|
Douglas Brinkley,
author of
Rosa
Parks
________________________________________
Rosa Parks, an African American seamstress in 1955 Alabama, had no idea she
was changing history when, work-weary, she refused to surrender her seat
to a white passenger on a segregated bus. Now she is immortalized for
the defiance that sent her to jail and triggered a bus boycott that catapulted
Martin Luther King, Jr., into the national spotlight. Who was she,
before and after her historic act?*
Douglas Brinkley, a familiar and respected television commentator on a wide
range of historical, documentary, and news programs, serves as Director of
the Eisenhower Center for American Studies and is Distinguished Professor
of History at the University of New Orleans. A noted biographer and editor,
he has published major volumes on Dean Acheson, Jimmy Carter, FDR, James
Forrestal, Jean Monnet, Theodore Roosevelt and Rosa Parks.
He shares his thoughts on Rosa Parks in a February, 2003 Jerry Jazz Musician interview.
"I was determined to achieve the total freedom that our history lessons
taught us we were entitled to, no matter what the sacrifice. When
I declined to give up my seat, it was not that day, or bus, in particular.
I just wanted to be free like everybody else. I did not want
to be continually humiliated over something I had no control over: the
color of my skin."
- Rosa Parks
If You Miss Me from the Back of the Bus
 , by Betty Mae Fikes
________________________________________
JJM I enjoyed reading your biography of Rosa
Parks, and was surprised by the depth of her activism, to tell you the truth,
because where I went to school there wasn't a lot taught about her beyond
her refusal to move to the back of the bus. I was left with the impression
that she was a courageous woman who happened to be at the right place at
the right time to make a statement, but after reading your work, clearly
she was much deeper and substantially more involved in the civil rights
movement than that.
DB That's right.
| JJM You wrote, "Sometimes it seemed as
if Rosa Parks were two people: one, a traditionally submissive Negro laborer,
the other, a modern African-American woman bold enough to demand her civil
rights." Who was Rosa Parks?
DB Rosa Parks was born in a racist Tuskeegee,
Alabama community, at a time when the Jim Crow system reigned in the South
and the echoes of slavery's whip were still present, when voting rights were
denied African Americans, and where African American women were often raped
by white men with no legal repercussions against them. So, she was like so
many African American women in the South, beginning with a broken home situation,
never having any money, and not having any kind of equal access to anything.
In order to survive in that kind of climate, she had to learn to deal with
the white segregationist system. That is the side of Rosa Parks that was
always mild mannered in many ways, who, as a seamstress, needed to mind her
own business if she intended to be employed in the homes of the local whites.
The other side of Rosa Parks -- while that kindly face was put forward --
was of someone whose pot was simmering all the time. Anger filled her about
all the inequities she encountered around every bend. Eventually, on
December 1, 1955, like a volcano she erupted, and refused to move to the
back of the bus, which became the opening salvo of the civil rights movement. |
 |
E.D. Nixon and Rosa Parks
|
JJM Was she involved in the civil rights
community prior to her actions on the bus?
DB Very much so, yes. She was a secretary for the
Montgomery branch of the NAACP, and ran the office of Mr. E.D. Nixon. People
like Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP people in New York knew her for a long
time. Examples of her activism include getting thrown off a bus in
the forties, and organizing African American students to march on a public
library to allow them the freedom to check out books from a "whites only"
facility. She was going to sue the state of Alabama for the right to vote
because they kept denying it. She was constantly pushing the envelope for
equal rights for African Americans. What grounded her, and kept her two sides
together, was the African Methodist Episcopalian Church. She was a true product
of the A.M.E. church, and a devout Christian. It was from a kind of Christian
perspective that she approached civil rights. |
JJM Her husband Raymond had quite an impact
on her activism as well.
DB Raymond Parks was one of the people involved
with the Scottsboro Boys case, and he led the legal defense fund in the state
of Alabama. He was a barber, in whose shop many African Americans would meet
and read the black newspapers out of Pittsburgh and Chicago and New York.
They would talk about how to smash Jim Crow in the South. So yes, she
was politicized by her husband.
| JJM Prior to Rosa Parks' refusal to move
to the back of the bus, there was another African American woman, Claudette
Colvin, who refused to give up her seat on a bus in March of 1955. Why wasn't
that the incident that sparked the boycott?
DB Claudette Colvin was a teenaged girl,
eating a candy bar while sitting in the "whites only" section of a bus.
The bus driver barked at her in racist terms to move, but she refused.
She was arrested in front of the Dexter Avenue church, where she was
handcuffed and dragged from the bus. The national NAACP was about to make
her the prime case to challenge segregation follwing the Brown v. Topeka
ruling, but because Colvin was an unwed pregnant teenager, she ended up being
deemed an unacceptable candidate by the black leadership.
|
AP Photo/Library of Congress
|
JJM What was the immediate personal fallout to
Rosa Parks over her protests?
DB Once the bus driver, James Blake, asked her
to move and she said no, and the police took Parks to the police station,
finger printed her and put her in jail, all around Montgomery, the 50,000
African Americans were in disbelief because Parks was well known as a kind
of saintly figure in the community. Ricocheting all over town were comments
of disbelief. "They arrested Rosa Parks? How low can they get for arresting
her?" From that moment, she became the spiritual symbol of the Montgomery
bus boycott, while Dr.King became the voice. The two of them, in a kind of
collaborative fashion, ended up turning all the eyes of the world to Montgomery,
and the drama going there. The victory of the bus boycott, of course, ultimately
made Rosa Parks' a household name. Yet, during this time, she was receiving
many death threats from white supremacists, and many in the black leadership
of the Montgomery boycott were jealous of her because she was suddenly famous
and they weren't. The major television networks and newspapers wanted to
talk to Rosa Parks and not them. Thus, she felt suddenly not at home and
displaced in Montgomery, so in 1957 she left and moved to Detroit, where
her brother Sylvester worked.
|
JJM And it was in Detroit that her views
toward non-violent protest changed...
DB She always admired Dr. King for his true
belief in Gandhian principles of non-violence. But Rosa Parks, although she
seemed meek and demure, felt that if you are slapped once in your face, you
turn your cheek, and that if you are slapped again you turned your cheek
again, but if somebody slaps you a third time, you have to strike back. So,
she wasn't a pure pacifist. She didn't believe in violence for violence sake,
but believed that in order to maintain one's personal dignity and integrity,
one had to stand up for their rights.
JJM Martin Luther King, who you describe as
being forever linked to Rosa Parks, said this about her: "I'm happy it happened
to a person like Rosa Parks, for nobody can doubt the height of her character,
nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity." In the end, did
she have any regrets about being the instigator of the boycott?
|
DB Rosa Parks never coveted fame or celebrityhood,
but they came to her, and she was treated as the mother of the civil rights
movement and an icon. It is a role she was never entirely comfortable with.
On the other hand, history created this reality about her, and she ended
up carrying herself decade after decade with a great deal of poise and dignity
and courage in confronting what she considered racist affronts or inequalities
in any guise. One of the things about Rosa Parks is, because she is part
white, part Cherokee Creek Indian and part African American, she never got
hung up on "I am a black person." She is not into black politics. She was
much more into the sense of the issues of teaching tolerance concerning skin
color and religion. In those ways, she was very high minded in her
approach to global politics. It wasn't one of race versus race or screaming
at each other, it was one of tolerance.
________________________________________
Rosa
Parks
by
Douglas Brinkley
*
Douglas Brinkley and Rosa Parks
________________________________
Rosa Parks products at Amazon.com
Douglas Brinkley products at Amazon.com
_______________________________
Interview took place on February 18, 2003
*
If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with Jackie Robinson biographer Scott Simon.
*
Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
* From the publisher
|
