The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (46 page)

Long committed to criminal justice regarding sexual violence against women, Parks was one of the founders of the Joanne Little Defense Committee in Detroit. Little was charged with murder when she defended herself against the sexual advances of her jailer, Clarence Alligood. Little had been in jail for burglary and Alligood threatened her with an ice pick and forced her to perform oral sex. Little managed to grab the ice pick, stabbed Alligood, and escaped, turning herself in to police days later. Her case brought gender issues to the forefront of many Black Power groups—and a broad-based grassroots movement to defend Little grew across the country. The mission statement of the Detroit group affirmed the right of women to defend themselves against their sexual attackers and raised the interlocking issues of poverty and criminal defense—and the ways poor people could often not afford to mount an adequate defense.
¹¹⁷
Parks was one of the people put in charge of soliciting help from other organizations. Little was eventually acquitted.

Parks also campaigned vigorously on behalf of Gary Tyler, a sixteen-year-old black teenager who had been wrongfully convicted for the killing of a thirteen-year-old white boy. As schools were desegregated in Louisiana, Tyler was riding a school bus attacked by a white mob angered by integration. Police boarded the bus and pulled Tyler off for allegedly shooting a boy outside the bus, even though no gun was found on the bus. In a five-day trial, after police pressured some of Tyler’s classmates (who would later recant) to testify, Tyler was sentenced to death. Parks gave the keynote at a packed meeting and rally of over three hundred people in Detroit on June 13, 1976, on behalf of Tyler.
¹¹⁸
She attended meetings and continued to work to see his conviction overturned.
¹¹⁹
In July 1976, the Supreme Court ruled Louisiana’s death penalty unconstitutional. However, Tyler, imprisoned at the notorious Angola prison, was never freed.

Throughout these years drawing attention to the political nature of these prosecutions remained a key priority for Parks. In 1981, a broad swath of activists from the Black Liberation Army, the RNA, the Weather Underground, and the May 19th Coalition were arrested in connection with the $1.6 million robbery of a Brink’s truck in Nanuet, New York. During the robbery and apprehension of the suspects, a security guard was killed, and a shoot-out between the activists and police left two Nyack officers dead. More than twenty people would be arrested in connection to the robbery—many of whom were known revolutionaries, though not all were part of the plot. (Members of these groups had also successfully helped Assata Shakur escape from prison in 1979, and law enforcement had become increasingly suspicious of these groups.) Chokwe Lumumba was defending RNA leaders Fulani Sunni Ali and Bilal Sunni Ali on conspiracy charges. Worried about radical high jinks and a politicized trial, the judge barred Lumumba from representing Fulani Sunni Ali, citing Lumumba’s behavior in the courtroom. Unwilling to acquiesce to this assault on civil liberties, Lumumba and others fought back and ultimately won back the right for Lumumba to represent the Alis in the case.

In the midst of the case, Lumumba returned home to Detroit to find a small note in the mail. The writer thanked Lumumba for all his efforts “standing up for your people. . . . For standing strong and not flinching.” Lumumba read the letter and thought, “This is a nice person who decided to write me. Really sweet. Then I put the letter down. A day later, I thought, ‘Rosa?!’ I went back and looked. The letter was from Rosa Parks.”
¹²⁰
At the age of seventy, Mrs. Parks, always the dedicated correspondent, had taken the time to write another letter—to tell one of the most prominent black nationalists in the city (whom she had not met in person at that point) that she was proud of his efforts.

Continuing her varied activism, Parks campaigned vigorously for George McGovern in 1972 and actively called for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. She addressed an overflowing crowd of fifteen thousand at the first Michigan Black Expo, sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation Breadbasket in July 1972, paying tribute to both King and Angela Davis.
¹²¹
She appeared on a program with Reverend Charles Koen of the Cairo (Illinois) United Front. Formed in 1969 to counter white-vigilante and police violence in Cairo, the Cairo United Front led a years-long boycott of white businesses; Parks praised the “unity created by the new black awareness.”
¹²²

Feeling there was still much work to be done, she told Studs Terkel in 1973, “Even with much of what has happened to our dismay and to our unhappiness . . . I’ll continue to be hopeful that there will be a way for us to eventually know freedom, with all of its meaning.”
¹²³
In another interview from 1973, she expressed a similar sentiment: “A lot of things have happened and are still happening, that I wish would not have taken place. But you have to remain optimistic. When things get bad, you have to keep telling yourself that maybe it’s just a phase, one more thing we have to go through. Nothing comes easily. We have to keep on trying, as long as we are alive.”
¹²⁴

In 1975, Parks returned to Montgomery to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the boycott, telling the cheering crowd: “I’m very proud we’ve come from a voteless and a hopeless and a helpless people to a people who can and should hold the balance of the power politically.”
¹²⁵
From the pulpit at Holt Street (where the first mass meeting had taken place), Parks was firm in her belief that the struggle was not finished. “Don’t stop,” she insisted. “Keep on. Keep on keeping on.”
¹²⁶

During the 1979/1980 school year, Parks paid a visit to the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School, an independent black elementary school started to address the deficits in Oakland’s public education system and the Panther’s longest-running survival program.
¹²⁷
The students performed a play they had written in her honor, which included a reenactment of her bus stand, and then she answered questions. “It didn’t matter if they asked the question again and again, she answered them,” according to the school’s director, Ericka Huggins, who recalled how much Parks loved it. “She just kept thanking me and the instructors and the Black Panther Party for doing what we were doing.” The students and entire staff were “touched,” according to Huggins that Parks “came all the way” and talked about it for weeks afterward.
¹²⁸
Huggins recalled her own delight at Parks’s visit. “I consider Rosa Parks a radical woman, a revolutionary woman, showing up in real time at an elementary school run by the Black Panther Party.”
¹²⁹

The late 1970s were a difficult time for Parks personally. Her ulcers continued to plague her, and she developed heart trouble. The family still struggled economically. Even more upsetting, Raymond, her mother, and Sylvester all developed cancer. “There was a time,” Parks recalled, “when I was traveling every day to three hospitals to visit them.”
¹³⁰
This took a lot out of her. She cut her work at Conyers’s office to part-time. In 1977, after a five-year battle with throat cancer, Raymond died at the age of seventy-four, devastating the sixty-four-year-old Rosa. Three months later, Sylvester died. “My health wasn’t too good at that time either, but I kept on working,” she explained. “I couldn’t do everything I wanted to, but I did what I could.”
¹³¹
And two years later, her mother passed away at the age of ninety-two. Within two years, Mrs. Parks’s closest family—and foundation of her support—had all passed away. This was an aching loss.

The emotional toll was accompanied by economic insecurity. Various friends stepped in to try to raise money again. In 1976, a six-hundred-person fund-raiser was held to build a “shrine” for her in Detroit, a museum-residence where she would live and people could visit and learn the history of her life in the struggle. Articles ran in the black press about these fund-raising efforts. At the same time, Durr, Horton, and Terkel hoped to raise money for a home and steady income for Parks to move back to Alabama. Durr wrote to Horton in 1979, “She tells me she has no money, that she wants to come back to Alabama where it is warm and I have no idea what her Federal pension will be. . . . When Congressman Conyers was here last spring I tried to talk to him about it, but he evidently misconstrued my remarks and got on the defensive and said he had done his best for Mrs. Parks and very abruptly ended the conversation.”
¹³²
None of these efforts came to fruition.

Even the depths of her personal loss did not stop her political activities. As she regained her physical and mental strength, Mrs. Parks carried on her political commitments. “I don’t plan as long as any effort is being made to be discouraged,” she told a reporter in 1983.
¹³³
Like many of her civil rights comrades, Parks had long followed the movement to oppose apartheid in South Africa and joined efforts to challenge U.S. support of South Africa’s all-white government. Alongside other activists in the Free South Africa Movement, she walked the picket lines in Washington, DC. On December 10, 1984, the seventy-one-year-old Parks made headlines, carrying a sign that read, “Freedom Yes Apartheid No!” She told the crowd how grateful she was to be there with them.
¹³⁴
Mrs. Parks patiently explained to one reporter who seemed incredulous as to why she had come out, “I am concerned about that [South Africa’s apartheid], and I am concerned about any discrimination or denial of any people regardless of their race.”
¹³⁵
Arthur Featherstone, who worked alongside Parks on Conyers’s staff, described Parks’s “special concern for what’s going on in South Africa . . . it really hurts her to see people being killed, as they were in Alabama, Mississippi and other states in the 1950s and ’60s.”
¹³⁶
In April 1985, she flew to Berkeley as part of coordinated anti-apartheid demonstrations to mark the anniversary of King’s assassination.
¹³⁷
And in January 1986, she journeyed back to Ebenezer Baptist Church for the National Conference Against Apartheid, where Bishop Desmond Tutu gave the keynote.

Parks had difficulty saying no to causes she found important. She helped lead a march in Philadelphia in 1976 to prevent the closure of Philadelphia General Hospital, which served many black and poor residents.
¹³⁸
Concerned with the U.S. military role in Central America and the Caribbean, in 1984 she served as a judge, along with Judge Bruce Wright, Reverend William Sloan Coffin, and Ben Chavis, in a war-crimes tribunal sponsored by the National Lawyers Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Conference of Black Lawyers, and La Raza Legal Alliance. The tribunal sought to examine and expose U.S. military activities and covert operations in Central America and the Caribbean and help spur antiwar activism against U.S. military interventions across the Americas.
¹³⁹

She supported Jesse Jackson’s bid for the Democratic nomination for president, headlining a fund-raiser for Jackson at Howard University in April 1984.
¹⁴⁰
In 1988, she came to the Democratic Convention in Atlanta to support him. Called onstage to cheers of “Rosa, Rosa, Rosa,” the seventy-five-year-old Parks joined Jackson at the podium.
¹⁴¹
Honored in Philadelphia, Parks explained to the thousand people gathered, “At some point we should step aside and let the younger ones take over. But we first must take care of our young people to make sure that they have the rights of first-class citizens. . . . And when we see so little done by so many, we just will not give up.”
¹⁴²

Closer to home was the nearly all-white suburb of Dearborn, home of the Ford Motor Company. The mayor had pledged to keep “Detroit’s trash out,” and in 1978 only a few blacks lived in Dearborn—many of those women serving as live-in domestics.
¹⁴³
The city then passed an ordinance forbidding “nonresidents” from using its parks. “Its mayor said the ordinance would keep the city clean. That was a metaphor for keeping it all white,” NAACP activist Joseph Madison explained. In 1985, he and Parks began to make plans for a boycott of the entire city. To Parks, the Dearborn ordinance “was like many of the intimidating tactics we had to fight against in the civil rights movement. . . . I could not bear to see it happening again.”
¹⁴⁴
The slogan for the boycott became “If you can’t play, don’t pay.” On the eve of the boycott, the city rescinded the ordinance.
¹⁴⁵

Madison and Parks continued working together. “People have a difficult time thinking of Rosa Parks as a fighter,” Madison explained.
¹⁴⁶
But fight she did. In August of 1987, Madison and Parks joined forces to call for a boycott of a local retain chain they saw discriminating against black employees. As Madison explained in 1988, “If there’s anything you write about Rosa Parks, you ought to try to dispel the myth that she is an old, frail woman. She is active, very forceful in a gentle way and extremely committed to the progress of young people.” Madison decided to run for president and asked Parks to run for vice president of the Detroit NAACP in 1985. “We were basically battling against the old guard,” explained Madison, “reaching out to the young people, becoming more active.”
¹⁴⁷
The slate lost.

At a gala celebrating Parks’s seventy-seventh birthday at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in 1990, Lou Rawls, Dick Gregory, Sister Sledge, Dionne Warwick, Cicely Tyson, and Melissa Manchester performed tributes to Parks. While always gracious, Parks did not seem to be in a love-song sort of mood and was one of the few on the program to highlight contemporary political issues, telling the star-studded crowd to “fight for the freedom of Nelson Mandela and those in South Africa.”
¹⁴⁸
In her brief speech she told those gathered “not to give in or give up our struggle to peace, justice, goodwill, and freedom for all oppressed people,” ending with the reminder that “many of us are oppressed today.”
¹⁴⁹