People’s Historians Online for Middle and High School

Jesse Hagopian: My name is Jesse Hagopian and I’m going to help facilitate today’s webinar. I want to welcome everyone here on behalf of the Zinn Education Project. I know that these are unprecedented times we’re living in right now and I’m wishing you and your family good health. I hope that everybody is staying safe and I hope that these lessons that we gain from today’s webinar help us figure out how to engage in the world today. Because these are really desperate times as cases of COVID-19 in the United States are now reaching number one in the world. At the same time, there are massive bailouts for some of the richest corporations in the world. We need the lessons of Rosa Parks more than ever about how to engage in this world in collective struggle.

I’m really excited to be in conversation today with guest historian Jeanne Theoharis, the author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History. That book has been invaluable to my understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and to my own teaching. It’s one of the best explanations of the master narratives that are used to disguise the real lessons of the Civil Rights Movement. Instead, Dr. Theoharis just goes through and systematically debunks most of the lies about the Civil Rights Movement and reveals the true lessons that we need so desperately today. She also co-produced the invaluable Rosa Parks biography website where you can learn more about the history that we’re talking about today. 

I just want to say a word before I get into this conversation with regards to Jeanne Theoharis, about how I first came into contact with her. Last year she began working on a young adult version of her book on The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. What I really came to admire about her is her commitment to have youth voices help shape that book. She reached out to me to see if the Black Student Union that I was advising here in Seattle at Garfield High School where I teach would be interested in helping her shape the contents of the book. I was honored to be asked, and my students were thrilled that they were going to have a chance to have input on this book. We began working together last year, having Zoom sessions and FaceTime sessions where my students were reading the original version of the Rosa Parks book and giving her comments about what needed to be included in the YA version and how to shape that narrative for youth. It was an amazing collaborative experience and I learned so much more about Rosa’s life and the way young people have been mistaught it, and also the critical lessons that they are able to draw from the real story of her life. So I’m very grateful for her including my students. This is a wonderful opportunity to get to be in dialogue with you now, Jeanne, so we will launch into the questions if that’s alright with you.

Jeanne Theoharis: That’s just great. I’m so happy to be here and I’m so happy to see so many young people and so many teachers and parents and young people with their parents and guardians. It’s just really nice to be all together in these strange times.

Hagopian: Absolutely right, building community anywhere we can is so important [especially] in this age of physical distance distancing, [where] we’re not actually emotionally and socially disconnected. I want to begin by talking about what’s wrong with the Rosa Parks most of us learn. In the introduction to your book you wrote, “Described by The New York Times as the accidental matriarch of the Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks who surfaced in deleuse of public commentary, was in nearly every account characterized as quiet and humble and dignified and soft spoken. She was not angry and never raised her voice.” Can you talk about the way most of us have been mis-educated about Rosa?

Theoharis: I imagine most people, probably everybody here, learned about Rosa Parks many years ago. Most of us learn about her in elementary school or in middle school. And we often learn one story about her, which is that she refuses to give up her seat on the bus, and then it galvanizes the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights Movement. So she’s like a one hit wonder; she walks onto history and she walks off as often characterized, like Jesse was saying, as she’s quiet and dignified and unique. Often these are the kinds of words that tend to get used about.

So, even though she’s incredibly honored, she’s also really trapped in this box, turned into a paper doll, if you will. Her actual life, she described it as a life history of being rebellious. So the title of my book is actually taken from something that she said. She gets very tired of constantly trying to tell people, “No, this wasn’t a one day thing for me, it was a lifetime.” It starts when she’s a kid, and it basically doesn’t end until she dies. That’s like 60 or 70 years of activism. But the version we learned, I bet many of us learned she was tired. Sometimes the story is that her feet were tired or she was tired and that’s why she doesn’t get up. I think sometimes she’s portrayed as old. There’s no sense that she has these decades of activism beforehand. And in particular, there’s almost no discussion of her decades of activism after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, that she just keeps going and going. And we’re going to talk about that today.

Hagopian: That leads us to need to better understand her life before the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the decades of activism, the way she was raised, that point to a life of activism and struggle. Maybe you could help us learn the things that we often missed in school about her life before the boycott?

Theoharis: Let’s start with her childhood. Very much her spirit, her feisty spirit, starts at home. She is raised by her mom and her grandparents. Her dad leaves when she’s about two, so her mom moves them back in with her grandparents. Certainly from her grandfather and her mother she learns this sort of spirit. One of her first memories, she’s six years old, it’s after World War I, and there’s this huge uptick of white violence after the war finishes against Black people, in particular against Black soldiers. Many white people want to put Black soldiers “back in their place,” so you see all this violence happening across the country. It’s often called Red Summer.

They live in Pine Level, Alabama and the Klan is again going through the county making trouble. Her grandfather would sit out at night on their porch with his shotgun, basically to protect them, and sometimes he allows her to sit with him. This is a six-year-old Rosa Parks sitting with him at night, with him and his shotgun, because as she puts it, “She wants to see him shoot a Ku Kluxer.” So this is a different place to start a story about Rosa Parks, right? This is not usually where we start.

She is very shy growing up, but she still has this feisty side and it often comes out around protecting her younger brother. A white bully is menacing them over and over and finally she picks up a brick and threatens him back and he stops and he goes away, and she goes home and she tells her grandmother and her grandmother is furious. Her grandmother’s like, “You’re going to be lynched before your grown” and “you can’t talk like that to white people.” And this is a young, pre-teen Rosa Parks. She’s astonished and she feels betrayed and she’s arguing back with her grandmother, “Well, I’d rather be lynched than not be able to say I don’t like it.” And we’re going to hear this again and again.

In many ways, her political life or activist sense really gets its start when she meets and falls in love with a politically active barber, Raymond Parks. She describes Raymond as “the first real activist I ever met.” In 1931 she’s 18 years old and Raymond Parks is an activist working on the Scottsboro case.

Hagopian: I’ll just add that the Scottsboro case has been an inspiration to me, radicals joining together with the Communist Party and others across the country to build an international campaign to try to defend boys who were accused of rape on a train, but really not given a trial and railroaded into prison. [They] faced decades in jail or being put to death. I think Raymond really cut his teeth in the struggle, helping to build that international campaign to defend the Scottsboro boys. That’s my recollection.

Theoharis: So he’s working on this, he’s one of these local activists trying to help these nine young men — the youngest who’s 12 — ages 12 to 19. They’re quickly tried, and except for the youngest one, sent to death. These local activists start to organize to try to defend these young men from being executed. They’re bringing them food in jail. And so this is what he’s doing when she meets him. They get married the next year and she joins him in this work. And it’s really dangerous work. He says they all go by the name Larry; they don’t know each other’s real names because it’s so dangerous.

She says that she remembers these late night meetings at their house, guns all over the table. Even having a meeting was dangerous. So in these first years of their marriage, he’s the more public activist and she’s a bit more behind the scenes. And that’s going to really change over the course of their marriage. She’s going to become a more public activist and he’s going to be more behind the scenes. But very much their love really rests on this shared political commitment. I think it gives her a tremendous sustenance when we’re going to see her become the activist that she will become.

That really kind of picks up during World War II. She is galled, she is angry because people like her brother are serving overseas during World War II, and yet most Black people in Montgomery would like to vote but can’t vote. She wants to register to vote. She says she sees in a local Black newspaper a picture of a local NAACP meeting and she realizes she sees a woman in there that she’d gone to middle school with. She realizes that women can be part of the NAACP. Raymond had been part of the NAACP in the 1930s and then he ended up leaving, finding it too middle class. But she decides to go to a meeting.

This is her first meeting. It’s 1943. She’s the only woman there, too. It’s actually branch election time, and they asked her to take notes. She says she’s too timid to say no. In that very first meeting, she is elected branch secretary and she makes it known that she wants to register to vote. A man by the name of E. D. Nixon comes by her apartment — she’s living in the projects, in the Cleveland Courts Projects — and here is going to begin a partnership that’s going to change the face of American history because E. D. Nixon and Rosa Parks will set about over the next decade to transform Montgomery’s NAACP into an activist chapter that, again, is going to shape the Montgomery Bus Boycott that happens about a dozen years later. What they’re working on in this decade, they’re working on two kinds of things: They’re trying to register to vote and trying to get people to register to vote.

One of the barriers is the test, and that test is administered differently for white people and Black people. For instance, as a Black person, you would often get a question either like how many bubbles in a bar of soap or a really detailed question about the state constitution. Whereas if you were a white person you would often get no questions or very simple questions about the state constitution. So, the first time she tries to register to vote she doesn’t pass. Nor the second time, And the third time, she says she’s angry. She decides she’s going to write down all the questions and all the answers and she’s thinking about filing suit. This is a decade before her bus stand. To me, it really shows that tenacity that we’re going to see again and again and again.

The other thing she’s working on is what we would call criminal justice issues. There’s two kinds of issues: one, cases like Scottsboro, which are cases where typically Black men are being wrongfully accused. One of the cases that absolutely guts her is a case of a young 16-year-old boy by the name of Jeremiah Reeves, who is having a relationship with a young white woman. She she gets nervous and cries rape and Jeremiah Reeves — again, 16 years old — is brought in, basically berated by the police, forced to sit in the electric chair, and confesses, similar to the Central Park Five confessions, then he recants that confession, and he will also be tried and sentenced to death. They work on his case, they press on his case over and over, and ultimately, when he turns 22, he’s executed. So they were working on this case, other cases, and they’re working on cases trying to get the law to protect Black people, particularly Black women.

Hagopian: I think those lessons about how long Rosa’s struggles were, and how it really felt like maybe they wouldn’t make any progress for such a long time. It’s incredible that she found the strength to keep going in the face of so much injustice, and oftentimes defeat. I think that brings me to a question about the Highlander Folk School. Several months before the boycott, Rosa went to the Highlander Folk School of Social Justice Education Center, and there she met one of my heroes, Septima Clark, a Black woman who was one of the leading figures of creating citizenship schools and radical pedagogy models to help educate Black folks across the South by seeing the model as part of the struggle for social justice. I wonder if you could talk about the impact of the Highlander Folk School on Rosa Parks.

Theoharis: Septima has a huge impact on her. She talks about her spirits being really low, she talks about feeling bitter and nervous. She’s recommended for a scholarship there but she’s sewing at night for one of the few white families in Montgomery who are kind of pro-civil rights. Their names are Virginia and Clifford Durr. Virginia Durr recommends Rosa Parks for the scholarship, in part because she sees how low Rosa Parks’ spirits have fallen. This is a two-week workshop where they’re going to be talking about implementing desegregation. Again, this is the summer of 1955, and 1954 is Brown v. Board of Education. This is when the Supreme Court says separate can never be equal and outlaws school segregation.

But, oftentimes we don’t talk about the fact that that decision actually has a second part to it. The Supreme Court made this decision in 1954 but it put off how it would implement that decision, how states have to implement it, for another year to hear more testimony. A year later, the Supreme Court comes back and puts no timetable on it and basically says “with all deliberate speed.” What that means is there’s going to be no implementation if civil rights activists don’t press for it. So the workshop that Rosa Parks attends at Highlander is actually a workshop about how to implement desegregation. She goes for two weeks, which is a big deal for a working class woman to take off two weeks of work. She attends a workshop with about half Black and half white people.

She talks about how transformative this experience was for her, for a couple of reasons. One, she talks about it as one of the first times that she could express her opinions in front of white people and not feel hostility. One of her favorite things about Highlander, white and Black people, unlike in many places, particularly in the south, they ate together, they shared rooms together, they sat at tables together, and journalists would come by and the leader of Highlander was a man by the name of Myles Horton, and they would ask Horton, “How do you get white people and Black people to eat together?” And Horton would say, “Let me tell you. First, we make the food. Second, we ring the bell. And third, we serve the food.” And she loved this because it was pointing out the absurdity of the question and observation, and just doing this in a really matter of fact way. She really found her spirit starting to lift and she was particularly inspired by Septima Clark.

When she gets to Highlander, Septima Clark was a teacher in South Carolina for 40 years at this point who’d been fired because she refused to give up her membership in the NAACP. Basically, South Carolina said that you couldn’t be a member of the NAACP and work for the government. So she was fired. And Rosa Parks is in awe of Clark because she says she gets there and she’s so nervous, she feels so bitter and suboptimal, and Clark is just so calm and so strong. So I think Clark is a real role model for her and a real mentor. And her spirits start to lift. On the last day, like any good organizer training school, they go around, “What are you going to do when you get home?” They get to Rosa Parks, and Rosa Parks says, “There’s never going to be a mass movement in Montgomery.” She says white resistance is too great and Black people aren’t unified. “I’m going to go back and keep working with the young people.” The year before she’d started a youth council of the NAACP because she was really tired of her own generation. She found them complacent. She starts to really pin her hopes on the militancy and spirit of young people. We can see that in somebody like Ella Baker, and this is going to be true of Parks across her life. She basically leaves Highlander saying “There’s never going to be a mass movement,” not “I’m going to start the modern Civil Rights Movement.”

Hagopian: That’s a great lesson for us today, because many of us have been involved in movements for a long time and can feel like it’s never coming. But to know that, that you just don’t know when the struggle is going to break out and you have to just keep persevering. I think that leads us to the seminal moment that most of us know about Rosa Parks, although there’s many master narratives as well about the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

But Rosa of course is most known for taking a stand by refusing to stand. On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake’s order to relinquish her seat in the “colored section” to a white passenger after the “whites only” section was filled. Could you talk about how she came to do this and what the impact was? I’m especially interested in the leading role that women played in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and in organizing it that often gets left out of the story.

Theoharis: So she’s not the first to resist on the bus. There had been a trickle of people, particularly in the decade after World War II. A woman by the name of Viola White in 1944 refuses to give up her seat on the bus, is arrested, pursues her case, and in response, police raped her daughter.

Hagopian: Ida B. Wells also refused to give up her seat at some point.

Theoharis: Absolutely, yes. If we look across the country, people are doing this all over the country. This is just in Montgomery. Viola White is in Montgomery. But absolutely, Black people are resisting all across the South, some places in the middle south or midwest, in terms of public transportation. So she is not the first, and there’s this trickle of people. In 1950, her neighbor, a Black veteran named Ophelia Brooks, refused. Sometimes bus drivers would make Black people pay in the front but have to go around to the back to board. Rosa Parks refused to do this. She was kicked off of multiple buses because she refused to do this. And her neighbor gets in an argument with a bus driver about this, and he refuses to do it. He’s a veteran. The police get on the bus and shoot and kill him. This is 1950.

Then, nine months before Rosa Parks’ bus stand as many of us now have started to learn, a 15-year-old by the name of Claudette Colvin is coming home from school, refuses to give up her seat on the bus, is arrested and manhandled by police as they’re arresting her. It’s really scary. Rosa Parks starts fundraising for Colvins’s case and she gets active in the NAACP Youth Council. A mass movement starts to galvanize around Colvin’s case. But, then a couple of things happen. First, the judge is very strategic in Colvin’s case: Colvin actually gets arrested on three charges, resisting arrest, assaulting an officer, and segregation. The judge throws out the segregation charge and throws out the resisting charge, so all Colvin actually is convicted on is an assault charge. He makes it much harder to pursue a segregation case. Then also we see something which we see today, which is that adults start to get nervous about having a young person at the lead. They see her as too feisty, too emotional. There’s a myth that Colvin was pregnant, [but] she’s not pregnant at this point. They drop her case; she will get pregnant later that summer, but she’s not pregnant [then]. That myth has developed as some sort of justification but it’s not true. It clouds how we understand what happens. Rosa Parks is trying to get Colvin interested and active in the Youth Council. Another teenager in October got arrested for resisting on the bus. So, Rosa Parks is not the first.

I think we all learned that Rosa Parks is courageous, but I think Jesse really pinpointed what makes this so very courageous, which is this perseverance. Rosa Parks has made stands before. Other people she knows have made stands before. There is nothing to suggest that anything good will come out of it. There’s a lot to suggest that something very terrible will come out of it. And something very terrible actually does come out of it for Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks will lose her job. Her husband will lose his job. They will have a decade of economic suffering because of what she’s about to do. But I think it’s that courage or perseverance, that courage of being able to act without knowing or being able to see what your action is going to do.

And so she refuses to give up her seat. She says reluctantly. In the row that she’s sitting in, there’s a Black man sitting next to her and two Black women sitting across the aisle, and everyone will have to get up so this one white person can sit down. She says at first no one gets up and then the bus driver says it again. Remember the bus driver is carrying a gun; bus drivers in Montgomery have police powers. So she says reluctantly the other three get up and she says she’s pushed as far as she could be pushed, and she says if she got up she felt like she would be consenting to that treatment. And she did not consent. So here we see that Highlander influence. She refuses and she’s not quiet in this moment. The police get on the bus — and you can imagine this scene — and the police are like, “Why don’t you move?” And she says to the police, “Why do you push us around?” One of the police officers is so surprised he’s like, “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you are under arrest.” So again, at very key moments Rosa Parks is not quiet.

So she’s taken to jail. She’s bailed out a few hours later, and once E. D. Nixon sees that Rosa Parks is okay, he’s in a measured delighted because here is the kind of test case they’ve been wanting, in part because they know how brave she is. One of the real paradoxes is Rosa Parks’ politics are key to why people galvanize behind her, and yet they are going to be really backgrounded during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in part because we’re in the middle of the Cold War and that long political history of Rosa Parks will be a liability. So she decides late that night that she’s willing to go forward with her case. She calls a young Black lawyer named Fred Gray. He calls the head of the Women’s Political Council, which was a middle class Black women’s organization in Montgomery that had been very active around challenging segregation.

It’s the Women’s Political council that decides to call for a boycott on Monday, which is the day that Rosa Parks will be arraigned in court. So, in the middle of the night, Jo Ann Robinson, who’s a professor at Alabama State College, with the help of two students — always students and colleagues, basically — go to Alabama State College and run off 35,000 leaflets that basically say, “Another woman has been arrested on the bus. Boycott on Monday.” And then early the next morning, the Women’s Political Council spans out across the city leaving these leaflets all over town. So, really it’s the Women’s Political council that really gets the Boycott going.

Hagopian: That’s beautiful. I think that most of us have learned something about the Bus Boycott, to some degree. If there’s more specifically about the Boycott that you want to say, you can throw that in, but what I’m really fascinated with, and I’ve learned so much from your work about it, is after the successful boycott that took a year but ultimately was able to integrate the bus system, Rosa, as you said, is out of work. She can’t get a job because of her courageous stand. She’s a working class Black woman that doesn’t have money and needs to find a way to make a living, and she and her husband move north. Reading about their life in Detroit was just absolutely fascinating to me, and I hope you can illuminate Rosa’s life after the Boycott and her involvement in the Black Power movement in the north. Because I think that that’s something that’s been systematically hidden from most students in school.

Theoharis: Like Jesse said, Rosa Parks and Raymond Parks lose their jobs weeks into the boycott, and they never find steady work in Montgomery ever again. The boycott thrusts them into very deep poverty. Even after the boycotts, they’re getting death threats. Her brother had moved to Detroit about a decade earlier so they decided to leave Montgomery, finally. They just can’t make it so they moved to Detroit.

Now, if you ever heard that Rosa Parks lived in Detroit, it tends to be talked about as the last sentence in her biography. “Then she moved to Detroit” and then, implicitly, she lived happily ever after. I think this really misses the second half of her life. Rosa Parks will spend more of her life fighting the racism of the North than she spends in Montgomery. She will spend 40 more years in what she called “the northern Promised Land that wasn’t.” She says there was thankfully not the public signs of segregation like she had seen in Montgomery. But the systems of segregation in housing and schooling, police brutality, job discrimination, that they leave in Montgomery, they find again in Detroit.

So she’s going to spend the second half of her life challenging that, fighting that, over the next couple of decades, as Black Power starts to grow, in and alongside the Black Power movement. Rosa Parks’ personal hero was Malcolm X. She loved King and she loved Malcolm X. She really admired the way that Malcolm X spoke to and challenged liberal racism, particularly in the North, absolutely active in our movement around Reparations and around police brutality. She took part in a peaceful vigil 1967, trying to hold the police [responsible] for the killing of three teenagers. During the 1967 uprising, she visited the Black Panther school. She was active in the campaign for Shirley Chisholm for president, and electing other Black people to office.

She was working locally. In 1964, she volunteered on an upstart campaign for a young radical lawyer who was running for Congress, that’s a young John Conyers. She helped Conyers win the primary by about 40 votes because she got King to come to Detroit on Conyers’ behalf, and so Conyers hired her in 1965 to be work in his Detroit office. This is her first paid political position. She’s been an activist for more than two decades at this point. She will also be doing a lot of on-the-ground work around public housing, around welfare, around job discrimination in Detroit, around police brutality in Detroit, working on behalf of prisoners.

She does a lot of prisoner defense work during the Black Power movement. She works on [the campaigns for] Angela Davis, the Wilmington Ten, and to free Joan Little. She just keeps going and going.

She also had a global vision. She was an early opponent of the war in Vietnam. She was active in the divestment movement in South Africa. She was critical of U.S. involvement in Central America in the 1980s. She kept going to the end of her life. She was saying, “The movement’s not over. There’s so much more work to be done.” And yet, I think often the way we tell the story of Rosa Parks is a story of progress, as a kind of happy ending. She sits down, then we boycott the buses, and then it’s over, while the actual Rosa Parks says it’s not over. And I think that that’s really one of the lessons we can take from her, that year after year, decade after decade, she keeps going and pressing for justice on a whole variety of different issues.

Hagopian: Thank you so much for sharing all that history. There are so many ways that we can apply that to thinking about the struggles that we need to engage in today to defend the most vulnerable from COVID-19. The kind of shock doctrine moment we’re in, as Naomi Klein has called it, where they’re trying to take advantage of this crisis, and it’s going to hurt so many working class people, people of color and Black communities across the country. We desperately need a new uprising, and the lessons you have shared with us today, I think, help reveal some truths that can help guide that struggle.

We’re going to pose some of these questions to Jeanne that you all came up with in your little classrooms just now. In group one, somebody wrote, “The fact that Rosa Parks was able to work with Martin Luther King and also Malcolm X breaks down the idea that the two are opposites.” I’m hoping, Jeamne, that you could talk about the politics and legacy of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King?

Theoharis: I think one of the things looking at Rosa Parks’ life shows us is that she’s taking influence from all sorts of people. She loves King, she loves Ella Baker in Central Park, as we talked about a tiny bit in the beginning. But she’s also really influenced by Malcolm X. She and Malcolm X meet for the first time in 1963, because he wants to meet her. We often forget that these big figures too, they are drawing inspiration and courage from each other. So, he puts out the word in 1963 that he wants to meet her.

When I was doing interviews for my book, I talked to one of the people who helped him start the Organization of Afro-American Unity. This man, Peter Bailey, said to me that Malcolm would talk about two people in the Civil Rights Movement that he was in utter awe of, and that was Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer. I think it changes how we see all of these figures, I also think it changes how we see where the Civil Rights Movement is. I think oftentimes the Civil Rights Movement we hear about in school, whether it’s middle school or high school or even college, is in the South, when there’s movements happening all over the country, from Seattle to New York, from Washington, D.C. to Pittsburgh, Chicago to Kansas City. So, really getting to grapple with that I think forces us to see that the race problem in this country is not a Southern problem. It’s not an aberration. It’s sewn into American politics and the economy, and therefore we see somebody like Rosa Parks, again, working on issues of poverty — she wrote, she will go to D.C. in the summer of 1960 to help keep going the Poor People’s Campaign that people were working on, and King was working on when he was assassinated, and she will join Coretta Scott King at the Solidarity Day of the Poor People’s Campaign to speak out on the interconnectedness of race and poverty and militarism in this country.

Hagopian: Yes, absolutely. Such important lessons for us to continue today. In group three, they wanted more information about Rosa’s work with the survivors of sexual assault. That was a fascinating part of your book and research. I hope you can share more.

Theoharis: Oprah Winfrey actually talked about it a couple of years ago and spotlighted it a bit, which was the case of a woman by the name of Recy Taylor, who was walking home from a meeting at church and was gang raped. This is in Abbeville, Alabama, and through the networks that Rosa and Raymond were in through the Scottsboro case they came to hear about what had happened to Recy Taylor, and [Rosa] goes down to investigate. They, along with people across the country, build the movement to try to get justice for Recy Taylor, to try to get an indictment of the men who raped her. There’s never an indictment. For a bit of time, E. D. Nixon and Rosa Parks help Recy Taylor come to Montgomery, because she’s not safe and she and her family are not safe there.

Another case in Montgomery is the case of a woman named Gertrude Perkins. They tried to get justice for her. She was also a raped. So, there are a number of these cases where they’re trying to make the law be receptive and protective of Black lives. Again, over and over, it’s very difficult, even after she gets to Detroit, people know the Free Joan Little movement. Joan Little was a woman who was in police custody and her jailer raped her and forced her to give him oral sex. In response, Joan Little grabbed the weapon from him and ends up killing her jailer. So a movement actually grows in this country in the early 1970s to protect Joan Little, and Rosa Parks is one of the founders of the Free Joan Little movement in Detroit, to basically assert the right of self-defense, even for someone in jail against her jailer raping her. Rosa Parks will do this again and again in terms of trying to protect women from sexual violence.

Hagopian: Such an important part of her legacy. In a society today where one in three women report having faced sexual assault, it’s important to understand the intersections of the Cvil Rights Movement and movements to defend women from sexual assault. So thank you for sharing that.

There’s maybe time for a last question. Group three was wanting more information about Rosa’s work with the NAACP Youth Council. Also, somebody asked a question about if other people also refused to give up their seats. Why does she get so much attention? I think having people understand her relationship with Claudette Colvin a little bit more, because oftentimes they’re juxtaposed with each other and people sometimes say, “Well, Claudette took a seat first, and we should be celebrating her instead.” I wonder if you could comment on her relationship with the Youth Council and Claudette Colvin?

Theoharis: I think there’s two points here. First, over her whole life you see Rosa Parks really putting her greatest hope in young people — really, I think many times feeling like her peers, her generation, weren’t fighting hard enough — and really seeing young people being the ones to put the issue forward. And that’s true of our Youth Council in Montgomery, that’s true of all the young Black Power people she was working with in Detroit, that she’s willing to also let young people lead. I think this makes her, in my opinion, really impressive in that she’s also working with lots of youth movements, not like she knows the way to do it, but in many ways letting them wait.

Like you were saying, I think there’s been this dangerous tendency to pit Claudette Colvin against Rosa Parks, and I think it misses both how movements happen — movements don’t happen on the first case of injustice, or even the third case of injustice. Mike Brown is not the first person to be killed by police in Missouri. So first, I don’t think we necessarily would have seen the reaction to Rosa Parks’s arrest had Claudette Colvin not done what she did nine months earlier, had Mary Louise Smith not done what she did two months before. People get to a breaking point.

Another thing that I really draw from Rosa Parks is this sense of the moment that things are going to change, if we look at the span of Rosa Parks’ life she tries so many things, she does them over and over and over, and there is a moment — and this is the moment that history shifts. But I think the lesson we learned from her is that you’re not going to know that moment until a long, long, long, long, long, long time after it’s happened. She talks about finding her arrest annoying and inconvenient, and I think what we hear in that is that she doesn’t think this is the beginning of something glorious. She thinks, “Now I’ve got myself arrested and I have stuff to do this week.” She was planning this workshop for her Youth Council that weekend and she was mad that she got herself arrested. She had work to do that night. So, I think part of what I draw in terms of really learning from her is that sense that you aren’t going to recognize the moment, that you have to act without being able to recognize it. And then things do change. But there’s no lightning bolt.

Hagopian: We face this unprecedented crisis in health care right now; masks are running out around the country in hospitals for our health care workers. I think that our government, from the White House on down, neglected so many people in this moment. But, I think this crisis also reveals the broader crises that have been ongoing in our society, the homeless crisis, the crisis of low wages, the crisis of racism, and state-sanctioned violence in communities of color, that are exacerbated by this outbreak of COVID-19. Any lessons and thoughts that you have about Rosa Parks’ legacy for helping us build a more just society today?

Theoharis: To me, one of the greatest lessons I take from her is the ability to just end up, that she believes that you have to dissent even if you don’t know what that dissent is going to do. Even if you think that you can’t see any possibility for change, right? There are so many moments in her life where she’s acting, not knowing what that action is ever going to do. And that’s really the thing I take from her is the ability, again, to act and act again and act again, believing that there is a line, and that that line of justice is too important to not mark it. But also that we’re not going to necessarily be able to see where we’re going. That we have to be able to act anyways. I think that’s a really profound lesson that I take from her is the ability to say, “This is wrong and I’m going to challenge it. I might not know where that challenge might go, I might not see change in my lifetime, but I’m going to still do it.” I think that’s one of the greatest lessons that I take from her, both in this unprecedented moment we’re living in and going forward.

Hagopian: That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that. Thanks for your commitment to learning and teaching a people’s history, and to our special guest historian, Jeanne Theoharis, for launching this series.

While this transcript was edited, there may be minor errors or typos — if you notice something you believe to be incorrect please contact us at zep@zinnedproject.org.

Jesse Hagopian: It’s really good to be in this space with you all to talk about such an important history today. I’m happy today to be in conversation with guest historian Jeanne Theoharis. Her book, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of the Civil Rights Movement, won the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library award for nonfiction. Her other book that we’ll be focusing on today is The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, and that won the 2014 NAACP Image Award, as well as the 2013 Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. I’m really excited to be in conversation with Jeanne Theoharis today.

Before I begin this dialogue with Professor Theoharis I just want to say a word about how I met Professor Theoharis, because it was an incredible experience. She contacted me about wanting to be in touch with the Black Student Union at the high school that I teach at because she wanted to get their feedback and input on how to translate her book, The Rebellious Life of Miss Rosa Parks, into a young adult version. And she actually wanted to hear from young adults, which says a lot about her approach to history and about how to do that. We had the unbelievable opportunity to read the book together with the Black Student Union and to be in dialogue, chapter by chapter, with Professor Theoharis. The students were just thrilled that they were able to give input about the key sections that should be included in the young adult version and insights about how to frame different aspects of Rosa Parks’ life. That experience brought us together and led us to this course today. I’m really excited to jump into the conversation and I want to welcome Jeanne Theoharis. Thanks for being here with us.

Jeanne Theoharis: Yeah, this is so fun to be here with everyone, obviously, in this weird time of sort of being home, but also getting to learn new things and to experience community in different ways.

Hagopian: Absolutely, yes. And thanks for reaching out and wanting to offer this service, because I think we’re going to learn a bit about the Rosa Parks you never learned in school. And now this quarantine classroom will give us the opportunity.

I wanted to just jump into the questions now, and I want to start with something that you wrote in the introduction to your book. My son actually stole the bookmark out of the book just now, but basically, it’s the part where you describe how she’s remembered today. This is right after Rosa Parks died, and it’s described by The New York Times as the quote,

accidental matriarch of the Civil Rights Movement. The Rosa Parks who surfaced in the deluge of public commentary was in nearly every account characterized as quiet, humble, dignified, and soft spoken. She was not angry, and never raised her voice, ‘never raised her voice’. Her public contribution as the mother of the movement was repeatedly defined by one solitary act on the bus on a long ago December day, and linked to her quietness, held up as the national heroine but stripped off her lifelong history of activism and anger at American injustice. The Parks who emerged was the self-sacrificing mother figure for a nation who would use her death for a ritual of national redemption.

I just think that’s such a powerful passage, and I wonder if you could talk about both what’s wrong with how most people learn Rosa Parks, but then I also wonder if you could comment on why it is that we learn this myth, this master narrative about her life?

Theoharis: I assume everybody on this call has heard about Rosa Parks, had some story of Rosa Parks in their schooling, oftentimes in their elementary schooling. Part of how I began this journey in terms of writing about her was realizing that, on the one hand, she’s one of the most honored Americans today. In fact, in a survey done of high school students, the two most commonly famous Americans that high school students pick today, other than a president, are Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. And yet the way that she’s talked about, the way that she’s celebrated, is reduced to one day on the bus. So you don’t get a sense. . . 

My book is called The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, and that’s taken from a quote from Rosa Parks where she describes herself as having a life history of being rebellious. Except that’s not how we learned about her. We learned about her as kind of a one note wonder: She walks into history and she makes this courageous stand on the bus and then she walks off. While the actual Rosa Parks had been an activist for two decades before her bus stand and would continue on for like forty years after. But that’s not how we learn about her, and that’s typically not how we understand her. I think Rosa Parks was certainly a shy person, but I think part of the way we honor her myth is that you can be shy and militant. You can be shy and fierce. You can speak softly and be angry.

Part of how we tend to honor her I think is about making ourselves feel good as a country in terms of like, we had this problem and here Rosa Parks sat down on the bus, then she galvanized this movement, then it has a happy ending, and now we’re done. So, I think partly we learn about her in a way that celebrates American progress. I think partly we learn about her like she’s a poster for Black History Month. It’s like she becomes just a name and a face, and the notion that she has this whole rich history is somehow seen as extra. We don’t have to learn about that. I mean, again, I think one of the things that I’ve been thinking about over the past few years is the ways that we honor the Civil Rights Movement, often it’s a lot about celebrating this country in the present and doesn’t actually take seriously both how hard and how long the Civil Rights Movement was. But also that somebody like Rosa Parks, to the end of her life, is saying, “It’s not over. There’s so much more work to be done.” Except the way we tend to package up the Civil Rights Movement puts it in a box.

Hagopian: That’s right. I really think that’s such an important lesson to understand, the way that they are using her legacy to try to celebrate America, that we have made so much progress and really gloss over her fierce attack on injustice in America. The other thing that really stuck out to me, what you just said is about that, you can be shy and be fierce. Working with my students last year, I really appreciated that you were able to draw that lesson out for my students in the Black Student Union, because there were a couple of Black students, especially a couple of my Black young women, who are shy and weren’t the most outspoken publicly. But they gained so much courage from going through those lessons, and I’ve seen them in the last year just really blossom into some incredible activists. So, I just want to thank you for helping draw those lessons out.

But, now that we have a basic understanding that she was not just this tired seamstress, and we know that that’s incorrect, can you tell us more about her lifelong commitment to activism and her life before the Montgomery Bus Boycott?

Theoharis: I think we have to start with her as a child. In some sense, she gets this feisty spirit at home from her grandfather and her mother. Her grandfather was a supporter of pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. One of her earliest memories, she’s six, it’s after World War I, and there’s this uptick of white violence after World War I, as Black soldiers come home, to put Black people back in their place. “Don’t get any big ideas, even though you fought in the war, you’re not going to get any kind of equality at home.” So there’s all this Klan violence. They live in Pine Level, Alabama, and her grandfather will sit out at night with his shotgun to protect their home. Six year old Rosa convinces him to let her sit vigil with him because she wants to see him shoot a “Ku Kluxer.” So, in some sense, she gets this spirit at home. She’s shy, but again, from a very young age she has a feisty spirit.

One time she and her younger brother Sylvester, they’re getting bullied by this white bully and finally she just gets fed up with it. She picks up a brick and threatens this white kid back, and the white kid goes away. She comes home and she tells her grandmother and her grandmother is furious. And Rosa McCauley — that was her name at the time — she’s so surprised. She’s like a preteen, and her grandma is so mad at her. Her grandma’s like, “You’re going to be lynched before you’re grown. You can’t talk like that and you can’t act like that.” Then this young Rosa says, “I would rather be lynched than say I didn’t like it.” So you see the spirit, but it also worries her family.

But I think that spirit really turns a corner when she falls in love with a man by the name of Raymond Parks. Raymond Parks, in 1931, he was working on the Scottsboro case. The Scottsboro case, if people don’t know, is nine young men who are arrested riding a train for free, except when they’re being arrested two white women are discovered in a train car with them, and so that charge quickly changes to rape. Those nine young men, ages 12 to 19, are arrested, tried, and all but the youngest sentenced to death. This is in 1931. So the movement grows in Alabama to try to protect and defend these young men from being executed, and one of the local activists working on that is Raymond Parks. He’s doing that when she meets him and she talks about how he’s the first real activist she ever met. It just opens a new world for her.

Hagopian: That was one of the biggest international campaigns against racism at the time, wasn’t it?

Theoharis: Yeah, and they build a movement both across the country and internationally. And it’s really dangerous. Raymond talks about how they didn’t even use their first names; they all went by the name Larry so that they didn’t even know each other’s names. She starts to work on it. They got married a year later, in 1932. She says she remembers late night meetings, guns all over the table, like even having a meeting is dangerous. They would develop a set of signals, like they would tie their shoes a certain way to signal what time the meeting was. So it’s very dangerous work. In the first years of their marriage, he’s the more public activist and she’s more behind the scenes. That’s going to change and really reverse, and he will become more behind the scenes and she’ll become a more public activist. But, at the heart of their relationship, again, is this shared commitment to justice and to activism.

Hagopian: Right on. Well, one thing I hope that you can talk a little bit more about today as well is that for the boycott Rosa went to the Highlander Folk School, the Social Justice Education Center. There she met one of my heroes, Septima Clark, who is this amazing teacher. As a teacher myself, I’ve taken great inspiration from her vision of education being so much more than just rote memorization of facts, about how education can be tied to struggles for social justice and liberation. Her legacy is incredible. People should read Freedom’s Teacher about Septima Clark. We could do a whole other session on her at some point. But, could you talk about what Septima Clark and the Highlander Folk School meant to Rosa Parks in the period just preceding this monumental boycott.

Theoharis: Just to back up a tiny bit, by the 1940s, Rosa Parks wanted to become even more active so she went to a local NAACP meeting because she wanted to register to vote. She recalled that her brothers served in World War II and yet most Black people couldn’t vote at home. That’s galling to her. So she makes it known that she wants to vote. One of Montgomery’s most militant activists, a man by the name of E. D. Nixon came by her apartment to bring her the materials and that began a partnership that’s going to change the face of American history, because the two of them are going to set about to really transform the Montgomery NAACP into a more activist chapter. He will run for branch president a couple years later, and so they will be working on issues of voter registration, they will be working on issues of what we will call criminal justice issues, both trying to find and defend particularly Black men being wrongfully accused of crimes, and also trying to use the law to get justice for Black people who have been victims of white brutality or white violence, or in many cases rape by white people. They’re working on this for years and have very little success. She talks about how hard it is, that you have to dissent, but how few people that were doing it, how dangerous it was. Her spirit is kind of just really in trouble.

She’s also working full time at a department store as an assistant tailor, but she’s also sewing on the side for one of Montgomery’s few white families that are civil rights activists, and that’s Virginia and Clifford Durr. Virginia Durr is affiliated with Highlander Folk School, and Highlander Folk School in the summer of 1955 is going to have a workshop for people interested in implementing desegregation. Where we are in history, we had Brown in 1954, but as they often don’t teach in school, even though the Supreme Court decided separate cannot be equal, that segregation is illegal, they actually put off the implementation of how it’s going to happen for a year to take more testimony. Then the Supreme Court came back in 1955 and put no timetable on it. They take the teeth out of it. So, people like the activists of Highlander know there’s going to be no implementation unless civil rights activists themselves push for it, so they’re holding a workshop that summer to talk about and strategize about implementing desegregation. And Virginia Durr recommends Rosa Parks for a scholarship to go to Highlander that summer.

Parks talks about how low her spirits are when she gets there, how nervous she is, how bitter she is. We would call it burned out. And she’s so in awe of Septima Clark. She gets to Highlander and Septima Clark is leading the workshop. Septima Clark had just gotten fired in South Carolina. Basically, they passed a law in a way targeting the NAACP, that you can’t be a member of the NAACP and continue to be a teacher. And September Clark refused to give up her membership and was fired after 40 years of teaching. She loses her pension. And Rosa Parks is just amazed at the kind of calmness and strength that Septima Clark has. And she’s super envious. She talks about just wanting to be like Septima Clark, and how much that workshop really lifted her spirits. It’s a workshop that’s half Black, half white. She says it’s one of the first times she feels like she can speak her mind in front of white people. She loves that she wakes up in the morning and she smells the coffee and she thinks to herself white people are making this for me. Just she loves that. But still, after the two weeks, at the end of the day they do a go round, as at any organizer training school, and they say, “What do you do when you go home?” They get to Rosa Parks and she says, “There’s never going to be a mass movement in Montgomery.” She didn’t say, “I’m going to launch the modern Civil Rights Movement.”

She really says, “Montgomery is the cradle of the Confederacy and white resistance is too great. Black people aren’t going to fight. We won’t stick together.” So she says, “But I’m going to go home and I’m going to continue to work with the young people” that she is putting her greatest stock in. She just founded the Youth Branch of the NAACP the previous year, and it’s in these young people that she sees the greatest hope for change and energy and militancy. She’s feeling like her peers are too complacent, so she leaves Highlander saying, “That’s where I’m going to put my energies.” And no, she doesn’t say, “I’m going to launch the modern Civil Rights Movement.” But she’s trying to get them to have protests at the downtown library because Black people can’t take out books at the downtown library, only at the colored branch. So she’s encouraging them to take more and more stands against segregation, and in many ways that spirit is coming, it’s really lifted at Highlander.

Hagopian: Yeah. There was a poll that we just did on this platform, and it showed that over half of people on this current call hadn’t learned anything about Rosa Parks in school other than the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So, that’s the one thing that people do get to learn about. I think they sometimes get mistaught also about the boycott itself. I wonder if you could say just a few short words on the boycott, because I think it’s the thing that people are most familiar with, and I want us to move to what her life was after the boycott because that’s the part that has fascinated me the most. But, can you talk about the role of women in organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott that can often get overlooked and pushed out in master narratives of the Boycott?

Theoharis: So, the biggest myth about the Boycott is that it’s all about walking. You don’t sustain a year long boycott just by walking, you sustain it by an incredibly well-organized carpool system that they develop, where they set up 40 pick-up stations all across the city where you can get a ride. If you need to go to the doctor, if you need to go to work, or if you need to go shopping, and at the height of this they’re giving 10 to 15,000 rides a day. It’s massive, and it’s massively well-organized. And it takes all this fundraising. So, these groups of Black women start to compete, like this friendly competition, to raise money to be able to sustain the carpool.

Rosa Parks gets fired from her job five weeks into the boycott. She’ll spend most of the year traveling, raising money for the boycott. So, if you learn one thing about the boycott today, the thing you should understand is that they sustain it through this incredible organization and this incredible carpool system. They’re getting tickets; basically the police sit outside each station and give ticket after ticket after ticket after ticket. People will get dozens of tickets, and they change the pick-up stations around to get away from the police. So, it’s massively harassed, but they keep it going for 382 days.

Hagopian: Yeah. And the role of Jo Ann Robinson and the women?

Theoharis: Basically, late the night that Rosa Parks gets arrested, she decides she’s going to go forward with a legal case. She calls a young Black lawyer in town by the name of Fred Gray to ask him — he’s a friend — will he be her lawyer. He says yes. And even later that night, he calls Jo Ann Robinson and Jo Ann Robinson is the head of a Black women’s political group called the Women’s Political Council. It is late that night, this is still December 1, 1955, that the Women’s Political Council decides to call for a one day boycott on Monday, which is the day that Rosa Parks is going to be arraigned in court. So literally in the middle of the night, Jo Ann Robinson, who is a professor at Alabama State College, with the help of two students basically sneaks into the college in the middle of the night and runs off 35,000 leaflets that say, “Another woman has been arrested on the bus. Boycott on Monday.” Then, at like 6 am, the women of the Women’s Political Council meet her, get the leaflets, and they fan out all over the city leaving those leaflets in barber shops, at schools, and churches, and stores to blanket the Black community about this plan for Monday.

Hagopian: I think that’s so important for everyone here to understand, because I think the way a lot of us were taught about Rosa Parks was that she, on December 1, 1955, was tired and one day refused to get up from her seat on a segregated bus, she gets arrested, and then the boycott happens. Then it’s turned over to the men, too. Then it’s Martin Luther King and the other men who then use that one action to actually build the Civil Rights Movement. But to learn that it was the Women’s Political Council and Jo Ann Robinson and this whole legacy of political women, I think, needs to be reinserted into the story. So thank you for that.

I want to move to what I think is probably the most interesting part of Rosa Parks’ life, which I’d realized I’d never thought to ask before I read your book, which is what happened to Rosa Parks after the boycott. Learning that she moved to the north, that she moved to Detroit, and she became involved with the Black Power movement just blew my mind. This is not the image that we’re often taught of her, and I hope you can share more of your insights about how she came to be involved with Black Power activists and what kind of efforts she was a part of.

Theoharis: So, basically she loses her job during the boycott, Raymond loses his job, and they never find steady work again. Even after the boycott is successful they continue to get death threats. So, in 1957, eight months after the boycott ends, they are forced to leave Montgomery and they end up in Detroit, where her brother is. And she will spend the second half of her life in Detroit.

I think sometimes when we’re taught Rosa Parks, we’re taught that she’s some old lady, right? She makes her bus stand at 42 and she lives to the age of 92. So, she spends more than half her life in the north. Except that we don’t really know that. And so, just like she’d done in Montgomery, she gets to Detroit and she describes Detroit as “the northern Promised Land that wasn’t.” This is no Promised Land. Thankfully, some of the public signs of segregation, like on buses or water fountains, are gone. But the systems of segregation in schooling, in housing, in job discrimination, and police brutality that they leave in Montgomery, they find again in Detroit. She says they don’t find too much difference in those things, so she sets about to challenge the racism of the North.

She’s doing a whole bunch of stuff. One of the things that she does is she starts to work on the campaign of an upstart civil rights lawyer, a young John Conyers. It’s a very crowded primary, he’s this radical civil rights lawyer, he’s not favored to win, and she’s volunteering on his campaign. She gets King to come to Detroit on his behalf, even though King’s not doing this, but he can’t say no to Rosa Parks. This is how John Conyers gets elected to Congress: With very much credit to Rosa Parks, he wins the primary by literally forty votes, and then he wins the general. One of the first things Conyers does is he hires Rosa Parks to work in his Detroit office. This is 1965, doing constituent work. This is her first paid political position. She’s been an activist now for more than twenty years and it’s the first time she’s ever gotten paid. She’s on the ground doing constituent work for Conyers as the Black Power movement both unfolds in the city and unfolds across the country. So she’s involved in all sorts of things.

In order to tell the second half of the story, I had to do a lot of interviews, because even though Rosa Parks was interviewed a lot, they never talked about the second half of her life. They would just talk about Montgomery, not Detroit. I talked to lots of Black Power people and they would say she was everywhere. She went to all sorts of things about political prisoners, and she was active on all sorts of political prisoner campaigns, like Angela Davis, the Wilmington Ten, the RNA 11, and Joan Little. She was a firm believer in Reparations. She’s very active in the early Reparations movement. She sits on the People’s Tribunal, which is a community effort to hold the police accountable for the killing of three Black teenagers in Detroit in 1967, during the 1967 uprising. She went to the Black Power convention in Philadelphia in 1968. She went to the Gary Convention in 1972. She’s everywhere is what people said, literally person after person was just like, “She was everywhere.”

And her personal hero was Malcolm X. She deeply admired King, loved King. Claudia Colvin says that Rosa Parks is the only adult who keeps up with her that summer. One of the things about Rosa Parks is that she forces us to see that it doesn’t have to be an either/or. It doesn’t have to be King or Malcolm. It doesn’t have to be. She loved and worked with King; she loved and worked with Malcolm; she loved and worked with Imari Obadele of the RNA; she loved and worked with Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and Queen Mother Moore. I mean, her political universe was huge and she wasn’t about having to choose. I think sometimes the way we put people in boxes, it’s like you’re either with Malcolm or you’re with King, and that was not it.

And Malcolm X really, really admired her. When I was doing interviews for the book I talked to Peter Bailey, one of the people who helped Malcolm start the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Mr. Bailey said to me, “There were two people that Malcolm X talked about in awe in the Civil Rights Movement, and that was Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks.” They actually met for the first time in 1963, because Malcolm X put out the word that he wanted to meet her. Understanding that people like Malcolm X needed activists, that activists need activists, right? Courage doesn’t just exist on its own. He wants to meet her because he’s drawing sustenance from her. And the last time she actually sees him is a week before he’s assassinated. She gets him to sign her program. It’s kind of a fangirl moment. So, again, just thinking about what they drew from each other. 

Hagopian: Right on. Well, that is such a wonderful overview of her life and legacy, politics and struggle. 

[breakout rooms]

We just have a few minutes left here, but I wanted to end by asking Professor Theoharis to comment on what this legacy of Rosa Parks means for us today in general, and also in this moment, as we’re dealing with a new crisis of health with the coronavirus and how we can use these lessons to build a more socially just future.

Theoharis: A couple of things, just as a resource for people. A couple years ago, we decided to create — for the reasons we’ve been talking about today, like so much material on Rosa Parks that’s taught in middle school and high school is just incomplete — so we created a website to help people be able to teach it better [and] for students doing projects. I know lots of students do like history day projects. It’s called RosaParksBiography.org. There’s like a timeline, there’s a story, there are teaching guides for teachers, there’s a whole bunch of materials — some of which we’ve talked about today, some of which we haven’t gotten a chance — there for people to draw on, if you want to. Again, if you want to be teaching into your class, or if you’re wanting to do a project on this, as a young person, as a student.

I think for me the biggest thing Rosa Parks always gives me from studying her life is both her lifelong conviction that you have to dissent, and you have to try no matter if you can see what your actions are going to do or not. She spent so many years not necessarily seeing or believing that there would be change in her lifetime. She’s just doing things. She talks again and again about both how hard it was to keep going but also just the importance of dissenting, just so people know that something is wrong, even if your dissent is not going to necessarily change things in the moment. That you have to do it anyways. I think that’s really useful, at least for me.

When she talks about that day on the bus, she has no sense that this stand that she made on December 1, 1955, unlike stands she’s made before, unlike stands other people have made before, that this stand is actually a history changing moment. But, I think what I’ve learned from her is that you don’t get to know what that history changing moment is until long after it’s happened. You have to act again and again and again and again.

Then, I think what she also shows us is that there is a moment when things do change and when things do shift, but I think a lot of what she gives me is the persistence and perseverance, that vision that you just keep going, even if you can’t see what’s going to do it to, to actually transform this injustice. That you have to just start the journey anyways. I think it’s one of the things that I really take from her life, that ability to persevere, that ability to try a bunch of things, that ability to say over and over, “If I can be helpful, I’ll come.”

So what did she do in the Black Power era? She just shows up everywhere. And, again, people just kept saying to me, they’d ask her to come to this or come to that and she’s like, “If I can be useful, I’ll come.” She just keeps showing up. And again, I think that’s a very useful thing in this moment, where I think we’re all very discouraged. It’s hard to know how to keep pressing forward and I think the spirit that she gives us, that sense that you just do it and you don’t have to be able to see where you’re going to start to do it.

Hagopian: That’s beautiful and I’m happy to be on that journey with you today, to think about continuing the struggle, even if we don’t know when the conditions will be just right for it to become a mass movement that can really transform our society and uproot racism and other forms of injustice. But, we’ve got to keep the struggle going. And I’m glad for the inspiration that you shared with us today, Jeanne.

Theoharis: Thank you. Thank you, Deborah. Thank you so much.

Hagopian: There was one question in the chat, particularly for young people. One of the questions posed was, “Could Jeanne please talk about finding your passion for your subject, because it would help for young people as they think about how to develop and follow their passions?”

Theoharis: I mean, partly I got interested in Rosa Parks around this question of how she was remembered. I actually started this project after she died, thinking about the way she was being honored. And it was this epic honor — Rosa Parks was the first woman and the first civilian to ever get this honor, her coffin laid in the U.S. Capitol. Forty thousand Americans came to pay tribute to her and President Bush laid a wreath on her coffin. This was an unprecedented honor. Yet who she was and how she was being honored seemed to me like it was getting kind of smaller and smaller, even though this was an amazing thing. So, part of how my passion for this started was in thinking about why we get these myths that we get. Why do we get this version of Rosa Parks as this quiet, tired version of Rosa Parks? Who or what benefits from that? So, to me, one of the ways that I’ve often found my passion for things is thinking about the ways that history is misrepresented and why. A More Beautiful and Terrible History, which Jesse was just mentioning, is a lot about thinking about that. Why do we get these versions and what do they do? What does it mean to have a fuller history? How does that change what we can imagine is possible and what kind of change we can imagine? So, that’s sort of how I got started with this.

Hagopian: Yeah. There’s a question in the chat box as well that says, “Is there a single news report that was the origin of Rosa Parks as a tired and a political myth?”

Theoharis: Now, in many ways, it does start during the boycott itself. We have to remember, this is 1955, 1956, we’re in the midst of the Cold War. And one of the ways that the Civil Rights Movement is targeted in the 1950s is that they’re seen as outside agitators. All of these rumors fly through Montgomery’s white community after she’s arrested, that she’s an NAACP plant; that she’s a Communist plant; that she doesn’t even live in Montgomery; that she’s Mexican; that she has a car; all these rumors. But at the base of these rumors is this idea that she’s somehow an outsider, that this is not an organic, indigenous protest. So, one of the things that you see is Black leaders in Montgomery, the Black press, even Rosa Parks herself, start to talk about her as a good Christian seamstress. That became the image of her, in part to keep the movement safe, because, again, this is the Cold War and these kinds of rumors can be so very dangerous in terms of undercutting movements before this.

So some of the myth starts then and just takes on a life of its own. This longer political history that she has sort of fades from view, even though it’s a lot of why people galvanize behind her, partly why people rise up after she’s arrested, is there’s an accumulation of outrageous, an accumulation of these injustices. But part of it is that they know that she’s brave, they trust that she won’t flinch under the pressure. And in many ways, if you’re going to build a movement around somebody’s case, you have to trust that they won’t flinch. It’s interesting that her politics and community work are partly why people trust her, but then they also go to the background, even in the boycott itself.

Hagopian: Right. And that leads me to another question about Claudette Colvin, because I think her story is increasingly reaching people. It’s important to understand that there were acts of civil disobedience on the bus before Rosa Parks. But why didn’t those lead to the same kind of boycott? Like you’ve said before, sometimes Claudette Colvin has been pitted against Rosa Parks, so help us understand her story as well.

Theoharis: I think many of us know this, but Claudette Colvin is a 15-year-old, who, eight months before Rosa Parks is arrested, Colvin is arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. One thing about Colvin, as with Parks, Colvin also has politics that I think often are erased from the story. Colvin had been studying segregation in school, studying civil rights, and had  come into political sensibility in school. She had been politicized by a case of one of her classmates, a young man by the name of Jeremiah Reeves, a 16-year-old in Montgomery who was falsely accused of rape. As a 16-year-old, he was given a death sentence. People organized and fought and tried to protect him from being executed. They succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to overturn his first conviction because it was an all-white jury. A second all-white jury convicts Reeves, and when Reeves turns 22 he is executed. The case of Jeremiah Reeves totally guts Rosa Parks, and it’s also very politicizing for Colvin.

So, Colvin has politics, and I think we want to see that. She’s arrested, and Montgomery’s Black community really is outraged by Colvin’s arrest. People start to organize and a couple of things happen. First, the city makes promises it doesn’t keep in terms of better treatment on the bus. Second, the judge in Colvin’s case actually does this very tricky thing which is that Colvin is actually arrested on three charges: a segregation charge, a disturbing the peace charge, and an assaulting an officer charge. And the judge throws out the segregation charge and throws out the disturbing the peace charge, so Colvin actually is only [charged] with assaulting an officer, which makes it much harder to build a legal case around Colvin. Then, third, with Colvin I think we see today as well that support for Colvin weakens among many kinds of adults. I think that there’s a way that sometimes adults don’t trust young people and don’t trust youth activism. I think we see that in Colvin’s case, as well.

But that’s not true of Rosa Parks. So, Rosa Parks gets Colvin very involved in her Youth Council. Colvin will talk about how Parks is actually really one of the only adults who stays in touch with her that summer. I think sometimes the way that Colvin is pitted against Parks makes it seem like it contributes to this newer myth of Rosa Parks as some sort of middle class respectability politics holding lady, and I think that doesn’t actually do justice. Rosa Parks is a working class woman. She’s living in the projects when she makes her bus stand. So this misses Rosa Parks’ actual life, but it also misses the ways that Rosa Parks is working with Colvin — fundraisers for her case, but also trying to nurture Colvin’s political sensibility.

The final thing I would say about Colvin is that what actually desegregated Montgomery’s buses is a federal court case that they filed three months into the boycott. That federal case has four women on it, two of whom are teenagers, one of whom is Claudette Colvin. It’s that case that goes to the Supreme Court, and it’s that case that leads to the desegregation of Montgomery buses. So Colvin plays this really important second role, which is in this federal case. And I think we often miss that about Colvin. They had wanted a man to be on that case; they wanted a minister to be on that case, but no minister was willing to do so. So, it’s really interesting that it’s four women, two of whom are teenagers, who summon the courage to do this.

Hagopian: Absolutely. Thank you for that. There’s a question in the chat box about how we live in this legacy of Rosa Parks right now, given the social distancing. It says so much of the language of activism is about showing up in the activist communities, and people are struggling right now with the fact that there is so much going on that requires a response. And there are very few ways to show up in a visible way. What do you think Rosa Parks would be doing from home right now if she was still here to lead? What would she ask of us in this unprecedented time? What does showing up look like right now?

I just wanted to share a recent experience that I had here in Seattle. We were told by the Seattle school district that all educators in Seattle could be compelled to go do childcare, and for no extra pay and no proper protective equipment. And they could just choose whoever they want and put them in. We were able to organize a Zoom call and hold our monthly union meeting and actually go through why we thought that actually child care should be provided by the unionized childcare workers who are going to lose a lot of work. This was an opportunity that they could get their work if they got the proper hazard pay and medical equipment they needed. So, the district backed down and we were able to have a union victory. And this time when we weren’t able to actually march together, but we could still come together and issue our statements about what would be best for working people right now. I’ve seen examples of people doing protests in cars, surrounding different buildings, and honking their horns. At the Immigration Detention Center here in northwest Tacoma there was a protest from the cars. So, there’s some interesting ways I’ve seen, but what do you think, Jeanne?

Theoharis: Rosa Parks believed in the power of a single person, the power of a single voice. So, I think part of what I’m hearing in the question is that it’s so hard to even know where to start. I think one of the things we take from her is that we just start somewhere, right? You’re calling either your congressional representatives or your local representatives. There are so many issues, from the local to the federal, that I think what she would be doing is she would start somewhere. If you’re making calls, you’re using social media, or, as Jesse was saying, organizing and having a meeting on Zoom. These various protests outside of prisons and detention centers? I think, to me, what she would say is that there’s so many things that are wrong, that there’s this temptation to just be like, “I don’t know where to start” And so don’t start. I think what she would say is that starting anywhere is a good place to start. That’s what I take from her. Even if it’s just calling your state representative, your mayor, your congressman, even once a day. Doing something I think would be part of what she gives us.

Hagopian: Absolutely. Well, I think that’s a good place to wrap up. I hope people will take that spirit with them, and I also hope that you will join us for the next two Fridays to learn so many other lessons from this crucial time period and be with us in those dialogues. So, thank you to everybody for coming together in community and discussing this legacy of Rosa Parks, and I look forward to seeing you all in the coming weeks. Jeanne, thank you so much. It was so good to be together.

While this transcript was edited, there may be minor errors or typos — if you notice something you believe to be incorrect please contact us at zep@zinnedproject.org.