resistance, her resolute belief in self-defense continued amidst the growing momentum of the nonviolent movement. On a church program in 1964, she copied lines from Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die”:

Parks encountered Malcolm X three times in the mid-1960s, and they became a bit friendly.
³⁶
In 1963, when the Northern Christian Leadership Conference and the Grassroots Leadership Conference were both held in Detroit, Parks attended both. Black radicals had come from across the country, including Harlem’s Jesse Gray, Brooklyn’s Milton Galamison, Freedom Now Party founder William Worthy, and Cambridge, Maryland, leader Gloria Richardson. Malcolm X wanted to meet Parks, and they had a warm greeting.
³⁷
At King Solomon Baptist Church on Detroit’s near west side, Malcolm X preached his “Message to the Grassroots” to a crowd of three thousand. Linking black struggle in the United States to anticolonial movements internationally, he rebuked the civil rights movement: “The only kind of revolution that is nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution in which the goal is loving your enemy is the Negro revolution.”
³⁸
Still he affirmed the importance of a black united front and of nonviolent disruption aimed at the federal government in Washington—a vision of independent political action that dovetailed with the emerging Freedom Now Party in Detroit. Just a couple weeks before Kennedy’s assassination and Elijah Muhammad’s silencing of Malcolm, the speech provided a preview of the post–Nation of Islam, politically independent Malcolm X.

Parks was also in the audience on April 12, 1964, when Malcolm X reprised his famous “Ballot or the Bullet” speech at a GOAL Legal Fund rally at King Solomon Church. Malcolm X extolled the power black people held, referring to the deciding role that black voters played in Kennedy’s 1960 presidential election. Explaining that he was not an American but a “victim of Americanism,” he called on black people to use the ballot independently and in unity: “A vote for a Democrat is a vote for a Dixiecrat. . . . It’s time now for you and me to become more politically mature and realize what the ballot is for; what we’re supposed to get when we cast a ballot; and that if we don’t cast a ballot, it’s going to end up in a situation where we’re going to have to cast a bullet. It’s either a ballot or a bullet.”
³⁹

This GOAL event helped to launch the Freedom Now Party’s 1964 campaign. Founded in October 1963 by Reverend Albert Cleage, Milton Henry, Luke Tripp, and others, the Freedom Now Party aimed to be an independent third party that protected the interests of black people. “We understand that a Democrat represents Democrats, a Republican represents Republicans but a freedom-now party candidate represents Negroes!” ran their slogan. The Freedom Now Party sought to build a party that put the interests of black people before partisan loyalty and backroom compromises with black leaders. In 1963, Cleage had urged a “no” vote—“No Taxation for Discrimination”—on a city millage referendum asking voters to increase revenue for Detroit’s public schools. Though this stance put him at odds with some civil rights leaders, Cleage opposed the increase, believing that blacks should not give more money to a system that oppressed black children and refused to change its segregationist ways.

Rosa Parks had long seen the importance of independent black political power. Though she never put herself forward on the ballot of the Freedom Now Party, Mrs. Parks was a supporter, as were a number of her friends, including Mary Hays Carter.
⁴⁰
She began making appearances at Freedom Now Party rallies, read their newsletter, and followed their progress. In 1964, the Freedom Now Party ran a slate of candidates for Congress, governor, and other state offices. All lost.

Parks had also been heartened by Malcolm X’s reaching out to the civil rights movement and his journey to Selma in early 1965 at SNCC’s invitation to support the movement there.
⁴¹
United front politics, Parks thought, were the key. Right before Malcolm X was assassinated, she got the chance to have a longer conversation with him. On February 14, 1965, Mrs. Parks received a Dignity “Overdue Award” from the Afro-American Broadcasting Company. Milton and Richard Henry, who had helped create the Freedom Now Party, understood the emerging power of the mass media. Recognizing the negative images of black people portrayed in public culture (if black people were portrayed at all) and the limited ways the media covered black protest, they had founded this black broadcasting company in Detroit to put forth programming for “spiritually free black people.”
⁴²
The Afro-American Broadcasting Company put out a two-hour radio show each Saturday on WGPR, which often featured Malcolm’s speeches in the program. In 1965, they held their first awards ceremony. Along with Mrs. Parks, those honored that evening included the Motown Record Company, Marian Anderson, Sidney Poitier, and Jackie Gleason. Perhaps because Malcolm X was slated to give the evening’s keynote, seven of the business honorees, including Hudson’s Department Store and the Chrysler Corporation, refused to accept their awards.
⁴³