You're Wrong About - Rosa Parks with Princess Weekes

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

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When the FBI is trying to kill you, you gotta let off some stress somehow. I'm just saying. Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall and today we are talking about Rosa Parks with Princess Weeks. Princess Weeks is a writer, a YouTuber, a historian, a cultural critic and one of my favorite guests we last heard from her about Lizzie Borden. It's one of my favorite episodes we've done recently and today she's back to talk about Rosa Parks. This is a conversation about history,

the way that we learn and tell our stories and the human elements of people that can get lost when they are enshrined in legend, even as heroic figures. We try and get close up. And I had such a wonderful time having this conversation with Princess. This month over on Patreon and Apple Plus, we are releasing the final installment of our Britney Spears saga, our book club on the woman and me with our friend Eve Lindley, truly the thorn birds of its day.

That episode will be out soon. Keep your eye out for it. And I'm so excited to share it with you as well. That's about it. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening to the show. Go plant something. And here's your episode. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we go back to seventh grade and tell you what really happened. With us today is Princess Week, so I'm so happy to have back. Thank you so much for having me back. I'm so excited to talk to you about Rosa Parks, because I feel I learned so much during this reading

experience that I literally can't wait to tell you all about it. I can't wait either. And to me, the story of Rosa Parks sort of, I think for many Americans is a synecdoche for how the entire civil rights movement was taught. Exactly. And I think with Rosa Parks, the inspiration for why even picking this talk, because I was talking with my friend Ken, and we were talking about how there's always been this back and forth about whether or not Rosa Parks sat on the bus intentionally, like if she was working with the NAACP or not. And I was like, you know, I actually don't know what is the, quote unquote, truth. Like I've always heard so many mixed things.

And then I think with the resurgence of people finding out about Claudette Colvin, there's also been a whole backlash of like, well, how much did she actually do? And I think in a lot of ways Rosa Parks is emblematic of the highs and lows of the structure of the civil rights movement about the leadership behind it and how they didn't really support the women very well. And I think in Rosa Parks, you see this really strong figure who gets whitewashed almost as equally as I would say, as like as MLK in terms of what she did, what she meant and how long she lived.

You know, I, in reading the intro to the book that I use as my primary source, The Rebellious Life of Miss Rosa Parks by Janine Theo Harris, I was reminded that I was alive when she died. It happened in 2005. It was during the Bush administration, which feels particularly anti-black.

But she was this living figure who I had seen lionized, but didn't really know much about. So this was a great way for me to just learn more about it and talk about it with one of my favorite people. Yeah. And I think that when people become iconic, it often kind of robs them of their humanity because if you're a hero who sort of enshrined in something well within your own lifetime. I mean, that's that's also very strange. And I love talking about people that that happens to. But where should we start? I really have a vivid memory of this specific history lesson, or at least I think I do. Well, I'm going to start at the very beginning because I think the roots of Rosa Parks

activism and grassroots really starts at home. So she was born Rosa Louisa McCauley on February 4th in Tuskegee, Alabama. And she was primarily raised by her mother and her grandparents and her great grandparents. And her grandparents had been enslaved. So she was really only one generation removed from slavery. And her grandfather, whose name was Sylvester, was the product of assault. So he had very white passing features growing up. And he would use that to basically punk white people and like embarrass them in public, which is my favorite thing about race warriors who were like skin in this era. They were always trying to make white people look embarrassed. And I miss that energy, honestly.

And it's in him that a lot of the family's rebellious streak can be traced. He didn't want his daughters to work for white families because of the sexual violence that he knew that they could experience. And he also didn't want his grandchildren to play with white kids, because he never wanted them to be in a situation where they would be forced to feel subservient to anyone. Rosa will talk about in her letters,

sitting up at night with him, holding a rifle waiting for the Klan to come and her just being like, I wanted to see him kill one of them. And I was in that moment when I was reading the biography, I was like, wow, Rosa Price is kind of a baddie. She's kind of just like, from the very beginning, resistant to the idea that she had to humble herself to white people. And her family was dedicated to her being educated, but she had to leave school early because there were a lot of health issues in her family. And she really struggled with that in the very beginning of being seen as an important

person within these movements because she only had us eventually a high school level education. But it was that education anyway that made her feel very resilient. And one of my favorite stories from her youth is that one day she was walking with her brother and some little annoying white kid was trying to talk both of them. So she took up a brick off the ground and threatened the kid to hit her. And then he didn't he punked out. And when she got home, her grandmother I know right heard about it. And she

told Rosa that if she kept that up, she would end up being lynched before she was 20. And Rosa said, quote, I would be lynched rather than be run over by them. They could get the rope ready for me anytime they wanted to do their lynching. And just the image of like this young girl growing up, just taking care of her brother, which I can relate to because I'm another sibling, just being like, I would rather die than force myself

to be subjugated by someone else and to have a sense of that so young. To need to develop a sense of that so young. To need to develop a sense of that so young. There's a story by Erskine Caldwell, who wrote Tobacco Road, that's called like Saturday afternoon or something like that. Have you read that story? I haven't read that. It's about a lynching in a small town and it's told in kind of close

third person on behalf of one of the lynchers. And it's a really, I think, brilliantly chilling piece of writing because it just describes it as something that happens amidst all the other things that happened that day from the perspective of the people who do it. And they just kill someone, don't really think about it, and then go back to work and just start thinking about what they have to do to close down the store. And the mundanity of lynching for white people feels like something that something that I think our obsession in American culture with evil intent makes it hard for us to accept that it was just something people did for fun.

And that's the evil is they're not thinking about it. Exactly. It's what did they say? The mundane of it all. When you realize that there are people who were going to barbecues and being like, yeah, I'm bringing my child to the lynching, and that there are postcards

and that they would take bones and teeth. And this is the environment that people are just living in. People are just trying to live their daily lives and trying to survive, to grow up knowing that you can be assaulted at any time and nothing's going to happen to you. But if you have a brother or a male person in your life, that they could be murdered at any time if, you know, a white woman even feels slightly intimidated by them and how that reality is something that Rosa didn't just grow up knowing about, but being biologically tied to it. It kind of reminds me of Octavia

Butler's kindred, knowing that for a lot of black diasporians that are sentient-to-trial slavery that part of your ancestry for a lot of us is also slaveholders who abused us. And to only be a generation separate from that. It's so traumatic, but it's also what made Rosa in her own way very determined to push back against those things. And also to meet people throughout her life that would embellish that. Like her husband, Raymond, she met him in the early 1930s. And at first, she wasn't into him because he was a little bit too light than she liked because she, you know, from her grandfather's influence, but she was really drawn to him because of his politics. He refused to be intimidated by white

people. He always carried a gun. And it's always funny to read about like Second Amendment rights from like the black American perspective of like, that's right, you do need a gun right now. And that's why they'll take it away from you. Yeah. But yeah, so they were when they got married, Raymond was part of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And one of the first cases they worked on together was the Scottsboro case. Are you familiar with that? Nicole Sattel Yes, but in a dusty corner of my memory. But was this basically a very long-standing wrongful conviction? Tanya Brown Yes. So it started in 1931 where there were

a bunch of white and black kids on a train that were hoboing, which essentially is like going from place to place on a train in a vagrant way. It's very Dickinson of them. And nine Black male teens were accused of raping two white women that they found a stowaways on the train. And over a course of many, many years, many of them were either convicted and then it was overturned and it was converted and it was overturned several times. During one of the many appeals and real trials, one of the victims admitted that she made up the story, that they were just doing it because they felt intimidated and they felt like I had to say something. The jury found them guilty

one time, but then the judge set it aside and they had a new trial. And this kept happening for years. And then eventually five of the nine boys who were then men were convicted and served sentences between 75 years to death. Three served prison sentences, one was shot in the face and disabled for the rest of their lives. Another escaped and went into hiding for years until they were eventually pardoned by Governor Wallace, segregation today, segregation tomorrow, that dude. Yeah, he was in Forrest Gump.

He has that one line and it sticks with you. But these were the kind of cases that Rosa and her husband were actively a part of during the movement. And they were very much invested in grassroots organizing. One of the things that the book really highlights is that during this time, there were a lot of class divides within these civil rights movements. And so you would have people who were very centered in like the middle class optics of everything, really cared about respectability. And then you had people like Rosa and her husband who were very much invested in trying to help everyday black people dealing with the injustices that they could not economically

just escape from. They didn't have the mobility to just leave. So they raised money. He helped her go back to school so she could finally get her high school degree because in the 40s, only seven out of every 100 black people even had a high school diploma. And throughout her entire life, up until she moved to Detroit, eventually she would struggle to find good work

because there weren't that many job opportunities for black people. And the ones that were were usually assistants and tailor jobs and all of those things that were very gendered and limiting. So they never had a lot of money, but they were always giving it back. They really became pillars of their community together. What makes Rosa such an interesting person and why I think she becomes this symbol is

not just because of all of the class and colorist things, because those matter as well, but it is because from the very beginning, she was always giving to others. And she kept getting more and more radical. She ended up having a basically political soulmate friendship with Ed Nixon. And if I'm talking about Richard Nixon, I'll say Richard Nixon, because there's a lot of just Nixon in here. And he was part of this militant group of porters that were trying to get you United is called the Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Partners. So he became sort of like her soulmate in terms of they were both communist adjacent.

It was still bad to call yourself a communist because the NAACP did not want to be tied in with that at the time, but Rosa never distanced herself actively from communism. So, you know, red red scare Rosa. So she was. So she very much worked on making sure that there were legal battle stones happening. So she was going all around the state, listing cases and finding stories of people who were being harmed and trying to find some way to bring those cases up so that they could cause some legal action. And Rosa would say about Nixon that, quote, he was the first person besides my husband and my immediate family and my mother to really

impress upon me the freedom that was ours and that we had to take a stand to at least let it be known that we want to be free regardless of the conditions under which we were living. Through that she would end up eventually becoming a secretary for the NAACP. And one of her duties was, I said, recording a bunch of incidents with the law, which would include sexual assault against black women. The most famous of that being Recy Taylor. This name people might remember because I think Oprah brought it up in a speech a

couple years ago and there's a really great book about it called At the Dark End of the Road Black Women Rape and Resistance by Danielle L. Maguire, highly recommend. And essentially Recy Taylor was a young black mother who was kidnapped and gang raped on her way back from church by a group of white men, one of them being a US Army private. And while this kind of abuse was common, what made her case unique is that she refused to be quiet about it. She wanted to actively bring legal action, even though there was fear of death, actively

from doing that. And the fact that she was a mother, a wife, literally coming home from church, really galvanized the community into doing a lot of organizing in order to create the institutions and movements that would allow something like the bus boycott to happen. It was these small moments, not small, but it was these other moments of just collective trauma that were building and building into something deeper.

I think that's also really important to understand is that the civil rights movement may be seen as like this like pocket in time, but it really is an accumulation of all of these things that were just making it harder and harder for Black people to just survive and pretend that they were okay. Because one of the things that they talk about in the book is that a lot of Black people, and I relate to this too even now, are taught to smile in the face of discomfort,

to not let people know that they are unhappy. And it is all of these moments of people pushing back against that, that allow us to get to the civil rights movement. While she was doing this work and trying to get justice for these women, that's when she was being started to be labeled a communist. It would eventually end up haunting her

when she became a symbol in the movement, but this is the beginning of her being seen as a menace. And despite her shyness, because everyone will talk about how, even though she had all of this like gusto, she was very shy and didn't let the publicly speak, which I'm like relatable. She didn't stop doing this work, even when it got hard. So some of the cases that she documented, I just want to name because I just think it's important to not just give context, but like if we know their names to say it, there was Gertrude Perkins who was raped by two police officers. This case was significant because originally the police chief wanted to pursue prosecution for the police officers.

But the mayor and the city council man, I believe, did not want it to happen and just ended up changing the names of the officers and pushing it aside. And they blame this kind of violence and rattling up of the community on the NAACP. Wow. Okay, wait, so is the argument there like, because you're making such a fuss about civil rights, you're direct, you're making us want to hurt you. Yeah.

Okay. All right. Great. It's literally the same art. It literally never changes. That's the thing that's so that's so chilling. It's like you fighting for rights are making people not want to give you those rights. Have you ever thought about just staying in your place?

Yeah, I wish that sounded more unfamiliar. Yeah, it's so deeply aggravating. And yeah, the NAACP would end up getting a lot of these flags. And because of that, they felt a responsibility, quote unquote, to be as respectable as possible. Another case that was really prominent was the rape and murder of Amanda Barker, who was 13 years old. Nixon, Black Nixon was able to get the governor to put up a reward for $250, which was very big at the time for the killer. But nothing ever came of that. The other really big one was the case of Jeremiah Reeves, who was a 16 year old high school student who went to Booker T. Washington's High School and had a consensual relationship with a white woman, but eventually after a lot of pressure from the community, she accused him of rape and he was beaten and tortured and then eventually sentenced to death. This was a really impactful case because he was this well-known student, very beloved, and there was just this rooted

fear of seeing it happen to someone who was on the right track, you know, who didn't do anything wrong. And one of his classmates was Claudette Colvin, who will show up again shortly. But she called his arrest the turning point of her life and really sort of made her grow as someone who wanted to do more activism and fight back. And what year did that happen? So this happened in 1953. They did try to appeal the case to the Supreme Court in 1954, and then he was eventually killed in 1955 by the state. God, yeah.

Yeah. I was born in 1988. I was born when my mom was 40, which is, you know, older for an 80s mom, but certainly very normal. I'll probably have kids at that age. mom, but certainly very normal. I'll probably have kids at that age. And, you know, she was a five year old the year this happened. The same way that I was a five year old when like free Willy was coming out and we were wearing LA gear. You know, this is. Mere minutes ago. Exactly. And I think, you know, as people who, as we've talked about in many different

ways about the fact that rape victims rarely lie and that it's a very, you know, a small percentage. And I think there's, there's just something about this period of the way in which this kind of weaponized rape accusations happened that I think is so still at the core of our discussions about it, but has been like misappropriated to sort of paint all women as liars rather than really sit with the fact that a lot of that comes from this paternalistic way in which that like, even though I do blame these women in a lot of ways, another part of it is that like, if they didn't say these things,

they were going to be beaten. They were probably going to be raped by other people. It's a topic that I don't want to read more about, but I would love someone else to do it. And like, I would love to read someone else's, you know, paper about that topic. Because as I was thinking about this thing, I'm like, it's such a thing that still comes up. Because anytime there is a dynamic between a, you know, a black man and a white woman in pop culture like even go to Jonathan Majors this kind of stuff always gets brought up. It's a reminder of why that response happens even though it's the context is completely different. But I think we're still kind of reckoning with what that means and I think even as a woman I think about what that means to

have something that I as a feminist know is not something that we use to see it be used against people who look like me. It's a bit of a ramble, but it is something that I was thinking about while I was working on this project. Oh yeah. And yeah, and these things are so knit together and it's so hard to live in the era of a million bad faith arguments where every time a woman is found to have lied or even just misremembered or given some kind of faulty testimony about a sexual assault, it's like another brick in the wall of a grand conspiracy theory about how all women make it up. I feel like in the cases we're talking about that there are different overlapping motivations,

most of them in some way symptomatic of having that kind of complicity in a patriarchal white supremacy that white women do so much damage with. And I wonder, obviously it makes more sense when there are cases where it's something elicited under duress or where you make a claim because you're afraid of what will happen to you. And so you direct the violence towards someone who will be hurt much more. But when it comes out of nowhere, I don't know.

Someone needs to figure it out. Someone knows. Yeah. Someone knows. It must do with power and power dynamics and trying to get power when you don't have any. At the same time, it's just one of those things that is so deeply scarring to so many layers of multiple communities. And I think it's one of those things that like,

when the woman who accused Emmett Till just died last year, it was kind of this moment of like ding dong, the witch is dead because it's like a child was murdered because of what you said. And there is no sense that you ever really grappled with that. That racism can go so deep that it would make you dehumanize a 14-year-old, you know.

But that's white supremacy for you. If you can't know why behavior exists, you can recognize it as a pattern, right? And it's worth emphasizing that this, you know, these weren't a few isolated incidents. This was, we have this pattern in culture of white women accusing black men or black children of some kind of sexual misconduct resulting in their deaths. And this happens, I mean, it's, that's a trend worth studying more than we have. Yeah. And I think it's one of those things, because you think of all the periods that like, I know it's kind of a things, because you think of all the periods that, like, I know it's kind of a tangent, but like how the Civil Rights Movement leads right

into the feminist movement. And so you have two conversations about rape happening at the same time. You have the conversations of, like, women who have been victims of rape but get no justice, black women who have been victims of rape but have no justice. But then where does the women who

accuse people of rape falsely fit into that? And I can even imagine to a certain degree, if we take it in the lens of white feminism, how those narratives are not helpful in terms of like, if you're trying to make a point about rape and rape culture, and about how it doesn't happen, it's easy to just dismiss that as like racism, and then just put it to the side, versus it being emblematic of something to do with the relationship that white women have to white patriarchy and white supremacy, especially in environments where they have so little power to enact and therefore find the smallest person to enact it on. And that ends up being black people. And it happens in the

domestic sphere. It happens in the sexual sphere. And yeah, it was just something that just I kept thinking about as I was reading all these cases. And also, because of the disconnect of all of these young black girls, and black women who just felt the need to stay silent because there was nothing else that they could do. Let's see, transition, transition, back to the Montgomery Boycotts. Yeah, transition, transition. Transition, transition. I think because Rosa Parks being arrested, as seen as the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycotts without meaning

to it erases all of the work that was happening beforehand. This was building up for a long time and Montgomery was very prime for it because there were two air bases in the area and there was a really large black service population that was using these buses all the time. And after World War I, that is when you would see black servicemen and black service people come home from war and face this disgusting treatment despite being veterans, you know, despite having served their country to come here and then be dismissed, to be beaten in their uniforms, to not get any of the benefits of what happened. And so there were many incidents of people

not giving up their seats, building up to what happened with Claudette and then Rosa. One of the most significant ones happened in 1945 where it was two army women who were in uniform, who were asked to move for a white man and they said no because there were other seats around and the driver hit them and verbally abused them and It was so severe that Thurgood Marshall called it one of the worst cases he'd ever seen and you know

He saw some shit. Yeah, and it's like to imagine like 1945 World War two all of that to have people in uniform being beaten for not getting up. Like that doesn't, you would imagine galvanizing everyone. Yeah, right. And, you know, if you've just come back from fighting and risking your life for your country, then there's nothing more you can do to win people over. It's right, you know, I would imagine. Right, like you did the World War II war that was known for the racism explicitly, and you come back and it's like, and then you're dealing with your own sense of just, you know, impending doom. And that was just one of the big cases. The others, because I have a list.

So we have Viola White, who was beaten and arrested for refusing to give up her seat. And then a white police officer kidnapped her daughter and assaulted her. Her daughter was 16 years old and nothing was done about this. There was Geneva Johnson, who was arrested for talking back to a driver. There was Mary Wingfield who was arrested for sitting in seats reserved for whites.

In 1949 specifically, there were two New Jersey teenagers who were arrested for not giving up their seats. The other thing that I think is important to know is that sometimes what they would do is, they would have you pay the fare, get off the bus, and get on through the back. Which was its own kind of indignity of like and so people would when this would happen, they would say like, well, just give me my money back because I don't want to go in through

the back or I want to just walk if I'm going to go to the back, I'll just walk through the front. And this would be seen as talking back. This would be seen as being disruptive. And it's so you could get beaten or arrested for this. And bus drivers were allowed to act as police officers in these situations, which is bananas. Can you imagine? Just like, yeah, you deputize every bus driver who's annoyed of being able to enforce the codes, and they're all annoyed. And they're all annoyed all the time.

Everyone wants change. They are. Oh my God. Yeah. Oh, well, I guess it's it's just perfect for creating someone who's a bit so ready to go mad with whatever power they have. Exactly. Add to that, you know, if there's a woman that's being quote unquote difficult, if you

hit her or assault her, you're not gonna get in trouble for that. So it really incentivizes the worst of everyone. And then all this leads up to Claudette Colvin eventually doing this herself. And let me get the date for you because I know how much you love dates. I do. Oh, I did make a mistake.

Reeve was actually executed eventually in 1958. All right. So it was March 2nd, 1955 is when Claudette Colvin is coming home from school on the bus, 15 years old, and she refused to give up her seat for a white man when asked to move. She was a very educated young woman and she knew the city code said that Black people should not have to get up if there isn't an open seat. That's technically what the city code said. So she just stayed seated. And she would say that if it had been for like an old lady or something, I would have gotten up, but it was just for some regular, regular white dude. So I sat down and she talked

about just sitting down and like saying she repeated Psalms while the police were coming for her. She was worried about being assaulted, but she fought back the whole time. She scratched and really fought back against it. She said that she went limp, but either way she tried to resist a little bit. But either way she got off, she was put into the back of the police car. And while she was there, she said that she recited Edgar Allan Poe, Annabelle Lee, the characters in Midsummer Night's Dream, The Lord's Prayer, and the 23rd Psalm. At 15 years old, how do you prepare yourself to resist in that way and to be strong and to know that sexual

violence is very possible but still try and maintain some sense of dignity and whether she clawed or she went limp or whatever the important thing is that her action created an impact people instantly wanted to raise money for her and Rosa because of what she did was very much at the forefront of wanting to raise money for her writing letters of support for her to get more people involved and was really invested in using what happened to her as a way to move things forward politically. Because for a long time there had been a frustration with Rosa and others about the lack of support

for a public boycott. There are a lot of people who didn't want to do it, who found it to be very inconvenient. And when people did try to resist and resist publicly, there wasn't always a lot of support even within the black community. There's an instance of a reverend saying like, he didn't want to put his money and then go back around and try to get his congregation to like come with him. And they were just like, no, you should know better. So there is also that sense of like trying to galvanize people to really resist around what's going on. The thing that happened is that eventually they found reasons to see Claudette is not the right kind of person to be the symbol for their movement.

She stopped shading her hair. And she talks about how when that happened, people just started to sort of like, blame her so that she should have known better sort of like, instead of rallying around her. A former classmate talks about how they really just sort of blamed her for causing a fuss. She was considered feisty and emotional, her family was poor. And so eventually, she was seen as not the right kind of client to take forward, to undo the segregation work in the boycott. But she does say that Rosa Parks was the only adult leader who kept in touch with her after that passed. And I think there is a desire to pit Colvin and Prex against each other because of colorism.

Yeah. Obviously colorism plays a role to it because Colvin was darker skinned, different backgrounds and respectability and that all matters and I think that Rosa, if she was here, would absolutely understand that as well. At the same time, I think it's important that while we call out those issues to recognize that Rosa never framed herself or tried to set herself up as the only person to have done anything of significance in this period. She never claimed that and she always mentioned the other people who led for this moment. So I think that if there is someone or a system to blame is the people up

above who decided that this young black girl was not worthy of being protected or brought forward because she wasn't the right kind of person. That's the ultimate flaw. And then eventually Claudette became pregnant very young. And this was also held against her, rather than understanding that she was in a very vulnerable space. And she had been set up to become a leader to stand for something, and then had that completely ripped from under her. And so I'm so glad that now people know her name, know what she brought to this table and how she really did galvanize and inspire people to fight for themselves. And even there is a civil rights lawyer, Fred Gray, who really says that Claudette really made them brave. To be 15 years old and do that, that's amazing. Yeah. Part of the problem also,

I think in moments like these is just the way the public wants to latch on to a single person as a symbol of something huge. And it's easy to forget that we can do that without that person ever asking us to. Exactly. No one person is a movement. It is everyone coming together. And it also makes it easier for people to understand that they have a place in this too. You know, I think when I hear when you hear about young people feeling this way, it makes you realize that it's possible for you to be involved as well. I think we take away the personal responsibility, the individual responsibility, when we make it seem as only one great kind of person can do the right thing. Yeah, right. And you're like, well, I couldn't start a movement all by myself. So I don't know. I guess stay at home and work on my macaroni art.

I mean, you have to do macaroni art as well to support your revolutionary practice, but you know. Exactly. Cause you can sell it. You can sell it in that way. You can have the art, but, but no, it just, it just reminds me of how when we talk about boycotts now, we kind of lionize the past. We always just say we lionize

the civil rights moment of the past. We sanitize it in order to make it seem as though it was exceptional people. And they weren't some exceptional people, but also it's making the choice not to participate in systems that do not benefit you. Because what's interesting about Rosa Parks is that before what happened,

she rarely, if ever, took the bus. Because it was discriminatory, and she's like, well, I don't want to, like, allow myself to be in a situation where I have to say that this is acceptable behavior for me. Which I think is so funny. So even though she had to walk everywhere, had no car, she still, for the most part,

didn't take the bus because it was a symbol of the oppression that she and people like her were facing. Nicole Yeah. And the way I remember this being framed in seventh grade is just like, she was just a woman like any other taking the bus like always. And then one day she just, it suddenly occurred to her to have to realize that she didn't feel like standing up and there was such an emphasis on like you know she certainly didn't have thoughts about anything. Yeah it's like they're just like just a day just an ordinary day just trying to get by which you know is true and a part of it and but we will get into that now because it's a perfect time to bring up her doing

this. So, and I said before, she was really frustrated about how they didn't want to call for a boy cop because she felt like hurting the bus company in its pocketbook was the best way to really make some changes. And then on December 1st, 1955, so again, not really far off from what happened to Claudette, she was just coming home. She was 42 years old. And she was originally trying to wait for a less crowded bus.

And she also had a reputation of being difficult. So sometimes certain bus drivers wouldn't stop for her because they were just like, she's been, she's troublesome. And so she just got on the bus one day and she sat in the middle. She wasn't sitting in the white section. She was sitting in the middle. And she says about this that people always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired.

But that isn't true. I was not tired physically or no more tired than I actually was at the end of a working day. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in. She didn't do it intentionally. She was, to a certain degree, just saying, I'm not going to be pushed around. That was it. It was just a small act of her resisting. What made it significant is that because she was an activist for so many years, because she was involved in grassroots, she knew how to act. So she knew to just sit there and wait. She knew to not make a scene essentially, beyond the scene that she was already making, and she just was prepared to use the moment well

if she was going to be in the spotlight. So it was because she was a seasoned activist who had done the work for years, that is what made her ultimately the best kind of person to do this. As I said before, she had worked her whole life trying to figure out how to resist without being killed. So that kind of quiet dignity was normal for her to have.

It was seen as outrageous because, you know, she's a middle-aged woman. She was an elder in the community. People knew her. People respected her. Even when she was arrested in jail for this, she tried to help a domestic violence victim get in contact with her brother. You know, she was always thinking of others. She was really a pillar of the community. So when this happened, they were like, Rosa? You sent Rosa to jail? It was just kind of like, that's like, sending like your favorite aunt to jail. Like, no one would do that. And it also

helped that she never had children with her husband. They just never got around to doing that. So she didn't have the threat of someone that she loved intimately like that being harmed because we saw cases of people's children being assaulted because of that. Her husband was also a radical person and she just wasn't the kind of person because of her history to give into threats or be intimidated by the racist harassment. And so because of all of that, she had the tenacity to stick it all the way to the end, but it was an immense sacrifice to her health,

to her financial life, and to the ability of her to live where she wanted. And I think if there's anything I want people to understand is that the serenity that she showed and the dignity that she showed is not her being quiet or being like this silent figure. It was about her standing up for herself. And the idea that she was comfortable and always happy with having to be that kind of symbol is just not true. She even mentions how she wishes during the bus incident that someone else would have spoken for her as well.

You know, that she didn't want to be alone. It just happened to be that way. And also her doing that overshadowed so much of the work that she did before because there was an investment in letting her be this simple, you know, seamstress with a high school education and completely ignoring that she was a fundamental part of building these moments and these movements her entire life. And I don't wanna get in too far into the boycott, but I do wanna talk about the financial issues that had happened because of it. So she didn't get any money from a lot of this.

So she and her husband both lost their jobs because of the boycott. She didn't directly blame it, but it's very much implied that's why she lost her job. And her husband wasn't allowed to talk about politics at work. When your wife is now the face of a giant boycott, that doesn't really work. So they didn't have work. They couldn't find a lot of work The NAACP kind of wasn't fully in on the boycott initially, so they didn't really help at first. boycott initially, so they didn't really help at first. And even though the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed in response to what happened to Rosa Parks, which was a collection of like these black ministers and community leaders in Montgomery, they paid a lot of

people to do the work of the boycott, but she was never offered a position. So she didn't get any help, even though she was trotted out and made to tour. She didn't really give speeches. She was already shy, but she was never offered the mic either. And she'd always struggled with illnesses. You know, she developed painful stomach ulcers. She had a heart condition. She already had chronic insomnia because of the clan always being an over, you know, an overarching albatross around her family, her husband ended up drinking a little bit more to cope and her mother was always chronically ill. So that on top of the constant phone

threats, the fact that she had seen friends and colleagues get their houses burned, seen them be bombed, you know, growing up in the epicenter of all this violence took a huge emotional toll on her. And so being the symbol of a movement, being the face of the movement, did not give her peace and it didn't give her any ability to make a living after it. Her biggest financial support actually came from a white woman named Virginia Foster Durr who really tried to help raise money for her because also Rosa Parks was a woman of really great dignity and so she didn't want to go begging, she didn't want to go ask people for it.

She kind of assumed that like we're doing this because of what I did, you know my financial situation, you can see that I'm struggling it should just be. Unnatural community thing because she did that for the people she would help invest money and put money into helping other people. She just thought it would happen for her i didn't feel comfortable asking. Which i think is so so relatable and emblematic of the way in which women are taught to just kind of like that you're supposed to sacrifice, be dignified, don't ask for much, even when you are the face of something that is creating legacies for other people's that she was such a seasoned activist and that activism is something that you learn and get good at and learn through being within communities as opposed to something that you just kind of innately know how to do. Because I think we do have this recurring fantasy that, you know, if you're lifted up as a symbol of a movement, it'll be fine, it'll be great.

And doing the right thing is its own reward. And it's like, kind of, but you know, sometimes they kill you. So not really. Or, you know, sometimes your life becomes completely dominated by fear. TANDI Exactly. I think that we've been talking about boycotts in the cultural zeitgeist right now, and the sacrifice that it takes, in the cultural zeitgeist right now and the sacrifice that it takes and the unwillingness of a lot of people to just make that sacrifice. And what we ask people to sacrifice now is much, much less than what Rosa Parks sacrificed for nothing.

You know, it's like, don't play this video game. Don't buy this video game. Don't buy this merchandise. Don't buy this coffee. Buy any't buy this merchandise, don't buy this coffee. Buy any of the other coffees. Yeah. Buy any of the any other thing. And it's treated as if like, well, why should I? What can I really do? What does it matter?

And I think if anything, this reminded me of how much every little bit matters because it trickles down to the next person. When you show it's Possible when you show support you make it easier for the next person to come and do that And I think it's so depressing to think about Even then even in this in this era of boycotting that we lionize and we hold up as being so great There were still people who were Dismissive of it. It still took a lot of work for people to feel like it was even a good idea, that it

was even worth doing. And it was successful, very successful, but it would not have happened if not for so many people being murdered, being beaten. And you have to ask yourself to a certain degree, why wasn't the first one enough? Why did it have to be Rosa Parks? Why wasn't it Claudette Coleman? Why wasn't it that 13 year old girl? Why wasn't it any of the army women who were being, why was those incidents not enough

for you to say, let's boycott, let's organize something and let's do that. I don't know the answer, but I know it's a question that's gonna stick with me from doing this work of like, why do we wait for the most perfect thing, the most perfect incident to say, now we should do something about this? Yeah, and it seems like in some cases, various circumstances have to align. But if

we're looking for the perfect test case, the same way that if you're challenging a lie, you want a client to bring to a Supreme Court case who's really compelling, who's got charisma. That's something special. Yeah. Or your argument applies to in a way that you want the strongest case possible. But what we have a hard time admitting out loud is that the strongest case possible often involves a certain type of person who can be shown around to the public and that what we want has nothing to do with their right to live a good life,

but with what we've decided is respectable, I guess. And I love this quote that Rosa Parks said, I learned that no matter how much you try, how hard you work to give people an incentive, it is something you yourself cannot give to another person. It has to be in the person to make the step to have the belief and faith that they should be a free people. The complacency, the fear and oppression that people had suffered so long after the emancipation of chattel slavery, the replacement of chattel slavery with mental slavery so people believed, actually believed that they were inferior to others because of the positions that they had to hold. When the oppression they had to endure was thrown off and they began to stand up, to

be vocal, be heard, to make known their dissatisfaction against being treated as inferiors. It's my belief now that we will never go back to that time again." She's so great. I mean, I was already, I guess, as close you could get to being a stan, but now I'm like, I want like eras t shirts, but for Rosa Parks. Yeah, you know, she can make that happen. I mean, I feel like it's also like we think of her. I think of her the way I was taught about her as just kind of a, as you've said, like a silent figure. And then that allows us to ignore everything that she said very clearly. silent figure. And then that allows us to ignore everything that she said very clearly. Exactly. And I would highly recommend reading the book to get even more quotes and even more depth about it because she's so fascinating. But I do want to talk a little bit about her life after she left Alabama. So she, like I said, she was dealing with a lot of illness, a lot of harassment and finding little to no work. And so in 1957, she eventually moved to Detroit to stay with her brother and sister-in-law.

And that's where she would be for the rest of her life and continue to be an activist. She worked on the campaign for John Connors, who would become the longest serving African-American member of Congress. He did have a misconduct scandal, but we can't blame Rosa for that. She didn't know. She was long gone by then, but she really helped him get elected. She brought Dr. King out to help campaign for him. And when he won in 1965, he hired Parks for a position in his Detroit office.

And that's where she would work until she retired in the 80s Wow, and it was the first time that she had a paid political position And even then she was still getting called a communist and a troublemaker, but she was constantly active She supported Shirley Chisholm's political career She helped do campaigns that talked about European colonialism She was super out that talked about European colonialism. She was super outspoken about Vietnam. She spoke out against apartheid, which I actually have a picture for you.

And it's this amazing picture of Rosa Parks at an apartheid. I'll send it to you via messenger. You can share what you see. Uh, I see, you know, it's hard to get scale, but I, I, I would call her a little old lady with big sunglasses and a big hat and a big coat and a scarf and gloves. She's all bundled up and she's carrying a giant sign that says freedom. Yes. Apartheid. No.

Isn't that so great? Yeah. It's so like she was just throughout all of that. She still was persevering and working, you know, the 70s have been a hard time for her because her mother passed away, her brother passed away, and then her husband passed away from cancer. So in a lot of ways for those last years of her life, she was doing a lot of that on her own and constantly trying to remind people,

getting people organized and encouraging young people to stand up. When there were riots going on, while she never quote unquote condone them, she was very much like, they're angry and they have a reason to be. And I think those aspects of her I find so compelling to think of her as supporting the Panthers, of calling Malcolm

X her hero and saying how much she admired his politics are all things that I feel are so distant from the image that were made to have of her, of her being this radical person who was standing up against the war, who is speaking out against all of these injustices until the day she dies. And she does get the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the Clinton administration. She has a statue of her sitting down on the bus because, you know, the brand is strong. So few people get to sit in a stash shoe, you know, that's really nice. You don't want to be standing for years and years.

They do this thing as well where like she was in her 40s, but they always try to make her seem significantly older as a way. They're like this old, old woman who merely needed to take a seat before her bones cracked into dust underneath her. She's 42. It's like this woman who exactly like this woman who's worked literally her entire life, like from picking cotton as a child, her feet were just tired. So she couldn't get up.

It's like, no, it's, it's a thing called dignity. Yeah, it's called dignity. She could get up. It's like, no, it's a thing called dignity. Yeah, it's called dignity. She could get up. Yeah, boy. A great album by Hilary Duff. One thing that did happen is that eventually it was addressed about her financial issues. In July 1960, an article from Jet magazine talked about how she was penniless and debt written and ailing with stomach ulcers and a throat tumor and living with just her husband and her mother in like a tiny two room place. And you know, shaming does work. I know it's hard to believe it sometimes, but that did get people to realize. But it's also so strange to think that in 1955 is when this started. By 1960,

that's five years. That's not even a full decade for her to be some forgotten figure. It's literally within less of a decade, her importance was shunted to the side where people say like, Oh, yeah, she started this, but where's her money? And it's not even that like activists deserve to be it's not even that like, you should get a check for starting a movement. But if you were in financial dire straits, because you helped lead a movement, because you helped start something, you should get some kind of compensation. That's what grassroots stuff is supposed to be for, you know, activism is hard work. And I think that one

of the things that we can all be better about doing is really working on building those funds. They're not just for sad, we should have emergency funds for all of the things that we care about. Yeah, and we live in a culture where we derive so much benefit from certain people. And then at the end of the day, we owe something to them, you know, because they have helped take care of us and we have to help take care of them, I think. Exactly. The idea of Rosa Parks living in squalor is the same thing that makes me feel when I think about how Nella Larsen or Zora Neale Hurston, like all of these amazing intellectuals and writers who form my life. The idea of them dying in like obscurity and squalor because of just racism and ridiculousness. It just makes me, it just makes me so sad.

Yeah. And we really do have to do better to the people who've made it possible for us to have access to so many things. And I'm so grateful that I got the opportunity to read about this woman, because I think there was a part of me that felt like this light-skinned woman who probably wasn't even the first one to do this bus thing, you know.

Like I knew about her thankfully, and more of her work from reading the book about Recy Taylor, but in reading this, I was just so properly illuminated of the ways in which that there are so many women who have carried this movement on their backs in the face of poverty, gender discrimination, to have the men that they were supporting not support them back. And I think it's just so important to remember that quietness is not synonymous with spinelessness.

You know, it's not a value judgment to be quiet. And even in the intro to the book, they mentioned that during her memorial service, then Senator Barack Obama called her a quote, small, quiet woman whose name will be remembered. And then Hillary Clinton spoke of quiet Rosa Parks moments. And I'm like, you mean the Rosa who was going to beat a little white kid with a brick when she was like... Yeah. And that, you know, that we it's so easy to know what she said because she wrote it down.

It's the same thing like Mandela, who whenever I read more about him, I'm like, wow, he was really about that life. But you just see the image of him as this old man who just had so much dignity. And it's like, dignity doesn't just come out of nowhere. You know, like, it's not just something that you're born with. You learn to have it and it's weathered in the worst storms. And yeah, I'm just I'm proud that I got to be alive and share just even a little bit of this journey in life at the same time as her. Yeah. And yeah, I'm just I've just I have so much respect for her. And I just I want this t

shirt. I want this freedom. Yes, apartheid now t shirt of her with this sign. She's so incredible. I really encourage people to look more at her. And I wanted to share with you one last thing. This is a quote from the Nikki Giovanni poem Harvest, which is about Rosa Parks and this little passage I just I thought I would like for you to read it. I just, I thought I would like for you to read it. Oh, okay. Something needs to be said about Rosa Parks other than her feet were tired. Lots of people on that bus and many before

and since had tired feet, lots of people still do. They just don't know where to plant them. Yay. Yay. My thought about what you're saying is that we're so trained to place people in opposition to each other because I think in America, at least we're trained to see history as a contest.

And we have to put people in a binary and there have to be winners and losers and there has to be the one true bus boycotter. And really we get to live in this continuum and this genealogy and this community with everyone before us and who we get to overlap with and learn from. And there's so much abundance when the revolution is in a contest.

Exactly. Like, even though it's good to know who threw the first brick at Stonewall, I think it's important to know that that brick came from a lot of stress from a lot of different people, you know, like it's great to have our figureheads and our symbols, but they're also people. And I think, you know, every time some article comes out about like how Martin Luther King did this or did that, I just think like, yeah, but like, what are you trying to tell me that he cheated and therefore what? Like, what's the hot take here? Did you know that he's plagiarized? It's like, I think the genie is out of the bottle at

this point. Like, he's already had an effect on the world. It's happened. Like, I feel like some of it is like, so what are you trying to say? Like that he's already had an effect on the world. It's happened. Like, I feel like some of it is like, so what are you trying to say, like, that he deserved to be shot? Like, what's the end all be all of this? Like, I do not expect a group of people who are fighting in the face of overwhelming oppression to be perfect people. And there is nuance and complexity.

When the FBI is trying to, you know, kill you, like, you got to let off some stress somehow, I'm just saying. And it's like, okay, he had consensual sex outside of wedlock. That's half of Congress, so I really can't. That's the good half of Congress. True, true. You don't want to know about the other half. The other half is so bad. There is this lack of understanding,

despite how hyper visible black American history and culture is, I think that there's a fundamental lack of understanding of how much collective suffering has been overcome to get even the smallest of victories. You know, when I hear the argument against CRT about like, if you teach these kids that they are oppressed, they will be weak. And I'm like, that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of myself, because Rose approximately grew up one generation away from slavery in the middle of Jim Crow during some of the worst periods of time. And she lived her life with complete and utter dignity. Knowing that a system is trying to harm you

protects you against that system. And we should embody people with enough tools to protect themselves at all times. You're never too old to be inspired by people who really practice what they preach. Yeah, yeah. And I feel like there's, I love seeing her bundled up protesting apartheid

and we need to be reminded by the people in our lives and sometimes they're the dead people who we get to know that it matters to keep showing up. And now we have so many reminders of what she did and I hope that those who listen now have a better understanding of how cool she was and Know that she was really about that life all the way through She didn't even you know, they let me say the actual picture her actual mugshot They really try to make her look all this old as fuck and I'm like, she don't even look like that dog Like it's crazy. This is a great mugshot. This is like

goes along with the one of Kitty Genovese. Yeah, she's got I feel like she's looking at the camera with like, an air of like, what? Yeah, it's big F you energy. Yeah, it's so good. Princess Weeks, what a joy. Thank you for taking us on this beautiful journey. Where can we find you? I know you've told us about a couple of your videos, but if you have something old you want to point people to, anything. Let's see. My stuff is on YouTube. I guess if I had one thing that I'm really proud of that's adjacent, it's this one video. I'll send the links for you.

It's about the Rylander v Rylander divorce case. And I'll give you a teaser about it. So it was this, I call it basically the Meghan and Harry of its time, because it was this really wealthy, younger white man who was part of the Rylander family, very rich New York family, fell in love with a mixed race, slightly older black woman who was a nurse. And they got married and then he divorced her when he realized that his family did not approve and he tried to claim that she lied about her race in order to entrap him.

So it's essentially a whole case of her trying to prove like you absolutely knew I was black the whole time. Wow. That's amazing. God, yeah. And this is something I've never heard of before this moment. And I love that, you know, you're bringing us into the past.

Thank you for all the journeys. Thank you for having me. I love you. And that was our episode. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for listening. Thank you to Princess Weeks, our wonderful guest. You can find links to some of her work in this episode's description. Thank you to Taj Easton for editing help. Thank you to Corinne Ruff for editing help as well. And thank you, as always, to Carolyn Kendrick for producing. And to responding to the news that I was building a trellis with a text that read, hell yeah, with five L's. And that's it from us.

Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here. We will see you in two weeks. you