49 pages • 1-hour read
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks
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Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “‘A Life History of Being Rebellious’: The Early Years of Rosa McCauley Parks”
Theoharis opens by addressing Rosa Parks’s views on the autobiography genre. Parks wondered whether sharing intimate details of her life might alter the impact of the symbol she became. She was born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Rosa’s mother, Leona Edwards, was a schoolteacher, and she instilled in her daughter the importance of education and dignity. Rosa’s father was absent for most of her childhood. Later in life, he made amends with his daughter. Her grandparents were enslaved, and her grandfather was a strong activist. From her family, Rosa inherited courage and the desire to enact change.
Ku Klux Klan activity increased after World War I, and Rosa and her family often slept with their clothes on in case of an attack during the night. Her schoolteacher mother was on constant guard against arson at the schoolhouse, a common act of the Klan and other white supremacists. Rosa described her family’s instilling in her the understanding that she was not yet free and that she must fight for her place in the world. The young girl often helped her family pick cotton, and she later recalled the plantation owner driving by to make sure they were working hard enough. Her deeply segregated community offered a meager education, and Rosa was schooled in the ways of white supremacy.
Rosa attended a special school for girls that was run by white women. Meanwhile, her mother remarried. Her education at the school focused primarily on preparing her for the labor workforce and marriage. While the school’s curriculum and instruction were problematic, Rosa claimed the school instilled in her a sense of pride and self-assurance. When she completed the eighth grade, the school closed due to pressure from the Klan and other white supremacist organizations. Rosa attended another high school in Montgomery, Alabama, but had to drop out when her mother became sick during the Great Depression. While working in a white person’s home, Parks was subjected to possible sexual assault, about which she later authored a semi-fictional story.
Rosa longed to fight against the racist systems that governed the lives of her family; her friends recalled her tenacity and rebellious spirit. After a white boy taunted Rosa and her brother, she picked up a brick and dared him to continue. Her grandmother admonished her for speaking up, leaving Rosa feeling that she must constantly be pulled between what she felt was right and what she was taught about staying safe. When another boy pushed her off the sidewalk as she walked home from school, she returned the shove. The boy’s mother threatened to take legal action, but Rosa pushed back, arguing that the boy pushed her first. She realized then that a show of strength and assertiveness has the power to change outcomes.
When Rosa met her future husband, Raymond Parks, she was stunned by his activism and desire to change the status quo. Rosa and Raymond married on December 18, 1932. At the time of their wedding, Raymond was involved in fighting for the freedom of the Scottsboro Boys. The couple was threatened and intimidated by white supremacists and local law enforcement. Raymond urged his wife to return to school and obtain her high school diploma.
Chapter 2 Summary: “‘It Was Very Difficult to Keep Going When Our Work Seemed to Be in Vain’: The Civil Rights Movement before the Bus Boycott”
Through Raymond, Parks became involved with the NAACP. At her first meeting in 1943, she was the only woman in attendance and was asked to take notes as secretary. At these meetings, she met E. D. Nixon, who would have a profound effect on her and her activism. She worked tirelessly with the NAACP to fight for civil rights in the United States for many years during an era that is often left out of historical accounts of the civil rights movement. Aside from her family and her husband, Nixon was one of the few people Parks met who shared her level of zeal for the cause. The two worked closely together to challenge the complacency of the leadership in the NAACP and to advocate for more proactive measures.
The NAACP worked with members to obtain voting rights. Parks tried to register multiple times, but she was denied each time based on false and convoluted systems put in place to keep Black Americans from the polls. Together, Mrs. Parks and Nixon also fought to establish justice for the victims of legal systems that favored whites. Mrs. Parks meticulously recorded the stories of countless victims of legal injustice, including a plethora of rape cases in which the abusers of Black women were freed, and cases in which Black men were falsely accused of crimes. Nixon’s leadership of the NAACP saw a significant increase in membership, owing largely to Parks’s efforts.
Parks engaged in her own personal forms of protest, refusing to drink from segregated water fountains and avoiding the bus when possible. In 1947, she heard that the Freedom Train was scheduled to visit Montgomery. The government issued a statement requiring the exhibit to be integrated. The outrage over this was so strong that the Freedom Train bypassed many cities. One of the youth Parks worked with was Claudette Colvin, who later became an important figure in the civil rights movement and in Parks’s own story. Her work with young people was extremely important to the success of the local NAACP and to the movement in Montgomery. Parks and other members of the NAACP worked diligently to secure a visit from the Freedom Train, and she organized a group of youth to visit.
While attending an NAACP leadership conference, Parks met and befriended activist and organizer Ella Baker, whose strength impressed her, as she challenged the NAACP’s long-held problems with class structures. In 1948, after the usually quiet Parks gave a rousing speech, she was elected the first secretary of the organization’s state conference. However, despite her stellar work and dedication to the cause, Parks had to deal with Nixon’s extremely gendered attitudes. He viewed her as a secretary; although he trusted her opinion, he did not believe that a woman could hold a leadership position like his own.
In the summer of 1955, despite Raymond’s misgivings, Parks attended the Highlander Folk School on scholarship to participate in a two-week workshop focused on the implementation of Brown v. Board of Education. At this point in her career, Parks was 42 and extremely tired and weary. She was frustrated with the inability of the NAACP and the country to take the necessary steps to enact change, and she began to feel disheartened about her purpose and role. The Highlander Folk School rejuvenated her. Everything about the experience uplifted her, including the fact that Black and white men and women ate together and shared sleeping quarters. The experience allowed her to visualize a different kind of future. When she returned to Montgomery, she was still tired—but this time she planned to do something about it. Four days before her historical stand on the city bus, she attended a meeting that highlighted the most recent atrocities and lynchings in Montgomery, including the story of a young man whose story closely resembled that of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black child who was beaten, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955—but did not receive public attention. Mrs. Parks was determined that Montgomery’s secrets would remain hidden no longer.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
The first two chapters emphasize the theme of “The Legacy of Rebellion.” Theoharis shows how Parks’s activism was informed by a family that challenged her to think deeply about her place within a system of oppression and to pursue the knowledge and desire to challenge the status quo. This legacy continued as Parks met countless other activists who, in ways large and small, contributed to the goals of the civil rights movement. Her new husband inspired her and introduced her to the NAACP. Her time in the organization led her to Nixon and her work advocating for voter rights, helping and instructing Black youth, and fighting for justice for those victimized by white abusers. Parks also understood how these stories came to be silenced. She watched repeatedly as white abusers skirted convictions, and innocent Black defendants were punished with life sentences and death penalties. The stories of these people, as well as the names of the activists who sought justice, disappeared. They dissolved into a false narrative of easy triumph by a chosen few. All these experiences shaped and influenced Parks, led to her decision on December 1, 1955, and prepared her for a lifetime of activism.
Parks’s time at the Highlander Folk School was especially transformative. At that point in her life and advocacy, she was extremely frustrated and worn out. She worked tirelessly for the NAACP but felt that her work was not receiving the support it needed to be successful. The Highlander Folk School introduced her to a new world where white and Black people ate together, slept in the same rooms, and worked together to enact change. Her time there rejuvenated her, and this vigor was evident in her advocacy work upon her return. The Highlander Folk School’s connection with communism did not scare Parks away. In fact, this connection provides another example of the ways that Rosa Parks the woman differed from the symbolic representation of her.
Parks was not afraid to be associated with stronger means of resistance. Her connection to the Highlander Folk School painted her a communist, but, as she consistently did, she understood the nuances and contexts of what was needed to enact change. She was unwilling to subscribe to a single doctrine that would define her activism. She believed in balance and in fighting with every tool available. This attitude is mirrored later in the text as Parks follows the Black Power movement while living in Detroit. The same fighting spirit that drove her to push back against the white boy who pushed her as a child directed her activism. This reality of Parks is in direct contrast to the symbolic public figure of her that focuses on her actions on the bus as if they were an isolated act of protest.
Theoharis challenges the fable of Parks’s tiredness; this false narrative paints a picture of a demure older woman whose feet were too tired for her to be coerced into standing. It strips the reality of its rebelliousness, and rebellion was at the heart of Parks’s action. It is true that she was tired, but her exhaustion was directed at the years she spent working toward justice and facing complacency, racism, and roadblocks at every turn. December 1 was not her first act of protest, nor was it her last. It was one in a lengthy line of small protests that she waged every single day.
This contributes to the theme of “The Narrative of Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement.” The image of Parks as the tired seamstress is a convenient narrative that dilutes the robustness of her activism and the reality of the systemic oppression she faced. It does not emphasize her hard work and forceful, powerful pursuit of justice; instead, it paints Parks as a meek and feeble woman who won a victory through passive existence. The opposite was true. Parks was a devoted activist who paid dearly for her activism. She understood that victories were won through arduous work and that the work was never over.
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