Dan Snow's History Hit - Rosa Parks

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

On the 1st of December, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. After taking her seat in the section designated for people of colour, Rosa was asked to move for white passengers that wanted to sit down. She refused, and was arrested. This incident has become one of the most infamous examples of segregation in the U.S., and Mrs. Parks has gained an iconic status in the civil rights movement. A lifetime of activism and campaigning earned her the title, ‘the first lady of civil rights’. On today’s episode, Dan is joined by Reverend H. H. Leonards, author of Rosa Parks: Beyond the Bus. Mrs. Parks was a guest in her home for nearly a decade, and she recounts for us her memories of this extraordinary person.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's on the 1st of December 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, Rosa Parks, was ordered by bus driver James Blake to stand up. She was sitting in seats that had been designated for people of colour in the bus towards the back of the vehicle, but the white section was filling up and white people wanted to sit down. So the driver ordered her to get up and she said no. He then apparently said, well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to call the police, have you arrested? And she said, you may do that. What happened next shook the politics of race and national politics in the US and sent ripples much further afield than that.

Rosa Parks was arrested, she was charged and fined, but a young pastor, Martin Luther King, came to town and organised a bus boycott in Montgomery, often seen as his first great moment in the national and international spotlight, one that would see him bring a gigantic march on Washington, speak about his dream for the future of America, help to usher in significant legislative change, win himself a Nobel Peace Prize, and then sadly attracted an assassin's bullet. But what of Rosa Parks herself? What of the woman whose bravery, whose refusal to be bullied, whose stand for dignity began this campaign. She was not new to the civil rights movement. She'd actually performed heroics,

putting herself through school, getting a high school degree, managing to beat the system of segregation in the South, passing various tests and scaling various hurdles placed in the way of African Americans voting and managed to become a voter in 1945. She worked in an administrative role with civil rights activists and she worked particularly on cases where young women of colour had been raped by police officers. She was intimately involved in the struggle for African-American dignity and rights. But contrary to some myths, this was not a stunt. She was just on the way home from work that day. She did not intend to sit down that bus and start a revolution.

For this podcast, I'm going to talk to a very interesting woman. She's the Reverend H.H. Lennertz. She goes by H. She's the founder of The Mansion on O Street, which is a boutique hotel and cultural center in Washington, D.C. She received a phone call some years ago, and it was a desperate plea to provide a haven, to provide shelter for Rosa Parks, as she was gaining in years. She'd been assaulted in Detroit during a break-in to her apartment, and as well as the resulting physical and mental trauma, she was struggling to make ends meet financially. So H took her in. They spent time together,

and she's now written a book about the lessons that she learned from Rosa Parks. I'm very grateful H is on the pod. She's going to tell us all about Rosa Parks and how she changed history. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. H, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. I'm honored to talk to you across the pond. That's right.

Well, first of all, talk to me about how you, well, you became friends with this legend of American history. I received a phone call from someone by the name of Brother Willis Edwards. I did not know who he was. He told me that Mrs. Rosa Parks had been severely assaulted in Detroit in her home. She was in the hospital. She had no money. in Detroit in her home. She was in the hospital. She had no money. When she got out of the hospital, she absolutely refused to go back into her home where she was assaulted. He had heard that we had free hotel rooms for heroes and artists in residence. Could she stay there at no cost while she healed? It would only be a few days. I did not know who she was, but I could tell from the urgency of his voice that I needed to say the words yes. So I did. And probably three weeks later, I got a call. She

had found free flights to come. Could five people come with her because she needed round-the-clock care? So I said yes. And that's how she came to the O Museum in the Mansion. It was an extraordinary first meeting. She was very frail. She was slumped in a wheelchair. We had ramps coming down into the mansion. And the moment I saw her and she looked up and she reached out her hand and I touched her, my life was changed. I think that's happened twice in my life. You feel the power of certain people

when that happens. And she was such a powerful woman that she passed in 2005, and I still feel her presence guiding me, teaching me. When was this moment when you first met her? She was 81 years old, and it was 1994. And how much time did you spend with her from then on? So at first, very little time because she was so frail and she needed her privacy. But every day after she started to heal emotionally, physically, and spiritually, every day at a minimum, we would have cookies and tea in the afternoon. And when she was able to go out again to church, I went to services with her all the time. So we spent a good deal of time together. And many times when we were

having tea together in the afternoon, we would just simply hold hands together. You didn't need to talk with Mrs. Parks all the time because you could feel her presence. And she was such a muse. She could channel her feelings through you by simply holding hands with her. And that was also a huge lesson that with people that you love, you don't need to perform. You don't need to have conversations all the time. It's sharing time together, focused on each other. That is so important. Before I go on, can I ask what was the second time when you felt that power sweep over you and when you met someone amazing, if you don't mind? Again, it was through the simple gesture of touching where you see your life ahead of yourself. I was in a church actually with a priest and it was extraordinary. And he became my mentor.

You're lucky to experience that kind of emotion. Many people can go a long time without having that kind of thing. Right. And what's interesting is he really became my spiritual guide because the lessons that he had to teach were really quite extraordinary. Speaking of extraordinary, let's go back a few, wouldn't mind sharing some of the details of Rosa Parks' life, both from what you learned from her, but of course, from the literature and the documentaries that abound about her.

What was her background? She grew up trying to get an education, but because she was black in the South, girls couldn't go to school after fifth grade. But her mother was a teacher, so she continued to try to go back into the school system. She did learn to read and write. She did finally graduate from high school when she was 26. That's called persistence. She read voraciously. She wrote voraciously. In the 1930s, she started documenting rape victims. She wrote voraciously. In the 1930s, she started documenting rape victims.

Many people don't know this. At her own peril in the South, black men and women who had been raped, she gave them an identity. She wrote their story. She was an extraordinary woman. And at the time, boys that were black in the South were not allowed to go to school after third grade. So many of the people in the NAACP, the men did not know how to write at the time. So she became the secretary by default,

but she documented everything. She never threw any piece of paper out because she knew from a small child how important it was to document her race and her thoughts and the people that she met. her race and her thoughts and the people that she met. And so before she became famous for refusing to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, she was already a committed, she was going to document, she was a secretarial, had a secretarial role within this civil rights movement. Yes. But the only time I would see her frustrated was when people assumed that what happened with the bus was planned. The NAACP had talked about doing this, but she would never have gotten on the bus if she had known who the driver was.

She said that she was fumbling in her purse when she walked up the platform to the bus. She put her money in and then she looked up and was horrified because she didn't know the bus driver. They had had an altercation before. She was petrified of him. In the South, if you were the last woman on the bus, you would be driven to the end of the bus line and be raped by the driver. So there was so much fear in her heart. But she said a week before this incident, she had seen the photograph of Emmett Till in his casket. And it was that emblazoned photograph in her mind and praying to God while she was shaking her seat that she did not get up. But also the misnomer in the press was that she had sat in the white section. That was not true either. She sat in the black section. And so that's a myth. We're told that she refused to leave that section. Tell me more about what

happened. She refused to leave her seat, but she was sitting in the black section. And she said that the weight of Emmett Till kept her in her seat and praying to God kept her in a seat. Did she know at that moment that she felt that she was going to be at the heart of something enormous or did it just feel like another day, another day of struggle? Another day, another day of struggle. That's a very good way of putting it. Her whole life was another day of struggle. People think that people that are famous have an easy life. struggle. People think that people that are famous have an easy life. They do not. Those committed to a movement have some very difficult times. It was, I think, 1968 riots in Detroit, and her husband's barbershop was destroyed, not by the rioters, but by the police. And in order for her to deal with that disaster,

she and her husband were sitting in a diner where they served you in a brown bag and she was at the table and to keep her heart together, she picked up a pencil and wrote on the brown bag, the struggle continues, the struggle continues, the struggle continues. And that powerful bag was preserved. She never threw it out. And it's in the Library of Congress today. You can see it. And you can feel that. You always have to continue.

Don't take the world for granted. And she used to tell me something over and over again that I did not understand at the time. And I now understand it. But it took me years to understand the power of what she was telling me. She said, people don't understand that we're hiding behind the laws. No one's taking the time to meet people that don't believe the way they do. If we don't spend time changing people's hearts and teaching them that love is all that matters and that we can come together in commonalities, the laws will roll back. And right now in America,

because we spent 50 years not paying attention to people's hearts, the laws are rolling back. So my mission is really to talk and teach the lessons of Mrs. Parks. It's so important today that we find commonality, because in commonality, that's where hope lies. You listen to Dan Snow's history, talk about Rosa Parks, what coming up. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, host of the new podcast, American History Hit. Twice a week, I'll be exploring stories from America's past to help us understand the United States of today. Join me as I head back in time to witness Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence, head to the battlefields during the Civil War,

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Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. You've kind of alluded to her bravery, which I didn't understand. You mentioned Emmett Till. He was a black teenager who was murdered because he was apparently flirting with a young white woman whilst visiting Mississippi. She herself had worked on cases where white police officers had raped young black women for things like this, right? As she sat there, this was not just a kind of political talking point. She was taking her life in her hands really as she refused to move on that bus. Yes. Yes. And she was petrified. She admits that it was not something easy and her life was threatened the rest of her life after

that. She could not find a job in Alabama. She and her husband moved to Detroit where her brother lived after the war. She could not get a job in Detroit either because she was Mrs. Rosa Parks. Right. Well, I yell, come to that afterwards. Tell me what happens then. She's asked to stand up and she refuses. She's carted off to jail, which was a very frightening thing for her. And she's bailed out. thing for her. And she's bailed out. And the only way of the news in the South was to go to churches. So people convene in churches. They knew somebody needed to organize. And they talked about a bus strike. And they talked about who could be the head of it. And Mrs. Parks insisted that it be Dr. King. And you'll see if you go to the Library of

Congress, the letters that she wrote to him to try to convince him to be the head of the Montgomery bus strike. He did not want the position. He was 26 in town. He said he was too new. He didn't know the people. And she said something really prophetic that is also a lesson. It's important that the new guy become head of this because we don't know anything bad about you right now. And no one can use anything against you in our mission because you're so new. So it's something to think about in the political sphere. Find someone that no one knows that's going to do the right thing because he changed history. Together, they changed history. And the idea was that you refuse to travel the right thing because he changed history. Together, they changed history.

And the idea was that you refused to travel on any buses, right? Until you're treated with equal dignity. Correct. It was successful. 361 days. Actually, I learned yesterday at her museum at Montgomery, Alabama, that was 362 days. People don't know, because it was a leap year, which is fascinating. And what was her role? She was arrested. She was found guilty after a very short trial. Fined $10, I think, or $14, including the court fees.

What role did she play after that? Did she want to be in the limelight? Did she find that huge pressure? She was always discriminated. She was black. She was Native American. She was white. And she was a woman.

So women were always discriminated against. So everyone would say to her, you've done too much. It's your time to just sit and be quiet. Even in 1963, when they had the big march in Washington and women organized the march, women came from all over the world for that march where Dr. King gave his, I have a dream, brilliant speech. Women were not even allowed on the stage to talk. And when they questioned this, the men leadership said, well, it's going to be televised. People will see you. You will be raped.

We're saving you from this horror. So they stepped back. But when President Kennedy asked Dr. King to pick 10 people to come to the White House to talk about civil rights legislation, he chose 10 men. And at that point is really when Mrs. Parks pivoted from the civil rights movement. People don't give her the credit, don't even know, but she helped found NOW, which is the women's organization in the United States that is so powerful. But she didn't want people to know that it was her idea because she didn't want it to be about her. It was a group of women. And she's given credit for helping to found it by the person that gets the credit, Anna Hageman. Her biography said if it wasn't for Mrs. Parks and her idea to do this, it would never

have happened. So she was a very humble woman. It was never about her. It was about the cause greater than her that was important. And then when she found out that women's organizations were discriminating against men, she really pivoted to human rights. So starting in the late 60s, she was focused totally on human rights. She firmly believed that if you discriminated with anyone in any group, it wasn't a positive thing. She loved her church. It was the AMA church. She brought people of all religions to her church to meet on Sundays. She didn't just do that. She learned about Judaism in depth. She learned about Catholicism in depth, Buddhism, Hinduism, because she felt as long as you believed in something bigger than yourself, that was good.

And she was a significant national figure, as you say, working with Planned Parenthood, other projects as well. Yes. By the time you met her, was she still working right at the end? She was working with a congressman, Conyers, in Michigan. She was this very frail, small, petite woman that had warrior in her heart, but so much love that her mission beamed through her. And all the people that had the opportunity to meet her and touch her hand, shake her hand, felt the same power that I did. So she could change people's hearts. She loved talking to people that didn't necessarily believe in what she did, because she felt if they met her,

they would not fear her. And fear really was the basis of racism. Fear really was the basis of racism. And she suffered an assault in her home. There was issues around money and her physical decline. Life wasn't easy for her. She didn't perhaps get the national treasure treatment she deserved in the last few years of her life. But that wasn't what drove her. What drove her was changing people's hearts.

She was never bitter. Whenever anything bad happened to her, she would fall down, obviously, emotionally and physically. But she would always get up. And another lesson that was so important that she taught me was that when bad things happen to you, disappear. disappear. So when her husband and brother died within months of each other, and she was devastated because those were the two people that she loved so deeply. She was taking care of her mother. She checked her mother and herself into a nursing home in Detroit for a year. She felt she couldn't take care of herself, let alone her mother. She felt she couldn't take care of herself, let alone her mother. And during that year, she got her strength back, her spiritual, her emotional, and her physical strength back to continue.

And she came up with starting the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development in Detroit. So she used the time where she disappeared from the public eye to figure out who she wanted to become. And it was an extraordinary institute. When she came to me at the age of 81, she disappeared for about six months to heal her mind, her soul, and her body again. And in that six months, she decided who she wanted to become. And she became stronger than she had ever been in the last 10 years because a horrible thing happened

to her. And so I learned that from that. When things knock me down, disappear. Sometimes it's a day, sometimes it's a week, but you need to gain your strength within yourself to go out to help people that are less fortunate than you. Very valuable lesson. What's her legacy? What does she mean in the long sweep of US and world history, do you think? That's a good question. I never thought of that question before. For me, her mission and her focus on love and the message of hope keeps me going. And I feel that people that meet me and listen to that will continue her message. She was so focused on giving children education and love her whole life, that that is the future.

So if we focus on our children and teach them lessons that she taught me and anyone that she met, that there is hope in the world. And it's interesting that everyone knows Mozart, Beethoven, but people don't know a politician that was alive during the time they created their music. And the same is almost true with Mrs. Parks. She will live long after all these politicians. That's a great place to end it, H. If people want to know more about her and your

relationship and the lessons, tell us the name of your book. It's Beyond the Bus. It's a book about her, Mrs. Parks' soul and heart and things people don't know about her, life lessons and leadership. And you can purchase it from Amazon through our website at omuseum.org or rhboyd.com, which is the publisher and is the oldest African-American publisher in the United States. A fantastic company out of Nashville. Thank you very much for coming on. Thank you, sir. you