Black History Month Spotlight -- Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks: Seamstress and Community Activist

Rosa (1913-2005) and husband Raymond Parks were both active in the Montgomery Chapter of the NAACP and while working as a seamstress, Rosa served as chapter secretary, and for a time, advisor to the NAACP Youth Council. Though Parks is often described as an innocent seamstress on her way to work on a public bus, author John Edgerton in “Speak Now Against the Day” writes that Mrs. Parks was in fact an alumna of "an institution in Monteagle, Tennessee known as the Highlander Folk School, usually and not inaccurately described as a communist training school.”

Edgerton writes that: “Highlander was founded by a gentleman named Myles Horton who was never actually a member of the Communist Party [USA, the CPUSA], but he told a veteran Red pal that he didn’t join so he could avoid having the label pinned on him. For all practical purposes, Horton was a communist." Mr. Egerton continues, “Highlander had started summer workshops on school desegregation in 1954, right after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs Board of Education decision.” His book contains a photograph of Mrs. Parks with Myles Horton at the school in 1957, but her first training session took place only a few months before she sat down in the front of the bus in December, 1955. In 1957, a photograph was taken of an audience at the school that showed Martin L. King sitting in the front row. Right next to him was Abner Berry, the correspondent of the Communist Party’s official newspaper, the Daily Worker.

The Montgomery NAACP chose Parks to attend a desegregation workshop at the Highlander Folk School to absorb mass public disruption strategies as well as the communist ideology taught there. “Reflecting on that experience, Mrs. Parks recalled, “At Highlander I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society…I gained there the strength to persevere in my work for freedom not just for blacks, but for all oppressed people.” On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black passengers to relinquish seats to white passengers when the bus was full. On the eve of her defiance of Montgomery law, there were only 500 members of the local NAACP chapter and no activist, public civil rights movement that masses of people participated in. Parks actions on behalf of the NAACP changed that with the 1955 mass bus boycott in Montgomery. Montgomery black leadership until then was dominated by conservative black leaders who encouraged hard work and self reliance.

In 1979, Parks received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, a virtual Who’s Who listing of black CPUSA members in the United States, and for her important contributions to the world, she received the Rosa Parks Peace Prize (Stockholm, 1994) and the US Medal of Freedom (1996) from President Clinton. In addition, Parks has been awarded two dozen honorary doctorates from universities around the world.

For a synopsis of the political revolution Parks was working to realize, the following is helpful:

“Increasingly the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) came to believe that the struggle of American Negroes for equal rights and for changes in the predominantly agrarian structure of the South would bring them into such basic conflict with monopoly capital that they would constitute a powerful ally of the white working class. Strategically then, the issue of democratic rights for the Negro became a central ingredient in the overturn of capitalism….as Harry Haywood, one of the original architects of the concept put it, “The full unleashing of the struggle for Negro liberation” meant “bringing up the strategic reserve of democracy and socialism” and striking at the “Achilles heel of American imperialism.” The communists had won adherents because they had championed immediate, simple and practical issues comprehensible to the Negro at a time when few other political forces paid him any attention.”

Also, black socialist A. Phillip Randolph and contemporary of Rosa Parks encouraged Negroes to look "toward their conversion to revolutionary radicalism…[and be] committed to the principles of the Soviet government of Russia and to the proposition of organizing Negroes for the class struggle"

Sources:

Quiet Strength, Rosa Parks and Gregory Reed, 1994, Zondervan Publishers

Speak Now Against the Day, John Edgerton, 1995

Wikipedia online