Rosa Parks: The mother of the Civil Rights Movement
Robin Washington
There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who
can say they’ve seen Rosa Parks in person, making anything
I have to add a drop in an ocean. Though shy and retiring, wherever
she went she drew crowds and turned heads, like the wave in a mega-stadium
or the entourage mobbing a movie star. But unlike those figures,
she also turned hearts.
I last saw her in 1998, at the funeral of U.S. Appeals Court Judge
A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. in Boston. Everyone who was anyone in America’s
civil rights struggle was there, and as the mother of that movement
walked into Peoples Baptist Church, the wave came in a multi-hued
throng that amassed around her. As she slowly stepped forward it
parted, like the sea around Moses, giving some the courage to extend
a tentative hand.
“Mrs. Parks, I just want to thank you,” I remember one
woman saying, echoed by the thank yous of countless others.
That included the powerful as well as the powerless. In one of her
numerous biographies, she related meeting Nelson Mandela during
the South African leader’s 1990 world tour following his release
from 27 years of prison. Exiting a plane amid a crowd chanting his
name, Mandela spied her and began chanting her name: “Rosa
Parks. Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks!”
Perhaps more than anyone else, Parks wondered about her celebrity
stemming from her single act of courage. “As time has gone
by, people have made my place in the civil rights movement bigger
and bigger,” she wrote in a 1992 autobiography, adding, “Interviewers
still only want to talk about that one evening in 1955 when I refused
to give up my seat on the bus.”
Whether by luck or otherwise, I knew better than to ask her that
when I met her in Detroit, her adopted home, the year she wrote
those words. Instead, I wanted to know what she remembered of other
civil rights figures and incidents from the struggle’s earliest
days about which I was producing a PBS documentary. Showing her
a series of photos, I asked if she recognized any of those in them.
As I remember — I didn’t take notes — she replied:
“That’s Glenn Smiley.”
“Yes, yes,” I responded excitedly over the picture of
the pacifist white Methodist minister who tutored the young Rev.
Martin Luther King on Gandhian nonviolence, and later shared a seat
with him for the first integrated bus ride in Montgomery.
“How is Glenn?”
“He’s fine. He says hello.” (Well, he hadn’t
actually, though I was sure he would have wanted me to). “Do
you remember these people?” I asked, pointing to a snapshot
of Freedom Ride pioneers Jim Farmer, George Houser and Bayard Rustin,
with an unidentified woman I was hoping she could name.
“That’s Jim Farmer. How is Jim?”
“He’s fine, too. Did you know George Houser?”
She nodded.
“And Bayard Rustin?”
“How is Jim?”
“He’s fine. But you knew Bayard, didn’t you?”
“How is Glenn?”
Though she was of advanced years, this was anything but Alzheimer’s
or senility speaking. She very well knew who Bayard was, and of
his brilliance as an tactician who would organize the 1963 March
on Washington as well as the danger to the movement posed by his
then too-taboo-to-mention homosexuality, followed by his split with
the orthodoxy of America’s black leadership in later years.
For whatever reason, it seemed, she just didn’t like him and
wasn’t going to offer diplomatic recognition to his image.
But it was that human element that personified Rosa Parks. An icon
to the world, she was an everyday person who had her likes and dislikes
and took the bus to where she had to go. Indeed, though she later
worked in the Detroit office of a powerful congressman, she still
took the bus. One can only wonder what went through the minds of
bus drivers black and white as she boarded.
Yet do not mistake ordinary for naïveté. She prepared
for, executed and accepted her role as mother of a movement, and
did so flawlessly.
“Mrs. Parks,” so many of us have said, both too many
times and not enough, “I just want to thank you.”
Robin Washington, a former managing editor of the Banner, is
editorial page editor of the Duluth News Tribune and executive producer
of the civil rights documentary “You Don’t Have to Ride
Jim Crow!”
|
|