Free The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis

INTRODUCTION
National Honor/Public Mythology
The Passing of Rosa Parks
    ON OCTOBER 24, 2005, AFTER nearly seventy years of activism, Rosa Parks died in her home in Detroit at the age of ninety-two. Within days of her death, Representative John Conyers Jr., who had employed Parks for twenty years in his Detroit office, introduced a resolution to have her body lie in honor in the Capitol rotunda. Less than two months after Hurricane Katrina and after years of partisan rancor over the social justice issues most pressing to civil rights activists like Parks, congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle rushed to pay tribute to the “mother of the civil rights movement.” Parks would become the first woman and second African American to be granted this honor. “Awesome” was how Willis Edwards, a longtime associate who helped organize the three-state tribute, described the numbers of the people who pulled it together. 1
    Parks’s body was first flown to Montgomery for a public viewing and service attended by various dignitaries, including Condoleezza Rice, who affirmed that “without Mrs. Parks, I probably would not be standing here today as Secretary of State.” Then her body was flown to Washington, D.C., on a plane commanded by Lou Freeman, one of the first African American chief pilots for a commercial airline. The plane circled Montgomery twice in honor of Parks, with Freeman singing “We Shall Overcome” over the loudspeaker. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the plane,” recalled Parks’s longtime friend, federal Sixth Circuit judge Damon Keith. 2 Her coffin was met in Washington by the National Guard and accompanied to its place of honor in the Capitol rotunda.
    Forty thousand Americans came to the Capitol to bear witness to her passing. President and Mrs. Bush laid a wreath on her unadorned cherrywood coffin. “The Capitol Rotunda is one of America’s most powerful illustrations of the values of freedom and equality upon which our republic was founded,” Senate majority leader Bill Frist, resolution cosponsor, explained to reporters, “and allowing Mrs. Parks to lie in honor here is a testament to the impact of her life on both our nation’s history and future.” Yet, Frist claimed Parks’s stand was “not an intentional attempt to change a nation, but a singular act aimed at restoring the dignity of the individual.” 3
    Her body was taken from the Capitol to the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church for a public memorial before an overflowing crowd. Then her casket was returned to Detroit for another public viewing at the Museum of African American History. Thousands waited in the rain to pay their respects to one of Detroit’s finest. The seven-hour funeral celebration held at Detroit’s Greater Grace Temple on November 2 attracted four thousand mourners and a parade of speakers and singers from Bill Clinton to Aretha Franklin. In their tributes, Democratic presidential hopefuls focused on Parks’s quietness: Senator Barack Obama praised Parks as a “small, quiet woman whose name will be remembered,” while Senator Hillary Clinton spoke of the importance of “quiet Rosa Parks moments.” As thousands more waited outside to see the dramatic spectacle, a horse-drawn carriage carried Mrs. Parks’s coffin to Woodlawn Cemetery, where she was buried next to her husband and mother. 4 Six weeks later, President Bush signed a bill ordering a permanent statue of Parks placed in the U.S. Capitol, the first ever of an African American, explaining, “By refusing to give in, Rosa Parks showed that one candle can light the darkness. . . . Like so many institutionalized evils, once the ugliness of these laws was held up to the light, they could not stand . . . and as a result, the cruelty and humiliation of the Jim Crow laws are now a thing of the past.” 5
    Parks’s passing presented an opportunity to honor a civil rights legend and to foreground the pivotal but not fully recognized work of