New Rosa Parks Documentary Celebrates a Rebellious, Overlooked Life Beyond the Bus

I never did, in all my interviews, tell anybody
that my feet were tired. –Rosa Parks

There’s a pesky myth that Rosa Parks simply stumbled into heroism when she violated Chp. 6., Sec. 11 of the Montgomery (Alabama) City Code by refusing to give up her bus seat to a White person.

With The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, directors Yoruba Richen and Johanna Hamilton aim to kill off this false narrative by highlighting the diminutive civil-rights icon’s lifelong activist leanings and a strategic worldview that was as close to Malcom X’s as to Martin Luther King Jr.’s.

Needless to say, the filmmakers spend plenty of time on the act of civil disobedience that put Parks in the history books, but the picture they paint includes the act’s calculated nature. By the time of her December 1955 arrest, for 12 years Parks had served as secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP and was well aware of the organization’s intent to legally challenge Montgomery’s racist bus law as soon as they could find the right plaintiff. As expected, the case was lost, but a boycott followed, and the rest is….

History was Parks’s favorite subject in school, but her consciousness of White oppression and violence against Black people — along with a we’re-not-gonna-take-it worldview — came earlier, “passed down almost in our genes” from her maternal grandfather. “By the time I was 6, I was old enough to realize we were actually not free,” we hear her say via actress LisaGay Hamilton. “The Ku Klux Klan was riding through the Black community burning churches, killing people […] At one point the violence was so bad that my grandfather kept his gun close by at all times. My grandfather was going to defend his home, whatever happened. I wanted to see him shoot that gun.”

Over the course of the next 90 minutes the filmmakers pinball back and forth in time to touch on Parks’s formative and activist experiences. From meeting future husband Raymond Parks, through whom she was introduced to the NAACP, we jump to 1971 (all chronological stops are announced by giant title cards) and her involvement in The Republic of New Africa, a Black nationalist organization advocating armed self-defense. Then it’s straight back to the early ‘30s, where Rosa becomes Mrs. Parks.

Although opting to hop around in time is not inherently better or worse than offering a chronological narrative, too often Richen & Hamilton’s moves feel random. For all the instances that display a thematic logic, almost as many do not, such as the inscrutable leap from a one-minute 1977 segment covering the deaths of Parks’s husband and brother to the Dearborn boycott of 1985. What’s the connection? Search me. These dubious jumps, along with a quiet, generic musical score — mostly beats — constantly shifting beneath the archival footage and talking heads, are the weakest elements in what is an otherwise competent — though not artful — documentary. This is one that you watch for the information, not the delivery.

But the information is worthwhile. That boycott of businesses in Dearborn, Michigan, exemplifies one of the film’s major themes: how Parks is generally overlooked for everything she did outside of that famous December day in 1955. As related by Joe Madison (at the time national director for NAACP voter education), in response to the passage of a city ordinance preventing nonresidents of mostly-White Dearborn from using public parks — this after a resident White family confronted a Black family for doing just that — it was Parks, a Detroit resident since 1957, who came up with the idea for the boycott. And although her involvement received some press coverage at the time, today we are hard-pressed to find reference to it. (Her Wikipedia page, for example, omits it entirely.)

Even within the civil rights movement and the NAACP itself, the filmmakers tell us, Parks was too often taken for granted, valued mostly as a figurehead and sort of one-hit wonder. After losing her job in the wake of her 1955 arrest, the NAACP did not offer her employment or financial support, leading Mr. and Mrs. Parks to move north in hopes of better prospects. But in 1959 the couple’s combined annual income was just $661. It was not until 1965, when John Conyers won a seat in the House of Representatives and offered her a job after she’d volunteered on his campaign, that 53-year-old Parks was getting paid for her political/activist efforts. And 20 years later, shortly following the success of the Dearborn boycott, she lost in her bid to become vice-president of the Detroit Branch NAACP.

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks is meant to foster a wider appreciation for all its heroine did — only some of which has been touched upon here — but also to inspire future rebels. Closing on the ironic note that on the 2013 day a statue of Parks was unveiled in the Capitol rotunda, the Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, which shortly they would reverse, thus striking down voting-rights protections (codified in the Voting Rights Act of 1965) that Parks had worked to obtain.

“And so a statue was the way we were going to remember the civil-rights movement,” comments author/historian Jeanne Theoharis, “and so she gets trapped in this image of this long-ago problem that we had in this country. And in many ways the statue reduce[s] and trap[s] what her legacy actually asks of us.”

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks can be streamed exclusively via Peacock.