Profiles in Character: Rosa Parks’s Lifelong Campaign for Civil Rights

The myths surrounding America’s heroes often ignore their faults.  Washington and Jefferson, for example, were lifelong slaveholders.  Rosa Parks, in contrast, was even better than the myth surrounding her.

Most recall a middle-aged black seamstress who on December 1, 1955 refused to relinquish her seat to a white rider on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus. The resulting thirteen-month bus boycott by black riders culminated in a victorious federal court ruling striking down Montgomery’s and Alabama’s bus segregation laws. 

History casts her as a woman undertaking a single courageous act. There her story usually begins and ends.  Scant attention is paid to the impact of her life before and after that moment.  Rosa Parks deserves more credit than she already receives.  She was not the first black woman to disobey Montgomery’s bus segregation laws, but she was the first whose character and commitment made the successful struggle in that city possible.

She was not pre-chosen by the NAACP for this task.  She made her decision alone, in the moment, tired after sewing all day in the basement of the Montgomery Fair Department Store.  “When I declined to give up my seat, it was not that day, or bus, in particular,” she later said.  “I just wanted to be free like everybody else.”

If she was not pre-chosen for her role, she was prepared – by background, education and character.

Born in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1913, Rosa McCauley later said “God is everything to me,” and “from my upbringing and the Bible I learned people should stand up for their rights, just as the children of Israel stood up to the Pharaoh.”  Sitting by her grandfather as he held a shotgun should the Ku Klux Klan appear, she vowed she’d never accept “bad treatment from anybody.” As a student at the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, she learned that “I was a person with dignity and self-respect and I should not set my sights lower than anybody because I was black.”

Her husband, Raymond Parks, introduced her to civil rights activism. She admired his support of the Scottsboro Boys, African America teens falsely accused and convicted of raping two white women in 1931.  She joined the NAACP in 1943 and worked in the Montgomery chapter on voting rights and bus desegregation.   She became advisor to its Youth Group in 1949 and its efforts to desegregate the Montgomery library.

The landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation ruling and the savage murder of Emmett Till on August 13, 1955 heightened her determination to seek change.  That same month she got a scholarship to the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, a training ground for civil rights workers.  Virginia Durr, a white Montgomery civil rights advocate had recommended her: “She is very quiet, determined, brave, and frugal, not [at] all sophisticated and very churchgoing.”  “I gained strength to persevere in my work for freedom,” Parks said of that experience.  Less than four months later, she was in a Montgomery jail.

The popular story of that December day leaves out the courage she demonstrated after the fateful moment.  She was arrested, finger-printed, charged, jailed, convicted and fined.  Agreeing to become the test case civil rights leaders had long sought, she understood the possible consequences.  Her husband might be retaliated against, she might lose her job (she did) and be subjected to death threats (she was). 

Two other Montgomery women had previously been arrested on the same charge, but it was Parks’s case that was ideal because of who she was. “Since it had to happen, I’m happy it happened to a person like Rosa Parks,” Martin Luther King, Jr. would later say, “for nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity.  Nobody can doubt the height of her character.”

King was himself a young pastor in Montgomery.  When his home was bombed, her case was subsumed under a broader challenge to the constitutionality of the bus segregation laws themselves.  It was that case that led to victory.

Her story ended not in Montgomery but in Detroit, where she moved in 1957 after another death threat.  In the Motor City, she helped John Conyers, who would become one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus, successfully campaign for Congress in 1964.  She worked for him until 1988, when she turned 75.   “You could never get her to say a bad word about anybody – not even an obvious fool,” Conyers said. “She just couldn’t be negative.”

Parks also become active in the local St. Matthew’s AME Church, whose pastor, Rev. Eddie Robinson, marveled that “Fame never touched her. She was still simplicity and utter humility.”

The culminating chapter of her life was the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, which she formed with Elaine Eason Steele in 1987.  By 2000, the institute had taken more than 5,000 young people on visits to historic civil rights sites in the U.S. and Canada to learn about and hopefully continue the long march to equal rights. 

In 2013, her statue was unveiled in the U.S. Capitol.  As the Architect of the Capitol described it her “posture, along with the expression on her face, suggests inner strength, dignity, resolve and determination, all characteristic of her long-time commitment to working for civil rights.”

Photo Credit: Rosa Parks, 1955, commons.wikimedia.org