The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

Chapter 5 explored in detail the theme of “The Cost of Activism.” Parks’s story did not end with her decision on December 1, 1955. She paid for that decision for the rest of her life. Even in her elderly years living in Detroit, she was still subjected to harassment and death threats. Her health and the health of her family suffered. However, it is important to note that these outcomes were not a result of her action but were the reactions of others to her activism. White supremacy dictated levels of abuse and harassment that contributed to Parks’s financial struggles and health. The NAACP and the MIA also failed to acknowledge her contributions to the movement or to provide her with a paid position for the work she was already doing for free for the organizations. Parks’s fame took her all over the country on speaking engagements, yet the money she made on these trips went directly into the accounts of the organizations. Meanwhile, she struggled to pay her bills and to afford much-needed medical care.

Parks knew that her decision on December 1 would have major ramifications for herself and her family, because she spent her entire life enduring mistreatment and the cost of being Black in a segregated and racist society. When Nixon spoke to her and her husband about the possibility of pursuing legal justice, they both knew what this meant. Raymond was an activist when Parks met him. They were forced to weigh the possibility of contributing to change and the reality of what that would mean for their family and their safety.

These costs forced Parks into a position of moving to Detroit. She and her husband could not find work, and the reputation rooted in her activism followed her everywhere. Raymond’s health was declining, and his drinking was worsening. Although they saw moving to Detroit as the opportunity for a fresh start, the family found that the media’s concentration on Southern politics allowed Northern discrimination to thrive by deflecting attention from it. Parks explained that she did not see much difference between Michigan and Alabama. Still, the press wanted to focus only on her connection to the Southern movement: Reporters were not interested in what she had to say about the injustices she saw in Detroit or the realities of her activism in her new city.

The belief that the North was somehow better and far more advanced in regard to racial politics was a myth that provided further evidence of how the civil rights movement was depicted in line with a series of fables rather than in a way that reflected an understanding of a complex reality. Parks witnessed the problems with the housing market and treatment of workers in her community, as Black workers struggled to make house payments that were far higher than those of their white counterparts for houses that were of much lower quality. Reality and representation were starkly different, contributing to the theme of “The Narrative of Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement.” The fable suggested that the North had everything figured out, and racism was a Southern problem. The reality was that Rosa paid dearly for her activism, and the North was also culpable.

Because the racism of Northerners was underreported, Detroit’s white leaders did not see the 1967 uprising coming. Politicians bought into the fable of the contentment of Detroit workers. After all, this was not the South. They believed things were better in the North. The fable allowed the media, law enforcement, and civic authorities to be surprised when trouble boiled to the surface—but Parks was not shocked by the violence. Her experiences with systemic racism, red-baiting, Klan violence, and media mythologizing made her particularly equipped to understand the disparities between myth and reality. Parks keenly understood the hardship, struggle, and fatigue that lay continually just below the surface for Black people who were abused by an unjust and exploitative power structure.