The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (45 page)

Rosa Parks attended the third national conference on Black Power in Philadelphia on August 29, 1968. Many of the leading Black Power advocates, like Amiri Baraka, Ron Karenga, Max Stanford (later Muhammad Ahmad), Richard Henry, Stokely Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown, were there along with nearly two thousand participants. Mrs. Parks kept her customary low profile and had no speaking role. As she would at many events, she sat, listened, and did her knitting (or some sort of handwork), according to Nathan Hare, who recalled her mingling with people, talking particularly with Queen Mother Moore.
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The conference—with its theme “Black Self-Determination and Black Unity through Direct Action”—garnered national attention from the media, the Philadelphia police, and the FBI. As Max Stanford was leaving, Hare pulled him aside to introduce him to someone he needed to meet. That person was Mrs. Parks. Stanford was “blown away. Here was the mother of the civil rights movement.”
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Continuing to work with activists throughout the country, Parks journeyed to Gary, Indiana, in March 1972 to attend the National Black Political Convention. That convention, convened by Amiri Baraka, Ron Karenga, and Richard Hatcher, brought together ten thousand black people from across the nation to outline an independent black political agenda during this presidential election year. Independent black politics was not new to Parks. She had been involved in independent black organizing two decades earlier with E. D. Nixon’s Progressive Democratic Party and had long been convinced of the power of an organized black vote—and she was not about to miss this historic gathering. Gwen Patton recalled Parks giving a short greeting at the Convention, conveying her “blessings” of the event.
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Asserting that both parties “had betrayed us” and protected white political interests, the Gary convention agenda focused on creating a black united front in order to harness black power nationally and support local initiatives. While some of the Michigan delegation, led by Coleman Young, who were more loyal to the Democratic Party and UAW, walked out partway through the convention, Parks did not. Perusing the book tables at the convention, Parks was captured on film by black photographer LeRoy Henderson. Henderson, who photographed numerous Black Power demonstrations and black caucuses in the 1960s and 1970s, spotted Mrs. Parks gazing admiringly at a poster of Malcolm X. “I was there with my camera watching, recognizing people, and grabbing candid shots of them . . . capturing this stuff for future generations. . . . Standing at this poster table was a lady nobody even seemed to know who she was. . . . I knew it was Rosa Parks.”
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Parks also found herself part of a growing, diverse Black Power scene back home in Detroit. “Honest to God, almost every meeting I went to, she was always there,” Ed Vaughn recalled. “She was so regular.”
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She began wearing “colorful African-inspired garb,” according to Brinkley, and took pleasure in new opportunities to learn about African cultural influences. The dissemination of black history to young people had long been one of her priorities, and in Detroit she supported after-school programs, independent black schools, Afrocentric educational initiatives, and black history curricula. Close to home, the Afrikan History Club at McFarlane Elementary School made Mrs. Parks its honorary secretary.

As much as her health and schedule allowed, she turned out for black events in the city. “Dang, that’s Rosa again,” Vaughn would note. Indeed, her schedule was so busy in the late 1960s that she convinced her brother, Sylvester, and his wife, Daisy, to allow her niece, fifteen-year-old Rhea, to come live with the Parkses to help look after her mother and Raymond. There were many meetings, functions, and out-of-town events that Rosa wanted to attend, and she wanted someone else at home because neither her mother nor Raymond was in good health.
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“She was always going somewhere,” cousin Carolyn Green recalled.
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But she was not always widely noticed. The combination of her unassuming presence and that her stature in the 1960s and 1970s was not what it would become by the 1990s meant that Parks’s political activities sometimes escaped broader attention. But the fact that she came out was important to many younger activists. While Mrs. Parks was not a street activist, if asked to do something, according to Dan Aldridge, she would. “People would be surprised at how she would come out,” he explained. “She was so ladylike and genteel. But she had a depth of political sensibilities.”
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Parks was in the midst of a growing black cultural and political nationalism in the city. With roots before the 1967 uprising, a Black Arts Movement emerged in the city. Long interested in black history, art and literature, Parks came to some of the Thursday evening biweekly forums at Vaughn’s bookstore and attended the Black Arts Convention in 1966, which brought Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Don Lee, and Nikki Giovanni and a host of young black writers and other nationalists to Cleage’s church. She tuned in to a new black radio station, WCHB, and saw shows at the Concept East Theater, a theater company founded to increase the opportunities for black artists to write, direct, produce, and act in Detroit’s fairly small theater scene.
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Other activists—including Rosa Parks’s friends Richard and Milton Henry—took up the call for reparations, believing that slavery and its legacies had fundamentally shaped the American political economy and required economic and political redress. The Henry brothers helped convene a five-hundred-person gathering on March 29, 1968, in Detroit to discuss the need for justice, reparations, and black autonomy—and the potential for creating a black nation within the United States. Two days later, one hundred people signed a document forming the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), outlining a doctrine for the black nation and naming a provisional leadership. Queen Mother Moore was the first to sign. Robert F. Williams was named president in absentia; Betty Shabazz was named the second vice president. The RNA advocated a separate state for African Americans to be formed in the five “black belt” states of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina as land due black people as reparations for the legacy of slavery. Parks closely followed and occasionally participated in the RNA’s activities, though it is difficult to document which events she attended. Many of her friends were deeply involved, and she was called on for help at key moments.

By most accounts, Parks did not attend the RNA’s second annual convention on March 29, 1969, which resulted in a historic confrontation between black radicals and the Detroit police. Three hundred people gathered at Reverend Franklin’s New Bethel Church. As the meeting finished, a shooting occurred outside the church. In response, the police broke down the doors of the church, poured hundreds of rounds into the church, and brutally arrested all the men, women, and children gathered. Police claimed self-defense, but an article in the
Michigan Chronicle
later revealed that members of the FBI, the CIA, and the Detroit police department’s “subversive squad” were in attendance who could have prevented the melee outside and identified who actually shot the officer, but instead, they stood by.
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Several convention members were wounded. One young policeman was killed and another wounded. The entire convention remaining at that point, 140 people, was arrested en masse.

Reverend Franklin (the pastor of the church) notified black judge George Crockett of the mass arrests. Parks, alongside a number of friends, had worked hard to see Crockett elected to Recorder’s Court in 1966. A bold legal advocate, Crockett had defended the eleven members of the Communist Party charged with violation of the Smith Act; represented Coleman Young and others before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC); and worked with the National Lawyers Guild in Mississippi. As a judge in Recorder’s Court, Crockett had been devoted to rooting out police misconduct and establishing firmer judicial oversight.

In the middle of the night, Judge Crockett proceeded to the police station, where he found legal disarray. The 140 people from the RNA convention were being held incommunicado. No one had been formally arrested, and in disregard of customary procedure, everyone was being treated as suspects—fingerprinted and given nitrate tests to determine if they had fired guns. An indignant Crockett set up court right in the station house, demanding the police either press charges or release people. He had handled about fifty cases, releasing most of the men, women, and children, when the Wayne County prosecutor, who had been called in by the police, interceded and promised a return to normal procedures.

Crockett came under tremendous criticism for this intervention. White politicians and citizens called for his impeachment; 200,000 people signed a petition spearheaded by the Detroit police officers’ association accusing Crockett of “gross misconduct.”
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In response, a Black United Front of nearly sixty organizations ranging from the NAACP to the RNA coalesced to support Judge Crockett. On April 3, 1969, they called for demonstrations in support of Crockett, and some three thousand people responded. Greatly disturbed by the police action at New Bethel, Parks was active in the campaign to defend Crockett. On a slip of paper for a speech for Detroit’s Alabama Club, she highlighted the similarities between police brutality in Montgomery and Detroit and then noted “my experiences with Judge Crockett,” perhaps suggesting some personal tie to the events at New Bethel or Crockett’s actions at the police station.
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Police brutality continued to escalate in Detroit. In 1971, the police department created a special undercover unit, “Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets” (STRESS). Using a decoy officer and usually two to three other officers, STRESS, in its first nine months, made 1,400 arrests and killed ten suspects (nine of whom were black). This tiny unit was responsible for 39 percent of Detroit Police Department deaths in its first year—and DPD topped the nation for civilian deaths. By September 1973, the number of STRESS fatalities had risen to twenty-two.
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Parks supported Coleman Young’s bid to be Detroit’s first black mayor in 1973; one key promise he made—and ultimately delivered on—was to end STRESS.

After the police roundup at New Bethel Church, a section of the RNA decided to move its operations to Mississippi. Richard Henry, now known as Imari Obadele, led a group south to begin acquiring land, settling on a farm in Jackson, Mississippi; Milton Henry, now Gaidi Obadele, stayed behind in Detroit. Following the New Bethel incident, the FBI stepped up its monitoring of the group.
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The Mississippi farm was threatened and raided, and in August 1971 RNA members engaged in a showdown with police. On that day, the FBI and the Jackson Police Department attacked the RNA farm with arms, tear gas, and a tank. A shoot-out between the RNA and the police ensued. One Jackson police officer was killed, and another patrolmen and an FBI agent were wounded. Eleven RNA members, including President Imari Obadele (who was not at the farm during the shootout), were arrested, and the police began to brutalize the suspects, including one of the women who was pregnant. The defendants were paraded half-clothed through downtown Jackson.

A neighbor phoned RNA Minister of Justice Chokwe Lumumba back in Detroit. Fearing what would be done to the people in custody, Lumumba frantically called Representative Conyers’s office to ask the congressman to intervene. According to Lumumba, Conyers’s office “got back to us immediately” that they had gotten the assurances from the Justice Department that the suspects would be humanely treated. Lumumba found out later that it was Rosa Parks who had acted so quickly. “She intervened and really saved their lives. If they had gone on unabated, some people would have killed. That was her intervention. . . . She saved the lives of my comrades.”
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Conyers’s version of the story corresponds to Lumumba’s. When Obadele died, Conyers “vividly recall[ed] Dr. Obadele working with Rosa Parks from my Detroit office, in 1971, to secure his safety in the Jackson, Mississippi jail following the RNA’s confrontation with the police. He often told me that the actions of Rosa Parks saved his life in that Mississippi jail.”
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Eight members of the RNA were convicted of murder; a year later, Obadele was convicted of conspiracy and served more than five years of a twelve-year sentence. Detroit city councilwoman JoAnn Watson remembered Obadele saying that during his five years in prison Parks would periodically call the prison to check on his well-being, being clear that this was “Rosa Parks calling” and informing prison officials they were being watched.
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Mrs. Parks had long been critical of the ways black defendants were treated within the criminal justice system. The 1970s and 1980s saw a number of black activists face criminal prosecution. Parks joined the efforts to draw public attention to this political persecution. In 1971, Reverend Ben Chavis had been sent to Wilmington, North Carolina, by the United Church of Christ to help engage students in a boycott of city schools. Seen as militant troublemakers, he and nine others would be subsequently charged with arson and conspiracy in the firebombing of a white grocery. All were convicted. Outraged, defense committees were started across the country to press for their sentences to be overturned. Detroiters founded a local Wilmington 10 Defense Committee—its honorary chairpersons in 1976 included John Conyers, Judge Crockett, and Rosa Parks—which called for an appeal in the case and fund raising to support it.
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Parks followed the case closely from her home in Detroit, as she did with the case of UCLA professor Angela Davis. (Involved in the Free the Soledad Brothers campaign, Davis had been placed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list and charged with murder and kidnapping in connection with the death of Judge Harold Haley but was ultimately acquitted of all charges.)
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Davis came to Detroit two weeks after her acquittal for an SCLC event at the Coliseum. Parks introduced her to the crowd of twelve thousand as a “dear sister who has suffered so much persecution.”
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