“Dr King was wont to say that black people should accept violence with love, and I believe that is a goal to strive for, but I have never been able to reach that point.” Rosa Parks was a seemingly timid and shy seamstress who never forced her way to the front, but at heart she was a proud woman who never bowed to racist laws. She had a spirit that even the most violent society could not break. When, on 1 December 1955, she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man and launched the famous Montgomery bus boycott, her fight for freedom and against the humiliations suffered by black people in the southern States of America neither began nor ended, even though her life changed drastically.
Even though she grew up in a time when her native Alabama was blindingly racist and militantly segregated, she had no chance of becoming a woman afraid of her own shadow. The Bible taught her that revenge is sometimes necessary, the spirit of the environment, that she should be proud of herself.
Former slave Booker T. Washington, a passionate but pragmatic and patient fighter for the rights of African-Americans, turned the town of Tuskegee, where he was born on 4 February 1913, into an intellectual hub for African-Americans. His rebellion against a society in which a man could be punished for beating a dog or killing a bird, while it was impossible to prevent the scum from burning and torturing human beings, as he wrote, so captivated his mother that she passed it on to her daughter with all her faith.
Her husband was neither a problem nor a help. He left when Rosa was 2, came back for a few days when she was 5 and her brother Sylvester 3, and disappeared again. She saw him again only when she was married. However, his absence did not irreversibly mark Rosa. She became firmly attached to her mother, although she too was often absent, teaching as a teacher in church schools for black people all over the country, and to her grandparents, with whom they lived.
Life with my grandfather was never boring. He was so fair-skinned that he was sometimes mistaken for a white man, but he regularly indulged in something that either humiliated or angered white people. He liked to shake hands with them, which was unthinkable at the time, or to address them by their first name, even though as a black man he was only allowed to address them as Mr and Mrs, and he was only allowed to introduce himself by his first name.
Unfortunately, his fair mulatto complexion has also had negative consequences. In 1923, he was chased out of a meeting by blacks because they thought he was white, and he abandoned his plan to return to Africa with his family. Instead, he focused all his energies on protecting his neighbours from the KKK, which had emerged after the American Civil War and which, after 1915, played the role of guardians of “white supremacy”: burning down black churches and beating, torturing and killing blacks. Between 1885 and 1918, some 250 black Americans were lynched in Alabama.
That’s why Rosa’s grandfather always had a double-barrelled shotgun at hand, ready to take down the first Kukluksklanov who broke into his home, if he couldn’t take down all of them. At night he slept dressed and with his rifle in his hand. Rosa felt safe enough around him that the violence she grew up in was more a source of curiosity than of fear.
By the time she was six, she was “old enough to understand that we are not free”. She also learned that her skin colour made her a tenth-class citizen, as she later put it, in the cotton fields, when she and other children were trying to earn a little money. She worked from dawn to dusk. Her feet were blistered to blood. If she or any of the children could no longer work, the overseer punished them all. If a child bloodied the white cotton, he beat him.
Stomping was her daily routine. They called her Zamorka and threw stones at her. She was born into racial segregation. Around 1875, racial segregation was officially adopted in the southern American states, separating whites and blacks in all forms of public transport, schools, hospitals, restaurants, hotels, theatres, barbershops and elsewhere. They were also not allowed to drink from the same well, go to the same public libraries and parks, lie in the same mortuary or be buried in the same cemetery. To make sure that African-Americans didn’t forget where they belonged, there were “white” and “black” signs everywhere.
Nevertheless, Rosa has never doubted her own worth. Rather, she felt sorry for white people. “It was almost genetic,” she explains, explaining how she came to believe that a proud African-American should not accept being messed with. Her mother, who taught her to be pragmatic and patient, and her grandfather, who taught her to stand up for herself, also played a role.
Miss White’s Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, has added a new dimension to her attitude towards the world. At this, the only quality school for black girls, students were taught dignity and self-respect, encouraged to be ambitious and to believe that they could achieve anything they set their minds to in life.
The school’s founder, Alice L. White, was ostracised by the Whites and attacked so fiercely by the Ku Klux Klan that she had to close the school and leave town in 1928. Rosa enrolled, but had to drop out of school to care for her dying grandmother and later her sick mother in her hometown of Pine Level. Instead of becoming a teacher like her, she cleaned white people’s houses, sewed a little for them at home and occasionally sold fruit on the street.
Monument to America
Her life took a new direction when she met Reymond Parks, a barber ten years her senior, one of the founders of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He regularly followed the major black newspapers and passionately, if secretly by force of circumstance, campaigned for the “Scottsboro boys”. On 25 March 1931, nine boys were arrested by a sheriff near Scottsboro for harassing white people on a train. Two white prostitutes were also thrown off the train. They immediately accused the boys of raping them and were almost lynched by the crowd.
The trial was a farce. The white jury sentenced eight boys to death, sparing only the ninth, aged 12. After a public outcry, the Supreme Court overturned the verdict in 1932. After five years of a new trial, the testimony of two experts that the prostitutes had lied about the rape, and political wrangling, the boys’ lawyer was forced to negotiate: four of the defendants were acquitted and five were sentenced to longer prison terms. “It’s a monument to America at its worst”, Rosa, who at the time was already writing as Parks, later described the events, which beautifully depicted the times.
She changed her maiden name from McCauley to her husband’s in December 1932, after initially being repelled by his fair complexion, but after two dates she no longer noticed it. In the midst of the Great Depression, they could not afford a wedding trip, but the newlyweds hosted secret meetings in their modest home, where Reymond raised money for legal aid for the Scottsboro boys. The men sat around a small round table. It was covered with their sewing needles. Rosa shuddered to think that they couldn’t even gather without fearing for their lives.
Although she did not take part in the talks, she learned from her husband all about the NAACP’s plans to ensure the right of blacks to vote in elections and other activities. He encouraged her to finish school. In 1933, she did. Yet seven years later, only one in seven of every 100 black people in America had a high school diploma.
Although Rosa took a job as a secretary at Maxwell Field School in 1941, the couple continued to work hard financially, but for the first time Rosa realised what life would be like if everyone was the same. The school stood on the grounds of an air base, and military bases were, at least in theory, fully integrated under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decree. When she rode the bus around the base, she could sit wherever she wanted, and when she left the base, she returned to real life. “You could say that Maxwell opened my eyes. He was a parallel reality to the disgusting racial politics of Jim Crow.”
Racial segregation was called Jim Crow and also applied on buses. Blacks had to enter through the back door and sit in the back of the bus. In the 1920s, they were not allowed on the buses that ran between Montgomery and Tuskegee at all. They had to get on the roof with their luggage, whatever the weather. But it wasn’t until then that things started to boil between them.
In 1892, Homer Plessy refused to get on a segregated train carriage. Four years later, the US Supreme Court upheld the “separate but equal” rule in Plessy v Ferguson, sparking the first wave of protests. In August 1900, clergymen called on Montgomery residents to walk rather than stand crammed in the back of the bus, because they paid the same fare as whites. After five weeks of walking, the streetcar company recorded a 25% loss in revenue and gave up. Segregation on Montgomery’s buses had been abolished, but was reintroduced in the 1930s when the Kukluksklan rebelled.
As the bus passed by, Rosa often thought about the 1900 boycott and how “we took one step forward and two steps back”. They didn’t get that far in elections either, even though the 15th Amendment, ratified on 8 February 1870, prohibited discrimination in voting on the basis of race or colour.
Rosa was not allowed to vote despite her job at the air base. Whites, especially the Kukluksklans, got their own way around the law. To prevent African-Americans from voting, running for office or taking leadership roles in society, they were intimidated: a few hundred were murdered as a preemptive strike.
When intimidation no longer worked, they looked for loopholes in the law. It required voters to pass a literacy test and pay a tax to register. The amount was so high that most blacks could not afford it. Nevertheless, the police regularly arrested them for trumped-up offences, just in case they could raise the money. They were not allowed to register as voters with a police record.
They did not announce in advance when the polling stations would be open, but as a rule they were open when black people could not leave work. If they did turn up, officials delayed the process so long that only a few managed to vote before the polling station closed. Others were wished better luck next time.
But Rosa wanted to vote. She wanted her voice to be heard. She wanted to influence her existence. She wanted what the NAACP was trying to do, so she joined in December 1943, even though her husband had already left.
First steps towards activism
They met in the home of the uneducated but brave and uncompromising Edgar Daniel Nixon. She was the only woman at the meetings. Of course, she immediately became secretary, if only because she was uncomfortable saying no, and Nixon momentarily put aside his chauvinist belief that women belonged only in the kitchen.
From then on, she earned money during the day and spent her free time in the office. Among other things, she tried to compile a list of registered black voters, few as they were, and in 1943 tried to register herself. Without success. With a high school education, she reportedly failed a literacy test. No explanation. The same thing happened to her a year later. Angered, she recalled Frederick Douglas’s words that ‘a black man will not be judged by the heights he climbs, but by the depths he digs himself out of’. She consoled herself by telling herself that she was 31 years old, happily married, healthy and with enough money to take care of her sick mother. In April 1945, she finally voted.
She has also been working on Montgomery bus segregation all along. This was simple in principle: the first ten seats were reserved for whites, the last ten for blacks, and the sixteen seats in between were supposed to be neutral, but were subject to the will of the driver. He could allow black passengers to sit on them or not. He could force them off them and into the back of the bus if whites got on. He could throw them off the bus or have them arrested if they so much as squeaked.
Black passengers never knew what was waiting for them on the bus, even though they paid the same fare as white passengers. For example, some drivers asked them to pay their fare at the front door, get off and get on at the back. Some found it hilarious when they drove off in between and ran away from a passenger who had already paid for the ride. The bigoted James F. Blake, who favoured black women as his target, particularly enjoyed this.
Rosa first became his victim in November 1943. She entered at the front door, because the rear passengers were already standing on the steps, and moved towards the centre. Blake went mad. He yelled at her to get off “his” bus and dragged her by the sleeve. She held her head high and begged him to let her go, because she was going to get off on her own. Then she deliberately dropped her handbag on the white seat and picked it up. Blake went even crazier. She proudly got off and walked rather than take “his” bus. Twelve years later, she made a mistake. It ended with the famous bus boycott.
But Rosa was already an active campaigner against racial laws before him. At first, she stayed in the background, but slowly her visibility among black rights activists began to grow, and with it her self-confidence.
In 1949, she became an advisor to the NAACP’s informal youth group, which was transformed into the formal Youth Council four years later. Even though she had no children of her own, she was great with them. That she never seemed happier than when she was reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin to ten-year-olds or teaching teenagers how to maintain their dignity in the grip of segregation, her friends told her later. “The children simply adored her. They forged a special bond, an understanding that was truly rare. It was full of hugs and all that,” E.D. Nixon later revealed.
It was also the year when black bus passengers rioted in Baton Rouge and the bus company made heavy losses. The organisers of the boycott might well have won if they had not compromised just before now. No one knew why. Rosa kept a close eye on the boycott, just as she had kept up with the NAACP’s activities during the two years she had to care for her sick mother.
On 17 May 1954, it seemed that fortune had finally smiled on black people. The Supreme Court overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling on which segregation was based, ruling unanimously in Brown v. Department of Education that segregated public schools were “inherently unequal.” It was one of the most important moments in African-American history and in Rosa’s life: “You can’t imagine the joy of black people and some white people.”
The court issued guidelines for school desegregation, which sparked immediate resistance in the South, but none was felt by Rosa when she started working for a white couple that year. Her husband was often ill and earned little, and she had to support her sick mother. Like most black women of the time, she improved the family budget by sewing for white clients in the afternoons.
Clifford J. Durr was a reserved lawyer, his temperamental wife Virginia Foster a human rights activist. They opened a law office in Montgomery for black clients, because whites refused to come to them, after they were driven out of Washington because of their world views and had to find a different way of life in what had once been a very prosperous world.
Virginia and the reserved Rosa, who charged so little for her work that Virginia paid her double, hit it off immediately. They could talk for hours about everything from Ella Fitzgerald’s singing to the injustices of American society. Although Virginia was Rosa’s closest friend outside the family, it took Virginia 20 years to get Rosa to call her by her first name. For her, Rosa was “one of the greatest” people she had ever met, “the embodiment of what you would call a Southern lady”. She was, she said, quiet, determined, brave, modest and very religious, but good to the last fibre, and people respected her for it.
But she was also extremely proud. So much so that Virginia didn’t know how to give her the money to travel to Monteagle, Tennessee, where she had arranged a 14-day education at the Highlander Folk School, where new generations of human rights activists were being trained. With a lot of tact, she finally succeeded and Rosa, who had never left Atlanta, saw for the first time a world in which whites and blacks were equal.
“We have forgotten what colour someone is. I was 42 years old and it was one of the few times in my life so far when I didn’t feel any hostility from white people.” For the first time, the world was harmonious. “I had the feeling that I could be honest without facing blows or hatred from others.” In Monteagle, she also met activist Septima Clark. She later recalled that Rosa was much more militant than she dared to show in her fear of the whites, and that those 14 days, in which she saw injustice even more clearly than before, gave her the strength to persevere in her fight for freedom.
She did not want to go back to the department store dressmaking room where she earned her bread and where “you had to be smiling and friendly no matter how badly they treated you”, but she had no choice. She also had to take a segregated bus to get there.
The day that changed your life
She left home with him on 1 December 1955. It was a long and tiring day. The bus she wanted to take back home was full a little after five o’clock in the afternoon. She went shopping and got on one of the next ones. The “white” seats were free, the “black” ones were not. She sat in the “neutral” ones. At the third stop, when all the “white” seats were taken, a white passenger got on. The driver asked Rosa, the man sitting next to her and two women to vacate the “neutral” seats. The trio stood up, Rosa just moved to the window. Her breath caught: she had mistakenly stepped onto James F. Blake’s bus, with whom she had had problems 13 years earlier.
He slowly approached her. Instead of fear, she now felt calm and bold. “But do you mean to get up?!” he scolded her. “No,” she replied calmly. Blake was momentarily confused. He didn’t know what to do. He threatened to arrest her. She politely agreed to it. She raised his pressure even more. She was calm. “I knew I had the power of my ancestors in me”.
She didn’t get on the bus to start a revolution, just a drop spilt over the edge when she had to stand with empty seats, even though she had paid the fare. “There’s a limit somewhere, and it was obviously mine. I was no longer going to let them sweep me off my feet. I wanted to find out what rights I had, if any.” The fact that she refused to get up on that particular day and on that particular bus did not matter. “I just wanted to be free like everyone else. I didn’t want to be constantly humiliated for something I had no control over: the colour of my skin.”
The other passengers got off and Blake called the police. Rosa was taken away, even though she was not breaking any rules because she was sitting in a “neutral” seat. She was completely calm the whole time. She only became agitated at the magistrate’s office when she wanted to drink, but was not allowed to because the tap was “white”. She did not even have the right to make a phone call.
The police took her fingerprints, photographed her and confiscated her handbag. She waited for the judge in a cell with two of her fellow inmates. One had not been allowed to call anyone for two months, so no one came looking for her. Rosa was finally allowed to call home. Her mother picked up the phone. “My husband was very upset and my mother was upset too. When I told them I was well and they hadn’t done anything to me physically, they felt better.”
Reymond went to the police, and E.D. Nixon went there too. He took Clifford Durr with him. He needed him because he was white. The police would only tell him what was happening to Rosa, and above all they would not dare to collect the bail Nixon had set without releasing Rosa. Finally she arrived, calm and dignified.
Nixon could not help but be grateful for his arrest. With Rosa, he finally had a person who could not be challenged in court on moral grounds, so the NAACP could use her to try to overturn the segregation law. They had previously planned to do it by arresting 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who refused to give up her seat on the bus, and on top of that, she was speaking in a language that was “worse than theft”, but it turned out that she was a few months pregnant, so she was not a suitable plaintiff.
In those days, blacks made up 75% of bus passengers, and the NAACP demanded changes from the city authorities. When, predictably, they didn’t, they started thinking about a boycott, and now Rosa and the bus operators have been given the option of a lawsuit. If only Rosa would agree to be a plaintiff.
Her husband and mother were against it. For years, they persuaded her to stop working with E.D. Nixon because one fine day she would bingle from the nearest branch. Now Reymond kept saying, “Rosa, the whites are going to kill you! Rosa, the whites will kill you!” Rosa took time to think: if she sued, what would be the consequences?
She, her husband and her mother lived primarily on her income, and a lawsuit would have ensured her dismissal. She would become an even bigger pariah than she already was. Her husband would be harassed by the police with trumped-up charges. Prolonged litigation and worry would certainly not be good for her mother’s fragile health. She made the decision she felt was right: she would sue.
The NAACP immediately started building a strategy and looking for money for a lawyer. Meanwhile, Alabama State University professor Jo Ann Robinson, two high school students and an economics professor wrote and copied a bus boycott call in the middle of the night for Monday, when Rosa would have to appear in court.
Nixon and black clergymen joined her cause. They were able to mobilise the most people, although the newspaper article on Rosa announcing the boycott did its part. But the organisers were worried. Would enough people decide to boycott? If at least 60% of them ignored the buses, it would be a victory. On Monday morning there were no black passengers on them. They were all going about their business, however heavy the loads they were carrying.
Rosa and her husband go to court. She did not know at the time that her opponents had already spread rumours that she was a trained communist and that the NAACP had put her on a bus to get a suitable plaintiff. The basis for the charges was her 14-day course at the Highlander People’s School and her secretaryship in the NAACP. Neither accusation was true, but since a lie quickly becomes the truth if repeated enough times, the shadow of those lies hung over Rosa and the boycott forever.
“I wasn’t particularly nervous. I knew what I had to do … There were so many people that you could hardly see the road,” she recalled of the crowd that came to support her. After a five-minute trial, Rosa was expectedly found guilty. She had to pay a $10 fine and $4 for court costs.
Now the NAACP has been given the opportunity to appeal on its behalf, first in district court and then in federal court, if necessary. At the same time, it has drawn up bus requirements: whites will occupy seats from front to back and blacks from back to front, but no one will have to give up a seat or stand if a seat on the bus is empty. Drivers will be courteous to all passengers and the company will hire African Americans as drivers.
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The high price of uprightness
The one-day boycott was extended to a one-week boycott at a meeting which surprisingly chose young Martin Luther King Jr. as leader. It would not last much longer, they were sure. The people’s rebellious spirit would be broken at the first sign of bad weather. It didn’t, and he stayed strong for 13 months, even though he encountered fierce resistance.
Police officers regularly stopped black taxi drivers and drivers organised into fleets. African-American homes were broken into without justification. They threatened and intimidated them. The Kukluksklan has also added its own pot. The boycotters, on the other hand, were armed only with ‘protest and love’, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it.
Rosa Parks was, of course, fired from her job. For her, this was a “blessing in disguise”, because she no longer had to worry about how she was going to get to work without a bus. She started to support her family by sewing and doing odd jobs. Her husband had quit his job at Maxwell Air Base because his boss had forbidden him to mention Rosa’s name or boycott. To top it all off, the family’s rent was raised. Reymond started drinking more and more. “It’s nice to be a hero, but the price is high,” Virginia Durr commented on Rosa’s difficulties.
The whites threatened Rosa, as they did Martin Luther King Jr. A bomb exploded on his porch. That’s when the boycott leadership changed tactics: at the initiative of Clifford Durr, it decided to file a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of four women convicted of violating segregation law, challenging the legality of city and state segregation laws.
They filed Browder v Gayl (Aurelia Browder was one of the women on whose behalf they sued, Gayl was the mayor of Montgomery). On 5 June 1956, the Supreme Court ruled in their favour, overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine. Rosa did not celebrate. She knew that the city authorities would appeal. And they did. The boycott continued after 13 November, when the Supreme Court upheld the ruling and struck down Alabama’s segregation laws. The Ku Klux Klan flooded black neighbourhoods, but this time they were met only with ridicule.
But it is not yet time to celebrate. The authorities appealed once more and the Montgomery people kept on marching. Meanwhile, the timid and shy, but lion-hearted Rosa, as Virginia Durr described her, was raising money for the boycotters in New York and Chicago. In December she was back at the Highlander Folk School, only this time she was famous. Everyone, including Septima Clark, embraced her as a heroine. Would she stay and teach teenagers the basics of non-violent resistance? “Mum said no. She didn’t want to live anywhere where she saw nothing but white people.”
Nevertheless, it returned home full of renewed vigour after a year of hardship and a turning point: on 17 December 1956, the Supreme Court rejected the city’s appeal and ruled that the city’s buses had to be integrated from 20 December onwards. The boycott ended.
The public’s attention shifted from Rose to the leader of the boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. She didn’t care. On the day the buses became integrated, she did not get on any of them. At home, she looked after her sick mother. In fact, she had not even been invited to ride and have her picture taken with the leaders of the revolt, but a Looka journalist came up to her and persuaded her, as the woman who had ignited the spark of the revolt, to get on the bus herself. Although she was initially terrified to be photographed, she was later “glad I let them”.
It was just a bit embarrassing to get on James F. Blake’s bus again. “We ignored each other. It was obvious that he didn’t want to be photographed with me or any other black person.” The reporter sat her down in the front seat by the window. She had to stare through it, just as she had a year ago when she refused to get up. The photograph has become legendary. Children from all over the world sent her copies to have her sign them.
Of course, the integration of the buses did not go without resistance: the Kukluksklans shot at blacks, harassed them, blew up their churches and homes. The only thing that has changed is that this time a few of them have been arrested, if not convicted.
But for Rosa, there was no peace in the city. She was constantly threatened. One evening in July 1957, the threat was so chilling that she called her cousin in tears. He agreed with her husband that it was time to leave: “The little white men will kill you!” Rosa did not object, and not only because of the threats.
Her notoriety made both her and her husband unemployable in Montgomery, but above all, her new fame made her the envy of the world. Male chauvinism could not bear that she was a heroine in the eyes of the people. The priests with whom she had previously worked turned against her and mocked her from the pulpit, saying she was a celebrity. E.D. Nixon, whose secretary she was for many years, also suffered in her neglect. He described her to a colleague as a “lovely, silly woman” who had been elevated to icon status by the media. When she refused the Reverend Ralph Abernathy’s proposal to boycott Montgomery Airport in the same way as the buses, she became for him a mere tool in the hands of the boycott organisers.
The women on whose behalf they brought the case were racked by jealousy. They felt that they, too, should bask in the media spotlight, not just Rosa. Rosa was left alone. In respectable people, trivial resentments only turned to shame when it became known that she was leaving. The Reverend Abernathy apologised and begged her to stay, but it was too late.
To the end with faith in justice
She went to Detroit. It wasn’t ideal, but it was still easier than Montgomery. Reymond tried to get a barber’s licence for Michigan, and in October 1957, on a lecture tour, she was offered a job. She became a sort of staff supervisor at Virginia’s Hampton Institute, a predominantly black college in Hampton, with the hope that she could find some work for her husband and that he would join her and her mother. She failed, but now she was mentally strong enough to live on her own in the Hamptons without any problems.
She felt like a fish in water among the students. She earned enough to send money every month to her husband, who had since taken a job and registered to vote for the first time in his life. She also received a gift in the Hamptons, a new book by Martin Luther King Jr, Stride Toward a Freedom. The dedication read, “To Rosa Parks, whose creative presence was the most powerful force that led to the modern flight toward freedom.” The satisfaction of knowing that he had written beautifully about her soon turned to hysteria and weeping when she learned that 42-year-old Isora Ware Curry had stabbed King and nearly killed him.
Even though she was excellent at her job, Rosa decided not to return during the Christmas holidays, which she spent at home. Her husband and her mother could not do without her. She had to exchange her job as a staff supervisor for a sewing shop. There she earned a living, an activist for her soul. She was driven out of Montgomery, but she was not so crushed that she did not immediately get involved with the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) in Detroit.
She took part in protest marches and also took part in the historic Washington March for Jobs and Freedom on 28 August 1963. It was not inspiring. Women were completely sidelined by the organisers. They did not include any of them as speakers. Septima Clark, Ella Baker, Rosa and others were not allowed to march with men either. For Rosa, this was as discriminatory and humiliating as segregated buses. All she kept saying to the women was that one day their time would come.
At home, she began to advocate more for women’s rights, although she still served men first at the table, and to get involved in politics. She endorsed a little-known 35-year-old black man, John Conyers, the Democratic candidate for Michigan’s first district for the US House. He had almost no chance of winning until Rosa called Martin Luther King Jr. He never got involved in politics, he could not say no to Rosa. He came to Detroit, supported Conyers and brought him victory.
Conyers immediately paid Rosa back. After five years of sewing, she became part of his staff in Detroit on 1 March 1965 and continued to do what she had once done for the NAACP and E.D. Nixon until her retirement in 1988 at the age of 75.
Conyers hits it into the black. She was “so famous that people came to my office to meet her, not me”. She was often on the road. She constantly apologised for her absences, but he never kept her. As usual, she was not spared the mudslinging. She had heard that she was good enough to scrub Conyers’ floors at home, but not to go into his office. And that she was responsible for the “revolution” among the blacks and should bow her curly head in deep shame. They sent her rotten melons and threatening letters telling her to die. She was even given a voodoo doll with toothpicks stuck in her vital organs. This time she was no longer upset about it. On the contrary, she was proud that she had disabused the fanatics of their righteousness.
People saw her as a trouble-making, dangerous woman, and her boss couldn’t believe that the icon of the American struggle for black human rights was such a mild woman. He could not describe her in one way. She was somehow mysterious, but not arrogant. She never raised her voice, got into an argument or berated anyone, even if they were a complete fool. She was deeply religious, but this was not evident in her behaviour. “She was pure simplicity and pure modesty,” was how the Reverend Eddie Robinson, who met her in 1966, described her. Fame did not get to her.
But however calm she was, unlike Gandhi and Dr King, she did not reject violence. She believed that some wars were justified and that oppressed people had the right to strike back. Although she did not support the Black Panthers of Malcom X out loud and disagreed with their hatred of all white people, she was very much on their side in her heart. Over the years, she became more hardline and less progressive.
She adored Martin Luther King Jr, but she also found Malcom X a wonderful man, warm and charming, as she described him when she met him in February 1965. A week later he was dead, and a month after that she was back in Montgomery, at Dr King’s invitation, to support the participants in the famous march from Selma to Montgomery, who were brutally stopped by the police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Montgomery had hardly changed, she realised after eight years away, but society had. She was warmly welcomed by her former roommates, but the young people didn’t even know who she was. The organisers did not even give her a special vest to mark the official participants, so the police were constantly pulling her aside in case someone did not take her under their protection.
But the next evening in her segregated hotel, she was not depressed and scared about it. She had a feeling that something bad was going to happen. He had not cheated on her. Kukluksklanovci shot Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old white woman, in the head for helping the protesters with their transport. Her murder filled Rosa with horror, but it made her even more determined to fight for the rights of the oppressed at any cost.
She became a more obvious Black Panther supporter and adapted her wardrobe accordingly, but she never condoned vandalism and violence, such as the eight days of destruction in Detroit in July 1967, when black people were forced out of their homes by the city’s urban planning policy and had nowhere else to go.
Hooligans also looted her husband’s barbershop and destroyed her new car, but this was insignificant compared to the pain she felt when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on 4 April 1968. After John F. Kennedy and Malcom X, he was the third man she had admired, but he was gone.
Yet her main concern now was that the murder would unleash a wave of violence. She immediately set off on a peaceful march. Her husband was convinced that she had gone mad, but he had long ago given up trying to convince her of anything by arguing that she was putting her life on the line. King’s death devastated Rosa. Music helped her through the worst of it. She listened constantly to the gentle ballad Long Time Comin’ by Sam Cooke, whose “soft voice was like medicine to me”. Two months after King, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. “It was as if we were losing everyone we thought was good.”
She was becoming more and more a symbol of resistance and less and less an activist in the eyes of the people, but she still divided the public as she had done in the past. In Montgomery, on the 20th anniversary of the boycott, she was for some a saint and for others a woman who was unjustly given her place in history because it belonged more to them. Many whites were ashamed of the city’s infamous era and, following the line of least resistance, blamed her for it.
By now she had got used to it, but life was taking its toll. The stress of the 1955 bus boycott left her with stomach ulcers. Now in her sixties, she had heart problems. Twice in a few years she had fallen: once she broke her ankle, the other her wrist.
All her loved ones have fallen ill. Her mother, husband and brother had cancer. For a while, she went to three hospitals at the same time. Reymond lost his battle first. After five years of fighting throat cancer, he died in 1977, aged 74. Although Reymond was not as active as she was, he supported her in everything and never tried to stop her, although he lived in constant fear that one day a white bigot would kill her.
Three months later, she lost her brother, and not long after that, in 1979, her mother. At the age of 66, she was “left all alone”. It was then that she became more closely attached to 34-year-old Elaine Eason Steele, whom she had met as a 16-year-old girl in a sewing shop in 1961. She became the daughter Rosa never had. She made sure that Rosa, who had been tight on money all her life, did not go bankrupt and that she did not completely exhaust herself trying to co-operate everywhere and write everyone off.
Rosa became a vegetarian, became fascinated by Buddhism, especially meditation, after meeting Dr Daisaku Ikeda, and even travelled to Tokyo in 1994 at the age of 81. She was attracted by the Suffragettes, learned to use a computer and read a lot, spending more and more time in bed as circumstances forced her to do so. She remained committed to her struggle to improve society until her death in 2005 at the age of 92.
