The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (34 page)

Parks’s associates had a sense of her continuing financial difficulties. In 1965, Horton tried to put together a fund-raising campaign for a tenth-anniversary commemorative gift to Parks. He sought King’s help but King never responded.
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Similarly, in Detroit, the Women’s Political Action Committee run by Parks’s friend Louise Tappes (and of which Parks was a member) decided to throw a testimonial dinner in her behalf. A 1964 WPAC newsletter explained:

On April 3, 1965, along with prominent church, community, and labor leaders, Coretta Scott King and Ralph Abernathy journeyed to Detroit to honor “a woman of bold and audacious courage.”
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Arriving an hour late to the festivities, Mrs. Parks received a thunderous standing ovation from the thousand people gathered at COBO Hall.
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Coretta Scott King honored “one of the noted women of the time [who] has been classified as an agitator by the Governor,” reminding the audience that “at the time [Mrs. Parks] took the stand it was much more unpopular than now to speak out for our rights.”
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Scott King spoke of the need for assistance to aid voter registration in the “Black Belt,” condemned the aggressive actions of many Southern law-enforcement officials, and then led the crowd in singing “We Shall Overcome.”
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At its annual convention in Birmingham in 1965, the SCLC also honored Parks. Lawyer Constance Motley gave the address praising Parks as a “freedom fighter”: “Yours is the kind of courage and determination and nonviolent spirit we all need for the future.”
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But it was John Conyers who fundamentally shifted the Parks’s family’s economic situation. Parks had been a dedicated volunteer in Conyers’s long-shot campaign for Congress. Elected in November 1964, Conyers became Detroit’s second black representative to the House. In March 1965, the newly elected congressman hired Rosa Parks to work with constituents as an administrative assistant in his Detroit office. Recognizing her need, skills, and value to his own emerging political base, Conyers put an end to a decade of economic insecurity for Rosa Parks. With this position, Parks now had a salary, access to health insurance, and a pension—and the restoration of dignity that a formal paid position allowed. Political activist Mabel Williams recalled talking with Parks about “the hard, hard times” the family had encountered, and how if it had not been for John Conyers they might have perished. “John was a real hero to me and others who knew [what he did],” Williams explained.
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Conyers, who became the sixth black congressman in the House at that time, was in a position to aid Mrs. Parks and also to benefit from her considerable personal and political skills. With her political acumen and decades of organizing experience, commitment to social justice, and ability to recognize people’s needs—as well as her volunteer work on his campaign—she could play an important role at his Detroit office. With her history working at the grassroots, she would bring her experience from the back roads of NAACP organizing in Alabama to take on the social issues facing blacks in Detroit. Emblematic of a new black political power, Conyers also recognized and was not threatened by Rosa Parks’s symbolic value in his office. Indeed, having this Southern heroine greet constituents in his office, attend community meetings, or stand beside him at public events embodied the mix of old and new black politics that Conyers was attempting to bring to the national stage. He saw her as the most important civil rights activist in the state.
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And so Mrs. Parks came to work for him.

Parks’s decade of deep economic insecurity was drawing to an end. Her own political work in Detroit, however, was on the rise. Times were changing, and Mrs. Parks was now in a better position to take on Northern racism.

A YEAR BEFORE MOVING TO
Detroit, Parks had visited the city on the invitation of Local 600 to speak to the membership about the boycott. Since 1949, Local 600 had emerged as a site of interracial militancy and dissent in the autoworkers union, as Walter Reuther consolidated his influence as UAW president. After public hearings investigating the Michigan Communist Party in 1952, white workers raged through the plants (as they had in the 1940s when blacks were hired in larger numbers in the auto industry), engaging in sit-down strikes and “runouts” to remove black activists who had been named as Communist sympathizers.
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The UAW did nothing to stop these hate attacks. Rather, shortly afterward, Reuther purged the leadership of Local 600 and placed its leadership under an international union administrator.
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This did not obliterate the feistiness of many Local 600 members. They wanted to bring Rosa Parks to address the local, though Reuther did not.
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Reuther’s continuing distrust of the local, and the controversial nature of the boycott, may have influenced Reuther’s opposition to her visit.
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Undaunted by Reuther’s lack of support, the local raised the money to bring her themselves and warmly welcomed her visit. Parks was no stranger to militant trade unionism herself, having aided Nixon’s work with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. While visiting the local, Parks likely made an important connection to the Tappes family. Sheldon Tappes worked at the River Rouge plant and rose through the ranks of the UAW; his wife, Louise, an active NAACP member and future leader of the WPAC, would become a close friend. Members of Local 600 put Parks up at the Garfield Hotel in Detroit’s Paradise Valley, because in 1956, Detroit’s downtown hotels were not open to black guests.
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Motown was rife with segregation. Detroit’s inner suburbs like Dearborn, Redford, Ferndale, and Warren swelled with whites fleeing black migration to the city and proudly asserted their racial exclusivity. Many of these suburban migrants condemned the city as decrepit and dangerous. And during the Montgomery bus boycott, the mayor of Dearborn, Orville Hubbard, boasted to the
Montgomery Advertiser
of his support of “complete segregation, one million per cent. . . . Negroes can’t get in here. . . . These people are so anti-colored, much more than you in Alabama.”
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Meanwhile, within the city limits, neighborhood associations had flowered like weeds following the black migration and racial tensions of the World War II era, as many white homeowners sought to prevent black people from moving into “their neighborhoods.”
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Though they did not post signs, many Detroit restaurants nonetheless refused black people service; the acclaimed Joe Muer’s Seafood served black customers in the back, wrapping their fish dinners in newspaper.
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Detroit hospitals separated black and white patients, with some even maintaining segregated wards,
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and the Arcadia skating rink, centrally located on Woodward Avenue, didn’t allow black skaters.
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Southerners had reacted to the double standard of being singled out for practices also happening in the North. Montgomery’s police commissioner Clyde Sellers had decried the hypocrisy of Northern outrage during the boycott: “The northern press wants to play up things going on in the South, but they don’t want to publicize segregation in their own cities.”
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And in her talk to Local 600 and in others across the North, Parks explicitly linked Northern and Southern struggles against racial injustice,
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and framed racial discrimination and segregation as a national problem, not just a Southern flaw.
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In 1961, the Parkses were able to leave their two rooms in the Progressive Civil League building. They moved to the ground floor of a brick flat in the Virginia Park neighborhood—a segregated neighborhood, as Parks described it to an interviewer, “almost 100% Negro with the exception of about two families in the block where I live. In fact I suppose you’d call it just about the heart of the ghetto.”
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Virginia Park boasted a wide cross-section of black people—union activists, schoolteachers, families on AFDC, and some militants, according to resident Ollie Foster.
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The area, which would later become the epicenter of the 1967 rebellion, had grown increasingly crowded as black migrants were corralled into certain neighborhoods on the west side due to urban renewal and highway construction.

For the next four decades, Rosa Parks made Detroit’s near west-side her home. Referring to the city as “the northern promised land that wasn’t,” Parks saw that racism in Detroit was “almost as widespread as Montgomery.”
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Because the apparatus of racial inequality in Detroit was more covert, the daily humiliation of separate drinking fountains, elevators, buses, movie theaters, and lunch counters was thankfully gone. Still, Parks did not find “too much difference” between race relations in Detroit and Montgomery.
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Like Montgomery, the city offered a decidedly second-class citizenship for blacks. The systems of racial caste and power in Detroit denied people of color equitable education, safe policing, real job opportunities, a responsive city government, regular quality sanitation and health services, and due process under the law.

Segregation operated somewhat differently in Detroit than Montgomery. While she cherished Detroit’s more integrated public spaces and a lessening of daily fear, Parks found “problems here . . . especially in the school system. The schools would be overcrowded. The job situation wouldn’t be none too good.”
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Housing was acutely segregated, and the differences in public services and policing that followed those boundaries made that segregation even more vicious. And many public spaces, while not explicitly marked “for whites only”—like Detroit’s hotels, restaurants, and hospitals—practiced that just the same.
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Looking at Rosa Parks’s life in the North provides a different view of the racial landscape of postwar America and her direct experiences of Northern, as well as Southern, racism. Parks is so associated with Montgomery, so intertwined in the public memory with the racism and segregation of the Deep South, that the fact she spent more than half her life in an also-segregated Detroit hardly enters into our understanding of her life and legacy. Her description of the city as “the promised land that wasn’t” is a palpable reminder that Northern migration didn’t necessarily produce salvation and that racial inequality was a national plague, not a Southern malady. The civil rights movement was not simply a struggle between the liberal North and a redneck South, as the fable of Rosa Parks too often suggests.

In many of the memorials and descriptions of her life, Parks’s migration north and her work in Conyers’s office is treated like a postscript—the happy ending to a difficult life in the South and a respite from Montgomery’s racial injustice. But the racial inequality that characterized Montgomery—jobs, housing, and school segregation, police brutality, negligible protection for black people under the law, limited black political power—was also endemic in Detroit. And thus Parks’s own activism was not limited to the Cradle of the Confederacy. A decade before the 1967 riot and the black militancy that would make Detroit famous in the racial imagination, Parks moved to the city and joined a burgeoning civil rights movement there. She would spend the rest of her life, nearly fifty years, in Detroit—as a churchgoer and an aunt to her thirteen nieces and nephews, as a staff member for liberal congressman John Conyers and a political activist drawing attention to the racial inequalities of the liberal North. Yet her sustained critique of Northern racism and her half century of political work and community life in Detroit are largely unexplored.

The historical connotations of black freedom in the “promised land” (runaway slaves, the Harlem Renaissance, and black migration during the two world wars) have made it difficult to envision Rosa Parks as part of a struggle for black freedom in the North. America’s race problem is often framed as a relic of a premodern system entrenched in the South and embodied in the form of bus driver James Blake, Montgomery’s intransigent city leaders, and its burgeoning White Citizen’s Council. The idea that Southern civil rights workers might also become Northern activists disturbs the easy oppositions embedded in these popular notions. Yet both Parks and King stressed the national character of racism. “The racial issue that we confront in America,” declared King in a 1960 speech in New York, “is not a sectional but a national problem. . . . There is a pressing need for a liberalism in the North that is truly liberal, that firmly believes in integration in its own community as well as in the deep South.” Parks too questioned the hypocritical silences of Northern liberalism, seeing Detroit’s 1967 riot as “the result of resistance to change that was needed long beforehand.”
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The depth of racial injustice in the North combined with the feign of Northern innocence proved frustrating for the “mother of the movement.” Parks continued to receive hate mail and menacing phone calls well into the 1970s in Detroit. She and King were called Communists, not only for their work in the South but also for their support of open housing and desegregated schools in the North. As Gunnar Myrdal had observed in
American Dilemma
, “The social paradox of the North is exactly this, that almost everybody is against discrimination in general but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs.” The terming of Northern segregation as “de facto” was a misnomer to appeal to Northern sensibilities, according to historian Matthew Lassiter, “despite ample historical evidence of comprehensive state action in producing deeply entrenched patterns of residential and educational segregation.”
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