The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (47 page)

Four months after Nelson Mandela was released from Robben Island prison, he came to Detroit as part of a U.S. trip to promote sanctions against the South African government. Somehow Parks had initially not been invited to meet him, but Judge Damon Keith insisted on getting her a place in the receiving line, despite Parks’s embarrassment.
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Mandela came off the plane amidst the cheering crowd of dignitaries and well-wishers, and froze when he saw Mrs. Parks. Slowly he began walking toward her, chanting “R
O-SA
P
ARKS
! R
O-SA
P
ARKS
!”
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The two seasoned freedom fighters embraced.

Conyers, Dick Gregory, and Rosa Parks all were supporters of reparations. By the late 1980s, calls for reparations had coalesced into the founding of N’COBRA, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. According to its founding statements, three centuries of chattel slavery and another century of government-sanctioned segregation and inequality meant both the American government and businesses owed black people reparations. In 1994, N’COBRA held its annual meeting in Detroit. Both Rosa Parks and Jesse Jackson attended, Parks sitting in the front row next to Queen Mother Moore.
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The next year, on October 16, 1995, Mrs. Parks and Queen Mother Moore journeyed to Washington to take part in the Million Man March, along with Dorothy Height, Maya Angelou, and Betty Shabazz. Parks received many calls from friends, particularly women friends, urging her not to go. Despite the “criticism and controversy [that] have been focused on in the media,” Parks felt it was a “new day in America.” As she had for decades, Mrs. Parks went where people were committed to doing good work; whether she supported the entire message or how it might look to other people were not her primary consideration. And so at the age of eighty-two, she accepted Louis Farrakhan’s invitation to come to Washington, DC, to address the march. Greeted with an extraordinary ovation from the crowd, she spoke about Raymond’s role in the struggle and how she was “honored that young men respect me and have invited me as an elder.”
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ROSA PARKS’S MOST HISTORIC HOUR
may have occurred on the bus in December 1955, but a moment that perhaps revealed more of her strength of character came forty years later. On August 30, 1994, at the age of eighty-one, Parks was mugged in her own home by a young black man, Joseph Skipper. Skipper broke down her back door and then claimed he had chased away an intruder. He asked for a tip. When Parks went upstairs to get her pocketbook, he followed her. She gave him the three dollars he initially asked for, but he demanded more. When she refused, he proceeded to hit her. “I tried to defend myself and grabbed his shirt,” she explained. “Even at eighty-one years of age, I felt it was my right to defend myself.”
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He hit her again, punching her in the face and shaking her hard, and threatened to hurt her further. She relented and gave him all her money—$103. Hurt and badly shaken, she called Elaine Steele, who lived across the street and had become a key source of support. Steele called the police, who took fifty minutes to arrive. Meanwhile, the word went out that someone had mugged Parks. “All of the thugs on the west side went looking for him,” Ed Vaughn recalled, “and they beat the hell out of him.”
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Commentators seized on the news of Parks’s assault to bemoan the decline of a new generation of black youth. “Things are not likely to get much worse,” lamented liberal
New York Times
columnist Bob Herbert. “We are in the dark night of the post-civil rights era. The wars against segregation have been won, but we are lost. With the violence and degradation into which so many of our people have fallen, we have disgraced the legacy of Rosa Parks.”
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The editors of the
Detroit Free Press
similarly intoned, “It is impossible to escape the cruel irony of the attack on Rosa Parks, beaten and robbed in her Detroit home Tuesday night by an assailant described as an African-American male. How could the woman credited with sparking the nation’s civil rights movement to obtain equality for black people be assaulted by a black man?” With the nation eagerly consuming news of a black underclass, Parks’s mugging served as a convenient metaphor for the degraded values of a new generation.

While saddened by the attack, Mrs. Parks did not see it as a sign of community dysfunction, rejecting the idea that the biggest problem facing the black community was now black people themselves. Rather, she urged people not to read too much into it.
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“Many gains have been made. . . . But as you can see, at this time we still have a long way to go.”
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Rejecting the media’s characterization of Skipper as representative of a new, degenerate cohort of black youth (a view held by many black people of her generation), she prayed for him “and the conditions that have made him this way.”
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Her approach at eighty drew from her lifelong commitment to young people. “I hope to someday see an end to the conditions in our country that would make people want to hurt others.”
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Mrs. Parks still believed, as she had with regard to the 1967 riot, that the way to stanch individual acts of violence was to transform the structures of inequity that provided the ground in which they grew. Even as she regularly reminded young people of the importance of good character, hard work, and motivation, Parks remained concentrated on changing the conditions that limited their ability to flourish. “She adored kids,” her cousin Carolyn Green, who became one of her caretakers, noted. “Worst child in the world and [she] always saw some good in everybody. That’s her philosophy.”
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To the end, Parks placed her hope in cultivating youth leadership. Worried that adults had become “too complacent,” Parks founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development with Elaine Eason Steele in 1987, seeking also to honor Raymond and his political commitment. According to Steele, “It always bothered her that he was kicked to the curb and never thought of. He, in fact, was her rock.”
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The institute, like the youth wing of the Montgomery NAACP she had founded four decades earlier, sought to develop leadership skills in young people to bring them into the struggle for civil rights. A cross between Miss White’s and Highlander, the institute stressed the importance of self-respect, comportment, and education for liberation to Detroit students. Black history for Rosa Parks had been one of the great transforming discoveries of her life, so the institute focused on exposing young people to African American history and encouraging them recover their own family’s past. “When students come to class and demand to be educated,” Parks observed, “education will take place.”
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The institute sent young people both south and north through its “Pathways to Freedom” program to engage students in field research and immerse them in black history, including the opportunity to retrace the path of the Underground Railroad. Raymond had always regretted the lack of opportunity to get an education, so one key aspect of the institute’s work was to provide college assistance. Parks saw a curriculum that stressed black pride and self-knowledge as a way to address the dropout problem affecting many black youth.
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Parks was clear that the movement was not over, nor was it limited to the public’s narrow view of civil rights as color-blindness or the end of legalized segregation. “Our struggle will never go away so I just have to keep on going on,” she told a reporter in 1985. Critical of Reagan’s policies and his “watering-down” of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Parks asserted that Reagan “didn’t understand the struggle” because he “never had to struggle.”
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She well understood the “forces at work to destroy what gains have been made” and warned of “taking too much time out to just sit down and not do anything, [or] that’ll soon be reversed.”
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And she remained steadfast about the need to “rededicate and reunite ourselves into a movement. I don’t think it’s time to stop or slow down or become complacent of what may be ahead.”
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Throughout the 1990s, even as her health waned, Parks spoke against many forms of social and racial injustice. She condemned Governor George W. Bush’s use of the death penalty in Texas. And, on September 19, 2001, a week after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, she joined with Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Gloria Steinem, and other human rights leaders to speak out against a “military response” to the attacks and to call on the United States to act “cooperatively as part of a community of nations within the framework of international law.”
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Refusing the terms of post–civil rights racial politics, Parks continued to see the struggle for racial justice as urgent and ongoing.

In 1980, an episode of the television game show
To Tell the Truth
featured three “Rosa Parkses.” The weekly show presented three contestants who played the same person and attempted to fool a celebrity panel. Contestants earned prize money for each vote they received. That week, the real Parks, Contestant Number 3, tried to convince the celebrity judges that she was the person who had refused to give up her seat on the bus. She spoke characteristically thoughtfully and in great detail about the events of 1955. Yet two of the three celebrity judges voting chose Contestant Number 2, a demure lady wearing a lovely church hat and pearls who claimed she spontaneously decided one day just to make a stand, and who was actually Lois Alexander, director of the Harlem Institute of Fashion and the Black Fashion Museum.
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One judge explained her choice of Contestant Number 2 by citing the “gentleness” about her. The symbol of Rosa Parks had become more compelling than the reality.

As the years went by, Parks noted, people still “only want[ed] to talk about that one evening in 1955.” In an interview in the late 1960s, she chafed at the detail interviewers wanted—“It just seems so much.”
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In 1973, she told an interviewer, “I hope I won’t be having to tell people that story for the rest of my life.”
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In a 1978 interview, she explained that she was “somewhat resigned to whatever contribution I can make.” She believed her public role and appearances were necessary to preserve the history of the struggle and help young people carry it forward, but she wished for personal space.

Though Parks had not been included in the local commemorations of the Montgomery bus boycott in the first years, she returned to Montgomery for the twentieth anniversary commemoration in 1975.
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This time, Mrs. Parks spoke from the pulpit at Holt Street, where she reminded those gathered to “keep on” the struggle for justice and equality. However, it wouldn’t be until the twenty-fifth anniversary of the boycott—and particularly the thirtieth and thirty-fifth—that these commemorations garnered significant national attention.

Reporters descended on her in 1980. A
Detroit Free Press
reporter described Parks as “weary of telling the story, weary of the reporters, weary of the questions.” She informed him, “It’s very difficult, very painful, to go over the same things all the time.”
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She told the
Los Angeles Times
that she did “very well” left alone and didn’t “like being overinflated.” The reporter stressed how often Mrs. Parks “slips in and out of rooms almost soundlessly and prays not to be noticed.” Her friend Louise Tappes explained, “Rosa would rather just forget the whole thing.” Still faced with requests for interviews and appearances to talk about her actions twenty-five years earlier, Parks found it “difficult going back to that time. I don’t keep it in my mind if I can avoid it. I know that good came out of it for a lot of people, but it wasn’t the most pleasant experience I ever had.”
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In 1995, on the fortieth anniversary of the boycott, she embarked on a 381-day tour throughout the United States. An
Ebony
article noted that she had “logged more frequent flyer miles than a busy business executive. Perpetually on the go, she keeps up with a numbing schedule of events that would be daunting to a person half her age.”
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Parks saw black history as an activist tool to challenge injustice in the present and continued to do events, large and small. “My problem,” she told Myles Horton in a 1981 oral history interview, “is—I don’t particularly enjoy talking about anything.”
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And yet over and over she talked about her bus stand, feeling she had a responsibility to do so. Throughout her life, if she was asked to do something for the good of the race—even if she might have preferred not to—she usually did it. Parks told another reporter in 1988, “I’ve always tried to be helpful to people in need but I could live without the publicity.”
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Indeed many interviews Parks did in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s expressed her discomfort with how she had become a symbol—both because of what it had done to her private life but also because of the limited ways that people had come to understand her action and the movement more broadly. While her own notions of decorum and race work made it impossible for her to refuse these interviews or lash out at the questions, she noted, “it has been very taxing on me physically and mentally.”
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