Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Hardships honed her strong will

Even as a young girl, she possessed a keen sense of justice, equality

By Shawn D. Lewis / The Detroit News

Montgomery Advertiser A teenage Rosa Parks poses with friend Samson Smith in this undated photo. Parks' mother, a teacher, saved for years to send her daughter to Montgomery Industrial School for girls. Comment on this story Send this story to a friend Get Home Delivery

Rosa Parks was just a child when she first took a stand against a racial rebuke in her hometown of Tuskegee, Ala.

She picked up a brick to defend herself after being threatened by a little white boy named Franklin.

Her horrified grandmother acted swiftly.

"She scolded me very severely about how I had to learn that white folks were white folks, and that you just didn't talk to white folks or act that way around them," Parks recalled in her autobiography, "Rosa Parks: My Story." "You didn't retaliate if they did something to you. She warned that if I wasn't careful, I would probably be lynched before I was 20 years old."

That incident set the tenor of indignation that set the course of her life.

"I felt that I was very much in my rights to try to defend myself if I could," she said in the book.

Early life was tough for young Rosa Louise McCauley.

She was born Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee. Her mother, Leona, was a teacher; her father, James McCauley, was a carpenter and builder.

He traveled throughout the South building houses; her parents separated when she was 5. She did not see her father again until she was married.

She and her younger brother, Sylvester, were raised by her mother's parents, who were sharecroppers in Pine Level, near Montgomery.

Parks' mother had to leave home to teach in the neighboring town of Spring Hill because the segregated black school in Pine Level already had a teacher. She returned home on weekends in a small mule wagon.

At the age of 6, Parks was handed a flour sack and told to pick cotton on her grandfather's 18-acre farm, which had been part of a plantation. She could attend school only when she wasn't needed in the fields from late fall until early spring.

"We didn't have any of what they called civil rights back then," she recalled. "It was just a matter of survival. ... It was just a matter of existing from one day to the next."

She remembered sitting up late at night near her grandfather in his rocking chair, while he held his double-barreled shotgun to protect the family against the Ku Klux Klan.

"I can remember my grandfather saying, 'I don't know how long I would last if they came breaking in here, but I'm getting the first one who comes through the door.'"

School instills pride

Parks attended racially segregated schools. She started school at age 6, studying in a one-room schoolhouse near her church, Mount Zion A.M.E. The school had 50 to 60 children in first through sixth grades.

In her autobiography, Parks wrote: "Another difference between our school and the white school was that we went for only five months, while they went for nine months. Many of the black children were needed by their families to plow and plant in the spring and harvest in the fall. Their families were sharecroppers like my grandparents' neighbors."

Parks' mother eventually enrolled her in the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, founded by liberal-minded Northern women. Simply going back and forth to school was traumatic. She and her schoolmates were taunted by white children who threw trash at them from a school bus window.

Parks' mother had saved for years to pay for Parks' schooling. There were free public schools in Montgomery -- but they were for whites only.

The school "instilled in us a certain pride, a certain evaluation of ourselves," said Johnnie Carr of Montgomery, a classmate of Parks' who became a lifelong friend.

But it was difficult to reconcile the goals learned at the school with the daily scourge of segregation.

Blacks could buy gasoline from a white-owned station, for example, but couldn't use the bathrooms. Some restaurants had special sections where blacks were forced to eat behind a shabby curtain; others served blacks only at a carryout window near the back door.

Parks went to Alabama State Teachers' College for Negroes for 10th and 11th grades.

But she dropped out just a few classes shy of getting her high school diploma to care for her dying grandmother.

As she was about to return to school, her mother became ill, and Parks delayed her education again to nurse her mother.

She wrote in her autobiography: "I was not happy about dropping out of school either time, but it was my responsibility to help with my grandmother and later to take care of my mother. I did not complain; it was just something that had to be done."

At age 19, she married Raymond Parks, a barber. Two years later, in 1934, she earned her high school diploma.

"Parks," as she called her husband, was the first civil rights activist she met. Both would be involved in numerous civil rights causes throughout their lives.

Active NAACP worker

Raymond Parks worked behind the scenes for the release of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men who were wrongly accused of raping two white women in 1931.

Rosa Parks was at one meeting that was held at their home, but her husband feared it was too dangerous for her to work with him on their behalf.

"The more I became involved with the NAACP, the more I learned of discrimination and acts of violence against blacks, such as lynchings, rapes and unsolved murders," she wrote in her book.

In fact, she was so determined to work for change, she joined the NAACP in the early 1940s, when it was considered dangerous for women to participate.

Again, her husband discouraged her from joining because he feared for her safety. But she became one of only two women members, and, in 1943, was elected secretary of the Montgomery chapter.