The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (35 page)

While offering them the opportunity to get away from the difficulties of Montgomery and a chance to be near family, Motown was not a land of milk and honey for the Parks.
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There was the blessing of extended family. Residing in Southwest Detroit, Sylvester and his wife, Daisy, had thirteen children, whom the Parks family now got to watch grow up. And her cousins Thomas Williamson and Annie Cruse and their families lived there. She saw them regularly. “They would make us clothes all the time,” cousin Carolyn Green recalled. “I loved going over,” niece Rhea McCauley concurred.
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But the family still struggled economically. Being a notorious black woman did little to improve her job prospects in Detroit. Its racially segregated employment structure created financial problems similar to those in Montgomery, and steady, well-paid work proved elusive. In the years before Conyers hired her, Mrs. Parks took in piecework, sewed in the home of a seamstress friend, and then got a job sewing aprons and skirts ten hours a day at the Stockton Sewing Company.

In many ways, the fable of Rosa Parks with its much simpler tale of good guys (moral, upstanding Southern blacks and their Northern white allies) and bad guys (racist Southern whites and alienated Northern blacks) has obscured this history of Northern struggle. The treatment of the race problem as a Southern—not national—issue was a strategic formulation of that era, meant to appease Northern sensibilities and Cold War imperatives. To acknowledge Parks’s comparison of Northern and Southern racial inequality would have disrupted this politically convenient binary. Framing racism as a Southern relic, Northern liberal politicians held up the Southern movement as proof of the perfectibility of American democracy and treated Northern movements and activists as dangerous and deviant. The media followed suit. In the liberal imagination, as the Southern civil rights movement increasingly captured national attention, a Southern sharecropper activist could be endowed with a righteousness that a protesting Detroit autoworker or public housing resident could not. And so, to associate Mrs. Parks with Northern militancy and ghetto struggle appears to put a blemish on the mother of the movement.

As with many Southern migrants, Parks’s political activities did not end when she left the South. But the image of Parks on the bus in 1955 is fixed in the popular imagination partly because she left the South as the civil rights movement she helped spur was blossoming. As her comrades in Montgomery and across the South fomented a nonviolent revolution increasingly captured by the national media, Parks had a new political base. Though she remained personally close to many Southern movement people and attended some events, she wasn’t a daily participant—and so became frozen in time, heralded for starting it all but largely unrecognized as an ongoing political actor. Simultaneously, with the nation’s eyes focused on the South, Mrs. Parks’s political activities and those of her comrades in Detroit were treated differently than parallel movements evolving in the South.

Many of the interviews with Parks—including more extensive oral histories on the civil rights movement—took place in her home or in Representative John Conyers’s Detroit office. Despite sitting with her in Motown, interviewers barely asked about her Northern activism or the racial landscape of the city (except for a question or two on the riot). They hardly seemed to notice her continuing involvement in the struggle for racial justice in Detroit. Much of the corresponding media attention to her in the 1960s and 1970s focused on Southern-based events—Mrs. Parks attending the Selma-to-Montgomery march, or the anniversary of the bus boycott, or King’s funeral. On the tenth anniversary of the boycott, reporters descended on Mrs. Parks. In numerous interviews, she made clear she “would do it again,” but she also noted, “I can’t say we like Detroit any better than Montgomery.”
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No one cared to probe that response, and Mrs. Parks didn’t elaborate.

The Southern focus of Mrs. Parks’s interviewers reflected a broader blindness among liberal commentators and subsequent historians to the parallels between Southern and Northern racism and anti-racism struggles. By the early 1960s, the national media (based outside of the South) had grown increasingly sympathetic to the nonviolent Southern struggle. Conversely, while Northern protests often made front-page news, they were not framed through the same righteous lens used for the Southern movement.
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In cities like Detroit, public officials regularly refuted black demands with the charge that “this is not the South” and repeatedly expressed their shock at rising militancy and the uprisings of the late 1960s—willfully forgetting that decades of black struggle had produced negligible change. Detroit’s white officials thought they had solved the city’s racial problems with interracial commissions, liberal proclamations, nominal desegregation, and token hires. And the media picked it up wholesale, particularly after the 1967 uprising, when few stories looked back on this decade of frustrated activism that had laid the foundation for the anger that would explode. Time and again, news articles expressed “surprise” over the riots.

Even when interviewers in the 1960s and 1970s asked her questions on contemporary race relations, they often inquired about the current racial situation
in the South
. Parks was almost never asked about whether things in Detroit had changed, about the Kerner Commission report, Northern school segregation, Nixon’s welfare policies, police brutality, or the war in Vietnam—despite her considerable attention to these matters. In an interview in 1970 in Conyers’s office, when asked about her decision to leave the South and her civil rights work there, Mrs. Parks pushed back. “I don’t know whether I could have been more effective as a worker for freedom in the South than I am here in Detroit. Really the same thing that has occurred in the South is existing here to a certain degree. We do have the same problems.”
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Notably, this interview took place inside Congressman Conyers’s office at a time when the office was a hotbed of local and national black political organizing. Parks was intimately involved in this push to elect more black public officials and cognizant of the needs of black Detroiters, yet few interviewers valued her insights about contemporary Northern black politics. Had Parks been a male civil rights pioneer turned congressman’s staff assistant, it seems inconceivable that these interviewers would not have probed for insights into Detroit’s race relations and directions for the congressman’s agenda. A related omission occurred as Parks worked on her autobiography with Jim Haskins in the late 1980s. Haskins had family roots and activist connections in Alabama, having been a student at Alabama State during the boycott, so much of their detailed conversation was spun out from this shared background. Moreover, Haskins brought numerous articles and other memorabilia to help jar Mrs. Parks’s memory and push her to clarify and nuance these accounts. But those articles tended to replicate a Southern focus—on the boycott, the political landscape of Alabama, and the various movements that led up to it. So Haskins and Parks concentrated on correcting and improving those accounts. However inadvertently, Haskins’s Southern focus indelibly shaped the structure of
Rosa Parks: My Life
and the extant historical record.

Despite these interviewers’ blinders, Rosa Parks recognized that the “same problems” beset her new hometown and, as she had for decades, set about seeing what she could do to challenge them. Parks was thus in on the ground level as a rising black politics—of grassroots activism and black electoral strategies—took hold in Detroit.

Black migration to Detroit swelled in the twentieth century. Half a million Southerners came to the city during World War II, most of them black, and the numbers of black migrants continued to swell in the decades after the war. Indeed, Detroit’s black population doubled between 1940 and 1950.
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The Parks family thus joined a heavy stream of black migrants to the North. By the 1960s, the majority of black people would live in the North. As historian Hasan Jeffries has documented, people who had moved from Alabama’s Black Belt to Detroit formed a key source of information and support for Motown’s migrant pool: “It was possible for a Detroit factory worker to earn ten times as much as a Lowndes County [the neighboring county to Montgomery] farmhand. At the same time, they were always the last hired and the first fired, and housing was just as cramped and crowded as it was in southern cities.”
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As in Montgomery, black women in Detroit were largely trapped in low-wage service labor.

Another demographic shift was afoot. Armed with home loans and new highways, white Detroiters migrated to the suburbs. Between 1950 and 1960, while the black population grew by 60 percent, the white population of the city shrank by 23 percent, or 350,000 people.
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A rating system developed in the 1930s by the Home Owners Loan Corporation and continued by the Federal Housing Authority to reassure banks and promote home ownership gave the best ratings to racially homogenous white neighborhoods still prime for development. Detroit’s expanding suburbs were given high ratings, which spurred this white migration, whereas 50 percent of all city homes were “redlined” and deemed unsafe for investment, even in solidly middle-class black neighborhoods.
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This sped up the decline of the city as federal home loan programs made investment in the city’s inner core sparse. With plentiful GI Bill loans significantly more accessible to returning white GIs than their black counterparts and millions of dollars for federal highway construction, Detroit’s suburbs proliferated with white families, while black neighborhoods within the city grew more crowded. Many white suburbs were hostile to black people moving in. Thus, the twin weapons of state bureaucracy and white vigilantism conspired to keep most black families jammed into increasingly crowded city neighborhoods while rewarding white families moving to Detroit’s white suburbs.

In 1948, the Supreme Court took up four cases of black homeowners, including Detroiters Orsel and Minnie McGhee, to rule unanimously in
Shelley v. Kraemer
that courts could not enforce restrictive covenants, which proscribed home owners from selling their property to certain groups of people. Indicative of how entrenched such discriminatory practices were in American society, three Supreme Court justices recused themselves from the case likely because they had restrictive covenants on their own properties. The Supreme Court’s decision did not prohibit the covenants, just the court’s enforcement of them—which provided an ample loophole for homeowners, public officials, and realtors to maintain such practices. And so Northern metro areas continued to be as segregated in 1960 as in 1940, in part because the FHA continued to support racially restrictive development.
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Despite the jubilation in the black community over the Court’s decision, Detroit authorities refused to enforce it and developed strategies, along with banks and realtors, to maintain these discriminatory practices, as white officials and businesspeople did across the country. “Detroit newspapers,” according to Detroit’s NAACP executive secretary, Arthur Johnson, “wrote detailed articles instructing and encouraging white homeowners to circumvent the law and keep blacks out. This was indicative of how the mainstream media in Detroit was but an extension of the white institutional power structure.”
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Between 1945 and 1955, about 100,000 private units were constructed on vacant city land, but only 2 percent of those were available to black people—and while the waiting list for public housing was six thousand deep for blacks, there was barely a wait for white families.
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Much like it was in Montgomery, state-funded urban renewal, slum clearance, and highway construction blazed through Detroit in the decades after World War II. The Detroit Plan crafted in 1946 promoted slum clearance, including razing 129 acres in the Black Bottom. Between 1949 and 1971, the state and city began twenty-seven urban renewal projects at a cost of $263 million.
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Detroit’s Paradise Valley fell prey to the Oakland-Hastings portion of the I-75 freeway (later renamed the Chrysler Freeway), as did the bustling Hastings Street with its black-owned businesses and music clubs. These urban renewal projects often resulted in black removal, and many community activists criticized them for focusing on attracting white suburbanites back to the city rather than improving housing for its black residents. Most black families forced out by renewal projects had difficulty finding other decent, affordable housing, and the city provided little assistance, often engaging in questionable removal practices. By 1962, almost 15 percent of the city had been cleared for urban renewal.
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In March 1963, the Detroit Commission on Community Relations reported that ten thousand structures had been razed or were scheduled for demolition, displacing 43,096 people, 70 percent of them black.
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The impact of urban renewal touched black life immeasurably.
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One facet of residential segregation was that black residents (who were poorer on average than their white counterparts) paid more for housing than white Detroiters in the metro area because they were restricted to increasingly overpopulated parts of the city. Yet, half of the housing black people inhabited was substandard, in part because of the difficulties in getting loans for upkeep.
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By 1967, Detroit boasted the highest rates of black home ownership rates in the nation, but the quality was far worse and the percentage of blacks owning still considerably lower than for whites in the city.
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Fires were common, particularly because many of the buildings were old and made of wood. Moreover, the city only picked up garbage once a week, which meant that in crowded neighborhoods, garbage overflowed. Thus, when Parks said she lived in the heart of the ghetto, this pattern of structural neglect was in part what she was referencing.