I'm sorry. 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 and 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 in Me with our friend Eve Lindley, truly the Thorn Birds of its day. That episode will be out soon. Keep her 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 your roundabout, the podcast where we go back to seventh grade and tell you what really happened with us today is Princess Weeks. 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 synacty key for how the entire civil rights movement was taught. Exactly and I think with Rosa Parks the inspiration for why I've been picking this talk is I was talking with my friend Ken and we are talking about how there's always been this back and forth about whether or not Rosa Parks
said on the bus intentionally like if she was working with the NWCP 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 and ring the intro to the book that I use as my primary source the rebellious life of Mr. Rosa Parks by
Janine Theo Harris I was reminded that I was alive when she died it would happen 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's 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 weirdly 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 grass is 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
his 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 there were always trying to
make white people look embarrassed and I missed that energy honestly and it's in him that a lot of the families rebellious streak can be traced he didn't 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 clan to come and her just being
like I wanted to see him kill one of them and it was in that moment when I was reading the biography I was like wow Rosa process 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 yeah 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's 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 I 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 to enforce 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 there's a story by Erskine called well 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 happen 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 you know
when you realize that there are people who were going to barbecues and being like yeah I'm bringing my child to the lynching you know 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 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 is 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 you know it kind of reminds me of like Octavia Butler's kindred you know knowing that for a lot of like black diasporians that are sent of child slavery that part of your
ancestry for a lot of us is also like slaveholders who abused us and to only be you know 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 was wasn't into him because he was a little bit too light then she light because she you know from her grandfather's influence but she was really drawn to him because of his politics um 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 um and that's why they'll take it away from you yeah but uh 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 yes but in in a dusty corner of my memory but was was this basically a
very long-standing wrongful conviction 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 you know going from place to place on a train in a vagrant way it's very Dickens of them and nine black male teens were accused
of raping two white women that they found a stowways on the 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 didn't say something the jury found them guilty one time but then the judge said 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 serve sentences between 75 years to death three serve 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 parted by governor Wallace
you know segregation today segregation tomorrow that dude yeah he was in forest gum 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 kid 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 um he helped her go back to school so she could finally get her high school degree because in the forties 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 when makes Rosa such an interesting person and why
I think she becomes dissymbol 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 scared Rosa so she very much worked on making sure that there were legal battlestones 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 Reese Taylor this name people right remember because I think Oprah bought 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 McGuire highly recommend and essentially Reese 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 where 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 we're 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 would 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 um she didn't stop doing this work even when it got hard so some of the cases that she documented
I just wanted 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 she wanted to pursue prosecution for
the police officers but the mayor and the city council man I believe did not want it to happen just ended up changing the names of the officers and pushing it aside and they blamed 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 you're making us want to hurt you yeah okay all right yeah great it's literally the same 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 mmm 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 and same 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 and like I would love to read someone else's you know paper about that because I was thinking about this thing I'm like it's such a thing that
still comes up because at any time there is a dynamic between a you know a black man and a white woman in pop culture like even going 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 I think about what that means to have something that eyes of feminists 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 isn't
and I was thinking about while I was working on on this project it's oh yeah and yeah and these things are so knit together and it 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 and yeah and I feel like and you know 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 you know and and I wonder obviously 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 the violence towards someone who will be hurt much more but when it comes out of nowhere yeah 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 like is so deeply scarring to so many layers of like multiple communities and I think it's one of those things that like when you know when the woman who accused Emmett Till just died last year yeah 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
yeah 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 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 tangent but like how the silver rice movement is
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 would get no justice black women who have been victims of rape they 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 into 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 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 say silent because there was nothing else that they could do let's see transition transition back to the Montgomery Boycecott um 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 One 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 II all of that to have people in uniform being beaten for not getting up like that doesn't in it you would imagine galvanizing everyone yeah right and you know if you 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 I have a list so we have Vial the 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 and 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
mm-hmm which was its own kind of a dignity of like and so people would when this would happen they would say like we'll just give me my money back because I don't want to go and do the back or I want to just walk if I'm going to go to the back I just walked through the front and this would
be seen as talking back this would be seen as being disruptive and it 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 got it oh my god yeah oh well and just it's it's it's just perfect for creating someone who's a bet was 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 going to 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 this 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 acts to move she 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 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 like she was worried about being assaulted but she
fought back the whole time she like scratched and like really fought back against it she said that she went limp but either way like she 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 resided at
Garland Poe Annabelle the characters in mid-seminized dream the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm at 15 years old how do you prepare yourself to 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 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 trying to get his congregation to like come
with them 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 straightening 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 sort of rallying around her a former class may talk 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 Prux was the only adult leader who kept in touch with her after
that past and I think there is a desire to pit Colvin and Prux against each other because of colorism yeah obviously colorism plays a role to it because Colvin was darker skined 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 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 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 that make 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 it is possible for you to be involved as well I think
we take away the personal responsibility the individual responsibility when making 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 yeah work on my macaroni art and
we need to do macaroni art as well to support your revolutionary practice but you know exactly because you can sell it you can sell it in that way you can have the art yeah but but no it just it just reminds me of how when we talk about boycotts now we kind of we kind of lionize the pet we
always just that we lionize the civil rights moment of the past we we sanitize it in order to make it seem as though it was exceptional people and they were 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 yeah which I think is so funny is like 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 yeah and the way I remember this being
framed and seven the great 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 what you know is true and a part of it yeah and but we will get into that now that 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 boycott because she felt like hurting the bus company and 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 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 be 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 you know 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 said Rosa to jail it was just kind of like that's like the setting 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 at a 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 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 want to get in too far into the into the boycott but I do want to 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 in place 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 they didn't have work they couldn't find a lot of work even after the boycott in Montgomery because white people either didn't want to hire her for racist reasons or they were afraid it would put a target on their backs to be publicly seen with her the N. double ACP kind of wasn't fully
in on the 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 communicators 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 did 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 foam 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 fosterdurr who really tried to help raise money for her because also Rosa was 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 a natural community thing because she did that for other people
she would help invest money and put money into helping other people so 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 it's so interesting that we erase the fact and my experience and I think a lot of 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 and lately 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 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 exactly I think that we've been talking about boycotts 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 Park 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 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 lie in eyes and we hold up is 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 mm-hmm like 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 beat 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 I that's going to 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 it's various circumstances have
to align but if we're looking for the perfect test case the same way that if you're you know challenging a lie you want a client to bring to a Supreme Court case who's like really compelling you know who's got charisma that's something special yeah or you know or you know her 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 as 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 there are placement of chattel slavery with mental slavery so people believed
actually believe 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 inferior 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 ares t-shirts but for Rosa Parks yeah you know she can make that happen I mean I feel like it's 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 exactly and I would highly recommend reading the book to get even more quotes and even more adept 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 in love with Ilmson of her 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 you know 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 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 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 you via messenger you can share what you see I see you know it's hard to get scale but 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 she 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 is
supporting the panthers of calling Malcolm X her hero and saying how much she admired his politics her 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 statue 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 all 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 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 yeah boy a great album by Hillary 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 yeah and it's not even that like activist deserve to be it's not even that like you should get a check for starting a movement but if you are in financial dire
straights because you helped lead a movement because you helped start something yeah 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 sag 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 Nell Larson or Dora Nell 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 Risey 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 valued judgment to be quiet and even in the intro to the book they mentioned that during her 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 gonna be the little white kid with a brick when she was like oh 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 like there's old 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 that you're
born with you 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 as the same time as her yeah and yeah I'm 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 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
yeah 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 is 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 boycottter 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 isn't a contest exactly like even though it's good to know
who through the first brickhead stone wall 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 the 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 what's the hot take you do you know that he's plagued your eyes it's like I think the genie is out of the bottle at this point
like is he's already had an effect on the world it's it's happened like actually 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 right I do not expect a group of people who are fighting in the face of overwhelming
oppression to be perfect people and there is new ones in complexity but 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 got consensual sex as kind of wedlock that's half of congress so I really can't that's the good
half true you don't want to know about the other half the other half is so bad um 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 rather proximately 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 prep 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 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 did and you know they let me say they actually
put her actual mug shot you know what I'm trying 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 mug shot this is like uh uh goes along with um the one of kitty genavis 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 where can we find you I know you've told us about a couple of your videos but you have something old you want to point people to anything
let's see uh myself 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 um and I'll give you a teaser about it so it was this I call it basically the Megan 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 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 wow that's amazing got yeah uh and this is something I've never heard of before this moment and I love that you know you're you're
bringing us into the past thank you for all the journeys oh 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
episodes description thank you to Taj eastern for editing help thank you to Corinne rough 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 elves 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