The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

Summary: A nuanced and detailed biography of a woman that has primarily been reduced to a single act.

I have read Jeanne Theoharis' books out of order. Her more recent book, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, has many themes hinted at in The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks but more fully fleshed out in the second book. Both books are well worth reading, although there is some overlap. There is a running joke among Civil Rights historians that quite often, the history of the civil rights moment is presented as that one day the Supreme Court announced the end of school segregation, and then the next day Rosa Parks sat down. A day later, MLK stood up to give his I Have a Dream Speech. Then the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were passed, and MLK was assassinated. The real history of the Civil Rights Movement is much more complicated and much longer.

In some ways, it is hard to categorize the boundaries of the movement because, as with all history, events influence other events. Both The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance-a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power emphasize that by 1955, Rosa Parks had been participating or leading on civil rights issues for nearly 20 years. The December 1, 1955 events may not have been explicitly planned as an NAACP action, but it was not a random event that did not have a larger context. Several events had to work together. Rosa Parks tended to avoid James Blake's bus because she had had run-ins with the bus driver before. Other events around the country like the lynching of Emmett Till, the Interstate Commerce Commission's ruling banning “separate but equal” regarding interstate bus travel, and Rosa Parks' recent participation in the Highlander Folk School training all likely had some effect. In the end, Rosa Parks refused to get up from her seat. City policy should have meant that she did not have to move because no other seats were available. Instead, the bus driver called the police, and she was arrested. Because this is such an essential part of Rosa Parks' legacy,  the event and the bus boycott are significant parts of the biography. But the biography also clarifies that Rosa Parks was far more important than just her single act, even if that act is what she is known for.

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and many other books about less well-known figures of the Civil Rights movement show the considerable cost that everyday people suffered. Money is not everything, but it is one illustration. According to tax records, it took ten years for the couple to recover their income from before the bus boycott, and they were not a wealthy family. At the low point, their income was cut by 80%. Even so, during this time, they were forced to move to Detroit to escape the harassment and job discrimination once the boycott was completed. Rosa Parks spent nearly two years working as a receptionist at the Hampton Institute in Virginia (a historically black college) away from her husband and mother because it was the only job she could find (and the Hampton Institute did not provide housing for the whole family). It was not until a year after the newly elected congressman John Conyers hired her as a congressional staffer in 1965 that their income reached above the pre-1956 income.

As always, there are details that I learn from every book. One of the things that was made evident in The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, in the context of voting rights, is that not only were potential Black voters given personalized “literacy tests” that were not given to potential White voters (because of grandfather clauses), but when a Black person was attempting to register, they had to pay not just a poll tax for the year that they were registering, but back taxes for every year that they had been theoretically eligible to vote. And again, in many cases, White voters were exempted from the poll taxes in the authorizing legislation. Rosa Parks attempted to register to vote three times. The first time she failed the literacy test. The second time she passed the literacy test but was never mailed a voting card (white voters were given the card at the time of registration, but black voters were mailed their cards.) The third time she again passed the literacy test but had to pay the annual poll tax of $1.50, but for all eleven years that she was technically old enough to vote. This would be the equivalent of nearly $300 in 2022 dollars, not an insurmountable amount, but when she and her husband's combined income would have been about $60-75 a week, it was still a significant sum. Rosa Parks' husband could never register to vote until they moved to Detroit in 1956.

One of the book's themes is the tension between respectability politics and the very real backlash against civil rights organizing. Rosa Parks was known for her conservative dress and proper manners. She was also a woman of deep faith and humility who did not like to promote herself or her needs. That conservative dress did not mean that she was politically conservative. In her later years, she spoke at the Million Men March organized by Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. She regularly attended meetings for the local chapter of the Black Panthers in Detroit. But Parks was aware of respectability's role in the civil rights movement.

The paradox was this: Parks's refusal to get up from her seat and the community outrage around her arrest were rooted in her long history of political involvement and their trust in her. However, this same political history got pushed to the background to further the public image of the boycott. Parks had a more extensive and progressive political background than many of the boycott leaders; many people probably didn't know she had been to Highlander, and some would have been uncomfortable with her ties to leftist organizers. Rosa Parks proved an ideal person around which a boycott could coalesce, but it demanded publicizing a strategic image of her. Describing Parks as “not a disturbing factor,” Dr. King would note her stellar character at the first mass meeting in Montgomery, referring to the “boundless outreach of her integrity, the height of her character.”

The foregrounding of Parks's respectability–of her being a good Christian woman and tired seamstress–proved pivotal to the success of the boycott because it helped to deflect Cold War suspicions about grassroots militancy. Rumors immediately arose within white Montgomery circles that Parks was an NCAAP plant. Indeed, if the myth of Parks put forth by many in the black community was that she was a simple Christian seamstress, the myth most commonly put forth by Montgomery's white community was that the NAACP (in league with the Communist Party) had orchestrated the whole thing.” (p83)