Rosa Parks

• 1. Tired of Giving In

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  Rosa Parks was forty-two years old on the evening she stayed in her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, and she spent decades insisting that weariness had nothing to do with it. She rejected the picture of herself as old or physically worn out. In her own words, "the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." That line points to a very different woman from the quiet seamstress of popular memory. Parks had already worked as a civil rights organizer for years before that evening. This documentary follows her from a girlhood in rural Alabama to the end of a long life in Detroit. Along the way it asks what shaped her, who stood beside her, and what a single arrest set in motion. It also asks why historians now argue over the way she is remembered.

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• 2. Childhood Under Jim Crow

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  Her name was stitched together from the names of her two grandmothers, Rose and Louisa. Rosa Louise McCauley was born on the 4th of February 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her mother, Leona, was a teacher from Pine Level, and her father, James McCauley, was a carpenter and mason from Abbeville. Her family tree held several stories. One great-grandfather was of Scotch-Irish descent, and one great-grandmother had partial Native American ancestry. Her maternal grandfather, Sylvester Edwards, was the child of an enslaved woman and a plantation owner's son.

  While Rosa was a baby, the family moved in with her father's relatives in Abbeville. The house soon grew too crowded, and her father was seldom home because his work kept him traveling. Leona left with her daughter for Pine Level, where her own family lived. There Rosa attended the African Methodist Episcopal church, a Black denomination more than a century old that free Black people had founded in Philadelphia. She was baptized at the age of two and remained a member for the rest of her life.

  During the week her mother taught in the nearby community of Spring Hill and lived there. Rosa stayed with her grandparents on their farm, where they grew fruit, pecan and walnut trees and raised chickens and cows. At six or seven she began picking cotton on the plantation of Moses Hudson, who paid Black children 50 cents a day. Her mother also taught her to quilt and sew. She finished her first quilt at the age of 10 and her first dress at 11.

  Segregationist policies began spreading across Alabama and other southern states in the 1870s and 1880s. A constitutional convention in 1901 then wrote Jim Crow into state law. The system separated people in nearly every part of life, including banks, hospitals, churches, burial grounds and public transportation. After World War I ended, the Ku Klux Klan stepped up its activity in Pine Level and across the country. Parks later recalled that she "heard of a lot of black people being found dead" in mysterious circumstances while growing up.

  Her first classroom was a one-room schoolhouse at the local Mount Zion AME Zion church. At eleven or twelve she enrolled at the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, where she received vocational training. When that school closed in 1928, she moved to Booker T. Washington Junior High School, a segregated public school. She then attended a laboratory school run by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes. She left it to look after her ailing grandmother and mother.

  After leaving school, Parks worked on the family farm and as a domestic worker in white households. Black women in that job often faced sexual violence. Sometime in the 1950s or 1960s she wrote an account of a white man called "Mr. Charlie," who tried to assault her. In the account she answered his advances with words and denounced his racism. Biographer Jeanne Theoharis notes that the story may be partly or wholly fictionalized. She adds that many of its elements "correspond to Parks's life."

  In 1931, when Rosa was 18, a mutual friend introduced her to Raymond Parks, who was 28. She was at first "not very interested in him," citing some unhappy romantic experiences and his light skin. He eventually persuaded her to ride in his car, a rare possession for a Black man in Alabama at the time. Parks later called Raymond the "first real activist" she had met, and she admired his opposition to racial prejudice. They married on the 18th of December 1932 at her mother's house. Soon afterward they moved to a rooming house in Montgomery's Centennial Hill neighborhood.

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• 3. Organizer in Montgomery

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  Nine Black youths stood falsely accused of raping two white women on a train near Paint Rock, Alabama, and their case drew Rosa and Raymond in soon after the wedding. The Scottsboro Boys were tried in Scottsboro and sentenced to death by electrocution. The Parkses hosted fundraising meetings at their home for the legal defenders. Historian Robin Kelley adds that the couple also attended meetings of the Communist Party USA, whose members helped draw attention to the case.

  With Raymond's encouragement, Rosa finished high school in 1933, when only 7% of Black people in Alabama held a diploma. She worked as a nurse's aide at St. Margaret's Hospital and sewed to add to her income. In 1941 she took a job at Maxwell Air Force Base, a training facility for air force cadets. The base was fully integrated, so she rode transit beside white coworkers while on the grounds. At home she still had to use segregated buses, and that frustrated her. Parks said the base "opened her eyes up" by offering an "alternative reality to the ugly racial policies of Jim Crow."

  A photograph of her former classmate Johnnie Carr at a meeting brought Parks to the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943. That December, members elected her secretary, a post then considered a woman's job. She explained, "I was the only woman there, and they needed a secretary, and I was too timid to say no." She and Raymond also joined the Voter's League, which worked to increase Black voter registration.

  The barriers to registering were many. They included poll taxes, literacy tests, intrusive questions on applications and retaliation by employers. In 1940, fewer than 0.1% of Black Montgomerians were registered to vote. Encouraged by NAACP activist E. D. Nixon, Parks tried to register beginning in 1943. She succeeded on her third attempt, in 1945.

  In 1944, as secretary, she began investigating the gang rape of Recy Taylor, a Black woman from Abbeville. A grand jury declined to indict the attackers. Parks and other activists then formed "The Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor." The Chicago Defender called it "the strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade." The campaign drew national attention and pressed Governor Chauncey Sparks, who promised an investigation. A second grand jury in 1945 still produced no indictments. Historian Danielle L. McGuire argues that the effort "brought the building blocks of the Montgomery bus boycott together a decade earlier and kept them in place." Parks also organized support for Jeremiah Reeves, who was accused in 1952 of raping a white woman. Reeves was executed in 1957.

  In 1954 Parks began sewing for Clifford and Virginia Durr, a white couple who opposed segregation and became her friends. They helped sponsor her at the Highlander Folk School, an activist training center in Monteagle, Tennessee, in the summer of 1955. There the veteran organizer Septima Clark mentored her. Black and white people worked, cooked and lived together as equals, and Parks remembered it as the first time in her adult life that she could envision a "unified society." In August 1955 she attended a Montgomery meeting about the lynching of Emmett Till. Theoharis says Parks was heartened by the attention the case received, since the custom was to "keep things covered up." Within months, a city bus would put what she had learned to the test.

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• 4. The Seat on the Bus

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  Montgomery's bus rules grew out of a streetcar ordinance passed in 1900 that segregated passengers by race. Black residents answered with boycotts between 1900 and 1902, and the city amended the law so that no rider had to surrender a seat unless another was available. Many drivers ignored the amendment. Historian Cheryl Phibbs notes that drivers held police-like authority over racial boundaries, and they were generally armed. Fights between drivers and Black passengers were frequent.

  By the count of the Women's Political Council, three-fourths of Montgomery bus riders were Black. Even so, the front rows were reserved for white passengers and the back rows for Black passengers. The middle rows were sorted at the driver's discretion. City ordinances did not require anyone to give up a seat, yet drivers regularly demanded it. Black riders were sometimes made to pay at the front, step off, and re-board through the back door.

  Parks had her own run-in in 1943 with a driver named James F. Blake. He ordered her to re-board at the back after she entered at the front. She answered that she was already on the bus and saw no reason to get off while people stood in the stepwell. Blake grabbed her sleeve. She moved to the front, sat in a row for white passengers, and dropped her purse. Blake told her to "get off his bus" and seemed ready to hit her. She told him he "better not hit her" and left. Afterward she generally avoided his bus.

  She was not the first to be arrested. Viola White, a Maxwell Air Force Base employee, was arrested in 1944, and Mary Wingfield in 1949. Teenager Mary Louise Smith was arrested in October 1954. Fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin of Booker T. Washington High School was arrested in March 1955. Aurelia Browder followed on the 29th of April 1955 and Susie McDonald on the 21st of October 1955. After Colvin's arrest, many Black riders rallied around the idea of a boycott. The Women's Political Council and the NAACP weighed Colvin and Smith as test cases but judged neither suitable. The council cared most about bus integration, partly because the problem hit Black women hard.

  On the 1st of December 1955, Parks left work at 5:00 p.m., bought a few items at Lee's Cut-Rate Drug, and walked to Court Square. She boarded around 5:30, lost in thought, and did not notice that Blake was the driver. She later said she would not have boarded had she seen him. She paid her fare and sat in the middle section, beside a Black man and across from two Black women. Her chronic bursitis was aching in her shoulders.

  At the third stop, in front of the Empire Theater, white passengers boarded and one man had to stand. Blake demanded that the Black passengers in the middle row give up their seats. Those near Parks complied. She stayed put. Of that moment she said, "I felt that, if I did stand up, it meant that I approved of the way I was being treated, and I did not approve." When Blake threatened arrest, she replied, "You may do that." She thought about resisting physically but decided against it, because she "didn't have any way of fighting back."

  Blake phoned his supervisor from a nearby payphone, and the supervisor told him to call the police. Two officers arrived and arrested Parks at Blake's insistence. Biographer Douglas G. Brinkley says the refusal was not premeditated. Her former classmate Mary Fair Burks adds that Parks did not act for the NAACP, which would have acted openly and demanded group action. At city hall Parks filled out arrest forms. At the city jail she was fingerprinted and photographed. After repeated requests, she was allowed to call home. Nixon drove to the jail with Clifford and Virginia Durr and paid her bail. Nixon and Durr would soon discuss whether her case could be the one that tested the law in court.

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• 5. The Boycott

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  Nixon and Clifford Durr favored Parks as a test case because of her high standing in the Black community and her respectable manners. Durr also prized her "firm quiet spirit," which he said "would be needed for the long battle ahead." Parks consulted her family, who feared violent retaliation, and she agreed anyway. Attorney Fred Gray agreed to represent her, and Jo Ann Robinson, president of the Women's Political Council, learned of the case. The council planned a one-day bus boycott for the 5th of December 1955, the day of Parks's trial. Under the pretext of grading exams, Robinson worked with two Alabama State College students to produce 35,000 leaflets. They used a mimeograph supplied by John Cannon, the college's business chair.

  Council members spread the leaflets through Black neighborhoods, and Nixon recruited clergy, including Martin Luther King Jr., pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. At a planning meeting at the church on the 2nd of December, about half the ministers left, not wanting to be linked to politics. The rest stayed and drafted plans for carpools and cooperation with local taxi drivers. King and pastor Ralph Abernathy handed out more leaflets at bars and clubs. Many pastors announced the boycott from the pulpit on Sunday, the 4th of December. The Montgomery Advertiser and local television covered it too.

  Police tried to organize escorts for Black riders they assumed feared retaliation from other Black residents. Ridership stayed low anyway on the day of the trial, and many people walked or carpooled. Almost 500 Black Montgomerians attended the proceedings at city hall. Parks pleaded not guilty, and two witnesses confirmed that seats were open when she refused to move. The prosecution switched to state charges, the judge allowed it, and Parks was found guilty of violating state law. She was fined $10 plus $4 in court fees. The trial took between five and thirty minutes. Gray appealed at once, and Nixon urged the crowd outside to stay nonviolent and go home.

  That afternoon organizers met at Mount Zion AME Zion Church and formed the Montgomery Improvement Association, electing King as its leader. A mass meeting that evening at Holt Street Baptist Church drew 15,000 people. Abernathy read three demands: courteous treatment on the buses, first-come first-served seating with white riders in front and Black riders in back, and Black drivers on Black routes. When he asked supporters to stand, the crowd overwhelmingly did. King hailed Parks as a "heroine," and the crowd repeatedly called for her to speak. Someone told her she had "said enough," and she stayed silent. Theoharis reads this as a sign of the male-dominated culture of the movement.

  City and bus company officials rejected the demands at a meeting on the 8th of December. The association then built its own ride-sharing network, and Parks worked for a time as a dispatcher. Coworkers at Montgomery Fair, where she worked as a seamstress, shunned her, and she was fired in January 1956. A week later Raymond lost his job at Maxwell Air Force Base. Police Commissioner Clyde Sellers began a "Get Tough" policy of harassing pedestrians and boycott participants. Organizers, Parks among them, received regular death threats. In February a state grand jury declared the boycott illegal and indicted several leaders, including Parks. Many were arrested and then released on bond amid protests at the courthouse. Only King was tried.

  City officials planned to stall her case in the state circuit courts, so Gray filed suit in federal district court. Parks was first a plaintiff but was removed to avoid dismissal, since her case was already before an Alabama court. The federal case went on without her as Browder v. Gayle, with Smith, Colvin, Browder and McDonald as plaintiffs. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the statute requiring segregated Montgomery buses unconstitutional, and a district court upheld that ruling. After the Supreme Court rejected appeals by the city and the state, it ordered the buses integrated on the 20th of December 1956. King called off the boycott that same day, 381 days after it began.

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• 6. Detroit and Beyond

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  In February 1956, with Parks out of work and the landlord adding $10 to the monthly rent, King sent a memorandum asking for $250-$300 from the association's relief fund. The money was authorized, but her struggles continued. She developed chronic insomnia, stomach ulcers and a heart condition. In March she traveled to Detroit to visit her brother and address United Auto Workers Local 600. That choice departed from the NAACP, which opposed trade union affiliations.

  In 1957 Virginia Durr offered her a job at the Highlander Folk School, hoping she would organize a Black voter registration campaign in Montgomery. Parks declined, citing Tennessee's distance and fear of reprisals if she spoke in Alabama, Mississippi or Louisiana. She also disagreed with King and the new Southern Christian Leadership Conference over their coming airport desegregation campaign. A rift between King and Nixon divided the association, and Parks took Nixon's side. Tension then grew between her and Nixon as well. In August 1957, citing economic insecurity, threats to her safety and the divisions, she left for Detroit. Her brother, Sylvester, and her cousins Thomas Williamson and Annie Cruse lived there. The association, embarrassed by her departure, raised $500 as a going-away present.

  In Detroit, Rosa, Raymond and her mother first lived with a cousin and then rented an apartment on Euclid Avenue. From October 1957 Parks spent a short time in Hampton, Virginia, working as a hostess at the Holly Tree Inn. She returned to Detroit that December. The family lost its apartment in 1959 and moved into the meeting hall of the Progressive Civic League, a Black professional organization. Rosa managed the treasury of the league's credit union, and Raymond served as caretaker. Surgeries in early 1960 left them with heavy medical debt, and the Black press began writing about her finances. In 1961 she found work at Stockton Sewing Company, and the family moved to a flat on Virginia Park Street.

  Throughout the 1960s Parks stayed involved. She was an honorary member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and attended its 1962 convention in Birmingham, Alabama. In August 1963 she joined the March on Washington, where more than 250,000 people gathered. Organizers honored her in a "Tribute to Women," yet no women were in the delegation sent to meet the Kennedy administration. Parks called the march "a great occasion, but women were not allowed to play much of a role."

  In 1964 she played a critical part in John Conyers's first congressional campaign. She persuaded King, usually reluctant to endorse local candidates, to appear with the novice. After Conyers won, he hired her as secretary and receptionist in his Detroit office. She visited schools, hospitals, senior facilities and community gatherings, steering him toward issues such as welfare, education, job discrimination and affordable housing. Conyers recalled that people treated her with deference because she was "so quiet, so serene."

  Parks attended the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, joined the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, and supported the Freedom Now Party. She admired Malcolm X and the armed self-defense advocate Robert F. Williams, and she befriended Williams after he returned from a visit to China. In a 1967 interview she said she did not believe in gradualism. After the 1967 Detroit riot she spoke in support of the rioters, comparing the burning and looting to her own actions during the boycott. Following the assassination of King, she attended protests tied to the Memphis sanitation strike. In 1968 she took part in the Philadelphia Black power conference.

  The 1970s brought more causes and more losses. In 1972 she attended the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana. She helped found the Detroit chapter of the Joanne Little Defense Committee. Little was charged with killing her jailer, Clarence Alligood, while he was sexually assaulting her, and she was acquitted in July 1975. Parks also organized for Gary Tyler, who was wrongfully convicted of shooting a 13-year-old white boy and was freed in 2016 after 41 years in prison. She introduced Angela Davis to a crowd of 12,000 after Davis's acquittal. Then Raymond died of throat cancer in 1977, and her brother Sylvester died soon after. She learned of the death of her close friend Fannie Lou Hamer from a newspaper. Her mother died in 1979, and Parks gradually withdrew from the movement.

  During the 1979-80 school year, Parks visited the Black Panther school in Oakland, California, and watched students perform a play about her refusal in 1955. Director Ericka Huggins said, "I consider Rosa Parks a radical woman, a revolutionary woman, showing up in real time at an elementary school run by the Black Panther Party." In the 1980s Parks joined the Free South Africa Movement and protested apartheid in Washington, D.C. and Berkeley, California. She supported Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. With radio host Joe Madison she planned a boycott over a proposed Dearborn, Michigan ordinance that would ban non-residents from city parks. A judge overturned the ordinance as racially discriminatory. In 1987 she and Elaine Eason Steele co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, which trains young leaders and runs "Pathways to Freedom" bus tours of civil rights and Underground Railroad sites.

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• 7. Final Years and Farewell

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  At a Washington, D.C. gala for her birthday in 1990, Parks used her speech to call for the release of Nelson Mandela. In 1994 she attended a reparations meeting in Detroit alongside Jesse Jackson and Queen Mother Moore. The next year, at the invitation of Louis Farrakhan, she joined the Million Man March with Moore, Betty Shabazz, Dorothy Height and Maya Angelou. She also wrote autobiographical books during the decade. They were Rosa Parks: My Story in 1992, Quiet Strength in 1994, and Dear Mrs. Parks in 1997.

  On the 30th of August 1994, a man named Joseph Skipper broke down her back door when she was 81. He claimed he had scared off an intruder and demanded a $3 reward. When she paid, he demanded more and punched her in the face. She gave him all the money she had, $103, and then called Steele, who called the police. Skipper was arrested the next day. Many commentators took the attack as proof of moral decline among Black youth. Parks cautioned against reading too much into it and spoke of "the conditions that made him this way." She moved from downtown Detroit to a gated community, and Little Caesars owner Mike Ilitch offered to cover her housing costs indefinitely.

  After the September 11 attacks in 2001, Parks signed an open letter with Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte and Gloria Steinem. It warned against a military response and urged international collaboration. In 2002 she received an eviction notice for non-payment on her $1,800-a-month apartment. By then age-related decline had left her unable to manage her own finances. A collection at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church in Detroit paid the rent. When the debt became public in 2004, her landlord forgave it and let the 91-year-old live rent-free. Steele said the notices had been sent in error, and several relatives alleged that her money had been mismanaged.

  Parks died of natural causes at home on the 24th of October 2005, at the age of 92. Detroit and Montgomery reserved the front seats of city buses with black ribbons and fabric until her funeral. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick placed a ribbon on the 27th of October. Her remains were flown to Montgomery for a public viewing and funeral service. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the mourners, "without Mrs. Parks, I probably would not be standing here today as Secretary of State." The plane carrying her to Washington circled twice over Montgomery while the pilot sang "We Shall Overcome."

  Representative Conyers introduced Concurrent Resolution 61, which passed on the 29th of October 2005. It allowed her to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda on the 30th and the 31st of October. The National Guard carried her there, and 40,000 mourners came. President George W. Bush and the First Lady laid a wreath on her coffin. She was the 31st person and only the second private citizen to lie in state. A memorial followed at the Metropolitan AME Church before her return to Detroit.

  In Detroit her casket was displayed at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. A memorial service took place on the 2nd of November at Greater Grace Temple, with Bill and Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama among the guests. Aretha Franklin sang, and an honor guard escorted the casket by horse-drawn carriage. A white hearse then took her to Woodlawn Cemetery, where she was interred in a mausoleum beside Raymond and her mother. The chapel there was renamed the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel.

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• 8. Legacy and Debate

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  The Southern Christian Leadership Conference created the Rosa Parks Freedom Award in 1963, but she did not receive it until 1972. In 1979 the NAACP gave her the Spingarn Medal, citing her "quiet courage and determination." She entered the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton in 1996. In 1999 she received the Congressional Gold Medal with unanimous Senate approval, despite opposition in the House from Representative Ron Paul. That same year Time named her one of the 20 most influential figures of the 20th century.

  Places took her name too. Detroit's 12th Street became Rosa Parks Boulevard in 1976, and Michigan designated the 4th of February as Rosa Parks Day in 1997. In 2000, Troy University opened the Rosa Parks Library and Museum, at a cost of $10 million, on the site of her arrest. The bus from the 1st of December 1955 was restored with funding from the Save America's Treasures program and displayed at The Henry Ford museum in 2003. After her death, President Bush signed H.R. 4145, authorizing a statue in the National Statuary Hall. She became the first Black American to be memorialized there. A competition drew entries from 150 artists, and the statue by Eugene Daub and Rob Firmin showed her on the day of her arrest. It was unveiled in 2013 with President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner in attendance. The asteroid 284996 Rosaparks, discovered in 2010, also carries her name.

  Her Detroit house faced demolition in 2016. The Berlin-based American artist Ryan Mendoza had it taken apart and moved to his garden in Germany, where he partly restored it as a museum. In 2018 the house returned to the United States. Brown University first planned to exhibit it, but cancelled the display. It was eventually shown at the WaterFire Arts Center in Providence, Rhode Island.

  Jeanne Theoharis, in her 2015 biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, argues that the image of a "quiet" and "accidental" Parks hides her lifelong radical activism. She calls the "quiet" portrayal a "gendered caricature." Academic Dennis Carlson says popular memory turns Parks into a "monumentalist hero," a figure used to support conservative versions of American history. Sociologist Barry Schwartz points out that Browder, Colvin, Smith and McDonald played equally important and even more active roles. Colvin felt glad that an adult had "stood up to the system." She also felt abandoned, because the community had not backed her months earlier. Browder's son said Parks's fame overshadowed his mother's part in the struggle.

  The debate has spilled into popular culture. The 2002 film Barbershop stirred controversy with a scene in which a character downplayed Parks's role, and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton criticized it. Parks herself boycotted the 2003 NAACP Image Awards, which the actor who played that character hosted. She sued the hip-hop duo Outkast over their song "Rosa Parks," and the case was settled in 2005. Angela Bassett played her in the 2002 biopic The Rosa Parks Story, and Vinette Robinson portrayed her in a 2018 Doctor Who episode titled "Rosa." In 2022 the documentary The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks became the first full-length documentary about her. Then in 2023, Alabama approved a statue of Parks for the grounds of its State Capitol, in the state whose courts once found her guilty.

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