One of the women who paved the way for the leadership of Black voting rights organizers like Stacey Abrams is Rosa Parks, but it might not be for the reason you think.
Parks, who died in 2005 and whose birthday is Feb. 4, is usually talked about—especially during Black History Month—as “a tired seamstress” who was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955. This act of courage sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott which ended a year later when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ruling declaring racially segregated buses unconstitutional and cemented Parks’ place as one of the most recognized figures from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But in recent years, there’s been more awareness of the fact that Parks had been a civil rights activist for more than a decade before that day on the bus, and that she wasn’t even the first Black woman to refuse to give up her seat on one of the city’s buses. Parks’ activism started with wanting to register to vote in the 1940s.
“She’s galled by how Black people, including her younger brother, Sylvester are serving in World War II, but they can’t vote at home,” says Jeanne Theoharis, author of the Rosa Parks biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and co-author of a young adult version out Feb. 2. “So very much one of the things that motivates her to get involved in the Montgomery NAACP is she wants to register to vote. This is really where her independent activism gets started.”
Parks herself tried to register three times between 1943 and 1945. She was flat-out refused the first time, and during her second attempt, Parks was thwarted by a difficult questionnaire, another Jim Crow-era voter suppression tactic to keep Black people off voter rolls.
“Voting rights were the foundation of Parks’s political training,” as historian Martha S. Jones writes in Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.
Frustration over the difficulty registering to vote was one of the many moments in her long activist career that had made Parks so resilient and gave her the strength to refuse to give up her seat on a bus on Dec. 1, 1955. Twenty years after successfully registering to vote on the third try, she would watch President Lyndon B. Johnson sign the Voting Rights Act at the White House on Aug. 6, 1965.
When the writer Studs Terkel asked her in a 1973 interview if she could elaborate on what was going through her head back on the bus on that fateful day in 1955, instead of stating one reason, she started to rattle off milestones in her life that led up to that point, and among them was “trying to become a registered voter under hazardous conditions, such as being denied a number of times, and feeling that there was a threat just to become a registered voter and cast my ballot to elected offices.”
Parks’ and voting rights organizers’ persistence offers a teachable moment for young activists.
“There’s a lot of things that are wrong with the popular version of Rosa Parks, but part of it is how for many years, she and this smallish group of activists are [working] and how discouraging it is, and so the fact that she keeps going I think speaks to a kind of courage we don’t always realize about her,” Theoharis says. “They keep going, even when they can’t see that there’s going to be change in their lifetime.”
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