The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

“One of the lessons Leona McCauley imparted that lodged in young Rosa’s head was how ‘slaves had to fool the white people into thinking that they were happy. The white people would get angry if the slaves acted unhappy. They would also treat the slaves better if they thought the slaves liked white people.’ As she became aware of the terms of white supremacy, the fact that acting happy produced better treatment stuck in her throat. She longed for ways to contest this treatment.”

Parks remembered this lesson throughout her life. She resented the idea that she must present a face of contentment and satisfaction in front of white people to stay safe. Parks believed that sometimes a little forcefulness was needed. She also recognized how the focus of the press on the South allowed the racism of the North to be ignored. In Detroit, Parks was angry with city officials’ widespread belief that Black Detroiters should be happy their lives were so much better in comparison to life in other places. The reality of the living and working conditions in Detroit was dire, and Parks was not interested in pretending otherwise.

“Rosa’s grandmother was trying to teach her a lesson about the cost and terms of survival. And Rosa would constantly have to balance these two forces: militancy could get a person killed and yet resistance, however dangerous, pushed back on the oppression and at times made it diminish.”

This lesson learned after pushing back at discrimination stayed with Parks for the rest of her years. It was this understanding that drew her to the words of Malcolm X. The two each had a spirit that was unwilling to submit fully to nonviolence in the face of absolute resistance. Parks knew from this experience as a child that sometimes a little force was needed.

“While my neck was spared of the lynch rope and my body was never riddled by bullets or dragged by an auto, I felt that I was lynched many times in mind and spirit. I grew up in a world of white power used most cruelly and cunningly to suppress poor helpless black people.”

“The Cost of Activism,” a major theme in Theoharis’s work, explores how Parks’s decision came at a high price. She was able to face that reality because she paid the price her entire life. From childhood, she lived in a segregated and unjust society. Being Black in America meant inheriting injustice.

“I had always been taught that this was America, the land of the free and the home of the brave [...] I felt that it should be actual, in action rather than just something we hear and talk about.”

The theme of “The Narrative of Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement” explores how both Parks and the civil rights movement became enshrouded in fable. The propaganda of the American civil rights movement presented a tidy triumph and ignores the complexities of the historical period and its profound personal effects for countless individuals.

“This decade of activism is often glossed over in standard accounts of the civil rights movement because it stands at odds with a more triumphalist narrative of civil rights. This was a difficult, dangerous, and ultimately demoralizing period for civil rights activists, as a growing black militancy stemming in part from the experiences of World War II met unyielding and increasingly aggressive white resistance and violence.”

Parks worked for the NAACP for 10 years prior to December 1, 1955. During this time, she became disillusioned and increasingly frustrated with the complacency of her local organization and all of Montgomery. Parks spent her time documenting the abuses and violence against Black citizens in the city. Theoharis examines the way common narratives of the movement ignore the reality of this work leading up to the bus boycott, as they run counter to the tidy and victorious fable of the civil rights movement.

“For a person like Rosa Parks, whose stand on the bus would come to be seen as ushering in a glorious new chapter of civil rights history, it first meant imagining that there could be a story, finding others who agreed, and then painstakingly writing it, word by word, for more than a decade to get to the good part.”

Parks rejected the idea that she should be the sole symbol of the movement, as well as the notion that the work began and ended with the bus boycott. She knew the reality of hardship suffered by Black citizens of Montgomery and the efforts she and countless others made leading up to 1955. Although she just decided that day to remain sitting, her decision was predicated by years of social justice work and a profound exhaustion with the continuation of the status quo.

“’There was this very popular phrase saying in order to stay out of trouble you have to stay in your place,’ Parks recalled. But then, she added, ‘when you stayed in your place, you were still insulted and mistreated if they saw fit to do so.”

Throughout the work, Theoharis wrestles with whether Parks believed her bus arrest and subsequent work as an activist were worth the price she paid for them. Regardless, she was never one who could sit on the sidelines. She needed to be in the midst of the action. She continued her political work until she died.

“Whites would accuse you of causing trouble when all you were doing was acting like a normal human being instead of cringing,’ Rosa Parks explained. Such was the assumption of black deference that pervaded mid-twentieth-century Montgomery. The bus with its visible arbitrariness and expected servility stood as one of the most visceral experiences of segregation. ‘You died a little each time you found yourself face to face with this kind of discrimination,’ she noted.”

Theoharis’s biography challenges the one-dimensional symbolic character of Parks and embraces the complexity of the woman. The fictional version ignores the hardships she faced and the countless experiences with discrimination that contextualized her activism.

“In Montgomery long before our protest began, on some occasions I had been on committees to appear before the city officials and bus company officials with requests that they improve our conditions that existed that were so humiliating and degrading to our spirit as well as sometimes physical discomfort in riding the bus. We would have some vague promises and be given the run-around and nothing was ever done about it.”

This quote shows Parks’s feelings about the tendency of the press to focus singularly on December 1. Just as the symbol of her represented a glossy version of her experience, the fictional narrative of the civil rights movement is that it began and ended with the bus boycott. Parks wanted people to acknowledge the years of labor and perseverance of Black Americans within a cycle of systemic abuse. Each gradual change was hard-won, and Parks knew that the battle was not over yet. This quotation exemplifies the theme of “The Narrative of Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement” in its contextualization of the fable of the civil rights movement, as well as “The Cost of Activism,” showing how those experiences affected activists.

“Parks had not planned the protest but ‘had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed.’ She ‘couldn’t take it anymore...It is such a long and lonely feeling. The line between reason and madness grows thinner [due to the] horrible restrictiveness of Jim Crow laws.’ And so she decided to withdraw her participation in a system of degradation. Parks felt she was being asked to consent to her own humiliation: ‘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.’”

Theoharis contradicts the narrative of the tired seamstress whose feet hurt too much to stand. She suggests that Parks’s exhaustion had more to do with the injustices and discrimination and that her refusal to move was the act of someone who spent a decade fighting and was fed up. The dignity that her mother instilled in her demanded Parks’s action. In fact, she watched as her own mother challenged a bus driver before her. The theme of “The Legacy and Meaning of Rebellion” is played out through her inheritance of activism.

“What Parks found that Thursday evening, what King articulated the following Monday, what black people in Montgomery realized was that the accumulation of tiredness at injustice brought courage and that courage brought a resolve that could withstand whatever lay ahead.”

Theoharis flips the concept of Parks’s tiredness, a characteristic that became skewed by the fable of the civil rights movement. In Theoharis’s assertion, tiredness is a catalyst for change. It is a response to ongoing abuse in a racist system rather than mere physical fatigue.

“Nixon knew Rosa Parks ‘wasn’t afraid’ and that once she committed to things, she did not waver: ‘If Mrs. Parks says yes, hell could freeze but she wouldn’t change.’”

Parks’s action was not the first of its kind. Many others, including Colvin, had already taken similar stands. Nixon believed Parks was the right person to take up the cause. She was proper, neat, and respectable. She was also stoic and steadfast.

“The paradox was this: Parks’s refusal to get up from her seat and the community outrage around her arrest were rooted in her long history of political involvement and their trust in her. However, this same political history got pushed to the background to further the public image of the boycott.”

An examination of Parks’s life reveals a woman who lived within two worlds. At all times, she had one foot in the symbolic narrative of her action and character and one foot in reality. The theme of “The Cost of Activism” explores the irony that her political activism made her the perfect candidate to symbolize the movement, while it halted her ability to be seen for her lifetime of contributions.

“The boycott fable is the founding story—the golden goose—of the civil rights movement, with its untarnished happy ending and its ability to reflect the best possibilities of the United States. A classic American tale, it is the story of an ordinary citizen who with a simple act inspired the nation to make good on its ideals. To see the Parks family suffering for a decade after the boycott’s successful end—to confront the cost and complexity of that success and the economic retaliation that many civil rights activists endured—mars the legend.”

The fable of the civil rights movement bypasses and ignores the difficulties and challenges of the period. Parks’s suffering highlights the theme of “The Cost of Activism.” Painting a picture of the movement as a tale of simple triumph, easily won over a decision to stay seated on a bus, is an insult to the woman whose life was altered by the experience.

“To Myles Horton of Highlander, she explained, ‘It is fine to be a heroine but the price is high.’”

Even Parks’s closes friends and fellow advocates grew to see her as a symbol. Nixon chose her with intention, and the moment he decided she would be a symbol, he undermined all her previous work and her many other valuable contributions. Because all her friends began to see her as the country saw her, they were able to ignore her persistent needs. Virginia Durr wrote this statement to Parks’s longtime friend and ally Myles Horton, insisting that even those within the movement abandon the fable.

“What makes this difficult to fully appreciate is that certain core precepts of the boycott have subsequently been adopted as common sense: that segregation was a systematic apparatus of social and economic power and that resistance to it was possible. Most Americans now look back in the glow of that new truth, assuming they too would have remained seated, written letters to the local paper, risked their jobs to print thirty-five thousand leaflets, or spoken out in favor of boycotting the buses.”

The fable of the civil rights movement is so powerful that it transforms history into a children’s story of moral triumph. The victories of the movement were hard-won through the determined efforts of countless activists in the face of discrimination and oppression. Theoharis suggests that the fictional narrative breeds complacency. Viewing the civil rights movement as a thing of the past—a fight that was already won—allows powers that currently uphold unjust systems to continue to do so without notice.

“Parks is so associated with Montgomery, so intertwined in the public memory with the racism and segregation of the Deep South, that the fact she spent more than half her life in an also-segregated Detroit hardly enters into our understanding of her life and legacy. Her description of the city as ‘the promised land that wasn’t’ is a palpable reminder that Northern migration didn’t necessarily produce salvation and that racial inequality was a national plague, not a Southern malady. The civil rights movement was not simply a struggle between the liberal North and a redneck South, as the fable of Rosa Parks too often suggests.”

Parks’s experiences in Detroit were not much improved from her time in Montgomery. She disparaged the way that focusing on the South allowed discrimination in the North to thrive. Reporters were uninterested in talking about her current activism or her life in Detroit, focusing always on her advocacy in the South. The theme of “The Narrative of Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement” explores this idea that the embrace of a false narrative denies hardship and struggle.

“In many ways, the fable of Rosa Parks with its much simpler tale of good guys (moral, upstanding Southern blacks and their Northern white allies) and bad guys (racist Southern whites and alienated Northern blacks) has obscured this history of Northern struggle. The treatment of the race problem as a Southern—not national—issue was a strategic formulation of that era, meant to appease Northern sensibilities and Cold War imperatives. To acknowledge Parks’s comparison of Northern and Southern racial inequality would have disrupted this politically convenient binary.”

This quotation lends itself to the theme of “The Narrative of Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement” as it reveals one of the many problems with viewing Parks as only a symbol. Seeing the woman this way fixates on December 1, 1955. It ignores her experiences before and after this day. Similarly, the fable of the civil rights movement fixates on the South. Discrimination in the North was ignored as all eyes watched what was happening in the South. In both these instances, a rejection of reality allowed discrimination to continue unchecked. Parks was not so willing to merely accept that what she was given or to lull herself to sleep in the cradle of complacency.

“‘If segregationists had realized...when the law had passed that there would be no more segregation, legally, because of race,’ she firmly explained, ‘if they had accepted it a bit more graciously instead of following this hard-core resistance and organizing White Citizens’ Council [and] all of these things they did to resist [...] there wouldn’t have been developed this new element that realized that with the nonviolent movement, what they had hoped had not been accomplished.”

One of the many divergences of Parks from her symbolic counter self is her admiration of Malcolm X and her watchful interest in the Black Power movement. She believed in nonviolence, but she also believed that sometimes more strength and force was needed. Just as was true with her life, her views were more complex and nuanced than the symbolic narrative’s profession of one-dimensional advocacy.

“There is a tendency to see racial militants as hard or angry or filled with hate—and miss the love of humanity that undergirded many people’s activism. Parks could love humanity and, through that love, be outraged by injustice and impatient with the lack of fundamental social change. That impatience was rooted in a tenderness toward people’s suffering that made it impossible for her and many others in the Black Power movement to rest easy in the face of continuing injustice.”

The fable of the civil rights movement conveniently villainizes militant activism, emphasizing passive resistance. In this way, it becomes a tool for systemic powers to wield and suppress movements that embrace the complexity of activism. Theoharis challenges this villainizing tactic, emphasizing how these movements are born out of love and a desire to challenge injustice.

“The fable of Parks is so powerful that even those who seek to challenge it often inadvertently hew to its contours. The focus on Parks’s respectability has unconsciously made it easy not to investigate her activities in these later decades. People have assumed that there was not a story to tell in these later years, and indeed Mrs. Parks was not one to disrupt that assumption.”

Parks did not actively seek to push back from her role as a symbol. Although many of her interviews betrayed her personal feelings, she understood what the symbol of Rosa Parks could do for the movement. It enabled her to speak all around the world about discrimination and the power of protest. For Parks, “The Cost of Activism” was the sacrifice of self for the greater good.

“As time has gone by, 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 [...] Interviewers still only want to talk about that one evening in 1955 when I refused to give up my seat on the bus. Organizations still want to give me awards for that one act more than thirty years ago [...] I understand that I am a symbol.”

Rosa Parks was aware of the narrative that was developed for her. At all times, she was conscious that, to the press, to the country, and to her friends, she was now someone else entirely. The theme of “The Narrative of Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement” expands how that role contributed to the costs Parks had to pay for her activism.

“Now that Rosa Parks’s body was too feeble to march and her voice had faded to a whisper, politicians lauded her as a patriotic icon. She had grown [...] harmless and safe to exalt.”

Parks was honored late in life, and those honors were delivered within the context of the symbol she had become. Theoharis suggests that these honors helped to continue a narrative that America was a postracial society.