[News] Rosa Parks has also been turned into a shadow of her real self

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Rosa Parks Biography

http://www.boggscenter.org/rosaparks.htm
Grace Lee Boggs, WORT JUNE 26, 2000

Viking/Penguin has just published a new biography of Rosa Parks who has 
become a symbol of courage for our time and for all time. All over the 
world she ranks with Nelson Mandela and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 
pantheon of 20th century heroes and sheroes who have expanded our notion of 
what it means to be a human being as we enter the new millennium.

But in becoming an icon, Parks has also been turned into a shadow of her 
real self. Few people are aware of her lifetime of struggle prior to and 
following that fateful day in December 1955 when her refusal to give up her 
seat on an Alabama bus triggered the 13-month long boycott that launched 
the modern civil rights movement. They don't know about her 
behind-the-scenes nitty-gritty work to build the NAACP. They don't realize 
that she had her own political views. How many people, for example, know 
that unlike Gandhi and King, she refused to rule out the righteous use of 
force? Not only did she admire Malcolm X; only a few years ago she flew 
down to Monroe, North Carolina, for the funeral of Robert Williams, the 
outspoken advocate of armed self-defense by the black community.

One of its main virtues of this book by a professional historian is that it 
demolishes the myth that Rosa Parks was just a good-hearted middle-aged 
seamstress who was simply too tired from working all day to give up her 
seat. Brinkley, the author of award-winning biographies of Jimmy Carter and 
Franklin D.Roosevelt and the Distinguished Professor of History and 
director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, has 
done the research needed to help us appreciate the hard work and the 
difficult decisions that educated Mrs. Parks politically and empowered her 
not only to say "No" on December 1, 1955 but to give permission for her 
"No" to become the basis for a constitutional challenge to Montgomery's 
bus-segregation ordinance.

For example, "while the NAACP executives made dinner speeches and attended 
national conferences," Parks, as the local NAACP secretary, "balanced the 
ledgers, kept the books, and recorded every report of racial discrimination 
that crossed her desk. She also did field research, traveling from towns 
like Union Springs to cities like Selma to interview African Americans with 
legal complaints, including some who had witnessed the murders of blacks by 
whites in rural areas." In 1945, on a trip to a NAACP leadership-training 
seminar in Jacksonville, Florida, she met and became good friends with Ella 
Baker, the legendary womanist who in the 1960s encouraged young civil 
rights activists to organize the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee 
(SNICK).

In the spring of 1955 she refused to go along with a petition drawn up by 
her closest associates for a partial desegregation of Montgomery buses 
because she thought it "demeaning" to demand less than outright 
desegregation. Shortly thereafter, over the objections of Raymond Parks, 
her beloved barber husband, she decided to take two weeks off from her job 
at the Montgomery Fair Department Store to learn new techniques for 
activism at the Highlander Folk School. At Highlander she met Septima Clark 
who had studied with W.E.B.DuBois at Atlanta University. "Some of her great 
courage and dignity and wisdom may have rubbed off on me," Parks would say 
later.

As "the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement," Rosa Parks has received 
countless awards, including the Congressional Medal of Honor. But most 
people see only the fame and not the enormous risks that she incurred. In 
1957, for example, the family was forced to leave Montgomery and move to 
Detroit because continuing death threats were driving Raymond to 
"near-suicidal despair" and also because Rosa's celebrity had made the 
couple unemployable by Montgomery's white business community.

Another too-often ignored reason for the Parks leaving Montgomery was that 
jealousy was raising its ugly head, springing mainly from the male 
chauvinism in the black community. Working black women, writes Brinkley, 
"were the most incensed by the unfair bus system because they were most 
dependent on it to get to work." Jo Ann Robinson, the forty-eight year old 
English professor and head of the Women's Political Council, was the one 
who actually launched the Montgomery Bus boycott by writing the 218 word 
flyer "asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday," and arranging for 
it to be mimeographed and distributed before daylight to 3500 homes, 
schools and churches. But black men and especially black preachers were not 
used to sharing the spotlight with women.

So, out of envy, male colleagues like E.D. Nixon and Rev. Ralph Abernathy 
began making Rosa's life miserable by belittling her and her husband. And 
it wasn't only the men. The female plaintiffs in a concurrent 
anti-segregation law suit were "angry that everybody was saying 'Rosa this' 
and 'Rosa that.'" They "felt they deserved the public adulation, the NAACP 
sponsored trips to New York, the invitations to speak, and the praise from 
Dr. King as much as she did."

After settling in Detroit Rosa Parks made her living for five years by 
working ten hours a day in the Stockton Sewing Company, a storefront 
factory, receiving 74 cents each for power-sewed cotton aprons and skirts - 
until in 1965 newly-elected Congressman John Conyers Jr. gave her a job in 
his Detroit office.

One of Rosa's workmates in the factory was Elaine Eason Steele, a 16-year 
old Cass Tech student who plied her with questions about the movement. 
Years later, when Rosa had become an aide to Conyers, Elaine was employed 
in the same building. Since then Elaine Steele has become Rosa's closest 
friend and colleague, holding at bay well-wishers and reporters, 
accompanying her on her award-winning trips, and especially helping her to 
found the Rosa and Raymond Institute for Self-Development whose main 
purpose is to get young people interested in history by trips retracing the 
Freedom struggle.

My good friend, Carl Edwards, says that as he was reading this account of 
Rosa Park's evolving consciousness, he was reminded of Hegel's statement 
that we "can't get to the Absolute like a shot out of a pistol. It takes 
the labor, patience and suffering of the negative." We all have a lot to 
learn from the incredible journey of this quiet, self-effacing radical 
activist. Let us not freeze her into a single day or a single moment.



The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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