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

movement women. Many sought to commemorate her commitment to racial justice and pay tribute to her courage and public service. Tens of thousands of Americans took off work and journeyed long distances to Montgomery, D.C., and Detroit to bear witness to her life and pay their respects. Across the nation, people erected alternate memorials to Mrs. Parks in homes, churches, auditoriums, and public spaces of their communities. The streets of Detroit were packed with people who, denied a place in the church, still wanted to honor her legacy. 6 Awed by the numbers of people touched by Parks’s passing, friends and colleagues saw this national honor as a way to lift up the legacy of this great race woman.
    Despite those powerful visions and labors, the woman who emerged in the public tribute bore only a fuzzy resemblance to Rosa Louise Parks. Described by the
New York Times
as the “accidental matriarch of the civil rights movement,” the Rosa Parks who surfaced in the deluge of public commentary was, in nearly every account, characterized as “quiet.” “Humble,” “dignified,” and “soft-spoken,” she was “not angry” and “never raised her voice.” 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 and linked to her quietness. 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. In this story, the civil rights movement demonstrated the power and resilience of American democracy. Birthed from the act of a simple Montgomery seamstress, a nonviolent struggle built by ordinary people had corrected the aberration of Southern racism without overthrowing the government or engaging in a bloody revolution. 7
    This narrative of national redemption entailed rewriting the history of the black freedom struggle along with Parks’s 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. It ignored her forty years of political work in Detroit
after
the boycott, as well as the substance of her political philosophy, a philosophy that had commonalties with Malcolm X, Queen Mother Moore, and Ella Baker, as well as Martin Luther King Jr. The 2005 memorial celebrated Parks the individual rather than a community coming together in struggle. Reduced to one act of conscience made obvious, the long history of activism that laid the groundwork for her decision, the immense risk of her bus stand, and her labors over the 382-day boycott went largely unheralded, the happy ending replayed over and over. Her sacrifice and lifetime of political service were largely backgrounded.
    Buses were crucial to the pageantry of the event and trailed her coffin around the country. 8 Sixty Parks family members and dignitaries traveled from Montgomery to D.C. aboard three Metro buses draped in black bunting. In D.C., a vintage bus also dressed in black, along with other city buses, followed the hearse to the public memorial at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. The procession to and from the Capitol rotunda included an empty vintage 1957 bus. The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, offered free admission the day of her funeral so visitors could see the actual bus “where it all began.”
    Parks’s body also served an important function, brought from Detroit to Montgomery to Washington, D.C., and then back to Detroit for everyone to witness. Her body became necessary for these public rites, a sort of public communion where Americans would visit her coffin and be sanctified. This personal moment with Parks’s body became not simply a private moment of grief and honor but also a public act of celebrating a nation that would celebrate her.