The author of a myth-busting new biography of Rose Parks, published to coincide with Monday's centennial of her birth, wants to correct "distortions of the Parks fable."
Jeanne Theoharis, a Brooklyn College political scientist with two University of Michigan degrees, talks about the challenges and rewards of her research in the introduction of "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks." That 4,100-word chapter is posted online by Random House, which published the hardback last Tuesday.
When I began this project, people often stared at me blankly -- another book on Rosa Parks? Surely there was already a substantive biography. Others assumed that the mythology of the simple, tired seamstress had long since been revealed and repudiated. Many felt confident we already knew her story. . . .
And yet I kept bumping up against the gaps in the histories of her. It became clear how little we actually knew about Rosa Parks.
Widely accepted myths, Theoharis says, have "only a fuzzy resemblance to Rosa Louise Parks" in reality. Accepted narratives "ignore her 40 years of political work in Detroit after the boycott" in 1956 to integrate buses in her hometown of Montgomery, Ala.
She has written books and articles on the civil rights and black power movements, and already earns media attention for her provocative new one -- the focus of a New York Times column this weekend by former Detroit News staff member Charles Blow.
Though it begins in Alabama during the 1940s and 1950s, "The Rebellious Life" winds up in Detroit, where Parks and her husband Raymond moved in 1957. Her seven-hour funeral at Detroit’s Greater Grace Temple on Nov. 2, 2005 attracted 4,000 mourners and speakers who included Bill and Hillary Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama and Aretha Franklin.
Theoharis recalls being "captivated and then horrified by the national spectacle made of her death." The scholar felt the Detroit service and an earlier ceremony at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., made a "caricature of her" and were an "ill-fitting tribute to the depth of Parks’ political work."
From her 360-page book's introduction, a chapter titled "National Honor/Public Mythology," here's a portion of how the author describes her motivation to present a fuller portrait than was heard in 2005 eulogies:
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. Held up as a national heroine, but stripped of her lifelong history of activism and anger at American injustice, the Parks who emerged was a self-sacrificing mother figure for a nation who would use her death for a ritual of national redemption. . . .
This . . . entailed rewriting this history of the black freedom struggle along with Parks’ own rich political history -- disregarding her and others’ work in Montgomery that had tilled the ground for decades for a mass movement to flower following her 1955 bus stand. . . . Her sacrifice and lifetime of political service were largely backgrounded.
If we follow the actual Rosa Parks -- see her decades of community activism before the boycott; take notice of the determination, terror, and loneliness of her bus stand and her steadfast work during the year of the boycott; and see her political work continue for decades following the boycott’s end -- we encounter a much different "mother of the civil rights movement."
Earlier coverage
New Book Portrays A Militant Rosa Parks, Equal Parts Malcolm X And MLK, Feb. 2
