The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (30 page)

Parks was a woman of action, but one who did not favor direct confrontation. Their decision to leave Montgomery in August 1957, eight months after the boycott ended, after having lived there together for twenty-five years, is revealing of her discontent—and it drew the attention of the black press. Calling her a “spunky little woman,” Chester Higgins’s article in the
Pittsburgh Courier
asked whether Parks was leaving “by choice”: “Mrs. Parks was seldom mentioned as the real and true leader of this struggle. Others more learned—not to take a thing from Dr. King—were ushered into the leadership and hogged the show. . . . Perhaps as a proud and sensitive personality, she resented standing in the wings while others received the huzzahs. She wouldn’t talk about this.”
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What Parks was willing to say was, “After I was arrested on this charge, the white trade began to fall off. I simply didn’t have enough work to keep me busy and I was politely laid off. The Negroes couldn’t furnish me with enough work. My husband worked, it is true, but I have been working at my profession for years. I couldn’t just sit and idle away.”
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Parks’s comment is telling because she asserts her desire to work as not solely about needing the money but as part of her identity. Like civil rights pioneer Ida B. Wells a half century earlier, Parks had consciously decided not to go into teaching, despite her love of young people, because she found the conditions too degrading. And like Wells, who was run out of Memphis for her bold journalism around lynching, Parks found herself exiled from her hometown of more than thirty years because of her stand against segregation.

The black press began to take notice of the trouble and these divisions. “She got no part of the money being paid out by the MIA—of which she was the direct cause!” Trezzvant Anderson, a reporter for the
Pittsburgh Courier
, wrote incredulously in November.
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He spent a day with Parks as she prepared to move to Detroit. Explaining how Parks was an “expert seamstress” with some of the “city’s very best among her steady customers,” Anderson wrote that Parks “paid the price” for her refusal on the bus. Describing her with “dimmed tears in her eyes,” “disillusioned,” and “sick at heart,” Anderson wrote that “not once did Rosa Parks grumble or complain.”
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The MIA newsletter of November 18 challenged the
Courier
’s account, claiming that “Mrs. Parks was not ‘asked’ but ‘begged’ by Dr. King to accept a job from the MIA office. She refused on the grounds that she was away from the city on speaking engagements too often.”
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Parks had been employed for a month in March 1956 as a dispatcher.
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The MIA’s rebuttal, however, was revealing. If true, then Mrs. Parks ultimately turned down a paid position with the MIA because she was doing too much public speaking on behalf of the boycott to be a responsible office assistant. This tendency corresponds to a similar situation that Congressman John Conyers recalled having with Parks decades later when she was working in his office. She had come in to talk to him about a wage reduction—“the only wage reduction conversation I’ve ever had” with any staff member, Conyers noted—because she felt she was away from the office too often on public appearances.
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He scoffed, telling her that he was honored to have her working in his office and doing public speaking. But years earlier, the MIA appears to have had a much different reaction to Mrs. Parks’s concerns, raising the question of why they didn’t create a position incorporating public appearances and office work.

The slightly critical tone Anderson took in the article must have drawn controversy. Both he and the
Courier
published statements to “set the record straight—the MIA gave her one $30 paycheck, a gift of $500 on the eve of her departure for Detroit, plus a donation of $300 during the boycott.”
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When interviewers touched on these subjects, Parks tended toward long pauses and halting statements. Some interviewers didn’t inquire. In Parks’s 1985 interview for
Eyes on the Prize
, when asked about how she got to work during the boycott, she noted being “discharged from my job after the first in January.”
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The interviewer didn’t pursue the issue. In Nixon’s
Eyes on the Prize
interview, when he explained that Parks had to move to Detroit because “nobody would hire her,” the interviewer said he thought Parks was working for him. Nixon grew flustered. “She wasn’t working directly for me, she was workin’ . . . at a clothes store when this thing happened.” Then Nixon turned the conversation back to the arrest and there was no further discussion in this interview, or others, about any responsibility Nixon had for her situation.
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Yet, in a 1970 interview, Nixon, while sidestepping his own responsibility, explained his frustration with the black community, and the ministers in particular, for not standing up for her.

Nixon’s frustration with how the ministers treated Parks dovetailed with his own disenchantment over the ways he’d been treated by King and the MIA and his role in the boycott ignored.

Militant blacks like Parks who publicly defied segregation were taught a lesson through economic intimidation. Particularly because Montgomery prided itself on its sophistication, getting a person fired was a more civilized way to maintain the racial status quo than physical violence. This tactic was widely used against civil rights activists. Historian Charles Payne has documented that every single woman voting rights activist he interviewed in Mississippi lost her job.
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To Nixon, the ministers’ unwillingness to give Parks a stable position had served white interests. Other comrades echoed these sentiments. In a 1976 interview, Septima Clark criticized the boycott leadership’s disregard for Parks. “I thought they should have put her down for a certain amount each year until she could find something to do.”
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Over the years, Mrs. Parks remained evasive on the subject. Resolutely self-sufficient, Parks said in a 1970 interview that she did not want to “place any blame on the community, because I do feel it was my responsibility to do whatever I could for myself and not to look to the community or to Dr. King or anyone else for my support or livelihood. I felt as long as I was well and could move around, I should be on my own, rather than looking to anyone to reimburse me or reward me for what I might have done.”
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For a middle-aged, respectable race woman, asking directly for help or being publicly angry about the lack of help contradicted her sense of dignity. Parks was tender toward the suffering of others and, understanding the structures that produced such suffering and inequality, saw no shame in people needing help. But she was less able to publicly acknowledge her own need. Historian John Bracey has theorized that a race woman of Parks’s era and temperament would have felt, “I should not have to ask for things. . . . You know what I did, who I am. If I have to go ask for it, I don’t want it. You should keep me from suffering.”
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In deciding to pursue her bus case, Parks had committed herself to maintaining a certain comportment. The importance of furthering the struggle meant she would keep many of her personal difficulties to herself.

The trouble Parks encountered in finding work was not an isolated case but rather the result of a systematic effort to economically incapacitate anyone who pressed for civil rights, in part achieved by terming them subversives. “They always accused of being communists,” Parks observed, “any body who stood up for their rights.”
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As Eleanor Roosevelt had warned her, Parks’s political activities and connections led quickly to charges of Communism.

By the 1950s, the United States’ Cold War with the Soviet Union had a rabid domestic side. Communists were feared to be infiltrating the fabric of American values and institutions, and Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and a phalanx of politicians vowed to root them out at every turn. Civil rights activists became one of the prime targets. One of the curious features of civil rights red-baiting was how it had everything and nothing to do with Communism. From the 1930s, the Communist Party USA had been one of the few groups pursuing many of these racial cases; thus many current and former CP members, black and white, were part of the backbone of the struggle for racial justice. Nonetheless, vigorously advocating racial equality was one of the easiest ways to get labeled a Communist, regardless if you did it from a church pulpit, purged Communist sympathizers from your organization, were a WWII veteran and patriot, feared Communism yourself, or had no connections to anyone related to or sympathetic with the CP.

Flowering during the first days of the boycott, the red-baiting of Rosa Parks continued long afterward. Amid her attempts to maintain a low profile, Parks had not shied away from people on the Left. That continued even after she was targeted. She and Raymond had worked on the Scottsboro and Recy Taylor cases alongside CP members and affiliates. During the boycott, she had willingly associated with the National Negro Labor Council and Local 600, even as these groups were home to many black Communists. She personally knew a number of current and former black Communists and corresponded with them over the course of her life. In the spring of 1957, she was asked to speak to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (run by Durr’s friends Corliss Lamont and Clark Foreman which formed in 1951 to defend political activists, including some Communists, from charges by the House Committee on Un-American Activities). NAACP director of branches Gloster Current warned her “of the “leftist slant” of the organization, and to “think it over carefully before accepting an engagement.” Parks did not directly challenge Current but foregrounded the group’s help in the boycott, redirecting how the conversation played out, and remained committed to giving the speech.
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Parks understood the ways that challenges to the racial status quo led to claims of Communist subversion. Her longtime work with the NAACP had rendered her suspect, and she had given up her position in the organization to protect the boycott and “not have it said . . . [it] was organized by ‘outside agitators.’”
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Indeed, in the wake of the
Brown
decision, the bus boycott, and Autherine Lucy’s attempt to integrate the University of Alabama, the NAACP (despite its own internal red-baiting) was banned in Alabama, and in many other states, as a foreign corporation. Governor Patterson saw the organization “pos[ing] a threat to our citizens who have no recourse at law for injury done by the corporation to them,” charging that the NAACP’s actions “resulted in violations of our laws and end in many instances of breaches of the peace.”
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Its membership records—which the NAACP refused to turn over—were demanded by the state, and the organization was fined $100,000.
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Parks’s ties to Highlander made her particularly suspect. On Labor Day weekend of 1957, Parks returned to Highlander for the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration of the school. Celebrated in Highlander’s press release as a featured speaker and leader, she described Montgomery as an “integration beachhead.”
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Reverends King and Abernathy joined her there. During his keynote on the last day of the anniversary celebration, King affirmed the sentiment of those gathered: “You would not have had a Montgomery Story without Rosa Parks.”
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Abner Berry, a black writer for the Communist paper the
Daily Worker
, also attended the events, as did an undercover agent from the state of Georgia, Edwin Friend, who took a series of photographs, including a picture of King, Parks, and Berry sitting in the audience.
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That photograph was subsequently displayed throughout the South as proof that King had attended “a Communist training center.” When King came under attack for attending this Highlander celebration, photos revealed Parks visible by his side.
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Indeed, Parks would periodically remind people that she was the one who had actually attended Highlander’s workshops and meetings, not King. “I had been there several times,” Parks explained to Studs Terkel in 1973. “He only accepted an invitation to be the guest speaker when they had the 25th anniversary. He stayed just long enough to make a speech and to be on his way.”
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Her clarification reflected Parks’s core feistiness; if there was going to be red-baiting, she wanted accuracy in terms of who did what.

The school’s commitment to interracialism signaled subversion to state authorities. Georgia’s governor, Marvin Griffin, claimed Communist infiltration: “The leaders of every major race incident in the South” had all been to Highlander. In 1957, making liberal use of Friend’s photographs, the Georgia Commission on Education published a broadside entitled
Highlander Folk School: Communist Training School, Monteagle, Tenn.: Every American Has the Right to Know the Truth
. The commission printed 250,000 copies, and factoring in reprints made by White Citizens’ Councils and Klan groups, over one million copies of the brochure were distributed by 1959.
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