The Rebellious Life Of Mrs. Rosa Parks featuring: Distinguished Professor Jeanne Theoharis

Ciara Taylor gets into conversation with Distinguished Professor Jeanne Theoharis about the first full-length documentary on Mrs. Rosa Parks (now available on Peacock) and the book by Dr. Theoharis that serves as the basis for the film. 

Transcript

Thank you all for joining us for this week's episode of It's Kairos Time. A Kairos moment is a time when crisis and opportunity collide. The possibility for something new can emerge. The Kairos Center has been hosting this series of these 30 minute talks with our partners, collaborators and movement builders to discuss what's happening in the world and what we are doing to respond to this Kairos moment.

This episode will be reflecting on the rebellious life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, and we are joined by Dr. Jeanne Ciara dr. Theoharis is the author and co-author of 11 books and numerous articles on the civil rights and black power movements, the politics of race and education, social Welfare, the Civil Rights, and Post nine 11 America as well.

Her biography, the Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks won a 2014 NAACP Image Award, the Latia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians, and was also named one of the 25 best academic titles of 2013 By choice. Her book a more beautiful and terrible history. The uses and misuses of the Civil Rights history won the 2018 Brooklyn Public Literary Prize for nonfiction.

Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Ms. N B C, the Nation, the Atlantic Slate Salon, the Intercept. The Boston Review and the Chronicle of Higher Education, uh, she is definitely our historian of choice with the Kairos Center, and we appreciate you so much for joining Dr.

CiaraUh, my name is Sierra Taylor. I support the Kairos Center with Cultural strategy, organizing and Political Education, and so we're. Um, we were talking a little bit today about the recent experience of the Montgomery Doc Brawl, and you were just reflecting a little bit on, uh, Your knowledge of the history and also experience being in Montgomery and being on this dock and, you know, uh, just with the, the Montgomery in itself as this, uh, living testament to this very complicated history.

And so sort of pass it over to Dr. Theoharis. Um, well, thank you for having me. And probably my other big accomplishment is that I'm Reverend Liz Theoharis' sister, so for the people listening who don't already know that, um, and uh, also the rebellious life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. We have also in a young adult edition and now in a film.

And so there's, it's available in very many different ways for people to learn this history. Um, so yeah. Uh, Many people listening will probably be familiar with what happened, um, last week in early August, down on the riverfront in Montgomery. But I was thinking about, and we were talking about today in terms of both what that, the literal place of where it happened.

So, so Montgomery sits on a river and I think there's no way to understand like Montgomery centrality. Um, in the history of this country, and particularly in the 19th century, and it's, you know, it's the original kind of, uh, home of the Confederacy, the first White House of the Confederacy, um, but partly Montgomery like occupies that place because it's on a river.

And so for me, there's no way to go down to that river and that dock and, um, That when you see that boat, which a little bit looks like a boat that you know you might've taken in 1850, it's like, kind of looks fancy, but in a kind of really old fashioned way and not feel that kind of longer history in Montgomery and in this, this country's history.

And so what it meant that, that sort of act of self-defense right, takes place, uh, in that space. Right? And so it's an, it's an historic space. Uh, both in terms of the history of slavery. Um, I think it also allows us to think about, since we're talking about Rosa Parks today, Rosa Parks was a lifelong believer in self-defense, and she saw no contradiction between that belief in self-defense that she learns at home and carries to the end of her life with the importance of like organized movement, building and organized non-violence.

Um, but in terms of a personal right to self defense, She learned that from her. You know, she will talk about kind of one of her earliest memories being sort of when she's six. It's 1919. Um, black soldiers are returning from World War I and it is the year many people will call Red Summer. There's this huge upsurge of white violence across the country.

Um, including in Alabama, there's a huge upsurge of clan violence in 1919. And so her grandfather will sit out at night, um, for a while with his shotgun, basically to protect their home, and she talks about how they would sleep in their clothes. She also talks about how sometimes she would sit vigil with him.

She would get him to let her sit with him because as she put it, she wanted to see him shoot a Ku Klux. So it's a different place to start when we talk about Mrs. Parks. Um, then fast forward like 75 years, um, and when Mrs. Parks gets mugged in her eighties, um, she fights back and she talks about how she felt like she had the, you know, right.

And I mean, she doesn't, it doesn't really, I mean, the person still hurts her and still takes her money, but she, that, that belief in self-defense, again, I. Last throughout her life. And she sees no contradiction. She sees no contradiction in supporting, you know, there's, it's not a Malcolm versus Martin, right?

Or it's, it's a kind of both end. And we're gonna see that in her politics more broadly. Um, but I think that space of sort of thinking about the Montgomery Brawl in terms of those kind of historical threads to me, um, I was also saying, Um, to see and Pauline that that going to the river there for me always is a space because the history feels so present there.

Not because I know any stories of her down at the river, but, but it is a place that, that is really beautiful and feels very kind of haunted and good and bad ways. And so it is a place that I often feel her presence. And so I have heard people talking about what it meant that that resistance and that, you know, happens there.

Yeah, that was a great way, I feel like a great introduction to Mrs. Parks and understanding, uh, who she was at the core as a leader, uh, and being able to hold all of these sort of unity opposites and the way that she moved throughout the world. Could you, um, talk a little bit about how she developed into the leader that she is both known for and not so known for?

Um, I, I really, we all really appreciate just the fullness of her life that you bring forward in, in your work. Yeah. So I mean, she gets this kind of spirit of resistance in some ways at home, uh, from her grandparent, from her grandfather, from her mother. Um, but it is, it is when in her late teens, she meets who she describes as the first real activist I ever met, and that is Raymond Parks.

Uh, and Raymond Parks is 28. He is a barber, but he is also an activist and he, this is 1931 and he is one of the kind of local activists. It's trying to protect and defend the Scottsboro boys. Um, nine young black men, uh, who are, uh, riding the rails. They're riding the train for free. They get, um, they get arrested, but then they discovered two white women also on that train and that charge quickly changes to rape.

And those young men are quickly tried and all, but the youngest who's 12, sentenced to death. So a local movement grows in Alabama to try to defend these. These young men from being executed and one of those local activists is Raymond Parks, and she meets him in the midst of this organizing in 1931. And he absolutely is sort of the first person for her that that in some ways expands what she thinks is possible, right.

From a kind of personal spirit of resistance, right. That we can see in our grandfather to what is like a more collective organized, um, Uh, spirit of resistance, um, and very much in the first years. They get married in 1932. Uh, and certainly in the first years of their marriage, he's the more public activist.

She's more behind the scenes. Um, she does talk about meetings at their, their house. Um, guns on the table even to have a meeting was dangerous. Um, you know, they're both trying to like, Work, a legal defense to sort of overturn these executions. Raymond's also doing things like bringing the young men food in jail, in prison.

Um, so that's really where her, where she gets started. Um, but then by the 1940s, she's wanting to be more active, uh, and she's galled by the fact that black people are serving overseas. This is World War ii, including her younger brother Sylvester, and yet largely not able to vote at home. Uh, and so she wants to register to vote and she, she sees in, in a local black newspaper, a picture of a local NAACP meeting.

Raymond had been part of the local NAACP for a while, but found it sort of elitist and sort of stops going, but it kind of communicated to her that it was just for men. So she sees a picture in this black newspaper and she sees a woman in the picture who she'd actually gone. To kind of middle school with Johnny Carr, who will be a lifelong activist in Montgomery as well.

So she's like, oh, I'm gonna go down 'cause if she's there, I can be there. Uh, so she goes to her first meeting in 1943. Uh, Johnny Carr is actually not there that day. She's the only woman there. She happens to be there for branch election time. Uh, they ask her to take notes. She says she's too shy to say no, and then they elect her secretary.

That very first meeting, because again, I. I can see the gendered aspect of that. Um, so that's really where she begins and she makes it known she wants to register to vote. And a man by the name of Edie Nixon comes by their apartment. They're living in the projects in Cleveland Court, in, um, Cleveland Court projects to bring the material to register to vote.

And this is also, I mean, if we talk about her development, the first person that's crucial is Raymond. But Edie Nixon, again, in terms of her own. Political activism Right. Will play a huge role because really that that meeting will begin a partnership that's gonna change the face of American history because over the next decade, she and Nixon will work to, to transform the Montgomery na aac p into a much more working class branch.

Um, and so they're working on this, they're working on, you know, kind of, uh, Voter voter, they're working on issues that we would call criminal justice issues. So two different kinds of issues. One are cases like Scottsboro, where black people have been wrongfully accused, often black men. Um, also cases of white brutality against black people, including in particular, uh, white rape and sexual assault against black women.

And the ways that black people were sort of not protected by the law at the same time over incarcerated. Right? So it's sort of two different sides. Um, so they're working on these cases. Um, They actually, as people may know, in the early 1940s, Ella Baker is the head, the director of branches for the NAACP nationally.

And what Ella Baker is doing in the forties is she is trying to build up all of these local chapters and trying to sort of develop their own kind of leadership and their own sense of, you know, um, kind of determining the issues that they wanna be fighting on. So they actually go to, she goes to one of these leadership training, um, kind of conferences that Ella Baker organizes in 1944.

So I think part of what's important about that is also if we understand that part of what, what is hard for Mrs. Parks is sort of seeing how a woman is in this struggle. Ella Baker provides a very early example of a mentor. They become friends. Uh, when Ella Baker comes to Montgomery, she will stay with the parks is.

So that's again, a third. I mean, so I think, um, time and again, we see four Rosa Parks, the importance of people kind of expanding, kind of, and this is true for all of us. What, what is possible, what you see is possible in terms of collective struggle and your own role in that. Um, and then I think the fourth person or fourth, this is really more of a group that has a decisive impact on Mrs.

Parks is Highlander Folk School. So fast forward a decade. So they've been doing all sorts of things, right? All of these different cases. And by and large, there is no justice. Um, she's very steadfast, so she tries and tries, and tries and ultimately does succeed in getting registered to vote, but most people don't, right?

So even though they've tried to mount this whole campaign, very few people have gotten registered. Um, so she starts to talk about how hard it was to keep going, how difficult, when all our efforts seemed in vain. She talks about feeling crazy. She talks about feeling alone, all emotions that we all kind of know.

Um, and then by 1955, she, 1954, she, she's working various jobs. And then 1954, she gets hired to be the assistant tailor at Montgomery Fair Department Store. It's the biggest department store in Montgomery. A segregated department store, which means that black people can shop there but they can't try on clothes.

Uh, she's an assistant tailor in the men's shop, which means that she's spending her life basically tailoring white men's suits and clothes right in a stuffy back room and to make extra money. She's sewing on the side and eating. Nixon knows Clifford and Virginia Dur and Clifford and Virginia Dur are one of Montgomery's few white families that are kind of civil rights kind of proc civil rights.

Um, Virginia DUR has been redbaited. Uh, so they're, one of the things that the DURs need is, um, their family has sent them all of these clothes. They don't have a lot of money, so, and so Mrs. Parks is tailoring those clothes for the DURs for their daughters. And so they become kind of friendly. Um, and juror recognizes kind of parks as kind of.

Whatever, low or kind of what we would call a burned out kind of spirit, and DUR is affiliated with Highlander Folk School now, Highlander Folk School. Probably most people on listening know it started in the thirties, but just in case we don't, it gets started in the thirties and the idea is that local people have kind of the best ideas in terms of, so solving their problems, but often are not tapped to be.

Seen as leaders or empowered as such. And so it gets started actually in the 1930s in the midst of this like economic right catastrophe, and mostly in the first years. Um, it's really focusing on kind of issues of economic disempowerment, economic injustice focused a lot on Appal, uh, Appalachia. Um, It had always been interracial from the start.

Uh, but it's not really till the 1950s that Highlander starts to turn to what we might call more like civil rights issues. And in the summer of 1955, Highlander is planning a two week workshop, um, around implementing desegregation because. Obviously 1954 we get the, the brown decision. Brown V Board, right?

The court unanimously decides right, um, separate can never be equal, kind of the right to an equal education. That's that, you know, kind of makes school segregation unconstitutional. But in order for Chief Justice Warren to get that unanimous decision in 54, he agrees to put off for one year. The second half of the court's decision, which is the implementation half, right?

So with with the court decision you have what the decision is and how it's gonna be implemented. And obviously with a case like Brown, the implementation is crucial, right? Uh, to hear more testimony. Um, and as you might imagine, most of these states, right? Um, the round case is actually five cases wrapped in one are saying We need a lot of time.

You know, it's, we need to go slow. This is gonna be very controversial. Uh, and the NAACP is like, no, we need a timetable. We need a schedule, we need a, um, and what we see is the Supreme Court really back off. And in 1955 in what scholars call Brown two basically come back with that very fa those famous phrases.

Um, they return the implementation to the states. So no federal oversight in those first years. They're looking, uh, For it to happen with all deliberate speed and a prompt and reasonable start to full compliance. Um, so what people like, um, uh, miles, Horton and septa, mcc, Clark and Highlander know what people like Rosa Parks know is there's not gonna be any implementation if, if people don't push for it, right?

So the Brown decision is both an incredible tool, but it's also not, there's no real enforcement mechanism. Now, the court has taken out a kind of robust enforcement mechanism. So Highlander's planning this two week workshop that summer and Horton tells Miles. Horton tells dur that they have a scholarship for someone to come from Montgomery, and she recommends Rosa Parks and, uh, Rosa Parks decides to go.

And that's a big deal. It's a two week workshop. She has to take off two weeks of work. That's a lot for a working class person. Um, we wanna remember that the parks, even though the way that Rosa Parks is often pictured is that she's some sort of middle class. Uh, person. The parks are not, uh, as I said before, they're living in the projects.

They are living in the projects when she makes her bus stand. Uh, Raymond is barbering at Maxwell Air Force Base. Um, so they are working class people, um, but she decides to go and she talks about the visit to Highlander being transformative, uh, both for her spirit. Um, she gets there feeling very bitter, very nervous.

Um, She, she says it's the first time she felt like she could talk openly about her opinions in front of white people without hostility. Uh, she talks about she loved Miles Horton's, sense of humor. Um, so as I mentioned, Highlander was, was integrated from the star, which means like Highlander when people would come to their, these, it's sort of like adult organizer training.

And so people would come and they would. Stay in rooms together, they would eat together. These, you know, again, in Tennessee in this period, this is very unusual. Um, and so reporters would come and they would ask Miles, Horton, how do you get black and white people to eat together? And he would say, well, first we would prepare the food second.

We ring the bell. Third, we serve the food, you know, and variations on this. And Mrs. Parks loved this 'cause it was sort of this like tongue in cheek making fun of like, this is some kind of like freakish enterprise that you would take a lot of. Like, well how would you, how would you possibly get people to do this?

So she loved that matter of factness. Certainly another commonality between Horton and Parks was their kind of deep faith, right? And a faith that required you to be in action, right? It's a faith that like, Um, that you can't just like, sit on the sidelines. Um, and so she'll talk about how, um, how transformative it is.

She'd wake up in the morning, she smelled the coffee. White people would be making it for her. That was incredible. Um, still in all, you know, they do a go around on the last day. What are you gonna do when you get home? Like any good organizer training school, they get to Mrs. Parks. She says this is August of 1955.

There's never gonna be a mass movement in Montgomery because white resistant, it's the cradle, the Confederacy white resistance is too great and black people aren't united. So I'm gonna redouble my efforts to work with young people. The year before she had refound the youth branch of the chapter of the Na Montgomery NAACP chapter.

In part because her spirits had gotten so low that she began, and we'll see this over and over in her life, to put her kind of greatest energy and hopes in the spirit of young people that she'd started in some ways to give up on her peers. Um, and, and to sort of despair that like there would be kind of, That people would be willing to unite and to sort of put more energy in, like, again, cultivating that, what we might call militant energy that young people bring.

Um, so we see that in, in, in Found refounding, the youth branch. Um, and that's her determination. When she gets home, she tells Edie Nixon that she's like, determined they're gonna kind of do more things. Um, She's encouraging them in sort of greater stands against segregation. So these young people, they do a readin at the downtown library.

The Montgomery libraries are segregated, which means there is a colored library. Um, but the books are much more limited than the downtown ones. So they go and they take, try to take out books. Um, so we're gonna see this over and over, both in Montgomery. And then if we fast forward into Detroit, into Black Power again, we see her taking much.

Heart, um, and, and, and kind of devoting her energies again there to kind of being, to both cultivating that leadership, to supporting that leadership to kind of doing what, you know, being willing to show up, uh, for black power things in part because she's heartened by that spirit again. Um, so I mean, I think in terms of her development, we don't get.

You know, this accidental, you know, activist that I think she's often portrayed as really both misses, like by her bus stand in 1955. She's been an activist for two decades. Um, but it also, I think misses like it's a collective of people and that she doesn't become Rosa Parks without a whole bunch of other people too.

Right. And she knows that. Right. And how important community is to being able to. To imagine. Um, you know, sometimes I talk, I say that like, I think what her greatest superpower is, right? And the way, the thing that I feel like is like, what is so amazing about her is her ability to keep going, like, to be both discouraged or depressed and still to keep taking steps forward.

Not because you can see. What's gonna happen, right? So I think one of the real myths about what she does December 1st, 1955, is also this idea that if you make a stand, something will happen. And there is nothing to suggest that day that taking a stand will do anything. Um, so she's not the first person to make a stand on the bus.

As we know, there had been a trickle of people in that decade, kind of starting with World War ii. Uh, a black woman by the name of Viola White gets arrested in 1944. She decides to pursue a legal case in response. Police rape her daughter, uh, and then they tie her case up in state court in a way that it just never comes to court.

And then, and Viola White dies before anything happens. Um, fast forward to 1955, where obviously in a different legal climate where Post Brown, and in March of 1955, as many of us know, a 15 year old by the name of Claudette Colvin refuses to give up her seat on the bus. Uh, the community's outraged. Um, people are angry.

Rosa Parks starts fundraising around Claudette Colvin's case. Um, and then a couple of things happen. The first is that the judge does something very savvy. So Colvin is actually arrested, not just on a segregation charge, but because, so the police put their hands all over Colvin and she struggled back. Uh, and so they actually arrest this like little tiny teenager of.

Um, disturbing the peace and assaulting an officer and the judge in Colvin's case in May drops the segregation charge, drops, the disturbing the peace charge and only sort of convicts colvin on the assault charge. So it's gonna make it a much harder case to pursue a segregate, you know, like a, a direct attack on segregation.

The second thing that happens is the city makes some promises, right? So, um, they say we're gonna have change, more respectful treatment on the bus. That does not happen. The third thing is something I think we see today, which is the ways that adults don't always tr like, trust young people. Um, and so I think part of what happens is Colvin is seen as too emotional, too feisty.

Uh, after her court case in May, she stopped straightening her hair. She decides she's not gonna straighten her hair until we straighten out this mess. Or I'm sort of paraphrasing, but it was something like that and people decide she maybe is not the right plaintiff. Um, but I do wanna say there is a myth that people drop her because she's pregnant and that's not true.

She is not pregnant. She will get pregnant later that summer. And perhaps because of the kind of isolation she starts to undergo that summer I. Um, but she is not pregnant when people decide. Um, but she is 15. And I think we see this today often in terms of youth movements and the ways that adults don't trust young people.

Um, so fast forward eight months, so again, this is parks is mentoring Clara Colvin in her youth council. She gets Colvin more active in the youth council. Um, so she's well aware. She's well aware of all these cases. There is nothing to suggest. When the bus driver, James Blake tells her row of people that they need to get up, that, that taking a stand today will do anything except perhaps get her hurt or raped, uh, perhaps get her fired, which it ends up doing right.

Um, and yet it's sort of a, you know, she talks about it in terms of, and again, in terms of the way we might see. Coming out of her Highlander experience that to get up would be to kind of be consenting or or approving of this treatment. And she did not consent. Um, she has had trouble with this bus driver before, and so, uh, but in he, she refused the practice of some Montgomery bus drivers was to make black people pay in the front, but then they had to get up and reboard in the back, so they didn't even walk by.

Uh, white people. She refused to do that. Um, she'd been thrown off the bus by this drunk bus driver by other bus drivers. Um, so this is also not her first active bus resistance. Um, but Blake, in the past, other bus drivers had just thrown her off. They hadn't had her arrested. Um, so the bus driver makes a very strategic decision that day too, which is he decides he wants her arrested and not just the police.

He goes to get the police. Uh, they come on the bus. She says in one interview she hears them kind of saying basically, you know, worrying about a court case, maybe we should just take her off and not, and then he wants her arrested. And one of my favorite interviews, she talks about how annoying and irritating it was to be arrested.

And I think how we can hear in that language is that she does not believe this is the start to something glorious. She sees this as just like now she's gotten herself arrested. She's actually planning a big kind of youth conference for that weekend. And so she has all this work to do at home. So in, in many ways that day she sort of sees this as a diversion from the real work, right?

Not as sort of the beginning of what it will begin. Um, but again, I think people are at a breaking point. Uh, and I do think one of the other ways that people, I think sometimes hit colvin against parks in really problematic ways. Uh, but one of the things I think we also miss about that is people don't tend to rise up at the first one, as we know, right?

Eric Garner's not the first. Mike Brown is not the first, right? Um, I don't necessarily believe that if Colvin hadn't done what she did, that people would've been at the breaking point they are with when Parks does what she did. Um, but they are, and so as we know that night, uh, so she's bailed out a few hours later.

Um, by the DURs and Nixon and um, and then Raymond, and then they go back to their apartment to talk because once Nixon sees that she's okay, he's kind of delighted because here is a test case they've been looking for. I. She's 42. Um, she's a long time, she's a long time active in her church, but she's a long time kind of community activist.

And so people trust also that she won't flinch under pressure, right? And that you have to trust if you're gonna build a case around somebody that they won't, Raymond that first night, does not want her to go forward. Um, he's very worried that she'll be killed and they'll be, you know, or hurt. And he's also very worried that what happened with Colvin will happen with her, which is that people will be, will rally around her for a while and then kind of not stick with her.

Um, but ultimately they talk it out. And late that night, she calls a young lawyer, black lawyer in town by the name of Fred Gray, so, and asks him to represent her. Then he calls the head of the Women's Political Council, a woman by the name of Joanne Robinson. This is a black women's group in Montgomery that had been for the past few years, kind of agitating around bus segregation, and it is that night that the Women's Political Council springs into action and decides to call for a one day boycott on Monday when parks will be arraigned in court.

Robinson goes, she's a professor at Alabama State College and she goes and she, with the help of two students and a colleague, runs off on the mimeograph machine, 35,000 leaflets and early the next morning, she and the women of the W P C fan out over Montgomery and leave them all over town. Like they leave them in barbershops, they leave them in churches, they leave them in sort of schools.

Um, And so very much like the idea for the boycott comes from this women's group. Um, and at first it's a one day, it's, it's only one day and partly out of what that day feels like and the fact that people actually stay off the buses that that night at a meeting at Hold Street Baptist Church people decide to continue the boycott.

Kind of indefinitely. But I think one of the things we see there that we often, I think miss in the kind of dominant way it's told is that like being in action expands what people think is possible. Um, and Rosa Parks will talk about that morning just being, you know, just like being delighted. And it's one of, you know, super exciting, but also like, why did we wait this long?

Right? And so there's also this mystery of like, why now? Why this? That's incredible. Um, It just makes me think so much about, again, this podcast, his name, it's Kairos Time. Yeah. And I feel like you were highlighting these kairos moments that, um, Mrs. Parks was engaged in, and I just feel like it's a testament.

To not only her as a leader, but as you mentioned, just this community of leaders, um, in Montgomery and Highlander when she gets to Detroit. Um, these communities that she's engaged in, who because of their relationships, their history with one another, um, their experiences in organizing were able to take these different moments and make movements.

Outta them. Um, and develop leaders that, um, have propelled our society forward in many ways. And I feel like we like to engage in this history and telling the stories of our, um, of our heroes throughout time. Um, Not just to, to remember them, but for us to be able to glean lessons from them. And so I really appreciate you taking the time with us.

Um, I'm not sure if there's, I know you're working on a piece right now, uh, on the, the life of, uh, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And the. The, the sort of battle of ideas that he was engaging in. Um, you lifted up some that Mrs. Rosa Parks, for those who are listening, um, how would you recommend they, you know, plug more into your work and, and more into this history?

Well, just to tell a teeny bit more about her. Right. So I think one of the things that we often miss is also the tremendous sacrifice that her bus stand then entails for her family. Um, so basically five weeks into the boycott, she loses her job. Um, Raymond is shortly after that for us to resign his job.

They never find steady work in Montgomery ever again. And even after the boycott successful end. They still can't find work. They're still getting death threats. And so eight months later in August of 1957, they are forced to leave Montgomery and they moved to Detroit where her brother and her cousins now live.

And so she will spend the second half of her life in what she describes as the Northern promised Land that wasn't. Um, and while some of the public signs of segregation are thankfully gone, The systems of school, segregation of housing, segregation of job discrimination, of police brutality that they leave in Montgomery, they find again in Detroit.

And so she will spend the second half of her life sort of fighting the racism of the north, um, and kind of by the sixties, kind of in and alongside a growing black power movement, both in the city and across the country. Um, and so kind of, we talked about this kind of both and of Rosa Parks, but I think we can see that both and of the ways that I think we often, um, often both King and Parks are used against contemporary activists as if like, you're not doing it right.

You should be more like the Civil rights movement and really missing what Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were actually like, and the kinds of things they were doing and the kinds of issues they were working on. Um, So, uh, just to pick one moment, so we all probably know in 1967, there is an uprising in Detroit, a six day uprising.

Um, it, John Conyers, the congressman, uh, who has been elected a few years earlier, um, who Rosa Parks helps to get elected and then for the first time in 30 years, gets her first paid political job with Conyers. Congress will call the Detroit Uprising a police riot. The amount of kind of police abuse and police brutality during those days is enormous.

There's all sorts of baseless arrests and all sorts of violence and, and dozens of people are killed by law enforcement. Um, perhaps the most egregious is the killing of three black teenagers at the Algers Motel. Um, and when not only are the cops not indicted, but the mainstream newspapers in Detroit stopped pressing the issue.

Young black power militants decide to hold a people's tribunal to kind of bring the facts forward, right? Like, I think this is a different moment in that like, we don't have cell phones. Basically, the mainstream Detroit newspapers wouldn't cover police brutality really at all, right? So part of what the, these, uh, black power young people are doing is just putting the facts of the case before the community.

And they ask Rosa Parks, uh, well, would she beyond the jury, um, She's like, yeah, like, and they were nervous. And then, you know, like, and this is sort of her mantra I heard over and over in terms of how she interacts with kind of these young black power people, which is just like, if I can be useful, I'll come.

And so people said she did all sorts of things. Um, she was on lots of prisoner defense committees in the sixties and seventies from well-known ones we know, right? Angela Davis. Joanne Little Wilmington. 10 r n a, 11. Uh, Robert Williams. Um, she did a lot of work around kind of anti-poverty work around public housing.

She, they had obviously lived in public housing in Montgomery and found it very useful. So she does a lot of that kind of work. Uh, she goes, um, to Solidarity Day of the Poor, the Original Poor People's Campaign in 1968. Um, it's an awesome picture of her in a very kind of sixties dress, wearing shades at the.

At Solidarity Day, um, she is an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and of us, uh, support of a part in South Africa. So her vision is kind of global, right? Like it's a very capacious, um, understanding of what freedom and, and black liberation and, and justice looks like. Um, and it absolutely. Is using all sorts of tactics, right?

Uh, boycotts, disruptions, um, you know, getting black history into every part of the curriculum. Um, and so I think this false opposition people try to make between like the good civil rights movement and sort of bla bad, overly disruptive youth movements today really doesn't hold up. When you look at, at what parks and what King are doing, are actually doing, um, which is a very kind of.

Um, both broad in terms of issues and also kind of belief that like injustice is comfortable for many people. And so non-violence has to be disruptive. It has to disrupt that comfort. Well, with that, I feel like I wanna ask you kind of a unfair question. Um, but you know, we started off our conversation with the contemporary moment of this Montgomery bus stop bra, and I guess my question is, is that, you know, You've done so much work in delving into her history, and then also, um, I feel like being a companion to our freedom movements today, how would you, what do you think, um, Mrs.

Rosa Parks would think of our, our current time? Or how do you think she might engage? I mean, there's just so much going on when we look at this history and. You brought up, uh, the roles of the uprising and rebellions of the sixties where you had such mass displacement, you know, the role of technology that pushed many people out of the south, black and white people into these northern ghettos.

The level of violence that pushed Minnie out of the South, including, um, Mrs. Rosa Parks and her family, if not physical, but the economic. You spoke about, um, war just constantly looming over our heads and, uh, just levels of houselessness and, and access to healthcare and the, the poor access to education.

Um, even the little bit of education we do have, I'm from Florida, so when you talked about, you know, the. In Montgomery going to the local library and trying to check out books. I feel that heavy. Um, and so like I said, this question is unfair, so feel free to do with it what you will. Um, but I just had to ask.

I mean, I think a couple of things, like, again, going back to kind of what I was like, to me, one of the thing, one of the greatest gifts she gives us is both understanding like, How hard it is and that she, there's a lot of her personal writings at the Library of Congress, and you can look at them online and she's talking about like how depressing it is, how lonely it is, how hard it is, right.

She spends so many years, right? Like not believing she's going to see any change in her lifetime. Right. And still you just have like, so the, the, like you can be depressed and you can keep sort of putting one foot in front of the other, right. That you don't have to. That both our heroes, it wasn't like they weren't depressed or they weren't feeling burned out.

Um, but also that you just, you don't, you know, you just, you know, you're put, you're like, in many ways it's like you're just trying a lot of different things. And then, and then there is a moment, right? We have that moment on December 5th, 1955 where she's like, this is amazing, and why do we wait for this long?

Like, there's a moment when then history shifts and then all of a sudden this thing that never seemed possible. Becomes more possible. Um, so I think that is one thing to that I think sort of what it means to channel our inner Rosa parks of just the ability to keep, um, taking steps. Uh, I think I. She's very adamant to the end of her life, right?

There's more work to be done. The struggle isn't over. So I think many of the ways that she's memorialized, she would be, you know, and it turn, you know, and all of this like, oh, we'll make a statue for her. We'll make a, you know, a special seat on the bus for the month of, you know, nonsense. Right? Like, it's just like what she would want I think is like people actually attending to the kind of real issues of our time.

Um, Again, she was a both and kind of person. Right? So, so just like the need for many different strategies. Um, I think I. The ways that, you know, and again, going back to kind of maybe where we started this, which is like how much she looked to young people and that kind of spirit as the spirit that was gonna take us forward.

And so how disingenuous it is for me, you know, kind of commentators and some adults to be like, oh, let me tell you. And one of the things that sort of like also when, when I. In talking to many people who worked with her kind of during the Black Power era is like, she didn't come and be like, this is how you're supposed to do it.

Right. Like, so, you know, you it, it's not like, you know, it's like, if I can be helpful, I'll come. Right. And so that's a, so it's not like running a youth movement. It's like, it's like helping to develop or support or be like, well, what do you need me to do? Kind of. And so I think that's another lesson that for.

You know, the more middle-aged people on the call, it's a lesson to take to heart as well. Um, yeah.

Yeah. Well, um, she said that at some, like, at a testimonial dinner for a another activist, and so that's another way to kind of think about what our. What we have to do. There's no retirement in so many ways. There's no retirement. I mean, then there's literally no retirement. I mean, she's never, I mean, just to stress this point, again, she never owns her own house.

She never, right. Like this. I mean, she is a working class person. You know, like never has a kind of significant amount of like economic security. Um, So also like literally ne you know, the sort of issues of like actual retirement, but also just how much work there is to be done. Thank you for that. Um, and thank you again for joining us.

Uh, thank you to Pauline and the team at the Kairos Center for producing this incredible series. Its Kairos Time. And with that we'll leave you.