I had a lot of fun teasing Mrs. Parks about being on the popular TV show, To Tell the Truth. I’ve re-watched her segment several times, and each time I see it, I love it more. It’s a fun slice of history. It also brings home the adage, you can never select who is famous. Stuff just happens.
Mrs. Parks very much enjoyed being on this show. She told me that anytime she was asked to tell “her story,” she would seize the moment and say, “Yes.” She believed that the television shows she was on and the movies she was in, as well as the gatherings, meetings and conferences she attended, were never about her. They were simply opportunities to have people hear her story so that her message could be heard on different occasions, by different people.
She told me many times that if people could meet her, perhaps their hearts would change and they’d be more open to the concept of human dignity for everyone, no matter their economic, cultural, religious or racial background. She astutely knew that while the law can change, real progress doesn’t occur unless you reach people’s hearts. And that’s what she set out to do.
To me, that defines a truly great person.
History should be accurate
Speaking of truth, Mrs. Parks debunked the myth that she refused to vacate her seat on the bus because she was simply too tired to get up after a long day at work.
I was often present when she recounted for others the details of December 1, 1955. Whenever she wrote or when she talked to groups, she’d correct the historical inaccuracies about her, saying “history” should be accurate.
“I was not tired physically,” she would say in her beautiful slow Southern drawl, “or any more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then.” When she told her story to others, she would always pause here, for emphasis, as she could watch the surprise in people’s eyes. “I was only 42.” Mrs. Parks would stop here and take a deep breath. “No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
She told me that as she sat on the bus, she remembered the photographs of poor Emmett Till, which haunted her, and she couldn’t move (see below for more about Till).
One hundred days after the murder of young Emmett, Mrs. Parks refused to give up her seat on the city bus in Alabama. She said, “I thought about Emmett Till, and I couldn’t go back (to the back of the bus).”
Mrs. Parks and Mrs. Till-Mobley [Emmett’s mother] became tireless civil rights activists and best friends. Emmett’s Mother frequently visited Mrs. Parks at The Mansion [hotel]. Mrs. Till-Mobley always stayed in the Country Room when she visited Mrs. Parks. They’d spend hours talking with each other in the kitchen outside Mrs. Till-Mobley’s beautiful white and blue flowered bedroom. The room features a private balcony overlooking the quiet, tree-lined street below. When the weather was nice, the two of them would sit there. They frequently would tell me they didn’t understand how we were in the center of Washington, D.C., yet the street below was so quiet.
Another myth associated with Mrs. Parks and December 1, 1955 is that she’d sat in the section designated “Whites only.” She was seated in the first row of the “Negro section” allotted to coloured people, Mrs. Parks would explain. I heard her sigh so many times. Sometimes, very heavily, as she was forming her words, so what she said was never out of character; and most importantly, never about her. She rarely complained; she would only smile.
And yet, no matter how many times she consistently told this story, the press would write that she was an older woman who was simply too tired to get up after a hard day of work and sat in the first seat she could find.
Mrs. Parks recalled about that day: “God has given me the strength to say what is right. Getting arrested was one of the worst days of my life. It was not a happy experience. … I had no idea that history was being made. I was just tired of giving in. Somehow, I felt that what I did was right. … I did not think about the consequences. I knew that I could have been lynched, manhandled or beaten when the police came. I chose not to move. When I made that decision, I knew that I had the strength of my ancestors with me.“
Not a premeditated act
Another myth, repeated frequently over the years, was a particular anathema to her. Her action on the bus “that day” has been characterized as a “premeditated act of civil disobedience.” It was not. Mrs. Parks was adamant about this.
Although she knew that the NAACP was looking for a lead plaintiff to test the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws in the South, she didn’t set out to be arrested on the Cleveland Avenue bus #2857 that day.
Mother Parks told me that she knew the bus driver, and that had she’d been paying attention to his face rather than fumbling for money in her purse, she would never have gotten on that particular bus. She’d had an unpleasant encounter with the bus driver, James Blake, before and was afraid of him.
In 1943, Parks had boarded a bus driven by Blake. She entered the front door of the bus, paid her fare and proceeded to take a seat. Blake told her to disembark and enter the bus again from the back door, which was a rule imposed by some of the drivers. She got off and decided to wait for the next bus, rather than enter through the rear door. Parks vowed to herself she would never ride with Blake again.
According to Mother Parks, James Blake later said, “She ruined my life.” Several news accounts paint a picture of an embittered Blake who apparently felt he’d been maligned and misrepresented by the media.
When Blake died in 2002, Mrs. Parks was asked by a reporter to comment. Gracious as ever, she replied, “I’m sure his family will miss him.”
She told me, one day: “I had no idea when I refused to give up my seat on that Montgomery bus that my small action would help put an end to the segregation laws in the South. I only knew that I was tired of being pushed around. I was a regular person, just as good as anybody else. There had been a few times in my life when I had been treated by White people like a regular person, so I knew what that felt like. It was time that other White people started treating me that way.”
She also told me that she didn’t know how much being in jail had upset her—until she got out. She recalled that her feelings were akin to her reaction when some people came to her house with newspaper photographs of the charred body of Emmett Till. The teenage boy being brutally and unjustly murdered by two White men had played heavily on her heart. Later, she became very close friends with Mamie Till [aka Mamie Till-Mobley], Emmett’s mother, who visited frequently when Mrs. Parks lived with me.
Emmett Till’s story
Emmett Till grew up on the south side of Chicago in the 1940s. On August 25, 1955, while visiting his uncle in Mississippi, he entered a store, purchased some candy and left. The woman at the counter alleged that he grabbed her, made crude remarks and wolf-whistled at her.
Three days later, her husband Roy Bryant and his brother-in- law J.W. Milam went to Emmett Till’s uncle’s house, where he was staying, and kidnapped him; his mutilated body was found in the Tallahatchie River. His mother, Mamie Till, chose to have an open-casket funeral for her son to show everyone the horrors of what happened.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson, a frequent guest of The Mansion, said, “With his body water-soaked and defaced, most people would have kept the casket covered. His mother let the body be exposed. More than 100,000 people saw his body lying in that casket here in Chicago. That must have been, at that time, the largest single civil rights demonstration in American history.”
A month later on September 23, those involved were found not guilty after only an hour of jury deliberation. The tragedy of Emmett Till added fuel to the fire that was the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.
H.H. Leonards is a wife, mother of three and the founder of O Museum in The Mansion in Washington, D.C., where Mrs. Rosa Parks, her friends and business associates lived with her, at no cost, as part of The Mansion and O Museum’s Heroes-In-Residence Program. A staunch advocate of social justice through music and storytelling, she is the co-founder of
51StepsToFreedom.org, a non-profit organization that’s developing a city-wide trail that traces
America’s struggle for equality and freedom.
Excerpted from the book Rosa Parks Beyond the Bus: Life, Lessons, and Leadership with permission from R.H. Boyd Publishing Corporation (all rights reserved.).
image 1: Wikimedia Commons; image 2: Jimmy Emerson, DVM
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