The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (29 page)

Horton did invite Parks back to Highlander in December to meet with a group of black students from Clinton, Tennessee to discuss their recent experience with school desegregation. The students were in need of support—and Horton thought Parks was a good adult to provide such counsel. Nixon drove Rosa and her mother to Tennessee. “It was a rather unpleasant ride,” Parks remembered, as Nixon was down on King and the MIA. Once they arrived at Highlander, according to Brinkley, “Everybody at the school, including Septima Clark, turned out to greet Parks like a conquering heroine, teasing her about her world fame and later reading Psalms 27 and 33 in her honor.” Later in the week, Horton offered Parks a full-time job at Highlander. But Parks’s mother said no. “She didn’t want to be ‘nowhere I don’t see nothing but white folks,’ so that ended that,” Parks explained. “Anyway, I was in no position to take off from Montgomery and stay somewhere else at that time.”
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Septima Clark also maintained that Highlander wanted Parks to speak in parts of Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana “but she didn’t feel as if she could do it. She felt . . . that the hostility was so great. She didn’t think that she could do that.”
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Bus desegregation did not improve the Parks family’s personal situation. Both Rosa and Raymond still found white establishments unwilling to hire them, and the hate calls had not subsided. She took in sewing (and Raymond did some barbering), but this did not bring in much money because white people would not hire her. Though economic retribution imperiled many civil rights activists in Montgomery and elsewhere, the troubled economic situation the Parkses faced was distinct from that of most boycott leaders. King, Abernathy, Nixon, Robinson, Gray, Graetz, Pierce, and Simms all had jobs that continued through and after the boycott. Parks did not, but she largely shielded her need from public view. As Virginia Durr wrote a friend, “I cannot understand why the Negro community has not taken better care of her but it hasn’t. She is a proud and reticent woman and that might be the reason. She does not mind receiving any money I get for her but cannot seem to get it for herself.”
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The plan of action Nixon and Parks put forward differed from the approach advocated by King and the ministers who in January 1957 formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King and Abernathy thought their next target should be the airport, which Parks, along with Gray and Graetz, thought was foolish given how few blacks actually used the airport. But, the MIA’s leadership was also wary of Nixon and Parks’s voter registration project, fearing this new project sought to take the MIA’s place.
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By late 1957, the SCLC would focus its energies on a Crusade for Citizenship, a Southern education, action, and mobilization campaign to encourage black voter registration—not completely dissimilar from Nixon and Parks’s original plan.

Divisions between King and Nixon that had simmered during the boycott heated up in the MIA.
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And Parks sided with Nixon. Durr described the schisms as “the old class split” that had previously plagued Montgomery’s NAACP, where some of the ministers treated Nixon and Parks with condescension. These class divides also had ideological components—the MIA leadership was wary of Nixon’s militancy (connected as he was to A. Phillip Randolph), and perhaps Parks’s as well. Moreover, Nixon resented the ways the young King received all the credit and adulation for the movement at the expense of other leaders.
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Parks’s troubled economic situation became grist for the widening feud within the MIA. In a February 15, 1957, letter, Virginia Durr wrote a friend of the “blazing row” taking place within the organization; Parks has “been a heroine everywhere else, [but] they have not given her a job here although she has needed one desperately . . . She is very, very disgruntled with MLK and really quite bitter which is not like her at all.”
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To another friend, Durr explained that while the MIA had $50,000 in reserve and a payroll of $500 a week, they refused to hire Parks. “They know she cannot get a job, they know she has suffered and is suffering and they blandly do nothing about it at all and this drives me nearly nuts and makes me distrust them very much indeed.”
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In its surveillance of the Durrs, the FBI took notice of Durr’s belief that the MIA “was controlled by a small clique” and her concern over Parks’s situation.
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The MIA did have money in its treasury. According to conservative estimates quoted in the
Pittsburgh Courier
, the MIA had raised $200,000—with Nixon acting as the treasurer.
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Though the MIA paid a number of people—$62.50 for a private secretary for King, $5,000 a year to its executive secretary as well as salaries to other staff workers—Parks was not offered a position. King historian David Garrow noted that “dissension developed over the organization’s continued refusal to put Mrs. Parks, a Nixon ally . . . on the payroll.”
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Birmingham author Diane McWhorter contends that SCLC cofounder Fred Shuttlesworth also criticized the MIA leadership for not taking care of Parks.
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Still everyone sought to keep the schisms behind closed doors. King later reflected, “Some people never knew the suffering she was facing.”
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King knew about Parks’s suffering, but his sympathies are unclear, since he seemingly could have assisted her. Many decades later, Robert and Jean Graetz talked about how “the world blamed all of us in Montgomery for not finding her a living” but said the community did not have the resources to do this for Parks or anyone else suffering from white retribution.
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Still, the Graetzes had no insight into why certain other people were hired by the MIA but not Mrs. Parks.

Gender had played a role in the organizational and leadership structure of the boycott. While women “really were the ones who carried out the actions,” Erma Dungee Allen explained, the visible leadership was male.
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King, according to Septima Clark, “didn’t respect women too much” and “never felt that women should have much of anything.”
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This may have contributed to the MIA’s blindness to Parks’s substantial need and to the decision within the organization not to offer Parks a position, despite her political experience and administrative skills. There were women employed by the MIA as office workers. But Parks did not have ties to any of the ministers, nor could she have simply been relegated to the role of acolyte. Mrs. Parks had a husband and no children, so given the gender conventions of the time, the ministers might not have seen her need. Moreover, on top of the more general gender biases, the construction of Parks as a symbol—a simple, tired heroine—made it difficult to see her as either a capable organizer or a martyr who had sacrificed much for the sake of the struggle. Parks’s reserve and unwillingness to ask for help only furthered this omission. Finally, Reverend Fields’s accusations of cronyism and mismanagement had scared and saddened King. Some of those charges had come indirectly from Nixon (MIA’s treasurer), even though Nixon distanced himself from Fields. Relations between King and Nixon became strained after that. In some ways, for King to change course and hire Parks might have admitted to the cronyism in not hiring her a year prior.

The most compelling evidence of Parks’s view that she was mistreated is an early outline of her autobiography, prepared with Jim Haskins in the late 1980s, that included an extra chapter entitled “In the Shadows,” which suggests how slighted she felt. The description for the proposed chapter notes,

Since no such chapter appears in the book, it may be that Parks ultimately felt this was better left in the past.

Little assistance was forthcoming. Parks went back to Highlander in February for another “Public School Integration” workshop. In March, Septima Clark wrote to Myles Horton that she had just answered a letter (from an undisclosed writer) that expressed distress regarding Parks’s situation and anger at Highlander’s inaction. Clark had apprised the writer that Horton “felt that the only way to do anything for Rosa in Montgomery was to work through the M.I.A., and in that meeting you held while they were here you told them that a separate fund raising would back fire. . . . I further told them of the conversation I had with Rosa about not feeling like doing anything and that she had an offer to publish a book on the protest if she could take time out to write down the facts. I feel that the whole thing is largely emotional and not to be taken too seriously.”
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The author of the letter was likely the white Southern liberal Aubrey Williams. According to Durr, Williams’s dismay resulted in Highlander giving Parks $50 a month, “but it took them a long time to get around to it and only after Aubrey really blew his top. Myles took in over $69,000 last year and I think he can afford it very well.”
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A couple months later, Durr wrote again, saying the Highlander money had only constituted one payment of $50 to Parks and that Aubrey Williams had again gotten angry with Horton for exaggerating the help Highlander was providing her.
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Tensions mounted. A few months later, Nixon resigned from the MIA, writing to King, “I do not expect to be treated as a child.”
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Despite his advocacy for her within the MIA, Nixon had also grown increasingly frustrated with Parks’s national stature, seeing his own role go largely unacknowledged. When the national NAACP called inviting Parks to speak in DC, Nixon volunteered himself but was told they wanted “Sister Rosa.”
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He exploded in anger at this slight. Later in 1957, Nixon was able to get some money to fund voter efforts through the MIA, but at this point Parks was no longer involved in the project.
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The stress took its toll on Parks and her health suffered, though she continued to travel. Raymond’s lack of steady work and drinking continued. Durr wrote a friend in April that she found Rosa and her mother ill and worried about her ability to withstand the pressure: “I am afraid she [Rosa Parks] is having some slight heart attacks and had one in Trenton, or nervous attacks or something.” Unwell herself, Leona McCauley grew worried about her daughter’s safety. According to a friend interviewed years later, Rosa’s mother became “very suspicious because of the very underhanded things that have happened to her and her family since Rosa sat on that bus and refused to move.”
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Her family urged Rosa to leave, according to the friend, “because they could see that Mrs. Parks never quit trying to help the NAACP or [stopped] any of her activity.”
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Wanting to spend more time with Sylvester, Rosa’s mother began to pressure Rosa and Raymond to move with her to Detroit.

Still Parks continued to make appearances for the movement. In May, billed as the “plucky woman . . . who refused to follow the usual handkerchief head,” she embarked on another NAACP fund-raising tour to Missouri and Kansas as a featured speaker to build local membership and raise money for the national organization.
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Then she journeyed on to Philadelphia where she spoke at a mass meeting with A. Phillip Randolph and on to Washington, DC, where she made a short speech at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. Nearly twenty-five thousand people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial on May 17, 1957, to commemorate the third anniversary of the
Brown
decision. The protest, organized by Randolph and Rustin, drew attention to Eisenhower’s lack of leadership and to rising white violence. Initially, Rustin had stressed that King focus on “economic and social changes” but after reporters began to claim that the planning had been infiltrated by Communists, they tempered the message.
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Rustin urged Parks to emphasize the national character of the civil rights struggle and the importance of the vote and ending segregation—points that Parks was all too cognizant of.

By the summer, Rosa was in poor health and financial trouble and worried about Raymond’s physical and mental health. White businesses were still unwilling to hire them, and sewing for black families brought in little money. With few economic prospects in the city and still receiving constant death threats, the Parkses decided to move to Detroit at the urging of her brother, Sylvester. Given the conditions the family now faced in Montgomery, Raymond was much more amenable to leaving Alabama. “I always felt that I wanted to go somewhere else to live. But I probably couldn’t have convinced my husband” until after the problems in Montgomery.
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The decision also came partly from the unfriendly reception Rosa was receiving from certain members within Montgomery’s civil rights community. Many had grown jealous of Parks’s national stature and made disparaging remarks about both Rosa and Raymond. Even Nixon had grown resentful of her public profile. One minister referred to her as “an adornment of the movement,” while Reverend Abernathy called Rosa a “tool” and referred to Raymond as a “frightened lush.”
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The women plaintiffs of
Browder v. Gayle
resented how much attention Parks had received compared to them, as did Jo Ann Robinson, whose own boycott leadership was not fully recognized.
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Rosa was bewildered by the animosity and frustrated with the schisms in the MIA and her spirit had plummeted.

According to Brinkley, “Much of the resentment sprang from male chauvinism [from many of the ministers and E. D. Nixon].”
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That summer, Parks tacitly acknowledged the impact this bitterness had upon her in an interview with the
Pittsburgh Courier
. “I can’t exactly say that the reaction from what happened in the boycott made me leave. I really had been thinking about leaving for a long time. But I guess something did have a part in our deciding to go, or rather my husband’s deciding for us.”
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In an interview in 1980, Virginia Durr noted, “I know people who have treated her very badly. . . . I could tell you a lot more that I’m not telling, because I wouldn’t say anything that would embarrass Mrs. Parks.”
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