The myth of Rosa Parks has proved to be a neutering of the reality of a radical Civil Rights activist. The image of a little seamstress too tired to give up her seat on a bus might be an attractive myth for the white mainstream, but it infantilizes both a woman and a movement, as though she was unaware of what she was doing and why. As Parks herself recounts in Yoruba Richen and Johanna Hamilton’s searing documentary The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks: “I never said I was tired.”
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks is based on the biography of the same name by Jeanne Theoharis and seeks to correct the mythology of Parks as a naïve “tired” seamstress who just didn’t have the strength to stand. It builds instead a picture of a woman involved in the Civil Rights struggle from an early age, whose family, upbringing, marriage, and developing personal beliefs reflected an increased radicalization and strong sense of independence and identity. Through interviews with family members and fellow activists, archival footage, interviews with Parks, and performances from her own writing, the film shows us not a “little seamstress” but a woman of exceptional courage, power, and radical ideology. Here was a woman who was an early member of the NAACP, worked on voting drives for Black voters, began the Montgomery Bus Boycott, marched in Selma, and who was a major figure and supporter of the later radicalism of the Black Panthers and Republic of New Afrika, and a friend of Malcolm X.
Parks’s radicalism is also explicitly related to her feminism and her understanding of violence against Black women as part and parcel of white supremacy. She was one of the people dispatched to help Recy Taylor prosecute her white rapists; she herself was the near-victim of a sexual assault by a white man, whom she eventually repelled by saying that he would have to kill her and rape a corpse. Nor does the documentary shy away from the sexism of the Civil Rights movement itself. Where Martin Luther King became a national figure after Montgomery, Parks was mostly relegated to a supporting player as the myth surrounding her action developed, eventually forcing her and her family to head to Detroit. Activists point out that although Parks and several female Civil Rights leaders were at the March on Washington, only one was asked to speak.
Much like the neutering of Martin Luther King’s rhetoric to make it more palatable for the white mainstream, the safety of the Parks myth means that the mainstream can ignore her real radicalism. It also means that it can continue to minimize the contributions of Black women to the Civil Rights movement. Parks, according to the film, understood the confluence of violence against Black women and the violence of white supremacy. The documentary draws chilling parallels between the segregationist Deep South of the 1950s and the America of today; between the “respectable” white supremacists of the 50s and the contemporary GOP, and between the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s and the current Black Lives Matter movement. While Rosa Parks’s statue was erected in the Capitol, the Supreme Court was gutting the Voting Rights Act.
But there is something hopeful at the base of her story, and at the base of the film. Civil Rights did not begin or end with the Montgomery Bus Boycott; it was and is an ongoing struggle that has and continues to make great strides. It might seem impossible to fight against that status quo, but we must remember that for a very long time, segregation was the status quo. It didn’t take a “little seamstress” with tired feet to naively challenge it, but a radical, intelligent, immensely brave Black woman who refused to stand when a white man told her to.
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks is currently on Tribeca At Home and will stream on Peacock.
