Author: MassCommons

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.

There’s a lot of anger these days from progressives on this site and elsewhere directed at President Obama for giving in to Republicans.  I don’t want to get into the specifics of whether people are “right” or “wrong” to be angry at Obama.  I do want to suggest that Rosa Parks’ story can give us some perspective about how serious and deadly our opponents can be, and about the range of survival skills needed to survive and to overcome such opposition.

“Not Just Another Little Girl” is the title of Chapter 2 of Mrs. Parks’ book.  (This is a woman with a strong sense of self.) It’s mostly a series of vignettes from the next few years of her life in Pine Level.

1 – After a 10 year old Rosa defended herself with a brick when a white boy threatened to hit her, her grandmother “scolded me very severely about how I had to learn that white folks were white folks and that you just didn’t talk to white folks or act that way around white people….My grandmother remarked that I was too high-strung and that if I wasn’t careful, I would probably be lynched before I was twenty years old.”

2 – Rosa’s mother taught her to read, and told her stories about slavery times:  “I remember she told me that the slaves had to fool the white people into thinking that they were happy.  The white people would …treat the slaves better if they thought the slaves like white people.”

“When white people died, their slaves would have to pretend to be sorry.  The slaves would spit on their fingers and use it to wet their cheeks like it was tears.  They’d do this right in front of the little slave children, and the the children would do the same thing in the presence of the grieving white people.”

3 – When white children rode by in their bus to school, black children would get off the road to avoid the trash thrown at them.  “We didn’t have any of what they call “civil rights” back then, so there was no way to protest and nobody to protest to.  It was just a matter of survival…so we could exist from day to day.”

4 – “At one point the (Klan) violence got so bad that my grandfather kept his gun…close by at all times….My grandfather wasn’t going outside looking for any trouble, but he was going to defend his home.  …I remember that at night he would sit by the fire in his rocking chair and I would sit on the floor right by his chair, and he would have his gun right by just in case.”

5 – “I heard a lot about black people being found dead and nobody knew what happened.  Other people would just pick them up and bury them.  Sometimes I’m asked how I lived with that kind of fear, but that was the only way I knew and Pine Level was the only place I knew.”

6 – Mr. Freeman was the overseer on the Hudson plantation where Rosa worked as a fieldhand picking cotton, as did all her black neighbors—except one:   “Mr. Gus Vaughn…didn’t work for anybody.  He didn’t do anything but walk around with his stick and talk big talk.  Mr. Freeman couldn’t stand Mr. Gus Vaughn.  He’d say, ‘Gus, I don’t like you.’  Mr. Vaughn would answer, ‘There is no love lost,’ and just keep walking.”

“So I saw that there was at least one black man who wouldn’t work for Mr. Freeman.  And later on, when I heard white people say that it was the light-skinned black people who had the courage to stand up to whites, I’d always think back and remember Mr. Gus Vaughn who had no white blood.”

When progressives get upset at President Obama for not “taking on” the Republicans, it is, in my view, worth taking a moment to consider the potential costs associated with “taking on” powerful enemies, and to consider the lessons Rosa Parks learned and embodied in taking down the segregated bus system in Montgomery.

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?

Near the end of his life, David Halberstam returned to the first great story of his journalistic career and wrote about the young leaders of the Nashville civil rights movement in “The Children”.  It’s an overly long, overly sentimentalized book (Halberstam was a 25 year old reporter for “The Tennessean” when he covered the campaign that led to the desegregation of public facilities in Nashville; the students—from Nashville’s HBCUs—were younger still), but it’s worth reading if only for the first third of the book, when Halberstam reports on the early years in the lives of eight student leaders.

Without exception, those student leaders—Diane Nash, John Lewis, Marion Barry, James Bevel, Curtis Murphy, Gloria Johnson, Bernard Lafayette, and Rodney Powell—had childhood memories of someone—a mother, a father, a grandmother, an uncle—who took the considerable risk of standing up to white people acting in racist ways.

So did Rosa Parks. Most of Chapter 1 is about her family—her father a carpenter who left when she was 2, her mother a teacher educated at Payne University in Selma, her uncle Robert a carpenter who studied at Tuskegee, her younger brother Sylvester about whom she “never did get out of that attitude of trying to be protective of him”.  But she writes most about her maternal grandparents, in whose house she grew up.

Her grandmother’s father was a Scotch-Irish indentured servant who married an enslaved midwife, Mary Jane Nobles, “a person of African descent with no white ancestors”.   Her grandmother was five years old when the Civil War ended, and shortly thereafter went to work in the Wright’s house taking care of their child.  “I don’t know how or when they did it, but sometime after Emancipation my great-grandparents purchased twelve acres of land that had been part of the Hudson plantation.”  When she wrote this memoir, Mrs. Parks still owned the table her great-grandfather built after Emancipation “so his family would have something to eat on”.

Where her grandmother was calm, her grandfather, Sylvester, was “very emotional and excitable”.  He was very light-skinned, and could pass for white.  His father was a white plantation owner, and his mother a slave housekeeper and seamstress, likely of mixed race herself.  

After they died, an overseer took over the plantation and abused Sylvester and “treated him so badly that he had a very intense, passionate hatred for white people.  My grandfather was the one who instilled in my mother and her sisters, and in their children, that you don’t put up with bad treatment from anybody.  It was passed down almost in our genes.”

For most of us, the first and most enduring lessons of “how you’re supposed to act” come from our elders—parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.  We learn from what they say, and especially from what they do.  Eventually we reach a stage in life when we’re the adults.  Very often, the strength we get to act “like you’re supposed to act” comes from the examples set by our elders.

“Dangerous memories” is a phrase often used by German Catholic theologian Johann Metz.  Metz argues that certain memories are subversive of the status quo, and therefore dangerous to the powers that be.  For example, the Israelites, enslaved in Egypt, remembered their ancestors and that there had been a time when they were free.  In their telling of history, they were enslaved when there arose a Pharaoh “who knew not Joseph”.  The Egyptian rulers had forgotten who the Israelites were.  However, through generations of slavery, the Israelites remembered who they were, that they had been a free people.  That collective memory (even though dormant for generations) is a dangerous one—for Pharaoh.

Rosa Parks’ story is full of “dangerous memories”.  Here’s the first one she tells, beginning on p. 2 of “Rosa Parks: My Story”:

“One of my earliest memories of childhood is hearing my family talk about the remarkable time that a white man treated me like a regular little girl, not a little black girl.  It was right after World War I, around 1919.  I was five or six years old.  Moses Hudson, the owner of the plantation next to our land in Pine Level, Alabama, came out from the city of Montgomery to visit and stopped by the house.  Moses Hudson had his son-in-law with him, a soldier from the North  They stopped in to visit my family.  We southerners called all northerners Yankees in those days.  The Yankee soldier patted me on the head and said I was such a cute little girl.  Later that evening my family talked about how the Yankee soldier had treated me like I was just another little girl, not a little black girl.  In those days in the South white people didn’t treat little black children the same as little white children.  And old Mose Hudson was very uncomfortable about the way the Yankee soldier treated me.  Grandfather said he saw old Mose Hudson’s face turn red as a coal of fire.  Grandfather laughed and laughed.”

Just in case it’s not clear to the reader what this story has to do with Mrs. Parks’ arrest in December 1955, she explains:  “There had been a few times in my life when I had been treated by white people like a regular person, so I knew what that felt like.  It was time that other white people started treating me that way.”  

Now, when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat, was this the first story in her mind?  Probably not.  But late in life, when she sat down to tell her story, this is where she started.  As she “looked back over her life, and thought things over”, there was a direct connection between the memory of how “the Yankee soldier” treated her (and how enraged Mose Hudson was, and how gleeful her grandfather was!) and her ability to take the actions that initiated the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

                                              Chapter 1

                                          How It All Started

   “One evening in early December 1955 I was sitting in the front seat of the colored section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.  The white people were sitting in the white section.  More white people got on, and they filled up all the seats in the white section.  When that happened, we black people were supposed to give up our seats to the whites.  But I didn’t move.  The white driver said, “Let me have those front seats.”  I didn’t get up.  I was tired of giving in to white people.
   “I’m going to have you arrested,” the driver said.
   “You may do that,” I answered.
   Two white policemen came.  I asked one of them, “Why do you all push around?”
   He answered, “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.””

This is how Mrs. Parks starts her story—with the arrest that sparks the Montgomery bus boycott.  Later in the book she’ll bring us back to this moment, providing additional detail and context, but for now, let’s stay with this moment and what she tells us of it.

Rosa Parks was 80 years old when she published these words.  She had been telling the story of her arrest for nearly 37 years.  She had told the story hundreds, if not thousands of times in public, to all sorts of audiences.  Here at the beginning, and throughout “Rosa Parks: My Story”, in the way of some elders, she is direct, even blunt, while at the same time keeping a sense of perspective in which she is simultaneously actor in and observer of her own story.

Mrs. Parks describes her motive in one sentence:  “I was tired of giving in to white people.”  This was a conscious political act on her part—an act of defiance against a legal and social system that defined her and her people as second-class citizens.

Notice too the air of calm amid the tension.  When the bus driver says he’s going to have her arrested, Rosa Parks says simply, “You may do that.”

The calm extends to at least one of the police officers.  When she asks, “Why do you all push us around?”, he replies, “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.”  He’s just doing his job.

Why so calm?  There are at least two main reasons which will be woven throughout the book:  

1.  Jim Crow was a deadly political structure, to be challenged only with great care and preparation; and,
2.  Rosa Parks had been preparing for this moment for most of the previous 42 years of her life.

Explaining those two reasons will be the subject of most of the book.

55 years ago today, Negroes (to use the language of the day) in Montgomery AL were finishing the first week of what became a year-long bus boycott that initiated the nonviolent direct action phase of the civil rights movement.

The boycott was begun in response to the Dec. 1 arrest of Rosa Parks.  I’ve been re-reading Mrs. Parks’ memoir, “Rosa Parks: My Story” (coauthored by Jim Haskins).  It is a remarkable book—packed with meaning, and with lessons about leadership and organizing for systemic change in a (very imperfectly) democratic society.  

The back cover of the 1992 Puffin Books paperback edition has in bold print at the top a quote from Mrs. Parks:  “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

In part because of this book, a growing number of people know that Mrs. Parks was more than “just” a seamstress, tired at the end of a hard day’s work.  She was fully aware of the consequences of breaking the bus segregation laws of Montgomery.  She did so consciously, not because she was physically tired, but because she was mentally, emotionally, politically tired of giving in to Jim Crow.

In future diaries, I’ll write more reflections drawn from “Rosa Parks: My Story”.  Today I just want to note that the first lesson from Rosa Parks’ story is that change does not happen randomly or accidentally.  It happens when leaders take purposeful, targeted action that results in others joining their actions.  Rosa Parks was such a leader.