we have the honor of having with us to start this whole celebration off is dr. jeanne theoharis who asked that question of rosa parks, what was behind that no, that no heard around the world? those little two letters that opened the flood gates of all those divergent streams into that one vast ocean. at the time that no carried with it great risk. risk in terms of gender, trials and race. the question is what is behind that kind of courage? what makes one take those kind of stands? and more importantly, what is the price paid for having done so? the doctor answers some of those questions, and she writes it in her new book, the rebellious life of rosa parks. jeanne theoharis was born in staten island and spent about six weeks there and her family moved to milwaukee, wisconsin, where she was raised. and as professor of political science at brooklyn college and also co-founder for educators for civil liberties. she's author of numerous books on the civil rights movement and contemporary politics of race in the united states including as coauthor our schools suck, students talk back to a segregated nation. she received her ab in afro-american studies from harvard college and a ph.d. in american culture from university of michigan. she's the author or coauthor of six books and numerous articles on the black freedom strug and the contemporary politics of race in the united states. her latest book, the one you'll hear about tonight from which she will be reading represents a corrective to the popular econography of parks as that quiet seamstress with one little single act that birthed the modern civil rights movement. she reveals a civil rights movement radical who fought to expose and eradicate the american racial caste system in jobs, schools, public services and committal gestures. let me welcome dr. jeanne theoharis. >> i'm so delighted to be here. my book came out last week, and it wouldn't have been impossible without the help and support and investigation of many, many people including many people here in montgomery who talk to me, who pointed me towards materials and archives. so this book -- and many people also in detroit who did the same thing, who were committed to telling a bigger, broader story not just of one day of rosa parks but a life of being rebellious as she would put it. so i am tremendously grateful to be here tonight and also tremendously grateful to many people i interviewed for the book here in montgomery and detroit that certainly this book is far better for that. it is one of the most well-known american stories even among elementary schoolers. she took the bus home after work. when the front of the bus filled and one white man was left standing the bus driver asked her to move. parks refused. and the bus driver had her arrested. her arrest galvanized the black community in a yearlong boycott of montgomery buses ensued. this catapulted a young martin luther king, jr. into national leadership and ushered in the modern civil rights movement. one year later montgomery buses were desegregated. despite parks' center placement in that story we rarely see the story and its surrounding history from her perspective. hidden in plain sight she is the symbol but rarely the story. parks has been awarded the nation's highest honors, congressional gold medal, presidential medal of freedom, the first woman and second african-american ever to lie in honor in the nation's capitol. next monday, february 4th on the centennial of her birth the post office will issue a stamp in her honor. but despite these honors her legacy is too often been reduced to a simple act by a quiet seamstress on a single day. that fable of rosa parks is used to show how far we have come to put this history of the civil rights movement firmly in the past. her quietness is celebrated over and over and over again. particularly because we are in this historic space where she made this stand. it seems fitting to return to that founding moment and its broader history and look at it anew. seeing these events from her perspective changes and deepens how we understand the civil rights movement in four substantial ways. first, it gives us a much longer history more than a decade of the political work that parks and a cadre of activists did. second, it shows how courageous parks' bus stand was and the key role including many women played in the black struggle and the sacrifice and suffering it produced for parks and her family. third, it shows the breadth of the civil rights movement as the parks family are forced to leave montgomery and she spends more than half of her political life in detroit challenging the racism of the jim crow north. finally, it provides lessons, i think, for us of what it takes to make change in a moment and over the course of a lifetime and what her legacy asks of us now. so who was rosa parks before the boycott? parks had a life history of being rebellious as she put it. she was raised by her mother and grandparents who taught rosa to stand up for herself. there was no education provided for black children past the sixth grade so at great sacrifice her mother sent her tomist white school for girls here in montgomery. rosa was a reserved girl, a bit of a goody two shoes her friends thought who followed the schools prohibitions against dancing, make-up and short hair. but she had a feisty side. when she and her brother were threatened by a white bully, she picked up a brick and threatened to hit him, he stopped. when a young boy pushed her in front of his mother, she pushed back. when the mother threatened to kill her, she said he pushed me and i didn't want him pushing me. parks met and fell in love with raymond parks in 1931, the first real activist i ever met, she says. when they married raymond parks was working to free the nine scots borough boys, nine young men ages 12 to 19 who had been caught riding the trains as many people did during the great depression. two white women had been found on that train and that charge quickly turned to rape, and they were quickly charged and sentenced to death. raymond and a group of local people sort of became the groundwork for a kind of free and defend the scots borough boys and rosa joined raymond in this very dangerous organizing. the meetings were secret. she recalled one late night meeting at her house with guns covering the table and later reflected that she was so scared she forgot to offer any refreshment. in 1943 she saw a picture of johnny carr in a photo of the local naacp. realizing the organization was open to women she decided to attend her first meeting. the only woman there that day, the branch was having elections and she was elected secretary. she wanted to register to vote. e. d. nixon, active in the unionwise heading up this effort. indeed there were only 31 black people in montgomery at that time registered to vote. nixon came by her apartment to bring her some materials and so began a partnership that would change the course of american history. she tried three times to vote. part of the process was a test, but that test was administered differently for black people than for white people. on the third time she took it sure that she had passed and deciding she would consider bringing suit if she didn't pass, she copied down all the questions and the answers. the registrar saw her. she passed the test. a final hurdle was that once you were registered people were required to pay poll taxes not just from the year that they got registered but from all the years back to when they had been ostensibly eligible to vote. $1.50 for each year, so for rosa parks that was $18 which was an extraordinary amount of money, but they found it. e. d. nixon and rosa parks wanted to transform the montgomery naacp into an activist branch. so 1945 nixon runs for president and wins. parks is again elected secretary. many middle class members of the branch wanted more of a social club and opposed these politics and they wrote to the national naacp office, and these letters are at the library of congress. and they're mad and they don't like him and they think he's a dictator for his politicking. and they try to unseat them and try to get the national office to come in. both parks and nixon were working class. they lived on the working class west side. she's living in the cleveland port projects with her husband and then her mother moves there. nixon and parks are re-elected to head the montgomery branch, and they also come to head the alabama conference of the naacp. a lot of what they did in this period, and this is the late '40s was try to document white brutality against black people, sort of file affidavits and also sort of protest and challenge legal lynching, the prosecuting of black men for sexual crimes who had either stepped out of place or were having consensual relationships with white women. and so these charges were sort of used to put people back in their place. rosa parks traveled the state taking testimony and trying to get people sort of be willing to tine affidavits to send to the justice department. and they'd send to the national office, they'd send to the justice department. but this work was incredibly dangerous. most people were very scared and refuse to sign affidavits much to the dismay and frustration of raymond parks. so i think when we hear the term naacp today it sounds somewhat mild. but this work was anything but mild. and only a few were courageous to do it. in the mid-40s rosa parks attends an naacp leadership training workshop organized by ella baker and she finds her tremendously inspiring and often will stay with rosa parks when she comes to alabama and when she comes to montgomery. over and over this sort of small group of activists sort of try to demonstrate their opposition, but most of these cases go nowhere where, and she is increasingly discouraged. she reforms the youth chapter of the branch and takes great pleasure in working with the young people and in particular trying to get the young people to take a more forceful stance against segregation including a sit in at the main library because the main library wasn't open to black patrons. black people had to go to the colored branch to get books. so she and the young people start to do sort of read ins when they go and try to get the main branch to serve them. on the suggestion of white civil rights supporter and leftist virginia durr who parks had been sewing for at night rosa parks decides to attend a two week workshop on school desegregation. highlander was an adult training school in tennessee and by the 1950s had turned its tension to civil right. it had always been an interracial space, but in the '50s particularly in the wake of the brown decision and the supreme court's unwillingness to put any timetable on school desegregation -- so in 1955 the supreme court backs off any implementation and so activists like miles horton who ran highlander and rosa parks so they're going to have to do this themselves. so for two weeks in august 1955 rosa parks goes to tennessee and joins with 48 other people to develop a plan for the implementation of school desegregation. this is tremendously good for her spirit. it's the first time she feels that she could speak and eat and meet with white people without hostility. she liked waking up in the morning and having white people make her breakfast. clark who ran many of the workshops, and she's a teacher who had been fired because she refused to give up her membership in the naacp is another huge inspiration and mentor for rosa parks. and parks really admires how calm clark is when she feels so nervous and so sort of worn down. on the last day they do like many organizing training workshops. they do a go around and everyone is supposed to say what they're going to do when they go back, and rosa parks says, well, nothing's ever going to happen in montgomery. white resistance is too enormous and the community isn't unified and won't stick together, so i'm going to work with the young people. so the idea that rosa parks just one day up and did what she did misses the community, the courage, the fortitude and the frustration that laid the groundwork for her action. okay, so the bus. various misconses as i think most of you know. she was not sitting in the white section. she was not particularly tired that day. she was not a plant. her act required tremendous courage in part because she and many other people had made stands on the bus against segregation that had gone nowhere. the bus driver carried a gun. her act was not the first or the third. indeed a number of black people in the decades since world war ii had made stands on the bus. her neighbor hilliard brooks in 1950 had been killed by police for his stand on the bus. the arrest had stunned montgomery emphasis black community and parks had raised money for her case but no mass movement had emerged. on that december evening she got off work deciding to wait for a less crowded bus she goes to the drugstore to pick up a few things. about 5:30 she boards the bus taking a seat in the middle section. at the third stop the bus fills up and one white man is left standing. and by the terms of segregation at that time four people are going to have to get up for that one white man to sit. the driver james fred blake tells the four black people in the middle row to move. three reluctantly according to parks get up, but pushed as far as she could be pushed she decides to stand fast making way for the man sitting next to her to get out and then sliding over to the window. people always say i didn't give up my seat because i was tired, but that isn't true. i was not tired physically or no more tired than i usually was at the end of a working day. no, the only tired i was was tired of giving in. but she did not believe that any movement necessarily would ensue from her act. there's no evidence of any plan or indication until the moment presented itself that rosa parks knew she could summon the courage to refuse to move from her seat. but thinking or even talking about it and actually being able to act in the moment are vastly different as most of us know. but what makes parks different is in that moment she sees the opportunity and summons the will to stand fast. unsure that she would get off the bus alive she described it one of the worst days of her life. in interviews later she admits to wishing other people had joined her and describes her stand in less than triumphal terms. but she also contextualized her decision within her role as a political organizer. an opportunity was being given to me to do what i had asked of others. seeing herself part of a fledgling movement, she felt she had a responsibility to act on behalf of that larger community. she'd been pushing the young people on her youth counsel and had grown disappointed in the way the adults in the community had, quote, failed our young people. her decision to act rose as much from her frustration in a lack of change than belief her particular action would alter anything. quote, i simply did it because i thought nobody else would do anything. so back to the bus. blake gets off the bus to call his supervisor who tells him to put her off the bus. that's what the supervisor says. people are grumbling on the bus. she can't hear them but they're grumbling. blake then calls the police, and the police come and could have just evicted her from the bus, and she believes that's what the police wanted to do. she overhears them saying something, but blake insist that he wants her arrested and agrees to come down after his run to sign the paperwork. she also in a number of interviews talks about finding her arrest irritating and annoying. and i sort of love these words because i think it -- at the time she sees this as a detour from the work she's doing. she's planning this big youth workshop that weekend and now she's gotten herself arrested, and she doesn't see this as a moment it's going to open up, just i've been arrestedch she calls home. meanwhile somebody on the bus goes to tell e.d. nixon and so nixon and the durrs as well as her husband come down to bail her out a few hours later. they go back to her apartment and nixon is delight because this is sort of the test case he's looking for. durr is worried for her safety but after some discussion she decides to go forward. she calls fred gray to ask him. fred gray is new young black lawyer in town she's been mentoring, meeting with. so she calls him that night, and gray then calls joanne robinson who's the head of the womens political counsel. and it's the womens political counsel that decides that night to act and call for a one day boycott on a monday when parks is to be arraigned in court. in the middle of the night robinson with two students sneaks into alabama state where she is a professor and runs off 35,0:00 leaflets. at 3:00 a.m. robinson calls nixon. robinson doesn't call parks interestingly, but she calls nixon and at 5:00 in the morning e.d. nixon starts making calls to ministers in town. so he calls reverend aber nathy and then he calls a young minister in town by the name of reverend martin luther king who's new in town and whose church is centrally located and nixon sees this as an ideal place to have this meeting. it is not until the next day at lunch, however, rosa parks finds out about these plans when she goes like she usually does -- she would often walk from her job at montgomery fair to have lunch at fred grays office. and she gets there that day sort of there's that -- she finds out about the plan. meanwhile that saturday she has scheduled the youth workshop and only a couple of kids come, and she's really disappointed and increasingly nervous. now they're planning this boycott for monday, and she is worried. so the first day of the boycott is amazing and she very much describes her best memory oum frt whole year is waking up that morning and seeing the buses empty. she goes to court and after court goes back to fred gray's office to help out. she doesn't go back to work that day. she doesn't go home. obviously it's been kind of a big day. she goes back because there's all these people calling fred gray's office, so she answers the phones. but she doesn't tell people that it's her. so she's sitting there answering the phone and telling people what they need to know but not saying this is me, this is rosa parks. and then meanwhile that afternoon gray goes to a meeting, right, that is actually the meeting that will birth the montgomery improvement association, right, and so rosa parks is back in his office answering the phones while gray and king -- and this is the beginning of the montgomery improvement association, the kind of seeds of it. and then that night 15,000 people pack whole street baptist church and the surrounding streets. thousands of people don't get in. virginia durr does not get in. rosa parks has to fight her way kind of into the church and she is on the dias that day and given a tremendous standing ovation but does not speak. i do recall asking someone if i should say something and someone saying you've said enough. in an interview with miles horton she noted she just sat up there. i think everyone spoke but me she said. it didn't bother me at that point. the boycott itself lasted 382 days maintained by tremendous unity, fund-raising and twice weekly mass meetings and amazingly elaborate carpools that was setup with 40 pickup stations around the city where they charged the regular bus fare and made it possible for people to go to work, doctors, shopping and other errands. people would use the "v" for victory sign to identify themselves. attempts to break the boycott and people were often pelted with food, stones and other things. police continually pulled over carpoolers on real and imaginary violations. the white citizens council membership explodes. 14,000 members in the first three months of the boycott. the mayor and the police commissioner join. and then in february using an old law in the books they indict 89 of the boycott leaders. but instead of weakening the organization this just further strengthens the resolve. rosa parks spends much of that year fund-raising, chris crossing the country raising money and attention for the montgomery improvement association and the naacp even though her own family is in serious financial trouble. she loses her job about a month into the boycott. she's working as an assistant tailor at montgomery fair, and then her husband is a barber at the maxwell air force base, and they say they forbid any talk of the boycott or that woman, and for a proud political man lake raymond parks that is an untenable situation, and so he also loses his job. so they are in serious economic trouble, so she is -- she spends again a lot of that year just all across the country raising money to make this -- this kind of amazing organization possible and also turning this local movement in many ways into a national struggle. so what happens afterwards? even when the boycott ends she and raymond still find it impossible to find any sort of steady work. they are still receiving constant death threats. her and nixon want to start an independent voter registration initiative for all of alabama. and the idea is that she would run it full time and it would be based at fred gray's law office. and virginia durr tries to fund raise her this. meanwhile this sort of dissension and controversy kind of erupts behind closed doors in the montgomery improvement association about a paid position for rosa parks. but nixon and parks are kind of on the outside, and so she is not offered work. eight months later unable to find a job, dispirited sort of by this situation and facing death threats they decide to leave and move to detroit where her brother is, and she describes detroit as the promise land that wasn't. she still struggled -- they still struggled to find work. they lived as she describes it in the heart of the ghetto. her health problems continue. she had developed ulcers during the boycott that continued to plague her and land her in had hospital in 1960, but they can't afford the bill so they go into collection. and the suffering starts to get exposed in the black press in particular this cover story by jet magazine in 1960 on, quote, the bus boycott's fraiten woman and that begins to sound the alarm and raise attention to sort of her situation and does lead to some help for the parks. even in the midst of these difficulties she spends the second half of her life in detroit challenging the racial discrimination of the jim crow north, housing, schools, jobs, police brutality. it's a palpable reminder that racial inequality was a national plague not a southern malady. while the public signs of segregation were thankfully gone rosa parks did not find too much difference that's her quote between race relations in montgomery or detroit. in 1964 she volunteered for a political campaign by a young up start civil rights lawyer by the name of john conyers who's running on a platform of peace and justice. and they're both early opponents of the war in vietnam. she starts volunteering with him on his campaign and she starts to persuade martin luther king, she prevails on king to come to detroit to make an appearance for john conyers. this is an extremely crowded primary, eight people running and conyers wins the primary by less than 100 votes. there's like 40 votes. and very much attributed part of why he wins is rosa parks prevailing on king to come. and so one of the first things that conyers does is he hires rosa parks to work in his detroit office handling constituent needs and doing community outreach. particularly around issues like jobs, housing, welfare. and again, this is particularly in the first years she's really kind of part of his community presence on the ground. obviously by the later years she works there until 1988, certainly by the '80s her role is becoming more ceremonial. but in the first year she's a key presence and key legitimizing force for conyers. and conyers gets a lot of flack for hiring rosa parks. the office receives all sorts of hate calls and death threats, and she receives all sorts of sort of hate letters. nonetheless she is sort of undeterred. and in the 1960s and '70s continues her work amidst the kind of growing black power movement. rosa parks' personal hero in fact was malcolm x, and she got to meet and hear him three times. the first time was in 1963 and he had wanted to meet her and he makes it known to mutual friends and so that's the first time they meet. the last time they meet is actually the speech he gives often referred to as the last message. it's the week before he's assassinated. it's actually a program being given by the -- and she's being honored at that program and so they get to and have a longer personal discussion that day. so by the 1960s and '70s her political commitments, and again these include -- she's a lifelong believer in self-defense. she has long believed that there needed to bemore black history in the curriculum. she's long been critical of the criminal justice system. she's long fought for black power and economic justice. all of these sort of long-standing political commitments of rosa parks intersect with the emerging black power movement and so she does what she can to support and take part in that. according to conyers parks had, quote, a heavy progressive streak about her that was uncharacteristic for a meek lady. part of what she did was show up, as conyers put it she spoke with her presence. ed vaughn said that rosa parks was everywhere. she attended rallies and speeches and meetings. she signed petitions, came out for lectures and immersed herself in all the black history she could get. she protested police brutality, and helped found prisoner defense committees. she sought to use her stature to get attention for the cause and she came out for things and let groups use her name. the 1967 detroit riot began about a mile from parks' house. she was deeply saddened by the events but also very much contextualized what was happening in the resistance to change, the resistance to civil rights demands that had kind of accrued over the decade. she could understand the up rising as she says as the result of resistance to change that was needed long beforehand. that's her quote. she saw the ways, that quote, the establishment of white people will antagonize and promote violence. so she is always one to contextualize, right, those actions in a much larger history and a larger white resistance. she takes part in the peoples tribunal in detroit. the peoples tribunal, part of what happens during the detroit riot in conyers words it becomes a police riot. there's tremendous police repression and police violence. perhaps the most egregious is three young men are killed at the -- motel and there's no accountability. the police are not indicted, and even the detroit media are not willing to kind of pursue any stories about it. and so they hold the peoples tribunal, and rosa parks serves on the jury for that. she also is part of the local rebuilding effort and helps be part of the virginia park district counsel which builds probably the first black owned non-profit shopping center in the country, and that breaks ground in 1981. she helped run detroit friends of snick and comes down to support the movement there. and so in 1966 when carmichael comes to detroit to give one of his famous black power speeches, one of the first things he does from the pulpit is call out and say mrs. parks is my hero because she'd just been in lowndes county. she helped take the poor people forward after martin luther king is assassinated. she speaks at the solidarity day rally. she attends the black power convention in philadelphia. she's part of the black people chicago democratic convention in 1968 that refuses to endorse any candidate. she attends the national black political convention in gary in 1972. she works on the defense committees for joe anne little, the wellington ten, gary tyler, angela davis. she's a long-standing opponent of the death penalty. she's an early and vociferous opponent of the war in vietnam, helps with the winter soldiers hearings. she opposes aparthide and in the 1980s will join pickets against apartheid and u.s. complicity in helping to prop up the south african government. and eight days after 9/11 she joins with a number of civil rights activists to call for justice not vengeance, to decry any move to war and to insist the united states sort of work with an international law and within the international community to bring justice. >> on the anniversary of the bus boycott last month president obama tweeted a picture of himself sitting in rosa parks post. next week we know the post office will issue a stamp. she is as one of my colleagues put it the american version of a national saint. but her legacy asks much more of us than a stamp or a statue. and if we are going to claim her legacy as president obama did last month then we must realize what it asks of us. rosa parks courage was the ability to make an independent stand even though she and others had done it before and nothing had changed and even when she well understood the harm that might befall her. and to make those stands over and over and over throughout the course of her life. even when the civil rights movement gained certain victories in the civil and voting right act, she did not rest but continued on joining with all the new comrades to press the struggle forward, not worried about what others would think of those alliances. honoring her legacy then means summoning a similar courage. it requires acknowledging america is not a post racial society and the blight of racial and social injustice is deep and manifest. it entails a profound commitment to the goal she spent a lifetime fighting for, a criminal justice system fair and just to people of color, unfettered voting rights, educational access and equity, real assistance to the poor, an end to u.s. wars of occupation and black history in all parts of the curriculum. finally it means heeding her words to spellman college students, don't give up and don't ever say the movement is dead. thank you. >> are there any questions or comments i ask you to please come forward. i have one. i politicized, and i want to ask you what made you want to write this particular story? was there something that happened? >> right. i mean, i think i come to this story from a number of different places, i come to it as a scholar and a historian but i also come to it as a political activist myself. i think i should put that on the table. my research around this starts actually right after the funeral. i was both kind of as i think many of us were sort of both kind of stunned and mesmerized and then also kind of dismayed by the national pageant, we by the national pageant, we could argue that was made of her passing and the ways that it simultaneously was supposed to be honoring her but then she sort of seems to be becoming this quiet, not angry, quiet not angry, and then all just about the bus, and so i did a talk that was -- it was sort of about her funeral and the memorialization of the civil rights movement, and the way that the civil rights movement was being memorialized in ways to put it in the past, to make it this very narrow movement. and a colleague actually asked me to turn that talk into an essay for a book that she was editing. so i sit down to sort of -- obviously then i wanted a little bit more meat in terms of, you know, who rosa parks was and sort of the ways that the kind of memorialization distorts this, and i start to look and i realize both how much of a story there was and i come to this research, the decade of research i did before the rosa parks book was on the civil rights movement in the north, and so sort of all of the work she had done in the north and all of the work that she had done sort of in and along side this emerging black power movement was really interesting to me and i think really sort of grabbed me because it -- here and in some sense of the most iconic story was all of these stories i've been sort of trying to tell for many years, and yet it was so puzzling to me as i started to do this research, that there was not a scholarly biography of her. i have to say it was just, i still -- sometimes people ask me, what's the most surprising thing you learn about rosa parks. the most surprising thing i learned about rosa parks is why isn't there a scholarly biography of her? here we can say she has gotten these incredible national honors, right? she's held up. everybody knows who she is, and yet she hasn't gotten the treatment of a serious political figure, right? if we think of lincoln, i mean his biographies number in the hundreds, right? king, but many figures, right, have, you know, really kind of serious treatment, and so it seemed to me that rosa parks deserved the serious treatment and that simultaneously we were sort of comfortable with this -- this kind of children's book version of rosa parks. and so i also felt sort of humbled by that. in some sense when i first started doing it, i assumed there's a biography. i just can't remember what it is, and so i think it was that process both of sort of seeing all of these sort of themes in her history and then simultaneously feeling like what was it that -- this kind of need, and i'm hoping that this book just begins that process, right? that -- i think there's so much more work to be done on her, so i hope this is just sort of a beginning. >> i found your comments about rosa parks to be very interesting and very exciting. i'm from detroit, so a lot of what you described, i lived. >> very good. thank you. >> so the riots and knowing rosa and congressman conyers, those were common place folks that we talked to. my question is this, how much anecdotal information did you get from individuals like representative conyers or their foundation, the rosa and raymond parks foundation members who have been quite active and were very active with her throughout her lifetime, what kind of anecdotal information did you obtain, or did you just get things from, you know, other things that have been written about her? >> this is -- for the second half of this book. so half of the book basically takes place outside of montgomery, and that required a number of things. i did dozens of interviews and a lot of those interviews were with people in detroit, as you allude to, i think, there are an amazing number of interviews with rosa parks and oral histories with rosa parks and a lot of them are done in detroit, and they're sitting there in john conyers office. do they ask her, what do you think about the war in vietnam? no, they do not. do they say what do you think the congressman should be doing? no, they do not. so in many ways, this part was harder to find. so a couple of things helped with it. the first is the black press and then the digitalization of the black press that's happened in the past decade was an extraordinary resource for my research because it meant that i could look at like decades worth of many, many, many different black newspapers because one of the things, even though people didn't tend to ask her a lot about her political opinion on things outside of montgomery, they did notice when she would go to things, so it was -- so this in some sense was kind of the place i started in terms of trying to figure out how to tell the post-montgomery story. i talked to a lot of her friends and political colleagues sort of in detroit and nationally to try to get sort of much more texture to this kind of what she's doing in the '60s and '70s and '80s. i can tell you some of the kind of -- some of my favorite stories if that would be -- one of my favorite stories, do people know the lawyer chokwe lumumba. heft he was in the rna. he was the lawyer for the scott sisters, people remember that case last year. they were two women who had basically served these incredibly long prison sentences for these like really, really tiny drug charges. so the sort of older man lawyer on their case, he tells me two really interesting stories. the first is the republic of new africa is started in detroit, and it is a group started around the kind of issue of reparations, and part of that group then breaks off and comes down to mississippi to set up the black nation. needless to say, the fbi doesn't like this, and so there's a survey, and then this whole kind of raid of the rna farm and there's a shooting. i mean a shootout between the police and the rna and 11 members of the rna are arrested and they're sort of paraded through jackson half naked. and one of the neighbors calls back to detroit and says this is happening, and one of the members of the rna, so chokwe lumumba calls conyers' office to tell them what's happening and to try to get conyers' office to intercede and basically to try to protect so these people don't just get killed because there had been this shootout, you know, an officer or two had been shot. and it's rosa parks who gets on the phone and basically calls and calls and calls the department of justice until she gets an assurance in that kind of like weird way where no, they're not being hurt, but nobody will get hurt. and they very much attribute her kind of quickness and her kind of getting on the phone to the department of justice as saving their lives and amario bedelli who is heading the rna at that point, says she will then call -- he's in prison for the next five years on conspiracy charges and she repeatedly calls and says hello, this is rosa parks calling, and just to show them that she was watching, so to me that speaks to kind of both her firmness and her just ability to just to kind of do things. she attended -- so edward ed vaughn ran a bookstore in detroit, and he talks about her like she went -- she and raymond would go to the bookstore all the time, and then she would participate, there were all these kind of discussion groups and activist groups that kind of came out of the bookstore, and she would attend many of their, you know, forums. he would -- he was saying to me, he was like i would just go to things and i'd be like, dang, that's rosa again, and she would just be everywhere, he would say and she was sort of, again, undaunted and not worried what people were going to think if she showed up to listen to some radical speaker, that she went where she wanted to go. one of the people who worked with her in conyers office said in these years she drove this huge car apparently really big white kind of american car, and mrs. parks is pretty small so she'd be just driving her big car around at night to all these events and the kind of image and juxtaposition that she just was going in her big car, so -- let me stop there. there's lots of other -- so again, there are many stories in the book in part through these interviews and in part then i was able to do things like find something in, you know, a little mention of something, but then that would often be enough to trigger people's memories or vice versa. so for instance, how i found out about the lowndes county stuff, so dorothy -- i did an interview with dorothy dewberry, and she said we went down to lowndes, and i looked and one of the big mass meetings like a year into the campaign there, then it's kind of listed that she kind of gives the opening. then it makes sense when carmichael comes to detroit a number of months later, right, there in the michigan chronicle, which is the black newspaper it says, one of the first things he does, she's sitting in the front row. he calls out to her, and so it sort of helped me piece these little strands together. a lot of what i did was just try to sew these little threads into a kind of bigger tapestry. but again, i think there's -- i hope i started it, and i hope other people are going to go even farther than i could. >> there was a second part, you indicated earlier that when you started -- you indicated earlier when you started your research you were surprised that there was not very much of it about her. >> yeah. >> why do you think that she has been marginalized so? her role in the whole movement has been marginalized? >> yeah, yeah, i mean, i think we think we know her, and we -- you know, we think -- and because we think we know her -- for instance there's a sort of new, incredibly kind of vibrant scholarship on the black freedom struggle over the past 10 or 15 years, right, and there's all of these new scholars, young scholars doing all this great work. but i think at first i think sometimes with parks, you just assume it's been done and you assume -- i think i assume this too, that somebody else had done it or that we sort of knew what she was, and so we needed to look at other stories, we needed to unearth other activists. i mean, i think it a little bit speaks to the kind of what i try to talk about a little bit at the beginning which is this kind of paradox of sort of the way she's honored but in some sense trapped or kind of that she's honored but just in this very small way, and so she's -- it's kind of this -- she's kind of relegated to being a symbol, and so symbols don't have to have like a whole history, and i think that's related to her being a woman. i mean, i think there's a gendered aspect of this too. both in terms of how we imagine what her story is and what it's not and the kind of questions we ask. so just to tell you another funny story about this. as i'm on the trail of the lowndes county story, i call a historian who's very kind of -- this is one of his specialties, and i'm sort of trying to get him to -- and he sort of says, well, you know, she did something we will know about it. i'm like, no, i know she went to lowndes, i have the document, i'm trying to figure out this a bigger story. i think there's this sense that because she's so famous, if she did these other things we would know it. when i actually think it might be the opposite. because she's so famous for this moment, it kind of obscures all the other things and the kind of much broader history, and the kind of broader coalitions that she's working in. >> i have something else. >> sure, no, this is awesome. >> sorry, i don't mean to monopolize. the other point that i was making that i would like to make based on what you said about the funeral. i also was at her funeral because she was funeralized in the museum of african-american history in detroit before she was shipped off to washington, d.c. and a lot of what you said about the ceremonialness of it in d.c. might be true. however, what i observed in detroit from the people that stood in line hours upon hours days upon days stretched around the corner of that building, a lot of her history is in anecdotal memories of individuals who knew her. >> yes. >> which might be part of the reason you're having such a hard time pulling some of it out because it's oral history for many people. people in detroit know rosa parks. people know what she did. they know about the montgomery aspect, obviously, because it was national, but those that live in detroit know what she did in the labor movement. my mother was in the labor movement so i saw her in that role as i saw my mother who was the first black secretary of the uaw. so people in detroit know what she did, and i think that the problem you're going to have is because it's anecdotal, because it's oral history, a lot of those people that knew her intimately are gone. >> yeah, yeah. >> the history is gone with them, so the perspectives you get will be tainted because they will be filtered through the eyes of people who really didn't know her as well. >> right, right, right. >> on the sort of -- on the -- no, i think -- i mean, i think what people did in terms of her passing on the ground and the kind of -- right, the people standing in line, the people standing outside during her funeral, i think many people across the country did memorials for her, in the book i'm trying to draw distinctions between the national using of her funeral versus kind of the ways -- and i think we're going to see this on monday, right, with the centennial, right? i think there are many people who are going to sort of be making real meaning and talking about the substantive legacy, right? but i think the other way the centennial is going to be used on monday is, again, sort of put the movement in the past. it's in some sense a very kind of feel good about ourselves like look how great we are. we're honoring rosa parks, and i think that's -- that's where i think the kind of -- the danger lies, i think, and i think this is not just about parks. i think there's kind of a -- there are uses of the civil rights movement in the ways a very narrow history of the civil rights movement and martin luther king. she was very disappointed. she fights really hard for a king holiday, and schenn she sort of sees the king lol day turn into this fuzzy dream my thing that it now is. the substance of the activist she knew starts to kind of get lost in the holiday and i think -- i imagine she might have that same critique in terms of sort of the kind of some of the ways that she is honored and the ways that kind of the substance of her. in terms of the labor stuff, let me tell one other story. so during the boycott, local 600 wants to bring rosa parks to detroit to speak to the local. local 600 is a real kind of militant local in the uaw. it had been purged of its communists, and it was very much seen by walter reuther as a trouble making local, and so walter reuther actually opposes local 600 wanting to bring rosa parks to detroit, but they raise the money, and they bring her anyways kind of above his objections. and it's sort of interesting because obviously, seven years later rut is going to be at the front of the march on washington. washington and i think his -- you know, he seems like this sort of -- this real civil rights stalwart, but there's a sort of -- he wasn't always there. so they bring her, and they bring her to detroit, and most of the hotels in detroit are not open to black people, so they put her up in the garfield hotel, and she makes a number of very important connections at that meeting that then she's going to draw on both personally and also politically when they move back, not move back, move there, sorry. and so she has a long standing relationship with black labor. and interestingly, it is a -- the detroit naacp is sort of -- it's very big but in some sense in those years it was a very middle class and not very activist branch, again, when she first moves there, but there's a little naacp chapter in river rouge, and river rouge is a kind of bedroom community to detroit, but it's also full of auto workers and it's full of local 600 auto workers in particular, and it is that little naacp group that actually gets the national naacp to help rosa parks. it is those sort of militant and that little river rouge chapter, it's super interesting, they sort of cut a very different path. they -- they're doing all sorts of kind of boycotts of the banks because they're not hiring black people and then they actually, after patrice lumumba is assassinated they pass a resolution calling on the national naacp to come out against his assassination. obviously the naacp doesn't go for that too much. it's this little river rouge chapter that kind of makes the national naacp after this article runs that i was talking about, it's this river rouge chapter that gets the naacp to kind of help her, right, and to sort of step in. so she sort of -- she has a kind of long history with kind of labor in detroit and labor, i think, really also was like a huge, you know, kind of protector and supporter of her, particularly in those years which were, i think very hard years for her family. and again, i'm talking about like the mid-like '59, '60, '61, those years. >> i don't have a question, but i've got several comments i'd like to make. >> great. i love it. >> first of all, since the book arrived at our house two or three days ago, i've read as much as i could because i wanted to see what you had written before i talked with you. and i'm very much impressed with your characterization of mrs. parks and those early days. well-written. >> thank you. >> look forward to reading the rest of the book. >> thank you. >> second, when mrs. parks was in at highlander folks school in 1955, she told us later on that while she was there she decided she would never again give up her seat on the bus, and which, again, feeds into the -- your characterization of her being a real activist and the kind of person who was full of bravery. >> right. >> third comment, you may or may not be aware of the fact that many of those young people that she led in the naacp youth council are active participants in the churches and the society here in montgomery today after all these years, and they forced trivial comment, there was a period of time when i was with john conyers periodically from time to time, and every time i saw him, he would laughingly complain that he was the only member of congress who had a staff person who got more invitations to speak than he did. >> right. he told me this funny story, so apparently at some point in the midst of this he comes in and wants to have a wage reduction salary and he chucks about it as the only wage reduction salary i've ever had because she was feeling guilty that she was traveling so much and doing so much public appearances and worried that she was going to feel like she was kind of taking advantage or not sort of living up to her responsibilities so he told me this. he was like, of course, i want you doing those things, and i'm not going to -- i think to him it was so horrifying that there's rosa parks saying you should reduce my salary because i'm doing all these public appearances. yeah. are there other -- >> i would make a comment, and that was you talked about rosa parks when she's at highlander, when she came back and you asked her what she was going too, and then you think about children today and the only thing they know really is that she gave up her seat on the bus. we live basically in a soundbite world so we only know the soundbite, so the thing is how do we get to again, uncover and look what's beneath all of that? i think that's what's important. as you live in this world, there's going to be more and more and more soundbite. >> right, right. >> how do we begin to look at and ask ourselves, you know, what does this really mean? and that brings me to the fact that i think we have to begin to look at what that really stood for. you know, i think that especially as you look at now, that for me and especially being at the museum, that what rosa parks did was she taught us to do the right thing instead of the expedient thing. >> right. >> she could have very easily have just gotten off the bus. and most times we do the expedient thing even though we know what the right thing to do is, and we say we're going to get back to it, and we never do. so i think as we talk about her and think about her as we honor her on this 100th birthday, we begin to think about rightness, and expediency, and sometimes we have to stop the bleeding, it's important. but once the bleeding has stopped, we have to begin to look at that which is right. >> absolutely. yeah, thank you. i mean, i often when i'm teaching that, right, that moment when she's sort of at highlander, and she's like, you know, we're not -- nothing's ever going to happen, and people aren't going to stay unified because i think that's a fear that people have today, right? i mean, my students often, you know, wish they, you know, look back on those years and it's like, well, back in the day people were so much more unified. you know, i wish i lived back in that day. black people today aren't unified, and then you're like these are the same fears that these people that we're studying grappled with, right? it wasn't that, you know, history doesn't present itself like a neon like, history's happening please, like step up. and it's scary and it doesn't -- you know, and the kind of worry, right, if we sort of think about the weekend before the first day of the boycott, right, how worried people were. right? will people, you know, that's not -- that the worries that we have are the worries that they had and so i think also -- i think humanizing the history so that you can see how to make the kinds of choices, i think by humanizing it, it also makes it -- you can see how people made choices and how people were able to make choices, you know, so the very, you know, sort of when -- as the story goes, when e.d. nixon calls martin luther king that morning, it's 6:00 in the morning, and king says, well, can you call me back, right? i mean, i am brand new here. we have a 1-month-old baby. it's 6:00 in the morning, right? can you call me back, right? he doesn't know he's martin luther king in neon. he's not -- he's just martin luther king, right? and he obviously has the, you know, he has the conviction but it's 6:00 in the morning and he has a new baby, right? and then when, you know, nixon calls him back, he's talked to abernathy and he wants to do it, and nixon obviously jokes around and said, well, good, because i've been telling people to come to your church anyways. but i think this kind of detail also, i think, makes it easier to imagine how we do it ourselves, and i think that's the other reason for a kind of more detailed look at her and her life, you know, among other -- among other civil rights histories is that i think it gives us a different way forward. weeknights this month, we're featuring american history tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span3. the uso or united service organizations marked its 80th anniversary last month. the nonprofit organization provides entertainment and other services to u.s. military personnel. tonight texas christian university professor cara dixon talks about the women who have volunteered to entertain american service members during wartime. watch tonight beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern and enjoy american history tv every weekend on c-span3. american history tv on c-span3 exploring the people and events that tell the american story every weekend. saturday at 2:00 p.m. eastern, university of georgia professor john morrow recounts the story of black american expatriot ye eugene bullard. and brad stone from the national museum of civil war medicine looks at the role animals served in the civil war from transporting supplies to acting as r regimental mascot. and sojourner truth, who spoke out on abolition and women's rights. and at 8:00 p.m. on "the presidency," a look at the personal and political partnership between franklin and eleanor roosevelt through home movies, which give a behind the scenes look at the couple, exploring the american story. watch american history tv this weekend on c-span3. >> candice shy hooper talks about her book "lincoln's generals' wives" four women who influenced the civil war for better and for worse, in which she profiles the wives of lincoln's top generals and examines how their relationships with their husbands and president lincoln affected the civil war. this was reported at politics and prose bookstore here in washington, d.c., in 2016.