A Relationship Built on Activism: Rosa and Raymond Parks and Links in the Long Civil Rights Movement

In her biography of Rosa Parks, historian Jeanne Theoharis notes, “Raymond Parks’s politics helped provide fertile soil over the years for Rosa’s to grow.”  This paper explores that fertile soil and its contents by tracing the origins of Mr. and Mrs. Parks’ romance and linking it to a common interest in resisting white supremacy.  Throughout their forty-five years of marriage, the Parkses continued to grow politically, constantly influencing one another.  Raymond went from viewing organizational politics as strictly men’s work, to joining the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor at his wife’s behest. Although her politics influenced his more in their latter years, it was Raymond’s history as an activist that certainly inspired Rosa to become more involved in organized efforts to achieve black freedom.  At the time of their meeting, Raymond had been involved in efforts to free the Scottsboro Boys, who were falsely accused of raping two white women and sentenced to death.  His activism in the 1930s certainly places him in the generation of activists that historian Sara Thuesen calls “the long civil rights movement’s first generation.”  This paper is an answer to Thuesen’s call for historians to demonstrate how activists from the classical phase of the civil rights movement—that phase between Brown v. Board in 1954 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—benefited from the experiences and connections of the generation of activists who came before them.  Earlier efforts emphasize Rosa Parks’s connection to civil rights activist Virginia Durr, but this limits Mrs. Parks’s work to the 1955 bus boycott, which occurred one year after her meeting Durr.  Rosa Parks’s earlier activism is undoubtedly influenced by Raymond Parks’s activism and her marriage to him.