[ Applause ]
>> Shari Werb: Thank
you and welcome
to the Library of Congress.
The area I direct, the Center
for Learning, Literacy,
and Engagement is
responsible for much
of the literary programming
at the library.
Most notably, we plan
and organize the Annual
National Book Festival
which turns 20 this year.
Ah hum.
[ Applause ]
On August 29th at the
Washington Convention Center,
we will present the biggest
and best book festival
in our history.
I hope to see you there.
Question, quick question.
How many of you have been to
the National Book Festival?
Wonderful.
Thank you.
How many of you have been
to these National Book
Festival Presents events?
Great. Thank you.
Keep coming back.
It's your love of the National
Book Festival that inspired us
to develop this new series, the
National Book Festival Presents.
It's a way, it's a way for
you to continue to hear from
and be inspired by some of
the world's top writers.
I do want to give a shout
out to our literary director,
Marie Arana who is watching
this program from Peru.
Hi Marie. The authors onboard
for tonight's program have,
themselves, been inspired by
a woman who was a fearless
as she was celebrated for
her inexorable dedication
to expanding and strengthening
civil rights in America.
Rosa Parks may be best known for
refusing to relinquish her seat
on a bus in Montgomery Alabama.
But, she did much
more than that.
She spent a lifetime
battling inequality.
And, she left us an
extraordinary collection
of writings which illuminate
the era and tell us much
about her own dedication
to justice.
I am pleased and honored to
tell you that three member
of the Rosa Parks family are
here; her cousin Jeff Williamson
and his wife Angela
Williamson and their son Noah.
Will you please stand
so we can recognize you?
[ Applause ]
Thank you for coming tonight.
The Library of Congress is
proud to be the repository
for the Rosa Parks Collection
in our Manuscript division
where her collection is
housed alongside the papers
of such notable Americans
as Thurgood Marshall,
those of 23 US presidents,
and the largest assemblage
in our collection, the
papers of the NAACP.
Our current major
exhibition in this building,
Rosa Parks In Her Own Words,
showcases rarely seen materials
that offer an intimate view
of Parks and document her life
and activism creating a
rich opportunity for viewers
to discover new dimension
to their understanding
of this seminal figure.
If you haven't already, I
urge you to see this once
in a lifetime exhibition.
The exhibit is accompanied
by this book,
Rosa Parks in Her Own Words,
which was just published
by the library.
And, it's available at loc.gov
and in our sales shop as well.
Some of you viewed the exhibit
before taking your seats.
If you did, I hope you
had a chance to visit our
By the People Transcription
Stations to contribute directly
to Rosa Parks' legacy
by transcribing her
writings and her archives.
If not, you can still
participate
in this crowd sourcing
initiative by going on line
at crowd.loc.gov where you can
help transcribe letters written
to Abraham Lincoln,
the writings of leaders
of the Woman's Suffrage
Movement,
and Clara Barton's diaries.
It's really cool.
I recommend doing it.
Finally, I want to encourage you
to attend our next National
Book Festival Presents event
on March 12th when the
great Margaret Atwood,
writer of the Handmaid's Tale,
and other present novels appears
with her long time editor,
the legendary Nan Talese.
It's a unique opportunity
to learn what goes
on between an editor and author
before a groundbreaking book
lands in your hands.
It is now my pleasure to
introduce Adrienne Cannon,
the Afro American history
and cultural specialist
in our Manuscript Division.
Adrienne played a critical role
in curating our Rosa
Parks exhibition
and she is deeply knowledgeable
about the library's
extraordinary collection
of African American history.
Please welcome Adrienne Cannon.
[ Applause ]
>> Adrienne Cannon:
Good evening.
In 1926, Carter G Woodson,
inaugurated Nigro History Week
to popularize the
study of black history.
Nigro History week, which
encompassed the birthdays
of Fredrick Douglas and
Abraham Lincoln was extended
to Black History Month
in February 1976.
Rosa Parks was born in February.
She is celebrated in black
history as the mother
of modern civil rights
movement in the United States.
She was an early activist
in the Montgomery Voters League
what helped African Americans
register to vote.
The 2020 Black History Month
theme is African Americans
and the vote.
Parks also promoted the study
of black history in schools,
at the Rosa and Raymond Parks
Institute for Self-Development
and as a board member
of the Detroit Branch
of the Association for the
Study of African American Life
and History, the organization
that Carter G Woodson
founded in 1915.
And, so it is entirely
fitting that the Library
of Congress hosts a program
about Rosa Parks
in February 2020.
Rosa Parks, In Her Own Words,
is the first major exhibition
of the Rosa Parks Collection.
The Rosa Parks Collection spans
140 years of family history
and consists of approximately
10,000 items
that document Parks'
heartaches and triumphs,
her every day life, her
activism, and her legacy.
The collection reveals a
more complex human portrait
of what we think is a
familiar iconic figure.
Included are personal
correspondence,
letters from presidents,
fragmentary drafts
of her writings, financial
and medical records,
political documents
and affirmera,
her Presidential
Medal of Freedom
and Congressional Gold Medal,
additional honors and awards,
presentation albums, drawings
by school children, and hundreds
of cards thanking
her for her work.
Family papers include
correspondence
with her husband Raymond Parks,
her mother Leona McCauley
and her brother Silvester
McCauley.
The photographs reflect
Parks' lifelong commitment
to social justice and human
rights, her dedication
to family, and her
work with children.
The books cover a
broad range of subjects
and include presentation
copies signed
by Martin Luther King Junior,
her attorney Fred Gray,
Alex Haley, John O
Killens, and Deepak Chopra.
The Rosa Parks Collection
is an important addition
to the library's
resources for the study
of the 20th century
civil rights movement
which include the vast
records of the NAACP,
the National Urban League,
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters, Leadership Conference
on Civil Rights, as well
as the personal papers
of Thurgood Marshall, Roy
Wilkins, A Philip Randolph,
Biard Ruston, James Foreman,
and Mary Church Terrell.
The collection was placed on
loan with the library in 2014
and became a permanent gift
in 2016 through the generosity
of the Howard G Buffett
Foundation.
Librarian of Congress James
Billington announced the loan
agreement at a preview event
of the library's Civil Rights
Exhibition, the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, A Long Struggle For
Freedom on September 9th 2014.
The news eclipsed
coverage of other events
in the library for
several months.
The Rosa Parks Collection
generated more favorable
publicity for the library
than any acquisition
in recent history.
The library opened the
collection to researchers
on February 4th 2015
to commemorate Rosa
Parks' birthday.
About two dozen items from
the collection were on display
in three glass cases in
the Jefferson Building
through the month of March 2015.
In addition, three
items were incorporated
into the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 Exhibition.
In February 2016, the library
placed online a digitized
edition of the collection to
maximize access to the public.
Shortly after Carla Hayden was
sworn in as the 14th Librarian
of Congress in September
2016, I introduced her
to the Rosa Parks Collection.
The sampling of items
I presented made a
strong impression.
Dr. Hayden felt that the library
had to share the collection
with the public for
a much broader view.
Thus, Rosa Parks, In Her
Own Words, was launched.
The fundraising proposal for
the exhibition was completed
in the spring of 2017.
Rosa Parks In Her Own Words is
made possible by the support
of the Ford Foundation, the
Catherine B Reynolds Foundation,
with additional support
from AARP, History,
Joyce and Thomas Moorehead,
and the Capital Group.
The following spring, I drew
up a preliminary list of items
for conservation
review and approval.
One of my objectives in
selecting the items was
to show the variety of materials
and formats represented
in the collection.
I began writing the item
labels, the introductory text,
and the section text
in the summer of 2018.
Development on the
physical exhibition began
in September 2018.
I joined other members of
the exhibition team in weekly
or biweekly planning
meetings with the designer
and filmmakers at Upswell.
The exhibition opened
on December 5th 2019,
the 64th anniversary of
the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
The boycott, a pivotal event
in the Civil Rights Movement,
was sparked by Rosa Parks'
refusal to vacate her seat
to a white man on
a segregated bus
in Montgomery Alabama
December 1st 1955.
The exhibition moves beyond
that single celebrated act
of civil disobedience to tell
the full story of Rosa Parks;
the seasoned lifelong activist
and the woman behind
the civil rights icon.
The story unfolds
in four sections
which explore Rosa Parks'
early life and activism,
the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the
negative effects of her arrest
on her family and
their move to Detroit,
and the global impact
of her life.
The sections are covered
with a floral wallpaper.
The rose covered
floral motif printed
on the wallpaper was taken
from a sweater Parks wore
in a well known photograph.
To tell the story, the
exhibition draws extensively
from the Rosa Parks Collection.
Personal writings and
photographs dominate.
But, you will also discover
ID badges, political buttons,
children's drawings, her
Presidential Medal of Freedom
and her Congressional Gold
Medal, a church bulletin,
and a pair of shoelaces.
The family Bible with a register
that partially charts
Parks' maternal image is
on display for the first time.
Supplemental materials are
drawn from the NAACP records,
Brotherhood of Sleeping
Car Porter records,
the National Audio Visual
Conservation Center,
and the Princeton
Photographs Division.
The story teller is Rosa Parks.
Parks' words are represented
in the exhibition by examples
of her personal writings
on display and quotes
from those personal writings
and her book Quiet Strength,
print on the wall panels
that introduce each section,
and the exhibition's six unique
looping films, and the prints
of artist Amos P Kennedy Jr.
The exhibition immerses visitors
in these various representations
of Rosa Parks' words as well
as photographs she accumulated
throughout her life allowing her
to tell her own story.
The exhibition will be on view
in the Jefferson Building South
Gallery through August 2020.
And, I encourage all of
you, if you've seen it
for the first time, to come
back and to invite your friends.
And, for those who
are in the DC area,
to please visit the exhibition
and the Library of Congress.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Shari Werb: Thank
you Adrienne
for your enlightening
look at the life
of Rosa Parks and
the exhibition.
And, I do want to say that,
even when the exhibit closes,
you can still see the
collection, you just need
to get a reader's card.
Our next speaker is the
distinguished Professor
of Political Science at
Brooklyn College and a scholar
of African American History.
Jeanne Theoharis is the
author of the Rebellious Life
of Mrs. Rosa Parks
which received the
2014 NAACP Image Award
and the 2013 Letitia Woods
Brown Award from the Association
of Black Women Historians.
It was also named one of
the 25 Best Academic Titles
of 2013 by Choice Magazine.
Her book, A More Beautiful
and Terrible History, the Uses
and Misuses of Civil Rights
History won the 2018 Brooklyn
Public Library Literary
Prize for Nonfiction.
She is published widely
on the Civil Rights
and Black Power Movements
and her work has appeared
in the New York Times, the
Washington Post, the Nation,
the Atlantic, Slate, Salon,
and the Chronicle
of Higher Education.
Please welcome Jeanne Theoharis.
[ Applause ]
>> Jeanne Theoharis:
Good evening.
It is a tremendous
honor to be here.
And, Rosa Parks was
honored in so many ways
over he course of her life.
But, in some ways, there is
no more fitting honor to her,
to someone who spent
her life insisting
that African American history
had to be at the center
of American history, that
it needed to be taught
in every classroom, then
to have her papers here
at the Library of Congress.
So I'm tremendously grateful to
the Howard Buffett foundation
and to the library,
because, again,
I mean Rosa Parks got
a presidential medal,
she got a congress, you know,
but this honor really, I think,
speaks to who she was.
So when Rosa Parks
died, in 2005,
she became the first woman ever,
the firs civilian ever to lie
in honor in the US capital.
Forty thousand Americans came
to pay their respects here.
President Bush laid a
wreath at her coffin.
It was an epic honor.
And yet, how she was honored
got smaller and smaller.
She was incisively referred
to as quiet, not angry,
quiet soft spoken,
quiet humble, quiet.
And, her contributions really
were reduced to that one day
on the bus in December 1st 1955.
It became an event,
in many ways,
to paper over a much
more uncomfortable event
that had happened
two months earlier
which was the devastation
of Hurricane Katrina.
And, then Hurricane
Katrina had raised questions
about persistent racial
and social inequality
in the United States.
And, this funeral for the mother
of the Civil Rights
Movement became a way
to show a much more positive
image of American progress.
Look, this woman who
had been denied a seat
on the bus is now laying in the
Capital, look at our progress.
The New York Times eulogized
her as the accidental matriarch
of the Civil Rights Movement.
Now, Rosa Parks spent
her life saying
that this was not just
a one day thing for her,
that she had a life
history of being rebellious.
And, to the end of her life,
she was insistent there was
a lot more work to be done.
And, so what I wanted to
do tonight, in my time,
was to basically give us a sense
of that life history
of being rebellious.
She's born in 1913 in
Tuskegee and she grows
up with her mother
and her grandparents.
And, very much her feisty
spirit begins at home.
She talks about one of her first
memories, after World War 1,
there's an uptake
of white violence
against returning
black soldiers.
It's often referred
to as Red Summer.
And, there is an uptake of
Klan violence in Pine Level
where they are living.
And, her grandfather
is a political man,
he's a supporter
of Marcus Garvey.
And, he decides he's going
to sit out on their porch
with his gun and protect
their family home.
And a six year old Rosa
sits with him many nights.
She insists on sitting with
him because, as she puts it,
she wants to see
shoot a Ku Kluxer.
So this is, I think, a
different place to start,
like, our story of her.
Right? She is a lifelong
believer in self-defense
that she gets at home.
She is shy.
But, she has a feisty side.
And, she's very protective
of her younger brother.
And, one time a white
bully is threatening them
and threatening them, and
finally she picks up a brick.
This is a preteen Rosa Parks.
And, she basically
threatens the bully back.
And, then she comes home and
she tells her gram about it.
And, her gram is furious and
terrified and basically says
to her you're going to be
lynched before you're grown
and you can't talk like that.
And, you can imagine
this preteen Rosa Parks,
basically she's,
she feels so angry
and so betrayed hearing her
grandmother saying this.
And, she's like, you know,
I'd rather be lynched
than not be able to
say I don't like it.
To have to be pushed
around, and we're going
to hear this language come back.
But, her political life,
I think, really begins
when she meets and falls in love
with a politically active
barber named Raymond Parks.
This is 1931.
And, Raymond parks is working
on the Scottsboro case.
Right? Scottsboro, nine
young men riding the rails,
young black men riding
the rails.
They basically have a fight with
some white boys on the train,
the white boys go get the cops,
and these nine black
teenagers are arrested.
But, as they're being arrested,
two white women are found
in the train also
riding the rails.
And, that charges
quickly change to rape.
And, those nine young men are
arrested, quickly tried, and all
but the youngest, who's
12, sentenced to death.
And, a local movement grows
in Alabama to try to protect
and defend the Scottsboro
boys from being executed.
And, one of the local
activists working
on that movement
is Raymond Parks.
And, she will describe him
as the first real
activist I ever met.
Because, I think, in Raymond,
she begins to take this spirit
that had grown at home
and see the possibility
of collective challenge.
They get married the next year
in 1932 and she will join him
in this Scottsboro work.
Now, in the first years
of their marriage,
he is the much more
public activist
and she's more behind
the scenes.
That will, that will change
over the course of their lives
and he will become more behind
the scenes supporting her
and she will become he
more public activist.
That Scottsboro work
is dangerous.
She talks about late night
meetings, guns on the table,
even to have a meeting
is dangerous.
Now, by the 1940s, she's wanting
to become even more active.
It's World War 2, her
own brother, Sylvester,
is serving overseas
in the Pacific.
And, she's frankly galled
that here we have
black people fighting
to protect the United States and
yet cannot register
to vote at home.
And, she wants to
register to vote.
And, she sees a picture
in a local black newspaper
of a local NAACP
meeting and she realized
that women can be
part of the branch.
So she goes to her first
NAACP meeting in 1943.
She's the only woman there.
She's asked to take
notes, she's too timid
to say no, she says yes.
And, then it's branch
election day
and they ask her
to be secretary.
And, again, too timid to say no,
she's elected secretary
that very first day.
Now she makes it known that
she wants to register to vote.
And, a man by the
name of E. D. Nixon,
one of Montgomery's
most stalwart activists,
comes by her apartment,
the Parks' Family of living
in the Cleveland
Courts Projects.
And, he comes by their apartment
to bring her the materials
to register to vote.
And, here will begin a
partnership that's going
to change the face
of American history.
Because E. D. Nixon and Rosa
Parks will spend the next decade
transforming the
Montgomery NAACP
into a much more
activist chapter.
And, they're working on a
couple of different things.
The first is voter registration.
She tries, for the first time,
in 1943 to register to vote.
Right? One of the
barriers is a test.
The test is given differently
to white people than
to black people.
Black people are given
very obscure questions
about the state constitution
or very absurd questions
like how many bubbles
are in a bar of soap.
The first time she tries,
she does not pass, 1943.
She tries again in 1944,
again she does not pass.
1945 she tries again.
And, this time she's fed up and
she decides she's going to write
down all of the questions and
all of the answers that she puts
down because she's
thinking of filing suit.
Now, where we are in history,
this is ten years before
her historic bus stand.
But, that tenacity is evident.
And, the voter registrar
notices what she's doing,
and doesn't want any trouble.
And, so low and behold,
Rosa Parks is informed
that she has successfully
registered to vote,
that tenacity, again, that we're
going to see over and over.
Raymond never succeeds
in Montgomery, right,
they make it very hard.
So she votes for the
first time in 1945.
And, so one of the things the
Montgomery NAACP is working
on is voter registration and
trying to get more people
to at least try to
impress against the system.
And, the other kinds of
issues they're working
on is what we would call
now criminal justice issues,
two kinds.
One like Scottsboro
cases where black people
and often black men are being
wrongfully accused of crimes.
One of the cases that gets
her the most is the case
of a 16 year old by the
name of Jeremiah Reeves.
Jeremiah Reeves was a
high school student,
he was a jazz drummer, he
delivered groceries for work
and he had started to
have a relationship
with a young white woman.
It got found out, she
accused him of rape.
He was brought in, they put
him in the electric chair,
it has a kind of,
there's a way that it sort
of resembles the
Central Park Five case.
They put him into
the electric chair
and they basically coerce
him into confessing.
He recants the confession.
He also is quickly
sentenced to death.
Parks and Nixon, they
fight this case for years,
they manage to get it overturned
because it was an
all white jury.
A second all white jury
convicts Reeves again
and Reeves is executed
when he turns 22.
The other kinds of cases
they're working on is trying
to get the law to be responsive
and accountable to black people
and particularly kind of white
violence against black people
and white rape of black women.
And, many of us heard
Oprah a couple of years ago
at the Golden Globes talking
about the Recy Taylor case,
a case of a black woman who
was coming home from church
and six white men gang
rapped her and told her
if she told anybody
they would kill her.
But, she did tell.
And, through the networks of
the Scottsboro organizing,
the Parks come to
learn about this case.
And, she goes, Rosa Parks
goes down to investigate
and a movement is built to try
to get justice for Recy Taylor
to try to get an indictment
of the men who raped her.
There's never an indictment.
And, in fact, for a time,
Parks and Nixon have
to get Recy Taylor out of
Abbeville to Montgomery
because her life is in danger.
So over and over and over,
and there are a lot more cases I
could talk about, they're trying
and by and large, they
are not succeeding.
Right? And, she talks about
how it was hard to keep going
when all her efforts
seemed in vein.
Now, by 1954, she has
been hired to work
at Montgomery Fair
Department Store.
Montgomery Fair Department
Store is a segregated
department store.
That means that black
people can shop there
but they cannot try on clothes.
It means that, for black
people working there,
the elevator's segregated, the
water fountain's segregated,
the employee lunch
room is segregated.
And, she's working,
she's an assistant tailor
in the men's shop, which means
that she spends her time
tailoring white men's suits.
And, to make money on the
side, she is doing sewing
on the side including for one
of Montgomery's few white
families that's very kind
of active in civil rights.
And, that is Clifford
and Virginia Durr.
Clifford is a lawyer, Virginia
Durr's a long time civil
rights activist.
And, Virginia Durr's affiliated
with an adult organizer training
school called Highlander
Folk School.
And, Virginia Durr sees how low
Mrs. Parks' spirits have gotten.
And, she recommends her
for a scholarship to go
to Highlander Folk School.
Highlander Folk School,
in the summer of 1955,
will have a two week workshop on
how to implement desegregation,
right, in the wake
of the Brown case.
And, she recommends Rosa Parks.
And, this is a big deal
for a working class person
like Rosa Parks to take
off two weeks of work.
But, she goes.
And, it's a transformative
experience.
She talks about how the workshop
she goes to is about 50 people,
about half black and half white.
She talks about it as one
of the first times she felt
like she could express her
political ideas in front
of white people without
hostility.
One of her favorite
things about Highlander is
that she would wake
up in the morning
and she would smell the coffee
and white people would
be making it for her.
And, she just loves that
matter of factness of it.
Highlander was started in
the 1930s around issues
of the Great Depression.
And, by the 1950s they've
turned to civil rights.
They've always an
interracial space.
And, reporters would come down,
it was located in Tennessee,
and would talk to the, Myles
Horton, one of the founders,
and they would say to him.
How do you get white people and
black people to eat together?
And he said you know,
this is what we do.
First we make the food,
second we put the food out,
third we ring the bell.
And, I think part of what she
loved about this is the kind
of pointing out of
the absurdity of it.
She's also incredibly impressed.
The workshop she's going to
is being led by Septima Clark.
Septima Clark was a
long time teacher,
activist in South Carolina
who had lost her job
because she refused to give up
her membership at the NAACP.
And, so Clark's running
the workshop
that Parks is taking part in.
And, Parks is in awe of her.
And Park, because Mrs.
Parks feels so bitter,
she says she feels so nervous.
And, here Clark seems so calm.
And, her spirits start to lift.
But, still in awe,
on the last day,
like any good organizer training
school, they do a go round.
What are you going to
do when you get home?
And, they get to Rosa Parks.
And Rosa Parks says
there's never going
to be a mass movement
in Montgomery
because it's the cradle
of the Confederacy white
resistance is too violent
and black people
won't stick together.
This is four months
before her bus stand.
But, she says but you
know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to continue to
work with the young people.
The year before, she had
refounded the youth branch
of the chapter.
Rosa Parks across her life
held out her greatest hope
for the kind of militancy
of young people.
Right? She often despaired
of the complacency,
and she'd use this word
over and over, of her peers.
And, so what she leaves
Highlander more resolved to work
with these young people.
All right.
We're to December 1st 1955.
Now this is not going to be Rosa
Parks' first bus resistance.
One of the things
she refused to do,
many bus drivers in Montgomery.
And, remember, Montgomery
bus drivers had police powers
which meant they carried guns.
And, some bus drivers would
insist that black people pay
in the front but then
reboard from the back.
And, she refused to do that.
She had been kicked off the bus
by the bus driver who's going
to have her arrested that
night 12 years earlier.
And, she'd been kicked off other
buses for refusing to do this.
Now she's also not the
first person to get arrested
for like refusing
to move on the bus.
There had been a trickle
of people in Montgomery,
particularly in the
decade after World War 2.
Viola White gets
arrested in 1944.
She decides to press her case.
In response, police
rape her daughter.
And, then they do this tricky
maneuver where they hold
up her appeal in state court
and it never gets heard.
And, Viola White dies before
her case goes anywhere.
And, Rosa Parks and E. D.
Nixon are working on that case.
In 1950, a Neighbor of Rosa
Parks, Hilliard Brooks,
refuses that practice.
He refuses to get
out and reboard.
He has an argument
with the bus driver.
The police get on the bus
and they shoot Hilliard
Brooks and he dies.
He is a neighbor of Rosa
Parks in Cleveland Courts.
Now 1955 is a new legal
climate where after brown,
so there's a potential
for a legal case,
and in March a 15
year old by the name
of Claudette Colvin refuses to
give up her seat on the bus,
is manhandled by police as
they take her from the bus.
She struggles because
they have her hand,
their hands all over her.
They book her on three charges
of a segregation charge,
a resisting arrest charge,
and an assault charge.
The judge strategically throws
out the segregation charge
and the resisting charge,
making it much harder to,
because the black community
of Montgomery was outraged
by Colvin's arrest.
But, then people start to
feel like she's too young,
she's too feisty, she's too
uncontrollable, she's poor,
she's dark skinned, and
she is not the right image.
And, so we don't
see a mass movement,
ultimately behind Colvin.
Although, I think there is no
way to understand what's going
to happen when Rosa Parks get
arrested without understanding
that Colvin really
lays the ground
for that accumulation
of outrage.
Movements don't happen with the
first injustice, as we know.
Right? It takes an accumulation.
Okay. So now we're
at December 1st 1955.
She gets on the bus
around 5:30 at night.
She had actually let a bus pass
because it was too crowded,
she sits in the middle section.
She is sitting here, there's
a black man sitting here,
and two black women
sitting over here.
At the third stop, after
she gets on, the bus fills,
one white man is left standing.
By the terms of Alabama
segregation,
everyone in that row is
going to have to get up so
that one person can sit down.
The first time the bus
driver asks, no one moves.
The bus driver asks more
threateningly the second time
and she says, reluctantly, the
other people decide to get up.
But she pushed, again this
language of being pushed as far
as she could be pushed.
She says she thinks
about her grandfather,
she thinks about Emmett Till
and the recent acquittal
of his killers, and she
decides not to move.
To her, to get up would be
to approve of this treatment
and she did not approve.
Now every school child
in America today learns
that Rosa Parks was courageous.
But, what makes this courageous,
I think, we really miss
in the telling of this story,
and that is the courage
of perseverance.
There is nothing to
suggest, I should say,
she's made stands before.
People she's known has
made stands before.
And, they haven't done anything.
And, they often have resulted
in people getting hurt or fired,
which she's going to get fired.
Right? So there's nothing to
suggest that doing this thing
on that day is going
to make a difference.
Right? And, yet and still
this is, in some sense,
the genius of Rosa
Parks' courage,
the ability to do something
again and again and again
when you don't necessarily
see that it's going to work
but yet you still do it.
Right? Because a line is a line.
Now, Rosa Parks is a shy person.
But, on the bus that
day, she is not quiet.
The police get on the bus,
they ask her why don't,
why didn't you move.
And, she says, why do
you push us around?
You can imagine the scene.
Right? And one of the
officers is so surprised,
he says well I don't know.
But, the law is the law
and you're under arrest.
Right? So again you
can imagine this scene.
She's taken to jail.
She actually meets a woman
in jail who's been there
for 60 days because
she picked up a machete
to an abusive boyfriend
and she doesn't want
to get back with the boyfriend.
And, they haven't allowed her
to make a call to her family.
And, Rosa Parks smuggles that
woman's brother's phone number
out of jail that night.
So she's thinking like an
activist even that night.
She's bailed out
about 10:00 both
by her husband and E. D. Nixon.
And, once E. D. Nixon
sees that she's okay,
he's kind of delighted because
here's the test case they've
been looking for.
Rosa Parks is 42 that night,
she's active in the community,
she's politically active,
they know she's brave.
And, here is the test case
they've been looking for.
Now, Raymond is not so sure.
Raymond is worried
she'll be killed
and Raymond is also worried
people won't stick with her
like they didn't
stick with Colvin.
Because, the only adult, in
fact, that stick with Colvin
that summer is Rosa Parks.
But, they decide to go forward.
And, she calls a young black
lawyer in town by the name
of Fred Gray to ask
him to represent her.
And, Fred Gray was
here the night that we,
that they opened the exhibition.
People were here for that.
And, he was 25 that night.
And, she asked him
to represent her.
And, even later that
night, he calls the head
of the Women's Political
Council,
a woman by the name
of Joanne Robinson.
And, it is the Women's
Political Council, that night,
that decides they are going
to call for a one day boycott
on Monday when she's
arraigned in court.
And, so in the middle of
the night, Robinson sneaks
in to Alabama State College and,
with the help of two students
and a colleague, runs off 35,000
leaflets saying another woman
has been arrested on the
bus, boycott on Monday.
And, she calls Nixon in the
middle of the night to tell him.
And, then early that next
morning he starts calling the
more political ministers
in town.
And, about 6AM, he calls
a new minister in town,
and this is a 26 year
old Martin Luther King.
The Kings had been in
town for about a year
and they had just had their
first daughter, Yolanda.
She is three weeks old.
And, Nixon wakes King up.
And, just like us, when somebody
wakes you up with a scheme,
it's 6 in the morning,
because Nixon wants
to use King's church,
like most of us,
King is like actually
could you call me back?
And, I say that because I think
sometimes the way we tell the
story of Parks and
King makes it seem
like they know their name is
in neon they know what to do,
God is talking to
them with lightening,
when there is no lightening.
There is nothing.
Right? There is nothing easy,
there is nothing obvious.
And, we know that King, in the
next days and weeks and months,
is going to step into
this amazing leadership.
But, there is nothing
obvious about it.
And, he says call me back.
And, Nixon calls him back
a couple of hours later
and he says yes you
can use my church
and Nixon says okay great.
I've been telling people
to meet there anyways.
Now, that Monday morning,
people like Rosa Parks
and Raymond Parks
are very nervous.
Right? Many of Montgomery's long
time activists are very nervous.
Will people stay off the bus?
And, she talks about
that Monday morning
as being he best part
of the whole thing.
Right? The Montgomery
bus boycott will go
on for over a year.
But, seeing that people
had done it, she wondered,
she thought it was magnificent.
But, why had we waited so long?
Now many times, people think
about the Montgomery bus boycott
as being about walking.
But, in fact, how they
sustain a year long boycott is
by this amazingly organized
carpool system where they set
up 40 stations all around town.
And, at the height of
it, they're giving 10,000
to 15,000 rides a day.
But, that requires
money and resources.
Now, for Rosa Parks, five weeks
into the boycott, she's fired.
She says people don't talk
to her at work ever again.
She's fired five weeks in,
Raymond loses his job
a couple weeks later.
And, they will never find steady
work in Montgomery ever again.
And, I think this is part
of the story we do not tell.
And, it is a part that,
if you look at her papers
and you look her papers and you
look at the exhibition, right,
one of the hardest things
in her papers is how profound
the suffering is for her
and Raymond and her mother for a
decade following her bus stand.
But, even though her
own family's in trouble,
she will spend much of
the Montgomery bus boycott
on the road raising
money and attention
for the movement back home.
The Montgomery's buses
are desegregated in part
because they file
a federal case,
like alongside Rosa
Parks' state case learning
from the Viola White case, that
case goes to Supreme Court.
And, on December 21st 1956,
Montgomery's buses
are desegregated.
But, that doesn't end the
Parks family suffering,
that doesn't end
the death threats.
And, so eight months after
the boycott's successful end,
the Parks family is forced to
leave Montgomery and they move
to Detroit where her
brother is living.
And, if you knew that she lived
in Detroit, often times the way
that story is like and
then they moved to Detroit
and they lived happily ever
after, like there's some,
like this is the Promise Land.
But, Rosa Parks will
talk and describe Detroit
like the Northern
Promise Land that wasn't.
Because, even though
some of the public signs
of segregation are gone,
thankfully she says,
the systems of housing
segregation, school segregation,
job discrimination, and police
brutality that they leave
in Montgomery, they
find again in Detroit.
She finds not too much
difference, to use her words.
And, so she will spend the
second half of her life,
she spends more of
her life in Detroit
than in Montgomery fighting the
racism of the Jim Crow North in
and alongside a growing
Black Power Movement
in the city and in the country.
Because, again, I think too
often we truncate Rosa Parks'
story the bus boycott
is successfully over
and that's the end of her story.
When, the actual Rosa Parks will
spend another 40 years fighting
for criminal justice, fighting
against police brutality.
Fighting for real public
assistance, and public housing
because public housing had
been so important to her.
She's an early opponent
on the war in Vietnam.
She's an opponent of US policy
in Central America in the 1980s.
She fights against kind of US
investment in South Africa.
She keeps going and
going and going.
She will describe Malcolm
X as her personal hero.
And, I did a lot of
interviews for my book.
And, I interviewed one of
Malcolm X's lieutenants,
a man by the name
of Peter Bailey.
If you're watching the Netflix,
he's in the Netflix
show right now.
And, Mr. Bailey said to me that
Malcolm talked about two people
in the Civil Rights
Movement with complete awe.
And, one of them
was Fannie Lou Hamer
and the other was Rosa Parks.
So they meet for the first time
in 1963 when he comes to Detroit
to give the message
to the grass roots.
And, they actually
meet for the last time
about a week before
he's assassinated.
He comes back, gives an
address at Ford Auditorium,
it's often called
his last message.
Rosa Park is there that
night, she's getting an award.
They have their longest
conversation,
she gets him to sign
her program.
And, I think we see in that, and
you will see pictures upstairs
of her and Stokely Carmichael
and her and Shirley Chisholm,
and her and Angela Davis.
Right? And, this idea that
courage needs courage.
Right? That, like part
of he genius of someone
like Rosa Parks is the ability
to go to try thing after thin
after thing to keep going
and going and going.
But, part of how
that is sustained is
by a community of activists.
So she keeps going into the
80s and the 90s to the end
of her life she is insisting
that there is much more
to be done, that
the struggle is not
over that we need
to carry it forward.
And, so I guess where I would
like to end tonight is that kind
of much more fitting honor
of Rosa Parks is by taking
that struggle forward, right,
and to resist the tendency
to tell this like happy one day
story about her and honor her
that way, but in fact actually
miss what she's asking of us.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Shari Werb: Wow.
Thank you Jeanne for that
extraordinary overview
of Rosa Parks and
for bringing her
into the room with us tonight.
Thank you.
It's now my pleasure to
introduce two more guests
who will be in conversation.
Douglas Brinkley is a Professor
of History at Rice University,
a Contributing Editor
at Vanity Fair,
and CNN's Official Historian.
His recent books include
Cronkite, the Quiet World,
the Wilderness Warrior,
and Rightful Heritage.
Six of his books
have been selected
as New York Times
Notable Books of the Year.
In 2005 he published
Rosa Parks a Life.
He is a member of the Century
Association and the Council
on Foreign Relations,
and an Honorary Member
of the James Madison Council
of the Library of Congress.
His new book is an American
Moonshot, John F Kennedy
and the Great Space Race.
Most notably, for our purposes
tonight, Doug was a friend
of Rosa Parks' family and
is amply equipped to tell us
about the human side of this
historic American figure.
Douglas will be in conversation
with National Public Radio's
Michel Martin, the weekend host
of All Things Considered where
she draws on her deep reporting
and interviewing experience
to dig into the week's news.
Outside the studio she has
also hosted Michel Martin Going
There, an ambitious
live event series
in collaboration
with member stations.
She came to NPR in 2006
and launched Tell Me More
a one hour daily NPR news
and talk show that aired
on NPR stations nationwide
from 2007 to 2014.
Prior to joining NPR, Michel
was a Washington Post reporter
and White House correspondent
for the Wall Street Journal.
She is also an Emmy Award
winning reporter for Nightline.
Please welcome Douglas
Brinkley and Michel Martin.
[ Applause ]
>> Michel Martin:
Thank you all so much.
Thanks for having us
follow Professor Theoharis.
Thought we were friends.
It's wonderful to
see all of you.
It's wonderful to be in
conversation with both of you.
Let's pick up where
Professor Theoharis left off.
Well actually, let's actually
go before Professor Theoharis.
Because, I think, what she was
trying to do, what she does
and what she's been doing
in her work is create a
different picture of Rosa Parks
from kind of he nicey nice,
you know, the one day,
this was the one day she
was tired, so she sat down
and then we all stood up and
then it was all was heavenly,
happily ever after, kind
of the fairy tale version.
She's trying to recover the
grit and the hardness of it
from the fairy tale version that
a lot of us have been taught,
like the Black History
Month post or version.
And, but you're doing
something else with your book.
What were you trying
to do with your book?
>> Douglas Brinkley: Well,
it's wonderful to be here.
And, it's wonderful to be
here with family members
of Rosa Parks, it's an
honor, and also people
who knew Rosa Parks very well.
H. H. Leonard's here.
Where is H?
There she is.
H used to put up Mrs. Parks when
she would come to Washington,
Mrs. Parks would stay at the
mansion at DuPont Circle.
And, I went all over places
where H was with Mrs. Parks.
And, they're very close.
And, what you did for her in her
later life is quite remarkable.
And, Elaine Steele but
I'm not sure she's here.
But hi Elaine, if you're
watching somewhere.
My book came out on Rosa
Parks in 2000 not 2005.
And, I was doing a class called
the Magic Bus in the 1990s
where I'd take school kids
on my bus and we'd go all
over the country studying
American history and culture.
And, that evolved into a, me
taking high school students
on Civil Rights tours
in the south.
This is right up people
like John Lewis's, you know,
and Julian Bond's wheel house
because I'd visit all the sites.
And, when I'd take these
students to Montgomery back then
and go to Cleveland Courts,
there was no historic
marker for Rosa Parks.
So I would bring these students
an bang on the door and go
into the apartment, which
was this desolate little tiny
cubbyhole where Rosa and
Raymond Parks lived those years
and just talk to the people that
were living there at that point.
And, when you get to
Montgomery, the proximity
of things start making sense.
The fact that, you know, the
Holt Street Baptist Church just
down the road from where Rosa
Parks' Cleveland Courts was
and the like.
It is called the walking
city because, about,
it was a place you could
successfully do a boycott due
to the, you know, the mileage.
It's in the 60,000 people
not 600,000 or a million
in Atlanta or something.
But, the great thing that
I, so I decided to try
to do a book on Rosa Parks.
And, this viking series, when I
pitched them, they had asked me
to do a book and listen to the
name of the people that are
in this series, you know
Leonardo da Vinci, Donte,
Jane Austin, Charles
Dickens, Buddha, Chekhov,
Martin Luther King,
Churchill, Andy Warhol.
And I came to James Atlas,
the editor, and I said I want
to do a book on Rosa Parks
because there were great
children's books out on her
but I didn't feel there was one
that told the story of her more
than the fairy tale of the
one night, as you put it.
And, I embarked on this.
And, this is how
I started knowing,
Elaine Steele was a gatekeeper.
When Rosa Parks moved
up to Detroit,
she worked at a rag factory
for a while with Elaine Steele.
They were making like just
garments out of a thing.
She would have to
take a bus in Detroit.
We sometimes forget
in our country
that celebrity doesn't
equal wealth.
And, you now, Rosa Parks
was never a wealthy person,
she had to work her whole
life to make a living.
And, they, I wanted to do it.
And, I finally met Elaine
at DuPont Circle afterwards
cafe here and pitched myself
to interview here and get
to spend time with her.
And, Elaine let me feel that she
wanted an African American woman
to be the one that wrote it.
And, it was, she said I
love your work and all this.
So I went back that evening
to my room and my phone rang.
And, Elaine said okay I didn't
like my telling you that,
we'll help you anyway we could.
And, at that point, they,
all people around Rosa Parks
just sort of allowed me
into her life, to to to
the AME Church in Detroit,
or to her apartment overlooking
the Detroit River and Windsor,
the Underground Railroad.
I believe H, I was with
you in Beverly Hills
at one point with her.
And, Detroit and Montgomery
with Johnnie May Carr.
And it was unbelievable for
me because Rosa Parks was,
had the deepest most beautiful
soul you could imagine.
There was nothing not
to like about her.
And, she exuded her Christian
faith, the AME Church,
the Freedom Church, that was
the heart of who she was.
That was the church of Harriet
Tubman and Frederick Douglas,
and Sojourner Truth and
she was a deaconess much
of her life in that.
And, she also loved the south.
She love Alabama as much as
she despised Alabama even
when she was in Detroit and
many of her friends were there.
I found her to be the
most remarkable person
for all the reason Jeanne said.
And the fact that
she was this activist
but carried this
dignity with her, and.
>> Michel Cannon: Let's dig into
something you just said though.
Did you have any hesitation
about being the one
to tell her story given
that you are not an African
American woman?
>> Douglas Brinkley: No.
You know, because I just
loved what, the more I learned
about her the more I
felt she was undersung.
And, history is never static.
Nobody's book owns anything.
It's a building block
to the point
that you build till
you get to the Library
of Congress having a miraculous
display like they're having here
and people really starting to
understand her legacy and all.
So I thought I might be able
to be a phase, you know.
And, the advantage of doing,
there are disadvantages
of getting to know figures.
The one advantage is you
get to talk to them more
and you get to see them.
Like with Rosa Parks,
she had gotten
into a very set deal
about December 1.
And, to get her to deviate off
script, she'd ask so many times
and we'd all tell
her the same story.
So you'd show her things
like a Montgomery Newspaper
where she'd see an orange soda.
Like oh that, we
used to drink that.
And, you can get her
into getting off what
everybody always asked her.
>> Michel Martin: I learned
a lot from your book.
And, in fact, it, you
know, it was, it reminds me
of Professor Theoharis' title
about one of her other books,
it was beautiful and
terrible at the same time.
I mean, there's just some
wonderful stories that you tell
but there are also some terrible
stories that you tell just
about the basic indignities
of life for a person of color
and African American women,
African Americans in general,
African American
women in particular
at that particular point.
Like you pointed out
that, in Montgomery,
there wasn't even a high school
for African Americans
until 1946.
And, you talked about
this sort of her,
sort of feisty early life.
Remember the story about
how this, she was walking
down the street and this boy was
on roller skates
and he pushed her?
And, she pushed him back.
And, his mother says to
her I could have you locked
up forever.
>> Douglas Brinkley:
That's right.
>> Michel Martin: I
could have you locked up
and she said I wasn't
doing anything.
Why did he push me?
>> Douglas Brinkley:
Well, and that's the side
of Rosa Parks that surprised me.
I asked a little bit
of what we just heard,
I asked Rosa parks once.
I asked a very dumb question.
I said something to the effect.
Well not, the first
part wasn't dumb.
I, you know, I just wanted her
to talk and I said where did,
so when did you first
meet Martin Luther King?
And she said the Pilgrim
Insurance Company in Montgomery.
And, she said, just
a group of us went,
some of us from a church went,
and we came to hear him speak.
And, a very small group,
a handful of women
came to hear him.
And, he was the new
preacher in town.
And, I then said to her,
you know, Mrs. Parks,
do you realize he was
like, this was a guy,
when you heard hims peak
that he was great, you know,
that this was going to be
somebody to keep an eye on?
And she looked at me with
this funny look and said,
we just kept saying
boy is he cute.
We finally have a
cute preacher in town.
And, she was very humid like
that and self-deprecating
and tell fun warmhearted
stories.
But, on the idea of being
bullied she then later talked
to me about King at one point,
she told me about when
she went to Birmingham.
This is after the bus
boycott of Montgomery.
And, Dr. King was giving a
speech onstage and a guy came
out and punched Dr. King, they,
a weird white supremacist type
who just obviously was
some form of deranged man,
you don't rush the stage
and punch somebody.
And, King was, did this
whole nonviolent thing,
she told me like, oh leave
him alone, leave him alone,
don't grab him, don't grab him.
And, he started talking,
why did you hit me?
And, it turned out that
he was angry because the,
Sammy Davis Jr, the entertainer,
was with a white woman,
the bigotry of it.
And then, I said well
then what happened?
She goes I went back and
got him a Coke and aspirin
and we were looking to
get ice on his face.
And, all that Dr. King was
saying is I don't want charges
pressed on him.
I don't want him going to jail.
And, then Mrs. Parks says, I
said well what did you think?
That must have been amazing.
She said I thought Martin's
getting crazy with nonviolence.
If somebody punches
me in the face,
I'll punch them right back.
And, she wasn't joking,
she was not
of the full bread nonviolent,
if somebody punches me,
I'm not going to take it.
Hence, it's, when she's
up in Detroit working
with the Black Power Movement
and befriending Malcolm X
and all, it was a
natural fit for her.
She only went so far
on the King philosophy
of constantly turning
your cheek.
>> Michel Martin: Well,
you heard the story how she
would sit next to her grandpa
when he had his double
barreled shotgun on his lap
and she wanted to see him
take care of business.
So you know, and
she not pushing.
>> Douglas Brinkley:
She wanted us
to remember Booker T Washington.
When we study as historians,
it's usually W. E. B. Du Bois
as well it should
be, he's the great.
But she was the beneficiary of
Booker T Washington in the sense
of he was the person Tuskegee
with the George Washington
Carver and the book
Up From Slavery of
Booker T Washington.
But, more to the point, he
created Booker T Washington,
these industrial
schools in the south.
And, she went to the Industrial
School for Girls in Montgomery
which was run by white people
from liberals, you know,
really from the, from the north.
And, that's when
she was very proud
that she actually graduated as
an African American from school.
And, that when many were,
you know, it was very hard
to get an education if you
were black in racist Alabama.
>> Michel Martin: Well, I'm
glad you brought that up
because she really did
believe in what a lot
of people call today
respectability politics.
I mean she believed
in being hardworking.
She believed in, you know,
being very proper and correct.
One of the things that though,
the other thing that I read
in your book, I just
wanted to clarify.
Because you say, it really,
crediting Professor
Theoharis' point
that the ground work
had been laid,
that people in Montgomery were
already very angry about the way
that they were treated, the
indignities large and small,
the big systemic ones,
the petty small ones.
You say that definitively she
really had not planned that day
to do what she did
on December 1st.
It really was a spontaneous
act even though there was a lot
of ground work being laid.
>> Douglas Brinkley: Yeah.
But we just heard a brilliant
lecture about how Rosa Park had,
during World War 2 years, was,
you know, marrying Raymond
in 1932 when he, the barber shop
in the African American
community
where they would start talking
and working with the NAACP
and gossiping about how to fight
against Jim Crow
and all of this.
And then she worked to
get African American kids
into the libraries
of Montgomery.
And we heard about the voting.
So me, I'm just suggesting in
the 40s she was very active.
Now it was a misogynistic world.
E. D. Nixon, amazing
figure, but you know,
he was like he'd carry a
gun with him and he was.
And, she was the secretary
but really she ran
the Montgomery office.
E. D. Nixon was out and about,
not to detract from him.
But she was keeping
the show moving in a,
you know, forward all the time.
And, so by the time of that
December 1, the Virginia
and Clifford Durr, white
liberal couple, new dealers.
Clifford Durr had got
a road scholarship.
They were Eleanor
Roosevelt people.
They had befriended
Rosa Parks also.
And, they were the ones
who helped pay her to go
to Highlander Folk School
and take the classes
on civil disobedience.
I felt one of my finds,
I went to her papers,
which are at Wayne
State University,
and she was a pack rat.
She would save clippings of
everything, just all the,
just endless files of clippings.
But, in the midst of all of that
were her notes from when she was
at Highland Folk, you know,
Folk School in Tennessee and,
you know, learning about
disobedience in a very real way.
And then the death
of Emmett Till,
horrible a 14 year old boy,
and money miss, wolf whistling
at a white woman and
being gauged and murdered
and the body thrown in
the Tallahassee River.
And, the bravery of Emmett
Till's mother to show the body
in magazines, touches her.
And, Adam Clayton
Powell would come
to Montgomery and
it touched her.
And, you know, there were cases,
we heard about Claudette Colvin,
but other people were coming.
So on December 1 1955,
she didn't wake up
and this is my big day.
She had bursitis in her arms
and she was working these steam
presses at Montgomery Fair
where you had to have
like pants like mine
and press them before
they went out.
And, she got off
a little time wise
from her normal bus routine.
It was Christmas.
There was a Santa like
Salvation Army thing
and they just were putting
the Christmas decorations up.
And, she really got on the bus
she didn't want to get onto.
Because, she wasn't riding
James Blake's buses since 1943
when he left her in the rain.
She went in and he made her go
in the back and then left her
on the side of the road.
Blake, the driver of the
famous December 1 1955 was a
Neo-confederate white
supremacist.
I went to track him down,
and I couldn't get him
to do an interview.
So I showed up at his
church he went to.
And, he wouldn't talk about
it at this point in his life.
But, she thought he was mean,
that all these other drivers,
she got to know some
of them that were okay.
Not that she was okay with
the system, but she humanized
that driver's pretty
nice, says hi, you know.
But, Blake was just a
nasty like rattlesnake.
>> Michel Martin: Wait,
didn't he curse you
out when you tried
to talk to him?
>> Douglas Brinkley:
Yeah he did.
>> Michel Martin: It wasn't
just that he didn't talk to you.
>> Douglas Brinkley: No
he was very pissed off
that he was being bothered.
>> Michel Martin: Because you're
going to tattle tale it all.
>> Douglas Brinkley:
There, at it.
And, she remembered him
like this was a person
that she had a kind of animosity
towards for the way he treat,
even within segregation, the way
he treated African Americans.
>> Michel Martin: And, later,
one of the other things
I learned from your book,
later at the show trial, I mean
it lasted what five minutes
of the proceedings, he lied.
He lied and said that there had
been a vacant seat in the back
of the bus, which was not true.
>> Douglas Brinkley:
Blake was a bad guy.
Honestly, a really
just bad person.
You know, I think the
hope was with him,
I've been with John
Lewis when he goes back
to Montgomery every year
with Faith and Politics and,
you know, he's hugged the
police that have beat him
and this didn't happen
with Blake.
Just like George Wallace later
denounced, said I'm sorry
for my sins later in life.
Blake wasn't one of them.
He was an unreconstructed
white supremacist.
>> Michel Martin: One of the
other interesting details
that I've got from your book was
that it wasn't just that Blake
like but that there were two
white women who were called
to the stand that the
prosecutor somehow found,
both testified falsely that
there had been an open seat
to which Rosa Parks
refused to move.
And, this is one of those
painful moments that you recount
in the book, one of the
Professors at Alabama State
who worked with Parks at the
local NAACP shook his head
in disgust and whispered to
E. D. Nixon, who returned
to New York for the trial,
he said you can always find
some damn white woman to lie.
>> Douglas Brinkley: Yeah.
Well, not just that, one of
the perils of doing history,
I guess it's the fog of war.
But, I was in Montgomery,
you know, and, you know,
there were only so
many people on the bus.
These aren't large buses.
If you go see it at
the Henry Ford Museum,
you can get an idea of the size.
And, I've met like 50 people
supposedly that were on the bus.
Half of Montgomery
had some role.
And, people do exaggerate
different moments in history.
And, because that's
such an iconic moment.
But her, also as much as she was
just, getting the right to vote
in the 1940s and in that was
an activist in a real sense,
as Jeanne just so told us.
She was, she was an
American who wanted
to win World War 2 again
fascism and beat the Nazis
and beat the Japanese.
And, it sickened her when
Sylvester, her brother,
came home and in a uniform and
all African Americans coming,
not all, but many coming back
in the southern communities
were being spit on, beat, hazed,
and here her brother didn't
feel he could come back.
He was a war hero.
He was on Normandy
picking up bodies
from the beaches over there.
Now he comes back
Sylvester to Montgomery
and he's treated like dirt.
And, ended up, of course,
going up to Detroit.
And, Rosa Parks, I had no
children, and she loved Raymond,
hence the Rosa and
Raymond Park Institute.
One of the things she told me,
when I was talking with her,
is to make sure that
I don't make Raymond
because it was unusual
for a man in that era
in the African American
community to allow his wife
in this way, you know,
back to the misogyny.
>> Michel Martin: Well
talk more about that.
That's where I was
going to go next.
So talk more about Raymond,
the role he played in her life.
You tell this funny story
how, at the beginning,
when Jeanne was talking about,
they would have the meetings
with guns on the table.
At first he didn't want
her to come to the meetings
because he said you
can't run if they,
you can't run fast enough
if they come in here.
So how did it go from
that to him sort of?
>> Douglas Brinkley: He
didn't have the nerve she had.
I think we have to be
careful of gender roles.
See I, Rosa Parks could
be calm and collected.
Raymond would be very nervous.
And, when the bomb
threats were coming
and the threats were coming
on them, and the, you know,
Montgomery becomes
a bit of a war zone,
Raymond started drinking heavily
and had difficulty with this.
I sent Rosa Parks my
manuscript to read.
And, I got back from
her directly
that there was one thing
in my, and I never do
that with the subject.
But, I was so worried
because I looked up to her
and actually loved her.
And, I felt I don't want her not
liking it or I blew something.
So she didn't have
any right over it.
I just said proof it, tell
me if I got something wrong.
And, her big change
was that I had called,
said Raymond had
been an alcoholic.
And, she said he, no
he was a heavy drinker,
don't use that word.
Because that was a different
generation that used that word.
And she didn't, and also
today we say mixed race,
Rosa Parks would
use the word Mulatto
which you don't use anymore.
But, she was very
proud that I'm,
everybody says I'm African
American but I'm also Crete
and I'm also Scot's Irish and
I'm also, I'm like a mixture,
kind of an Omni American
as Albert Murray
out of Alabama talked about it.
>> Michel Martin: Did she ever
talked about how painful it was
for her, the episode in her
life, what Jeanne talked about,
where after boycott like
all the hell fire raining
down upon her family and
really on the community?
I mean you tell some
stories in the book.
And, it's not just that yes it
was ingenious how the community
organized itself.
But, they were constantly
their insurance canceled.
There were all these schemes
to kind of bust the boycott
which you also point out
wasn't called a boycott
because boycotts were illegal.
It was called a protest.
I mean hell fire
was raining down.
>> Douglas Brinkley:
It really was.
>> Michel Martin: On
her and her family.
Did she ever talk to
you about that period.
>> Douglas Brinkley: Yeah.
>> Michel Martin: And
how she dealt with it.
>> Douglas Brinkley: Of course.
And, she talked to a
number of people about that.
But keep, I just want
to let you realize
that she had a lot of joy.
It just wasn't angry all, I mean
she would laugh about things
that went on during all this.
And, I'll, somebody on a bicycle
and remember the
funny weird stories
because they were in a protest.
They were humans,
they just weren't
in outrage every
minute, you know.
But the bomb threats there and
the fact that she had to get
out of Montgomery and lead,
the, she had gotten fed up.
But, as Jeanne just
said, once she got
to Detroit it wasn't the
Promise Land, as she put it.
You know, that Virginia Park
area, they put construction
of highways there, the schools
were segregated, you know.
This isn't just an
Alabama problem on racism.
Detroit had racism that
she had to encounter there
and Sylvester had to encounter.
And, she survived because
of a sense of humor.
And, what I've appreciated
about Jeanne's work that's
very pioneering, in my view,
is her bringing together, which
I had missed when I done this,
and Jeanne got it and I
didn't, the idea of her working
with women and rape survivors.
I just didn't find
the trail of it.
But, it's all there.
And, I just missed
it when I did it.
But she, that is another side
of the feminism of Rosa Parks.
She would tell me about
things like at the March
On Washington not being
able to be a speak,
she didn't like public speaking,
she wasn't looking forward
to being, she really
didn't like celebritihood
in any meaningful way.
But she was offended that
women weren't given a real role
on the famous March on
Washington for, in jobs.
It wasn't about her.
It's just let's elevate
the women.
And, that's a big
part of her too.
And so the Women's Movement
thoughts, so like as mentioned
with the photos and the
exhibit here of Angela Davis
and Shirley Chisholm
mean a lot to me.
But, she's backing
with Shirley Chisholm
for her to be president.
>> Michel Martin: Well I
was going to ask you that.
We're having a mind, Vulcan mind
melt here, because I was going
to ask you are there aspects or
are there particular artifacts
in the exhibition that
particularly moved you given
that you had this time
with her that so many
of us wish we had,
had but didn't have?
>> Douglas Brinkley: Well,
anytime I see her face,
it's just so striking.
I mean, it's, you're
a photographer,
it's just something about
her look and then the aura.
I noticed when people would
realize it was Rosa Parks,
H I'm sure has experienced
this more than me.
But, when she was in a
wheelchair with her bun
and people would suddenly
realize there's Rosa Parks,
people would they
couldn't almost talk.
And, sometimes I mean, people
would just want to touch her.
It's just like you're real.
I've heard about, in the
African American community
in particular.
But, you know, she was very
also into Nelson Mandela.
I interviewed Bishop Tutu
and people like this and how,
in Africa, Rosa Parks
became a big figure.
It wasn't just in
the United States.
And, in fact, in 1990, when
Nelson Mandela got released
from the Robben Island Prison,
and he got with Winnie Mandela,
they got to come to the United
States, Brown, Thermon, Adam,
you know, they were
coming here in Washington
and George Herbert Walker
Bush was seeing them.
But, she was in Detroit and he
wanted Mandela to go see Joe,
his hero boxer Joe Lewis and
meet Rosa Parks in Detroit.
And, nobody, he flew to Detroit,
Wayne County Airport, Mandela,
but nobody invited Rosa Parks.
Even though he had
said, Mandela,
he'd love to see Rosa Parks,
it got mixed in the snafu.
And, this part of her is
demure, Damon Keith, a federal,
a judge there in Detroit
said you're coming with me.
And, she says no I
didn't get an invite.
I'm not trying to like
hog Mandela's time.
And, he's like you're, he
said he wanted to see you.
She said but nobody gave
me an official invitation.
And, he goes you're invited.
And, they got into
a heated argument
which only somebody her age,
they were the same age
and he was a judge.
And, he said you're coming.
And, they finally got
there and she kept saying,
she was in the wheelchair,
I don't want to go up front,
I'm not trying to get attention.
She's just so worried
that, that's the way.
But, she got up there and
just sitting and Mandela comes
down out of the little airport
and she's like in the front,
and he's doing like, saying,
they're selling Mandela T-shirts
and Swahili words for
power, it's like a big deal.
And, he's just walking and
waving, he's going like this
and comes down a carpet they
had there and is walking.
And, suddenly his eyes fixed
on Rosa Parks sitting there.
And, he just stood and
tears started swelling
up in Mandela's face.
And, he tried to talk.
And he just goes Rosa Parks,
Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks.
And, people there started
chanting their name
when they had forgotten her.
And, then they came and hugged
each other, this embrace
of somebody fighting Jim
Crow hatred in America,
somebody fighting
Apartheid and they're both
in the same grain generation
embracing each other there
at the Detroit Airport.
>> Michel Martin: What
did she think about that,
the fact that she became a
person whose name was chanted,
the fact that she was a person
who could render
people speechless,
a person who as a child was felt
a little white boy could push
her off the sidewalk just
because she was there?
Did she ever talk
to you about that?
>> Douglas Brinkley: Yeah
but I, she was somebody,
honestly who didn't need
to be famous in her mind.
She liked, she loved
kids, she loved children.
And, one of the times I went
with her to a middle school
up in Detroit where
she was doing a program
to teach middle school kids how
to do, middle school kids going
to senior assisted living people
and teaching the elders how
to do email and how to use.
So it was a way to
empower the young person
and also heal generations that
an older person would be talking
to a younger person instead of
boxing off like generationally.
So education was big.
The Underground Railroad, it
was her life time fascination.
And, anything about
Harriet Tubman
in particular had
really caught her fancy.
And, she learned
about the system
of the Underground Railroad
and the lure that, you know,
now it's, they built
a museum in Cincinnati
for the Underground
Railroad and all.
But, when she was starting
to wanting kid group children
to really learn that
Underground railroad history.
>> Michel Martin: You really,
you're sort of redirecting
us here.
Because it's interesting because
we, I keep wanting to kind
of push her back onto the
Black History Month calendar.
Right? And, you're bringing her
back down to us and the work
that still needs to be done.
And, it sounds like she
was always doing the work.
While I have you, I don't want
to let my profession
off he hook.
I mean, you tell some
really disturbing stories
about the way journalists
treated her.
One in, I mean in San
Francisco in particular,
you write about how she
was on the speaking tour
that Professor Theoharis talked
about while the bus
boycott was going on.
There was this one reporter
in San Francisco who asked her
if she was a prostitute
who basically told her he was
going to rip her to shreds.
And, was the one time
in the book you talk
about how she was crying,
that it made her cry.
>> Douglas Brinkley: Yep.
When, that's when she
toured around the country,
after her big moment December
1st of 55 and into 1956,
she would go to Seattle and,
you know, to New York and had
to become like a
spokesperson for things.
But, people, the
hatred guys is so real.
I, last week, was with Hank
Aaron the baseball great
in Atlanta where we dedicated
a building to Hank Aaron
and I gave a historian speech
where they did a ribbon cutting
for an Atlanta Technical
Building.
You guys should see
the mail Hank Aaron got
for bating Babe Ruth.
I mean the most vile letters
of a hatred you could imagine.
Rosa and Raymond had to endure
that hell fire, as you put it,
of just hatred and bigotry.
But she knew, like Mandela.
You know, Bill Clinton,
I interviewed not long
ago about Mandela.
And, he basically
said, when he was going
through his impeachment
ordeal, he talked to Mandela
and he said did you
despise your jailers?
Did you hate your jailers?
You're in jail for,
you know, decades.
And he said, you
know, I despised them
for a week Mandela said.
And, I just was so angry at
them when I finally got out.
And, then I realized
they still own me.
And, if I didn't let
go I wouldn't be free.
Rosa Parks was free.
She died a free person.
Nobody owned her.
She did it through a
combination of things, social,
grassroots activism encouraged
by young people, the AME Church
and the teachings of Christ,
Buddhism, vegan lifestyle.
There are a lot of
components to it.
But this is not somebody who
felt, she transcended hatred
with her brand of love.
And, that's why she's a figure
that people are so drawn to.
>> Michel Martin:
What's your best memory
of her, just the two of you?
>> Douglas Brinkley: You know,
I think we forget she's southern
in the sense because she
has a southern accent.
And, she's, her fondness for
place and people, like her,
even though Detroit
had all these problems
and share her being beaten
in her own home, you know,
I mean a horrible story.
I don't think we
have time for it all.
But, I mean she was
beaten terribly and rushed
to a receiving hospital and all
the deprivations of her life,
but she'd find what was
good and great in Detroit.
I remember her telling me
she listened to records.
She liked Dr., I think
she loved Dr. King's voice
and his speaking.
Motown Records in addition
to doing Stevie Wonder and,
you know, the Tempations
and they all up there
in Hitsville USA, did a record
of Dr. King's Cobo Arena speech
where he tried out I have
a dream before the here.
And, she would play that a lot.
She liked listening
to King's sermons.
But also Sam Cook and
the music of Sam Cook.
And, when King was assassinated
she'd listen to Sam Cook
that kind of healed some of
that sort of music she felt
as a cure to heal her.
And, then the great work she did
for John Conyers the great
congressperson there.
Everybody wanted to meet
her and what she wanted
to meet were the young
kids who wanted to be
with her and talk to her.
And, that brought her joy.
I think the, my wife
got to talk to her
when our baby Benton was born.
She's got a real thing about
children that had been with her
as a consistent through her
life, the sanctity of childhood.
>> Michel Martin: Did she get
to read the book that you,
you did you sent her a draft.
Did she like it?
What did she say?
>> Douglas Brinkley:
That's the only thing,
she said you did a nice
job but you got to get rid
of that about Raymond.
She wanted, she said I needed to
amplify her husband in the sense
that he had the, like she
was leaving and he had
to keep the books, keep
the, it's a role reversal.
>> Michel Martin: She loved him.
>> Douglas Brinkley:
She loved him.
>> Michel Martin:
And, she admired him.
>> Douglas Brinkley: She
loved him and admired him
and she loved all of her nieces
and nephews and extended family
in Detroit and beyond,
and loved her friend set,
Johnnie May Carr, who we have
mentioned out of Montgomery
who was something
else in real life.
And, she loved Johnnie May Carr.
They were like this and they
had all these micro memories.
And, I thought what Jeanne said
so moving to me was, yeah, we,
she put it somehow like
we think like Rosa Parks
and Martin Luther King and
just how down home it was
in Montgomery there
with the food
and the culture and
the friendships.
And she would dress perfectly.
I mean Claudette Colvin's
story's different.
But Rosa Parks didn't
swear and curse
and she would wear
her best clothes.
So when she's arrested,
the people of Montgomery,
the African American community
and some white community,
but they would say,
they arrest who?
Rosa Parks the most angelic,
you know, wonderful, she's an.
They're fingerprinting her?
And, it united her, the symbol
of her helped unite the country.
And, then in a fluke of history,
Dr. King became the leader
because Reverend Ralph Abernathy
had been around there too long
and made some enemies.
And, King was the
new preacher in town
and he got the assignment.
And, wow, you have the combo
will be linked in history.
And, she was much older.
She was 42 when Dr.
King's in his 20s still.
>> Michel Martin:
And he was cute.
>> Douglas Brinkley:
And he was cute.
>> Michel Martin: Professor
Theoharis gave us kind
of a charge.
And, I know that you all
occupy sort of different spaces
in the world and I don't know if
you feel comfortable doing that.
But, I would, before
we let you go,
do you want to give us a charge
based on the knowledge of her,
based on the time
you spent together,
based on your understanding
of who she was?
What would you, what
would Rosa Parks want us
to be thinking about tonight?
>> Douglas Brinkley:
Love, love your family,
love people, the gospel of love.
But, also fight the activists.
Don't allow oppression and
injustice or social inequity.
She was both.
She was a sweet loving
human person.
And, if you treated her with
respect, she would treat you,
she never in her life treated
anybody with disrespect
if they were repectful in
any way shape or form to her.
But, if you crossed her and you
were disrespectful there was
this fighter in her.
And, she was indomitable in
that because, in the end,
Rosa Parks knew who she was.
She didn't have to worry
about like fame and this.
She never lost her
internal spirit.
So get involved, vote.
She wanted young people to vote,
she wanted people to be engaged
in democracy, she
wanted to believe
that you can make change.
And, I do think that
she'd be happy
to see these women marches.
I'm sure, even in a wheelchair
she would've tried to be
at a million woman march
for women's rights.
Think of her not just
for civil rights figure
or human rights figure but
somebody who loved democracy
and the possibilities of
it and somebody who thought
in global terms and saw
the oppression of people
of color everywhere
in the world.
>> Michel Martin: Douglas
Brinkley thank you so much.
>> Douglas Brinkley: Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Sheri Web: Doug I'm sorry
for post dating your book.
>> Douglas Brinkley:
That's okay.
>> Sheri Web: Thank you for
your insightful conversation.
You've given us so much to
think about as we leave.
But, before we do, I want
to bring Adrienne
Cannon back to the stage.
And, Jeanne, if you wouldn't
mind joining us as well,
we have a very special
gift from you all,
for you all from the library.
[ Background noise ]
>> Walla.
>> Wow.
>> Wow.
>> Wow.
>> Wow.
>> Douglas Brinkley: Cool.
>> That's amazing.
>> Douglas Brinkley:
Tell them what it is.
>> Adrienne Cannon:
I consider this
to be the standout
piece in the collection.
And, it's an example of Rosa
Parks personal writings.
It's a rich array that include
autobiographical sketches
and notes and notebooks
and spiritual reflections
and prayers.
And, I call these notes.
And, in the notes she describes
her arrest on December 1st 1955,
she actually reflects
on the arrest.
On the first page
that's written in ink,
she describes the arrest.
And, she says I have been pushed
around all my life and I felt
at this moment I
couldn't take it anymore.
When I asked the policeman why
we had to be pushed around,
he said he didn't know,
the law is the law,
you are under arrest.
And, those are the words
that Jeanne said earlier.
And, it was a familiar
refrain that she repeated
in print interviews
and film interviews
that she writes confidently
in pen
because she knew what
she was going to say.
Now, in the next three
pages, you'll notice
that they're written in pencil.
These next three pages, she
describes the effect that,
that arrest had on her.
And, I think she wrote in pencil
because she was dealing
with her feelings.
She was vulnerable.
She didn't know what
she was going to say.
And, when your write in pencil
about your feelings, if you,
if you say something that
you think is too much,
you always have the comfort of
knowing that you can erase it,
that you can take it back.
And so she goes into a whole
new territory exploring
these feelings.
And, I think, on
the second page,
she recounts her
brief incarceration
in the Montgomery City Jail.
She writes in Quiet Strength,
her book Quiet Strength,
that she's first
put in a small room
with bars before
she's transferred
to the cell with
two other women.
And, she says next I felt
that I had been deserted,
but I did not cry, I said a
silent prayer and I waited.
And, then she continues
on the second page,
I want to feel the nearness
of something secure.
It is such a lonely lost feeling
that I'm cut off from life.
I am nothing.
I belong nowhere and to non one.
Then she describes
the personal toll
of living in Jim Crow racism.
Again, on the second page
and as we go further down,
she says there is so
much hurt, disappointment
and oppression one can take.
The bubble of life grows
larger, the line between reason
and madness grows thinner.
And, finally, she
considers the broader impact
of what she says he
criminal Jim Crow has done
to one life multiplied
millions of times
over these United
States and the world,
he walks us on a tightrope.
Little children are
so conditioned early
in segregated pattern as they
take their first toddling steps
and are weaned from
the mother's breast.
And, she ends this, these
set of notes with an image
that evokes the special
nurturing relationship
that she had with children.
And, I think that the
notes are significant
because they crystallize
the bus arrest
which is the defining moment
in her life, her iconic status
as to mother of the modern
Civil Rights Movement,
bus simultaneously, they remind
us that she is a woman, that,
that she is human, that she is
vulnerable, that she is like us.
>> Well thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Shari Werb: Thank
you Adrienne.
Can we have another
round of applause
for Jeanne, Michael, Michel.
[ Applause ]
We have one for each of you so
they'll be mailed to your homes.
>> Douglas Brinkley:
Thank you very much.
Thank you guys.
>> Michel Martin: Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Shari Werb: Before you go,
please remember that Jeanne
and Doug will be signing
their Rosa Parks books
in the room next door.
I hope you enjoyed our National
Book Festival Presents Program
and that you will
return on March 12th
for a memorable conversation
between Margret Atwood
and Nan Talese.
And, please look for our
announcement on February 19th
when we will have news about
an exciting programming series
happening every Thursday night.
For more information about
our programs, go to loc.gov.
Thank you so much.
[ Applause ]
>> This is awesome.
>> Isn't it.
>> It's awesome.
>> It is so beautiful.
>> I'm so used to hearing
your voice [inaudible].