“I knew Mrs. Rosa Parks in a way that few people ever experience a truly inspirational person. She was far more than an icon of history and a survivor. She was a person whose impact will forever be among us. Mrs. Parks was an ‘influencer’ long before the term became trendy within social media circles.”
So writes H.H. Leonards in her recent book, Rosa Parks Beyond the Bus: Life, Lessons, and Leadership, about arguably the greatest public citizen the United States has ever known. Leonards, founder and chair of the Mansion on O Street and the O Street Museum Foundation, headquartered in Washington, D.C., took Parks into her home in 1994, soon after Parks was robbed in her own home in Detroit. It is that act of selfless friendship that brings us this necessary book.
Parks resided in Washington, D.C., for ten years, unbeknownst to most Washingtonians—including me—and Leonards got to know her well.
The book is striking for what it is: a biography about Rosa Parks, a person who few have deeply examined, despite the importance of her contributions to the American experiment and human progress. Besides historian Douglas Brinkley’s biography, Rosa Parks: A Life, Jeanne Theoharis’s The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, and countless children’s books, Parks is mostly absent from the world’s literary landscape.
For these reasons, Leonards’s book is a pleasant surprise, and perhaps the beginning of a deeper look into Parks’s life and work. To Leonards’s credit, she immediately moves beyond the obvious. Everyone knows why Parks is important and about the personal sacrifice she made for justice and freedom. Instead, Leonards provides us with a view of Parks’s life as a vulnerable human being with emotions and a personal history that shaped her before and after the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956.
R.H. Boyd
Parks had a loving husband, Raymond, who helped make much of her work possible. She and her brother both had distant relationships with their father, something that Parks worked tirelessly to mend.
Anecdotes like this prove there is much more to Parks than a bus seat she refused to relinquish. As Leonards writes in the introduction, “I believe it is time for the world to celebrate Mrs. Parks beyond the bus—her life, philosophy, and devotion to all people. I am forever grateful to have shared an intimate decade with her.”
Leonards’s book is a series of vignettes that bring Parks to life as a full person, not the larger-than-life, yet neglected, American citizen. Just as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s life has often been reduced to his “I Have a Dream” speech and not his call for economic justice and an anti-war culture, Parks’s life has been reduced to the tale of a tired Black seamstress who refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
But as Leonards makes clear, Parks told her she wasn’t tired that day in December 1955, but rather she was tired of “giving in.” The protest was mostly about Park’s’ personal commitment to human rights and dignity.
Who knew that after that struggle, Parks continued to support African American causes and the rights of women? Who knew that she openly aligned herself with Malcolm X and Angela Davis? Who knew that in 1991, she spoke out against the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court? That she supported reparations for African Americans?
One of the more astonishing stories in the book details Parks’s opposition to the exclusion of women from the March on Washington in 1963. While that march is often recognized as a great historic moment in U.S. history, it was also a demonstration of sexism and patriarchy that is rarely mentioned each year on the event’s anniversary.
Leonards writes that Parks was “dumbfounded” by the fierce opposition of the men to equal participation by women in the protest. It didn’t become a moment of retreat for Parks, but rather it prompted her determination to fight for the rights of all people.
Parks’s work with the NAACP’s investigation of Recy Taylor’s brutal rape in Alabama, in 1944, is another important detail of her life. Parks insisted that she be allowed to investigate the case, and although it took nearly seventy years for Alabama lawmakers to apologize for not prosecuting the six white rapists, Parks’s work was crucial to documenting that injustice.
There are also details of her life behind the headlines when she was living in Washington, D.C., such as the friendship she developed with Mamie Till, the mother of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old victim of America’s wicked racial caste system. Parks also formed a close bond with South African hero Nelson Mandela, whom she met in 1990, upon his release from prison.
In the end, we learn that Parks was such a significant public citizen that she lay in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, the first woman and only the third private citizen to be given that honor. I can personally attest to standing in the long, winding line of Americans who came to the Capitol to pay homage to an ordinary citizen who did extraordinary things.
Is this a feel-good book without much of the typical ups and downs of a historical biography? Yes. But Rosa Parks is deserving of any literary treatment the world can give right now.
Parks, as Leonards shows us, was a human being who demonstrated how to live a purposeful life. This is badly needed in this era of selfishness and self-promotion.