The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (49 page)

Looking at Parks’s funeral reveals the “memory wars,” to use Blight’s terminology, now at play around the civil rights movement.
⁵⁸
As with the history of Reconstruction, a mythic history of the civil rights movement developed at the turn of the twenty-first century to serve contemporary political needs. According to this new popular story—and essential to the framing of Parks’s memorial—the civil rights movement demonstrated the resiliency and redemptive power of American democracy. This nonviolent revolution proved the power of American dissent and self-correction.
⁵⁹
Parks’s funeral communicated a lesson on the history of American progress and the end of racism, proclaiming a once and final end to the Second Reconstruction. In this narrative, racism was cast as an aberrant flaw rather than a constitutive element of American democracy—that, once recognized, had been eliminated.

National histories give comfort; they promote civic pride and communicate national values. They explain—and thereby justify—present-day action
and
inaction. Promoting reconciliation and national unity, those turn-of-the-century histories of Reconstruction explained why further federal government intervention was no longer needed. By portraying former slaves as angry, sexually promiscuous and reckless individuals who illegitimately sought special rights, these mis-histories cast black people as responsible for their own problems and undeserving of full rights.

The other side of the same coin, the celebration of the quiet Rosa Parks and the distorted popular histories of the civil rights movement at play today are also used to demonstrate how America cured itself of its previous history of discrimination. With the legacy of racial discrimination now vanquished, the problems people of color face can once again be cast as the product of their own values and poor character. Images of a debauched and violent black underclass, similar to those that had peopled the old histories of Reconstruction, were the backdrop of the Parks fable.

Of course, those histories are different. Woodrow Wilson’s showing of
Birth of a Nation
at the White House is, in key respects, a world apart from Rosa Parks lying in honor in the Capitol. Yet aspects of these mythologies operate similarly. Just as early histories of Reconstruction explained why no further action from the federal government was needed and allowed for the criminalization of black people and a cheapened labor supply, so too does the fable of Rosa Parks and the successful end to the Second Reconstruction. Just as turn-of-the-century Reconstruction histories held up good black people as deferential and happy, so too does the incessant celebration of Parks as “quiet” and “not angry.” A tribute to a quiet national heroine proves that good values and individual acts are rewarded—that once revealed, real injustice is eradicated in a democracy like America without people having to get aggressive about it. The national honor for Rosa Parks also became a way to mark the death of racism, a form of national self-congratulation that Parks spent her life fighting against. Persistent educational inequality, widening economic disparities, skyrocketing incarceration rates for people of color, unending wars, and rampant racial and religious profiling—these contemporary injustices were implicitly rendered as so very different from the clear wrong that Parks had protested, despite the fact that the actual Rosa Parks and many of her colleagues had spent a lifetime trying to address them.

While many of the eulogies sought to put Parks’s protest firmly in the past, Parks herself had continued to insist on the enduring need for racial justice in the present. Parks had kept on speaking her mind on the ways “racism is still alive”—reminding Americans “not [to] become comfortable with the gains we have made in the last forty years.”
⁶⁰
Indeed, she ended her autobiography observing, “Sometimes I do feel pretty sad about some of the events that have taken place recently. I try to keep hope alive anyway, but that’s not always the easiest thing to do.”
⁶¹

As King had before his death, Rosa Parks spoke in 1995 about how she wanted to be remembered. “I’d like people to say I’m a person who always wanted to be free and wanted it not only for myself.”
⁶²
A full accounting of Parks’s life and politics thus offers a different set of reasons for the nation to honor her. Laboring for decades in relative obscurity, Parks and her colleagues faced white terror to challenge racial injustice and till the ground for a movement, determined at the very least to register their dissent, even if they could deal no significant blow to white supremacy. When her courageous stand galvanized a mass movement, she did what she could to cultivate and sustain it. And when it gained certain success, despite the considerable sacrifice it had entailed for her and her family, she did not rest but joined with new and old comrades in the late 1960s and 1970s and onward to keep fighting for social justice and racial equality. That combination of steadfastness and outrage, tenacity and courage is what deserves national veneration.

Doing justice to Parks’s legacy requires something much harder for the nation than a simple casket lying in the Capitol. It means acknowledging that the roots of racial and social injustice in American society are deep and manifest. It entails a profound recommitment to the goals she had spent her lifetime fighting for—real justice under the law, community empowerment and voting rights, educational access and equity, economic justice, and black history in all parts of the curriculum. It calls for dedicated, persistent action, year after year, decade after decade, as she did, to create systemic social change. Finally, it means heeding her advice to Spelman College students: “Don’t give up and don’t say the movement is dead.”
⁶³

THERE IS NO WAY TO
write a book like this without the help of a community of people. My first thanks goes to Julian Bond. When I was an undergraduate and then subsequently as his teaching fellow, Julian Bond taught me how to tell this story. More recently, he has been steadfast in his efforts to get the Rosa Parks Archive opened to scholars and in his support of this research.

A host of friends and colleagues made this book possible. Irva Adams, Gaston Alonso, Caroline Arnold, Beth Bates, Jennifer Bernstein, Chris Bonastia, Herb Boyd, John Bracey, Naomi Braine, Doug Brinkley, Brenda Cardenas, Julie Cooper, Matthew Countryman, Emilye Crosby, Paisley Currah, Angela Dillard, Tilla Durr, Jason Elias, Johanna Fernandez, Melissa Harris-Perry, David Garrow, Henry Louis Gates, Brenna Greer, David Goldberg, Stephanie Melnick Goldstein, Laurie Green, Joshua Guild, Gwendolyn Hall, Roderick Harrison, Wes Hogan, Hasan Jeffries, Amy Schmidt Jones, Peniel Joseph, Ira Katznelson, Robin Kelley, Steve Lang, Chana Kai Lee, Laura Liu, Eric McDuffie, Mojúbàolú Okome, Annelise Orleck, Kimberly Phillips, John Ramirez, Barbara Ransby, Russell Rickford, Dinky Romilly, James Smethurst, Irene Sosa, Robyn Spencer, Kelly Stupple, Celina Su, Patricia Sullivan, Heather Thompson, Patricia Turner, Stephen Ward, Jocelyn Wills, Barbara Winslow, Craig Wilder, and Gary Younge all provided key assistance, inspiration, and support. There would be no book without them.

Numerous archivists assisted with this endeavor. I am particularly grateful to the research staffs at the Library of Congress; Wayne State’s Reuther Library; the Amistad Center at Tulane; the State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Boston University, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe; the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; and Alabama State College. An AAUW American Fellowship helped fund my research sabbatical, and a Tow Travel Grant enabled me to visit various archives. The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics seminar and a PSC-CUNY grant helped me finish.

In Detroit and Montgomery, many people enabled me to do this research. Thanks go to Dorothy Aldridge, David Ashenfelter, Eleanor Blackwell, Carol Carter, John Entenman, Sherrie Farrell, Alfonzo Hunter, Judge Damon Keith, Keenan Keller, Georgette Norman, Gregory Reed, Howard Robinson, Elaine Steele, Mills Thornton, Penny Weaver, and Danton Wilson. My aunt Susan Artinian provided wonderful support and hospitality.

Numerous people gave generously in interviews, committed to the belief that the political life of the great Rosa Parks merits substantive, scholarly research. I am immeasurably grateful to Barbara Alexander, Leon Atchison, Muhammad Ahmad, William Anderson, Dan Aldridge, Dorothy Dewberry Aldridge, Peter Bailey, General Baker, Julian Bond, Herb Boyd, John Bracey, Jamila Brathwaite, Candie Carawan, John Conyers, Doris Crenshaw, Fred Durhal, Willis Edwards, Nikki Giovanni, Robert and Jean Graetz, Carolyn Green, Nathan Hare, Larry Horwitz, Ericka Huggins, Alfonzo Hunter, Esther Cooper Jackson, Frank Joyce, Judge Damon Keith, Roslyn King, Marian Kramer, Chokwe Lumumba, Rhea McCauley, Martha Prescott Norman Noonan, Jack O’Dell, Gwendolyn Patton, Quill Pettway, Judy Richardson, Howard Robinson, Mildred Roxborough, Adam Shakoor, Sue Thrasher, Ed Vaughn, JoAnn Watson, Loretta White, Vonzie Whitlow, Mabel Williams, and Thomas Williamson.

My students at Brooklyn College supplied tremendous enthusiasm for this project and remind me continually of the importance of this research. A number of student research assistants provided key assistance over the course of the project: Alexander Perkins, Dane Peters, Khalina Houston, Darryl Barney, and Marwa Amer. It is hard to imagine this book without Marwa Amer, who was unstinting in energy, unflagging in insight, and the best research companion a scholar could hope for.

My editor, Gayatri Patnaik, is the definition of excellence—committed to the political biography I wanted to write and to the grace of its prose, and with a font of enthusiasm for this project. This book is vastly better for her efforts, those of the amazing Rachael Marks, Rosalie Wieder, Susan Lumenello, Marcy Barnes, and the careful work of the rest of the staff at Beacon, as well as my wonderful indexer Tara James and proofreaders Athan and Nancy Theoharis.

During the writing of this book, I have been engaged in a contemporary struggle for justice, which began with the case of my former student Fahad Hashmi, challenging the rights violations occurring in the federal judicial system post-9/11. Like Mrs. Parks, my friends and comrades in that struggle demonstrate what it means to be steadfast and undaunted in speaking truth to power. I am particularly grateful to—and thankful for—the Hashmi family, Sally Eberhardt, Laura Rovner, Pardiss Kebriaei, Rawad Guneid, Brian Pickett, Shane Kadidal, Suzanne Hayes, Saadia Toor, Leili Kashani, Sean Maher, Farah Khan, Bill Quigley, Amna Akbar, Vikki Law, and the people who attended the vigils outside the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York for their work for justice. That struggle profoundly shaped how I would see and reflect the history I tell here.

I am blessed by the remarkable gift of friendship—of friends who read chapters, reminded me time and again of the importance of telling a new history of Rosa Parks, carried on about the world with me, and sustained me over the years this book took. Prudence Cumberbatch, Dayo Gore, Karen Miller, and Brian Purnell discussed each twist and turn of this research, and cared tremendously about me and this project. Komozi Woodard was immeasurably supportive from this project’s inception and unwavering in his belief that the bigger story of the radical Rosa needed to be told. Arnold Franklin endured endless conversations about the book and my spirits. Alejandra Marchevsky is a “friend of my mind.”

And finally, like for Mrs. Parks, this all begins with my family, who taught me to love justice and practice kindness—and inspire me with theirs—and to whom this work is dedicated.

1
. The first African American honored was Jacob J. Chestnut, one of two Capitol police officers fatally shot in 1998. Michael Janofsky, “Thousands Gather at the Capitol to Remember a Hero,”
New York Times
, October 31, 2005; Judge Damon Keith, author interview, Detroit, MI, June 14, 2007; Willis Edwards, author phone interview, November 17, 2010.