Rebellious Women in the Black Freedom Struggle

From Montgomery, Alabama, to the United Nations, women activists promoted the black freedom struggle in the mid-twentieth century, and scholarly biographies of their impact have been emerging since around 2000.¹ Two recent biographies of Rosa Parks and Eslanda Robeson break new ground in deepening our understanding of gender and the “long history” and international scope of the Civil Rights Movement.

While it will come as no shock that Eslanda Robeson, activist journalist and anthropologist, was a radical like her husband, Paul Robeson, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks may surprise some readers. Both women had associations with the Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., black nationalism, the peace movement, and the left wing of the union movement. Their biographers, Barbara Ransby and Jeanne Theoharis, are both noted civil rights historians who have argued for the “long civil rights movement” and have placed women at the center, rather than the margins of their analysis.

The result is a rich, gendered view of the long civil rights movement and an examination of the way we view black women activists in our culture. Some of the most important analysis in Theoharis’ The Rebellious Life, is her examination of Rosa Parks as a symbol and her critique of that symbolism. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., who often remains frozen in time giving the “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, Rosa Parks has been frozen standing on a bus in Montgomery in 1955, refusing to give up her seat. As Theoharis points out, Parks has often been portrayed as a quiet seamstress who was tired that day: an “accidental heroine” who acted as an individual and showed the world the flaw of racism in American democracy, so it could be corrected. Her own rebelliousness in confronting racism through collective organizing in the NAACP, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Highlander Folk School is usually left out. Omitted also is her suffering from this stand and the intense white reprisals—both economic and physically threatening—that drove her out of Montgomery. The many decades of her political life after moving to Detroit, her participation in the Black Power movements in Detroit and nationally, her opposition to the Vietnam War, and her support for nuclear disarmament and the anti-apartheid movement have been virtually invisible. Yet there she stood, as Theoharis writes, “hidden in plain sight” (p. xi).

Class and gender analysis are important in both these biographies. Theoharis’ subject preferred to be called Mrs. Parks, and that is how the author refers to her throughout much of the book and (with the addition of her first name) in the title. Rosa Parks was a working-class woman, with all the disadvantages (and advantages of insight) that that position entails in American life. Perhaps the most painful part of being a working-class woman for Parks was that she was not considered qualified enough to have a position with the Montgomery Improvement Association, which received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations during and after the bus boycott. She herself lost her job at the department store where she had been an assistant tailor (not the more feminized title “seamstress”). As a result, she fell into destitution. As a married woman without children, many assumed that her husband was supporting her, but due to his ill health and the economic retaliation, he too suffered from the actions of segregationist whites.

Theoharis is careful to be fair to Raymond Parks and stresses that Rosa Parks loved him deeply and valued his support and companionship as a fellow radical. She points out that Rosa McCauley thought of him as “the first real activist” whom she had ever met (p. 13). Raymond Parks was organizing support for the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930s when...