The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (53 page)

62
. Robinson,
Montgomery Bus Boycott
, 39.

63
. Ibid., 40–42.

64
. “Early Years in Montgomery, 1947–1950,” Vernon Johns Society website,
www.vernonjohns.org
.

65
. Ralph E. Luker, “Murder and Biblical Memory: The Legend of Vernon Johns,”
Best American History Essays 2006
(New York: Palgrave, 2006), 220; Jackson, “Born in Montgomery,” 32–44.

66
. Aretha Watkins, “Mrs. Parks Recalls the First Time She Saw Dr. King,”
Los Angeles Sentinel
, April 11, 1968.

67
. Brinkley,
Rosa Parks
, 100; Watkins, “Mrs. Parks Recalls”

68
. Taylor Branch,
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 124.

69
. MB-NAACP minutes, 1954–55, Box 1, Book 2, SC.

70
. Hoose,
Claudette Colvin
, 41.

71
. Ibid., 42.

72
. MB-NAACP minutes.

73
. Hoose,
Claudette Colvin
, 42.

74
. MB-NAACP minutes.

75
. Parks,
My Story
, 129. In the interview transcripts, Haskins was clearly a bit startled by Parks’s vehemence, asking, “Do you want me to say that?” She replies, “It’s up to you.” Parks, taped interview by James Haskins, December 28, 1988, JHC.

76
. Metcalf,
Black Profiles
, 260.

77
. Patricia Sullivan, ed.,
Freedom Writer
:
Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years
(New York: Routledge, 2003), 87.

78
. Robinson,
Montgomery Bus Boycott
, 42.

79
. Hoose,
Claudette Colvin
, 50.

80
. Ibid., 51.

81
. Yeakey, “Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott,” 270.

82
. Ibid.

83
. Branch,
Parting the Waters
, 123.

84
. Leventhal,
The
Children Coming On
, 41–42.

85
. Parks, Horton, and Nixon, Terkel interview, June 8, 1973, Transcript Box 14, Folder 4, MHP.

86
. Hoose,
Claudette Colvin
, 53.

87
. Williams,
Thunder of Angels
.

88
. Hoose,
Claudette Colvin
, 52.

89
. Ibid.

90
. Ibid.

91
. Durr, CRDP, 63.

92
. Phillip Hoose’s
Claudette Colvin
provides more substantial evidence to dispute this misinterpretation. Parks in her autobiography also mixes up the timing (129–30).

93
. Durr, CRDP, 63.

94
. Eliot Wigginton,
Refuse to Stand Silently By: An Oral History of Grassroots Social Activism in America, 1921–1964
(New York: Anchor, 1991), 230.

95
. Rosalyn Oliver King, author phone interview, August 9, 2010.

96
. Hoose,
Claudette Colvin
, 54.

97
. Yeakey, “Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott,” 272.

98
. Hoose,
Claudette Colvin
, 54.

99
. Lewis Baldwin and Aprille Woodson,
Freedom Is Never Free: A Biographical Portrait of Edgar Daniel Nixon
(Tennessee General Assembly, 1992), in Rosa Parks File, BWOHP, 49.

100
. Jo Ann Robinson, interview by Steven Millner, in Garrow,
The
Walking City
, 571.

101
. Parks,
My Story
, 127.

102
. Rosa Parks, J. E. Pierce, and Robert Graetz, workshop discussion, August 21, 1956, tape, Integration Workshop/Highlander Series, UC 515A/173, HP. Black people in Montgomery referred to the boycott as “the protest” because one of the tactics the city used to try to break the movement was dredging up old laws about conspiracy and boycott.

103
. Parks, Horton, and Nixon, Terkel interview, June 8, 1973, Transcript Box 14, Folder 4, MHP.

104
. Interview with Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, August 22–23, 1978, BWOHP, 255.

105
. Rovetch,
Like It Is
, 46.

106
. Sylvia Dannett,
Profiles of Negro Womanhood, Volume 2
(Yonkers, NY: Educational Heritage, 1966), 291.

107
. Parks,
My Story
, 130. Bus 2857 would be saved from the scrap heap by mechanic Roy Hubert Summerford, restored, and displayed at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI.

108
. Rosa Parks, interview conducted by Blackside, Inc., on November 14, 1985, for
Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954–1965)
, available at Washington University Digital Library,
http://digital.wustl.edu/eyesontheprize/
.

109
. Interview with Parks, Rosa Parks File, Box 2, File 7, GMP.

110
. Wigginton,
Refuse to Stand
, 234.

111
. Parks, CRDP, 8.

112
. Document II-B-17, RPA.

113
. Williams,
Thunder of Angels
, 47.

114
. Dannett,
Profiles of Negro Womanhood
, 291.

115
. “The Two-Way Squeeze,”
Nation
, December 24, 1955.

116
. According to Virginia Durr, Blake, like other drivers, called out, “Niggers move back.” (Virginia Foster Durr,
Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr
[Montgomery: University of Alabama Press, 1985], 279.) Herb Boyd also says this in “Rosa Parks Remembers: Forty Years Later,”
Crisis
103, no. 1 (January 1996). I have found no public interview where Rosa Parks narrates it this way, and I have found other events where Parks quotes other people using the word “nigger.”

117
. Parks, CRDP, 4.

118
. Rosa Parks, interview by
Newsforum
(video), 1990, SC

119
. Mamie Till-Mobley says that Parks told her this when she met Parks in 1989. Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson,
Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America
(New York: Random House, 2003), 257.

120
. Parks,
My Story
, 132. Jo Ann Robinson reproduces the “tired” explanation in her autobiography and downplays Parks’s politics, stressing her “high morals and a strong character.” Robinson,
Montgomery Bus Boycott
, 43.

121
. Parks, CRDP, 4.

122
. Horton, Parks, and Stenhouse, radio interview, HP.

123
. Yeakey, “Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott,” 195.

124
. Joseph Azbell, interview conducted by Blackside, Inc., on October 31, 1985, for
Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954–1965)
, available at Washington University Digital Library,
http://digital.wustl.edu/eyesontheprize/
.

125
. Rosa Parks, interview by Sidney Rogers, in Stewart Burns, ed.,
Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1997), 83.

126
. Document II-A-11, RPA.

127
. Parks, interview, BWOHP, 254.

128
. Metcalf,
Black Profiles
, 262.

129
. Robinson,
Montgomery Bus Boycott
, 43.

130
. “Story of Rosa Parks in Current Esquire,”
Los Angeles Sentinel
, November 19, 1964.

131
. Interview with Parks, Box 4, Folder 13, VP.

132
. Interview with A. W. West, Box 4, Folder 3, VP.

133
. Paul Hendrickson, “Montgomery 1955: The Supporting Actors in the Historic Bus Boycott,”
Washington Post
, July 24, 1989.

134
. Interview with Parks, Box 4, Folder 13, VP.

135
. Yia Eason, “Mrs. Rosa Parks: When She Sat Down the World Stood Up,”
Chicago Tribune
, June 7, 1973.

136
. Parks,
My Story
, 133.

137
. Doris Crenshaw, author phone interview, January 10, 2011.

138
. Rovetch,
Like It Is
, 50.

139
. Parks, CRDP, 20.

140
. Sidney Rogers interview with Rosa Parks in Burns, ed.,
Daybreak of Freedom
, 84.

141
. Rosa Parks, interview by
Newsforum
(video), 1990, SC.

142
. Randall Bush, “The Theological Ethics of Prophetic Acts,” PhD diss., Marquette University, 2003, 187. Bush describes Parks’s faith as the “most important influence” affecting her decision.

143
. Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed,
Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue with Today’s Youth
(New York: Lee & Low Books, 1997), 42.

144
. Blair Kelley,
Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of
Plessy vs. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 11.

145
. Travers Clement, “The Negroes Find Their Own Way,”
Dissent
(April 1957).

146
. Sikora, “Rosa Parks Visits a Different South.”

147
. Parks, Pierce, and Graetz, tape, August 21, 1956, HP.

148
. Selby,
Odyssey
, 54.

149
. Hendrickson, “Montgomery 1955.” Blake says in this interview that “niggers all up and around here were calling up my house for weeks after it happened, just any hour of the day or night, making the vilest threats to me and my wife and family you ever heard.”

150
. Rovetch,
Like It Is
, 47.

151
. Selby,
Odyssey
, 57.

152
. Robert Graetz,
A White Preacher’s Memoir: The Montgomery Bus Boycott
(Montgomery: Black Belt Press, 1998), 15.

153
. Rovetch,
Like It Is
, 47.

154
. Parks interview transcripts, Box 40, Folder 2, JHC.

155
. Parks,
My Story
, 134.

156
. Document II-A-11, RPA.

157
. Interview with Parks, Box 4, Folder 13, VP.

158
. Howell Raines,
My Soul Is Rested
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 40.

159
. Interview with Rosa Parks, Box 4, Folder 13, VP.

160
. Nixon, interview,
Eyes on the Prize
, 5.

161
. “Obituary: James Blake,”
Guardian
, March 27, 2002.

162
. Parks, interview,
You Got to Move
, LMP.

163
. David Levering Lewis,
King: A Biography
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 47.

164
. Burks, “Trailblazers,” 72.

165
. Conyers recalled conversations in which she said she hadn’t planned her action but “knew one day she would resist the law and pay the consequences.” Cooper, “Husband Gave Fire to Reluctant Leader,”
Detroit Free Press
, October 26, 2005.

166
. Williams,
Thunder of Angels
, 48.

167
. Parks, interview,
Eyes on the Prize
, 8.

168
. David Garrow,
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(New York: William Morrow, 1986), 12.

169
. Nikki Giovanni, author phone interview, March 16, 2010.

170
. Patrick L. Cooney, “Martin Luther King Jr. and Vernon Johns,” in Cooney,
The Life and Times of the Prophet Vernon Johns: Father of the Civil Rights Movement
, Vernon Johns Society website,
http://www.vernonjohns.org/
.

171
. 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), 24.

172
. Parks,
My Story
, 133.

173
. Parks, interview, BWOHP, 254–55.

174
. Parks, CRDP, 7.

175
. Rovetch,
Like It Is
, 51.

176
. Parks, interview, BWOHP, 253.

177
. “Local NAACP Rolls Up Big Membership,”
Los Angeles Sentinel
, April 12, 1956 (emphasis added).

178
. Rovetch,
Like It Is
, 52.

179
. Burns,
Daybreak of Freedom
, 84.

180
. “Tribute to Mrs. Rosa L. Parks,” Box 88, Folder 1530, PMP.

181
. Parks,
Quiet Strength
, 22.

182
. “Keep On Fighting, Says Mrs. Parks,”
Baltimore Afro-American
, May 24, 1958.

183
. Mildred Roxborough, author phone interview, February 27, 2012.

184
. Parks,
Quiet Strength
, 77.

185
. “Rosa Parks Receives MLK Peace Prize,”
Afro-American
, January 26, 1980.

186
. Parks, CRDP, 6.

187
. Herb Boyd, author interview, June 11, 2011.

188
. Selby,
Odyssey
, 66.

189
. Parks, Pierce, and Graetz, tape, August 21, 1956, HP.

190
. “Keep On Fighting,”
Baltimore Afro-American
.

191
. “1,000 Hear Heroine of Alabama,”
Afro-American
, October 6, 1956.

192
. Morris,
Origins
, 51.

193
. Jonathan Rieder,
The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr
. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 177. See also Eric Sundquist,
King’s Dream
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

194
. Burns,
Daybreak of Freedom
, 221.

195
. King,
Stride Toward Freedom
, 31.