“All organizing is reorganizing.” Once a campaign is over, it can’t be repeated. People change; relationships change; conditions change.
Rosa and Raymond Parks moved to Detroit shortly after the bus boycott ended. “My picture had been in the papers, and it was doubtful that I could ever get a regular job in a white business in Montgomery.”
Raymond worked at a barber college; Rosa ended up working for a seamstress friend, and then at a clothing factory, before getting a job in the office of Rep. John Conyers.
Mrs. Parks continued traveling and speaking about the Montgomery bus boycott and the civil rights movement. She was invited to the 1963 March on Washington. She notes that “women were not allowed to play much of a role….Nowadays, women wouldn’t stand for being kept so much in the background, but back then women’s rights hadn’t become a popular cause yet.”
She was invited to, and attended the last leg of the March from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965—but was put out of the march because the (young) march organizers didn’t recognize her.
Eventually, “people have made my place in the history of the civil-rights movement bigger and bigger. They call me the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement….”
