Revolutionary leaders tend to come from the middle-class. Rosa Parks is one of those revolutionary leaders.
Her father, James McCauley, and uncle, Robert, carried on their father’s trade, and were skilled carpenters and stonemasons at a time when most African-Americans had been forced out of those trades. Her mother, Leona Edwards McCauley, was a teacher, with a certificate from Payne University in Selma, at a time when, as Mrs. Parks writes, “most southern women, black or white, didn’t go beyond grammar school”.
Her parents were married by her father’s brother-in-law, Rev. Dominick, pastor of the Mt. Zion AME Church in Pine Level. Her great-grandparents, James and Mary Jane Percival, bought and owned their own land in Pine Level after Emancipation, and James was a skilled furniture maker. Their daughter Rose married Sylvester Edwards, and it was in their house that Rosa Parks grew up.
Mrs. Parks came from a family of ministers, skilled tradesmen, teachers and landowners. Her family was the only black family at the Hudson plantation that owned their own land.
We all learn to have certain expectations of life. From her family, Rosa Parks learned she was expected to get an education, to be a leader in her community, and to resist white oppression when she could.
“If anybody asks you who you are,
who you are,
who you are.
If anybody asks you who are are,
tell ’em,
that you’re a child of God.”
That’s a subversive old spiritual. On the one hand, what could be more innocent in the Christian South than to identify oneself as a “child of God”. On the other hand, in the Christian South, is there any claim an African-American could make that was more subversive of the status quo?