There’s a belief among some activists that marriage is a bourgeois institution that inevitably diminishes people’s progressive beliefs and their willingness to take political action. That was not Rosa Parks’ belief or her experience.
Chapter 4 of her memoir is titled “Marriage, and Activism”. In her telling, Rosa Parks’ political activism did not diminish, but grew because of her marriage.
“I first met Raymond Parks when a mutual friend, a lady I knew very well, introduced us….When he saw me, he wanted to come and call on me, but I thought he was too white. I had an aversion to white men, with the exception of my grandfather, and Raymond Parks was very light skinned. He was in his late twenties and working as a barber in a black barbershop in downtown Montgomery owned by Mr. O. L. Campbell. I was in my late teens. I knew he was interested in my, but I just spoke politely to him and didn’t give him another thought.”
But Raymond Parks persisted, and in the spring of 1931 he and Rosa McCauley started seeing each other. They were married in her mother’s house in December 1932, settled in Montgomery, and the next year Rosa got her high school diploma after returning to school with Raymond’s encouragement.
“He was the first man of our race, aside from my grandfather, with whom I actually discussed anything about the racial conditions. And he was the first, aside from my grandfather and Mr. Gus Vaughn, who was never actually afraid of white people….”
“Parks was also the first real activist I ever met.” And by activist she meant a member of the NAACP who was active in the defense of the Scottsboro Boys—the most significant civil rights case of the 1930s. Ten of the 15 pages in this chapter are about the case and Raymond’s involvement with the Scottsboro Boys Defense Committee. Theirs was a relationship and a marriage inextricably bound up with the struggle for freedom, dignity and equal rights.
“Parks was working for the Scottsboro Boys from the beginning. I don’t know if he was working officially with one of the big organizations. The people he was working with came from places other than Montgomery….Whites accused anybody who was working for black people of being a Communist, but I don’t think anyone in Parks’ group was a Communist.” (Mrs. Parks may not think any of them were Communists, or she may be choosing her words carefully here. In the early 1930s there were very few white people coming from outside of Montgomery for secret meetings in defense of the Scottsboro Boys who did not have Communist ties.)
“I didn’t go to the meetings because it was very dangerous. Whenever they met, they had someone posted as lookout, and someone always had a gun. That was something that he didn’t want me to take an active part in, because the little committee he was working with had to meet late at night and into the morning when everybody else was asleep. He didn’t want me to go because it was hard enough if he suddenly had to run. He wouldn’t be able to leave me, and I couldn’t run as fast as he could. Also, he felt that I was just too young at the time.”
Raymond preserved Rosa’s “plausible deniability” about the meetings by not telling her who attended and what went on. “That way if someone asked me, I could truthfully say I didn’t know. He wanted to protect me.”
Rosa recounts one time, after their marriage, when the meeting was at their house. “It was the first meeting we’d ever had at our house, and it was in the front room. There was a little table about the size of a card table that they were sitting around. This was the first time I’d seen so few men with so many guns.”
“I can remember sitting on the back porch with my feet on the top step and putting my head down on my knees, and I didn’t move throughout the whole meeting. I just sat there…. After the meeting was over, I remember, my husband took me by the shoulders and kind of lifted me from the porch floor. I was very, very depressed about the fact that black men could not hold a meeting without fear of bodily injury or death.”
Some months later, the Parks’ moved from Huffman St. to South Union St. where they stayed with Mr. King Kelly, a deacon at Dexter Ave. Baptist Church (who disapproved of the Parks’ activism). “One night two cops on motorcycles passed by. I was sitting on the porch on the swing, and Mr. Kelly was on the porch too. I kept talking about how a couple of days before, the police had killed two men who were connected with the group Parks was with, people Parks knew well. Every time he was at those meetings with those people, I wondered if he would come back alive, if he wouldn’t be killed.”
So as a young (20 years old) newlywed, Rosa Parks was intimately involved in the the biggest civil rights case of the decade—a case that was a matter of life and death not only for the Scottsboro Boys but also for their supporters in Alabama. By the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, she had spent her entire adult life (over 20 years) working in ways small and large for civil rights.