The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (50 page)

2
. Keith, author interview.

3
. “US Capitol Honors Civil Rights Leader Parks,”
ABCNews.com
, October 30, 2005.

4
. Peter Slevin, “A Quiet Woman’s Resonant Farewell,”
Washington Post
, November 2, 2005. In November 2006, the postal service changed its policy to reduce the wait from ten to five years after a person has died before he or she can be honored with a postage stamp, partially due to the pressure for a Parks stamp; on July 4, 2007, Senator Barack Obama introduced a bill authorizing a Parks stamp.

5
. “President Signs H.R. 4145 to Place Statue of Rosa Parks in U.S. Capitol,” press release, White House, December 1, 2005,
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/
.

6
. Frank Joyce, author phone interview, March 28, 2012.

7
. Described as “unassuming seamstress” in Maria Newman, “Thousands Pay Final Respects to Rosa Parks in Detroit,”
New York Times
, November 2, 2005; “accidental matriarch” in Janofsky, “Thousands Gather”; “quiet” and “humble” in “US Civil Rights Icon Dies,”
BBC.com
, October 25, 2005, and “Parks Remembered for Her Courage, Humility,”
CNN.com
, October 20, 2005; “humble” in “Thousands Attend Rosa Parks Funeral in Detroit,”
USA Today
, November 2, 2005; “quiet” in Slevin, “A Quiet Woman’s Resonant Farewell”; as “mild-mannered” and a “gentle giant” in Cassandra Spratling, “Goodbye Mrs. Parks,”
Detroit Free Press
, October 25, 2005. While challenging a number of the myths surrounding Parks’s life, E. R. Shipp eulogizes Parks in a way that contributes to the idea of her as a nonpolitical actor. Shipp, “Rosa Parks, 92, Founding Symbol of Civil Rights Movement, Dies,”
New York Times
, October 25, 2005.

8
. Douglas Brinkley,
Rosa Parks: A Life
(New York: Penguin, 2000), 118.

9
. The
Detroit Free Press
would go so far as to write, “When Rosa Parks refused to get up, an entire race of people began to stand up for their rights. . . . It was a time when racial discrimination was so common, many blacks never questioned it. At least not out loud.” Spratling, “Goodbye Mrs. Parks.”

10
. Taylor Branch lauded Parks in his Pulitzer Prize–winning
Parting the Waters
, as “one of those rare people of whom everyone agreed that she gave more than she got. Her character represented one of the isolated high blips on the graph of human nature, offsetting a dozen or so sociopaths.” Yet all Branch included about Parks’s political work in his nearly one-thousand-page book was the fact that she had been secretary of the local NAACP chapter (but nothing about what she actually did with the chapter) and a mention of her 1955 visit to the Highlander Folk School on the urging of white Montgomerian Virginia Durr. Branch,
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 125.

11
. Historian Komozi Woodard recounts being at Blackside Productions during the editing of
Eyes on the Prize
and witnessing how nearly all of Parks’s interview ended up on the cutting-room floor because she spoke too slowly.

12
. Guernsey’s auction house compiled an inventory of all of the papers and effects, scanned a handful of documents, and prepared a short summary of a small number of other documents, which they made public to enable the sale. I have used this in limited ways in the book, cited as the Rosa Parks Archive (RPA). Documents downloaded April 18, 2010.

13
. Debra Johnson, “Civil Rights Leader Donates Papers to Archives,”
South End
, Wayne State University student newspaper, clip undated, in Box 41, Folder 1, JHC. Approached to donate her papers to the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State, she gave a portion covering her political activities up to 1976 to them, but not the entirety of them. Her quote in the Wayne student newspaper makes it seem as if she anticipated making a second donation at a later date. There are some notable papers at the Reuther Library, including all of her notes from her first visit to Highlander, but very few personal letters from friends or political allies, notes from her speeches or other personal writings, or any form of diary. Given how many radical publications and newsletters she donated to the library in 1976, it is clear that Parks wanted to leave a record of her own politics and preserve the contributions of these more militant organizations to the black struggle.

1
. Rosa Parks, Myles Horton, and E. D. Nixon, radio interview by Studs Terkel, June 8, 1973, transcript, Box 14, Folder 4, MHP.

2
. Stewart Burns,
To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King’s Sacred Mission to Save America 1955–1968
(New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 18.

3
. Document II-C-3, RPA.

4
. Document II-A-8, RPA.

5
. Document II-A-13, RPA.

6
. Gregory Skwira, “The Rosa Parks Story: A Bus Ride, a Boycott, a New Beginning,” in
Blacks in Detroit: A Reprint of Articles from the Detroit Free Press
, Scott McGehee and Susan Watson, eds. (Detroit: Detroit Free Press, 1980), 12.

7
. “‘I’d Do It Again,’ Says Rights Action Initiator,”
Los Angeles Times
, December 16, 1965.

8
. Rosa Parks, interview by Cynthia Stokes Brown,
Southern Exposure
(Spring 1981): 16.

9
. Roxanne Brown, “Mother of the Movement: Nation Honors Rosa Parks with Birthday Observance,”
Ebony
, February 1988, 70, 72.

10
. Leona had three sisters; her sister Fannie was the oldest and had a different mother. Leona was the middle daughter, between Bessie and Cora, of Sylvester and Rose Edwards. Leona also had a much younger brother, Sonny, who also had a different mother. Census records downloaded at
ProGenealogists.com
; Barbara Alexander, author phone interview, May 23, 2012.

11
. Douglas Brinkley,
Rosa Parks: A Life
(New York: Penguin, 2000), 15.

12
. Rosa Parks, transcripts of interviews with Jim Haskins, 1988, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC. In the James Haskins Collection, on file at Boston University, there are portions of unedited interview transcripts and one tape from his interviews with Parks. This is only a portion of the interviews he did with her and it is unclear whether the transcripts cover the whole interview from that day. Portions (sometimes jumbled) include interviews from July 7, August 22, August 24, August 25, and May 18, 1988. In time, it is hoped that the rest of the transcripts and all the tapes of Haskins’s interviews with Parks will be found and opened to the public.

13
. Interview with Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, Marcia Greenlee, August 22–23, 1978, BWOHP, Volume 8, 248.

14
. Listed in inventory as D304 and D306, RPA. He signed his letter “James.”

15
. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.

16
. Eliot Wigginton,
Refuse to Stand Silently By: An Oral History of Grassroots Social Activism in America, 1921–1964
(New York: Anchor, 1991), 159.

17
. Rosa Parks, interview, June 19, 1981,
You Got to Move
research files, Folder 1, Box 11, LMP; Brinkley,
Rosa Parks
, 22.

18
. Rosa Parks,
Rosa Parks: My Story
(New York: Dial Books, 1992), 30.

19
. Parks, interview,
You Got to Move
, LMP.

20
. Document II-A-6, RPA.

21
. Mary Rolinson,
Grassroots Garveyism
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 88, 89, 197–202.

22
. In David Garrow, ed.,
The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955–1956
(Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1989), 554.

23
. Ibid.

24
. Wigginton,
Refuse to Stand
, 161.

25
. Parks, interview,
You Got to Move
, LMP.

26
. Ibid.

27
. Earl Selby and Miriam Selby,
Odyssey: Journey through Black America
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), 56.

28
. Document II-A-4, RPA.

29
. Parks, interview,
You Got to Move
, LMP.

30
. Parks,
My Story
, 34.

31
. Ibid., 33.

32
. Interview with Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks File, Box 2, File 7, GMP.

33
. Parks,
My Story
, 53–54.

34
. “Race Urged to Keep Faith in its Fight,”
Chicago Defender
, June 9, 1956.

35
. Document, II-A-14, RPA.

36
. Ibid.

37
. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.

38
. Interview with Parks, Rosa Parks File, Box 2, File 7, GMP.

39
. Wigginton,
Refuse to Stand
, 163.

40
. Selby,
Odyssey
, 55–56.

41
. Parks,
My Story
, 33–34.

42
. Selby,
Odyssey
, 56.

43
. Parks,
My Story
, 26.

44
. Brinkley,
Rosa Parks
, 28.

45
. Parks,
My Story
, 26.

46
. Ibid., 27.

47
. Scanned handwritten document ca. 1956, Document II-A-14, RPA.

48
. Ibid.

49
. “Ancestors of Rosa (McCauley) Parks,” census documents,
Ancestry.com
and
Progenealogists.com
.

50
. Barbara Alexander, author phone interview, May 23, 2012.

51
. Records describe Leona as divorced but do not suggest that Jim Carlie had been previously married.

52
. Janell McGrew, “Parks’s Quiet Courage Helped Change the World,”
Montgomery Advertiser
, October 25, 2005.

53
. Parks, interview,
You Got to Move
, LMP.

54
. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.

55
. Brinkley,
Rosa Parks
, 29.

56
. Parks interview, BWOHP, 249.

57
. J. Mills Thornton III,
Dividing Lines
:
Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 58.

58
. Parks,
My Story
, 56.

59
. Willy S. Leventhal,
The Children Coming On: A Retrospective of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
(Montgomery, AL: Black Belt Press, 1998), 52.

60
. Mary Fair Burks, “Trailblazers: Women in the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in
Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers
,
1941–1965
, Vicki Crawford et al., eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 72.

61
. Parks,
My Story
, 54.

62
. Interview with Parks, Rosa Parks File Box 2, File 7, GMP.

63
. Parks,
My Story
, 55.

64
. Carolyn Green, author phone interview, May 29, 2012.

65
. Ibid., 57.

66
. Wigginton,
Refuse to Stand
, 163.

67
. Ibid., 165.

68
. Parks, interview,
You Got to Move
, LMP.

69
. Scanned letter, “Galatas” to Parks, April 3, 1929, I-G-35, RPA.

70
. Garrow,
The
Walking City
, 553, 558.

71
. Wigginton,
Refuse to Stand
, 165.

72
. Parks, interview,
You Got to Move
, LMP.

73
. Document I-D-22, RPA.

74
. Parks, interview, BWOHP, 248.

75
. Brinkley,
Rosa Parks
, 36.

76
. I am calling the unnamed narrator Rosa because the piece is written in the first person.

77
. Scanned handwritten document c. 1950s or early 1960s, Document II-A-1, RPA.

78
. Parks’s story resembles
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
, whose author, Harriet Jacobs, managed to outwit her slave master and refused to consent to a sexual relationship by using her own words and cunning.

79
. Parks,
My Story
, 62. Given that in other places she says she didn’t have a lot of romantic experience, this could be a veiled reference to Mr. Charlie.

80
. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.

81
. Parks, interview, BWOHP, 25.

82
. Ibid., 252.

83
. Parks,
My Story
, 63.

84
. Ibid., 68.

85
. One exception is Angela Bassett’s portrayal of Rosa and Peter Francis James’s as Raymond in Julie Dash’s 2002 film
The Rosa Parks Story
.

86
. Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed,
Quiet Strength
:
The Faith, the Hope, and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994), 46.

87
. Vernon Jarrett, “The Forgotten Heroes of the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” series,
Chicago Tribune
, December 1975.

88
. Parks,
Quiet Strength
, 46.

89
. Septima Clark with Cynthia Stokes Brown,
Ready from Within
(Navarro, CA: Wild Trees Press, 1986), 16.

90
. Alice Walker,
The World Has Changed:
Conversations with Alice Walker
(New York: New Press, 2010), 271–72.

91
. Garrow,
The
Walking City
, 557; “Reminiscences,” BWOHP, 252.

92
. Parks,
My Story
, 67–68.