After the boycott, Parks slipped into the background. In 1957, dismayed by the persistent death threats directed at herself and her husband, she and her family moved to Detroit. From here onwards, the book becomes extremely sketchy. Events cascade forward with little real explanation or evaluation. The sit-ins, the March on Washington, Selma, Black Power, the Detroit riot of 1967, the assassination of King. Brinkley claims that by the mid-1960s, Parks had become "a tough-minded, free-thinking feminist who had grown impatient with gradualist approaches." But he offers little detail to substantiate this claim, other than her admiration for Malcolm X. Parks certainly remained active in the civil rights struggle and in the 1980s picketed in Washington as part of the anti-apartheid movement. In 1994 she became a national symbol of a rather different kind when she was robbed in her Detroit home by a young black intruder. She remains alive today, at the age of 88.
Within the constraints of the series, Brinkley has done justice to his subject. The same cannot be said for the publisher. Presumably to avoid frightening off those potential airline readers, the book has no notes and no index. Perhaps worse, there are no illustrations. Brinkley vividly describes well-known photographs of Parks, including one published on the front page of the New York Times when she was arrested as part of a crackdown on boycott leaders by city officials. He writes of the "haunting Alabama photographs of African Americans during the Great Depression" taken by the Swiss journalist Annemarie Schwarzenback, which "offer a marvelous visual record of the world in which Rosa Parks grew up." But what these images actually depict is left to the reader's imagination.
Despite Brinkley's heroic effort to make us understand Parks as a seasoned activist and part of a popular movement, the older image remains more sale-able. What does the publisher put on the back cover to promote the book? "When in 1955 Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, she changed the course of history." Like King, frozen in historical memory on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech, Parks is forever the simple woman with tired feet who singlehandedly brought down segregation.
Today, Montgomery is integrated, and blacks vote in the same proportions as whites. But a startling gap in income, life expectancy and education continues to divide the races. The housing project in which Parks lived still stands, located on the renamed Rosa L. Parks Avenue. But squalor has overtaken these once well-maintained if segregated houses and random gunfire can sometimes be heard at night. The story of Rosa Parks underscores how far America has come since the days of Jim Crow, and how far it still has to go.
-
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
