The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (37 page)

Parks too had found a deep connection between her racial activism and her Christian faith. When she got married, she had stopped reading the Bible, perhaps because her husband’s politics were less faith-based.
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But she had long since returned to a rich and active worship, first in Montgomery and then in Detroit. Parks joined St. Matthew’s AME Church on Petoskey, a small church with only about two hundred members, because her cousin Annie Cruse and friend Mary Hays Gaskin went there.
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By 1965, she had risen to the position of deaconess, the highest rank a woman could attain. The deaconesses held responsibility for promoting the general good of the church and ministering to the needs of its congregants.
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Faithful in her Sunday attendance, she often came by during the week to pray or help with the church program or other needs.
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But while St. Matthews remained her religious home, she often attended events at Cleage’s Central Congregational Church. According to SNCC comrade Martha Norman Noonan, Parks gravitated toward political events held at Cleage’s church, choosing to align herself with the more radical elements in Detroit.
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Central Congregational held numerous programs on the black struggle and black consciousness that interested her—and the church was close to her Virginia Park home. Historian Angela Dillard writes about how Cleage’s church blended “theology, social criticism, and calls to action, during the late 1950s . . . attract[ing] a core of activists who would become influential in the theory and practice of black nationalist politics in Detroit.”
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One speech Parks attended there featured black sociologist Nathan Hare speaking on “The Psychology of Uncle Tom[:] ‘White on the Inside,’” another featured Stokely Carmichael talking about Black Power. Hare recalled the first time he met Mrs. Parks was after a speech he gave at Cleage’s church; she seemed “in her element,” he recalled, and came up afterward and told him how much she liked his talk.
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Parks, like Cleage, was a staunch and devout Christian—and the mix of black activism and Christianity that developed in Detroit resonated with her. She saw no contradiction between religious belief and political militancy. Serving God necessitated collective action to address the needs of her fellow men and women. To Mrs. Parks, God stood with the oppressed and did not take kindly to complacency. As her Mississippi comrade, Fannie Lou Hamer, also a devout Christian activist, explained, “You can pray until you faint. But unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap!” Certainly as her interest in slave resistance and the Underground Railroad grew, Mrs. Parks saw the deep roots of Christian militancy in the struggle for racial justice in America. That faith also underwrote her courage. She often carried her Bible, and many times, particularly in difficult situations, would take it out to read and pray.
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As in Montgomery, class, ideological, and religious differences ran through Motown’s black churches and black Detroiters’ attempts to draw attention to the city’s racial inequality. In November 1965, Detroit hosted two civil rights conferences, providing a preview of the black militancy that the media would discover in 1966 with Stokely Carmichael’s calls for Black Power. Hoping to capitalize on the tremendous energy of the summer’s Great March, organizers wanted to start a Northern counterpart to the SCLC—an NCLC—and planned a fall conference. Differing on whether to include militants and black nationalists like Malcolm X in the conference program, Reverends Cleage and Franklin, reflecting tensions in Detroit’s activist community, parted ways. Cleage decided to organize a rival conference, the Grassroots Leadership Conference. The NCLC held its three-day convention at Cobo Hall, but the attendance was disappointing; about fifty people participated in the workshops, and only three thousand came to Adam Clayton Powell’s keynote address.
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Between three hundred and four hundred activists attended the Grassroots Leadership Conference and heard Malcolm X’s keynote, titled “Message to the Grassroots” and recorded by Milton Henry. While Parks started out at the NCLC, she also attended the Grassroots Leadership Conference.
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The Supreme Court’s 1962 decision on urban voter underrepresentation in
Baker v. Carr
led to the redrawing of Michigan’s congressional district boundaries. The creation of Michigan’s First Congressional District on Detroit’s north side opened up the possibility for Detroit to send a second black representative to Congress (Charles Diggs represented Detroit’s east side).
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Even before the boundaries were finalized, the firm of George Crockett and Maurice Sugar had encouraged a young civil rights attorney, John Conyers Jr., to enter the race against the incumbent, white congressman Lucien Nedzi.
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Conyers’s campaign thus commenced before that of his closest challenger, black Democrat Richard Austin.

In early 1964, Rosa Parks took an interest in Conyers’s long-shot campaign.
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Having met Conyers through his work on behalf of voting rights in the South, she volunteered in his campaign for “Jobs, Justice, Peace.”
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Born on May 16, 1929, in Highland Park, the thirty-five-year-old Conyers had been educated in Detroit public schools and attended Wayne State University, where he obtained his undergraduate and law degrees. He served in the army during the Korean War. In 1963, Conyers had gone to Selma as a legal observer. Conyers’s father, John Conyers Sr., had been an official in the UAW until he was ousted by Walter Reuther along with Coleman Young, George Crockett, and Walter Hardin for ties to the CP and CP activists. Before running for Congress, John Conyers Jr. had served as a legislative assistant with Congressman John Dingell and worked for the Michigan workmen’s compensation department. Because of his work with Dingell and his father’s union work, Conyers was known politically throughout the state.
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An early opponent of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Conyers had received support from the emerging antiwar movement, civil rights advocates, and portions of Detroit’s labor movement. Parks began attending campaign meetings, rarely saying anything but willing to help with campaign tasks. “Everyone was frozen in their tracks,” Conyers recalled. “Rosa Parks is supporting Conyers.”
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Many people, including the candidate himself and King’s nephews who lived in Detroit, wanted Dr. King, who had purposely chosen to steer clear of any political races, to come to Detroit on Conyers’s behalf and had reached out to him. But Conyers credited Parks’s efforts as the decisive factor in convincing King to come.
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Parks called King and implored: “You’ve got to come to Detroit and embrace Brother Conyers. We need you.”
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King could not say no.

Over Easter weekend, King came to Detroit, where he gave a moving speech at Central United Methodist Church and then endorsed Conyers’s campaign, the only political endorsement he made. According to Conyers, “Boy that really zoomed me right up.”
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King’s visit “quadrupled my visibility in the black community. . . . Therefore, if it wasn’t for Rosa Parks, I never would have gotten elected.”
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Conyers faced considerable opposition in the crowded primary, particularly from Richard Austin. Older and more well known, Austin was an accountant with many influential white and black supporters as well as ample ties to the labor movement and the Democratic Party. According to Conyers, once Austin entered the race, “people were told to take my bumper sticker off their car.”
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Initially the UAW had come out for Conyers; when Austin entered the race, they equivocated, as did the Trade Union Leadership Council (TULC). Formed to be an independent voice for blacks in the UAW after Reuther purged militants, the TULC had played a crucial leadership role in black politics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, pivotal in the election of Jerome Cavanagh as mayor in 1962 and in various local efforts around school segregation and urban renewal. Conyers was legal counsel to the TULC, and his father had a long and strong relationship to the UAW.
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This decision to support Austin split the TULC’s leadership and membership and weakened relations between the pro-union Conyers and the UAW.
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Conyers was seen as more progressive and more independent, making him the choice of many politically minded black people like Rosa Parks—and backed, according to the
Los Angeles Sentinel
, with the “largest volunteer organization ever seen in Michigan.”
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Thousands of volunteers—along with the candidate himself—stumped at churches, supermarkets, and block clubs.
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Women played a crucial role in this grassroots support; many felt, according to Ida Murray, that “John was a candidate of the people,” whereas “labor was picking your candidate” with Austin.
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Many saw the young Conyers as a David going up against the Goliath of the Democratic Party and union establishment. One lucky break for the campaign was that Detroit’s two main newspapers were on strike; had they not been, Conyers believed, they certainly would not have supported his upstart candidacy and Austin might have benefited.

In September, Conyers won the Democratic primary in a field of eight candidates by a slim margin and the recount narrowed the win to forty-three votes ahead of Austin.
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The September 1964 election was not a mandate for progressivism, however. Faced with a rising open-housing movement pushing to end the right of homeowners and realtors to discriminate, Detroit voters approved an anti-open-housing referendum allowing homeowners and realtors to “accept or reject any prospective buyer or tenant for his own reasons.”
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California voters followed suit in November, passing Proposition 14, which repealed the recently passed Rumford Fair Housing Act. Most white people in Detroit and L.A. wanted to retain their right to discriminate in the sale and rental of their property. Thus, the white backlash against civil rights typically associated with the period after the riots in these cities was actually a frontlash that sought to thwart any real Northern desegregation years before the riots.
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In the general election, Conyers ran against attorney Milton Henry (who lived in Pontiac, not in the district) of the Freedom Now Party and Robert Blackwell of the Republican Party and executive secretary of the Michigan Labor Mediation Board (who later became the first black mayor of Highland Park in 1968).
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Because the First District was about half black and two-thirds Democratic, Conyers won handily.
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Conyers became the sixth black in the House of Representatives and the first black person ever to serve on the House Judiciary Committee.

On March 1, 1965, Conyers hired Parks for a position in his Detroit office, where she would work till she retired in 1988. Tellingly, after more than twenty years of dedicated political work, this was the first time Parks had held a paid political position. She would remain within a gender-appropriate role, answering phones, handling constituent needs, welcoming visitors, and coordinating the office. But her work was invaluable to the new congressman. Conyers would spend a great deal of the time in DC, so Parks helped hold down the fort in Detroit in an office on the third floor of the Michigan State Building. Indeed, for a time, Parks was Conyers’s surrogate in the city, doing community work, keeping a pulse on the most pressing issues, and demonstrating the congressman’s commitment to community struggles.
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Traveling all over the city, she visited constituents at schools, hospitals, and senior citizen homes, attended community meetings and rallies, and kept Conyers grounded in community activism. Taking up various urban social issues, Mrs. Parks heard people’s problems, gathered information about their concerns, and filled in for Conyers at public functions. Her job often focused on addressing constituent needs, particularly around welfare benefits, education, job discrimination, Social Security, and affordable housing.
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She sat in with the congressman in numerous meetings in Detroit, particularly in the first years. Adam Shakoor recalled that when he met with the Conyers in the early 1970s on alternative treatments and community initiatives for addressing heroin addiction, Parks joined them.
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She also traveled with Conyers to national black events and to support black candidates and often joined the congressman in meetings with community activists in Detroit. Conyers aides Leon Atchison and Larry Horwitz were adamant in later interviews, however, that Mrs. Parks made her own political agenda, and that she attended many black political events because of her own beliefs and moral compass, not because the congressman sent her or she was representing him.

The office was a busy place, filled with the cultural politics of the era. Above the desks, for instance, was a mimeographed poster, done by graphic artist Ron Cobb, of an older black man with a hoe bearing the caption: “Remember, Uncle Tom says—‘Only you can prevent ghetto fires.’”
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People often came to Conyers with incidences of discrimination, particularly numerous complaints of race-based job bias. At some workplaces, Atchison recalled, they were able to get redress. At the IRS, black women were being discriminated against and not promoted. They went over and interviewed people on the spot. The office put pressure on them to get rid of the director of the local office. They had similar success at the Army Tank Automotive Command.
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Thus, Parks was well acquainted with the needs of Detroit’s black poor and working class. Housing, and particularly public housing, were among the issues closest to her heart.
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Housing for blacks in Detroit by the mid-1960s was decrepit, deeply overcrowded, unsanitary, and unequal. The density in black neighborhoods was often more than twice that in white neighborhoods.
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Having lived in public housing herself in Montgomery, she worked to get money for public housing in Detroit. Particularly as President Johnson’s Great Society programs opened up funding for city needs, Parks tried to get a piece of that money for Detroit. Part of her job was to listen to what people needed and then report this back to the congressman.