Photo: philip friedman; peacock
It’s neat. It’s tidy. It’s easy for elementary school students to digest. But a new documentary,The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, is challenging the way the civil rights icon’s story has been told.
“The narrative of Rosa Parks was misunderstood,” journalist Soledad O’Brien, who executive produced the film, tells PEOPLE.
“You learn in school as a little kid: Rosa Parks was tired, her feet hurt, she didn’t want to get up out of her seat,” O’Brien continues. “And that was the moment that she decided to take a momentary, and even accidental, stand for civil rights. Well, that’s actually not the story of Rosa Parks at all.”
Civil rights icon Rosa Parks is the subject of a new documentary film.Peacock
Based on Jeanne Theoharis' book, also titledThe Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, the new film (surprisingly, the first full-length feature documentary devoted to this key figure of the civil rights movement) shines a light on Parks' lifelong fight for racial justice, which included nonviolent protests as well as more radical views.
In a clip used in the documentary, an older Parks is speaking at an event and describes staying up all night with her grandfather who, armed with a shotgun, was determined to protect his family and their home.
Parks devoted her life to the fight for equity and justice.peacock
“She wrote about it a lot, the anger that she had, even as a child, watching her grandfather and how he dealt with the trauma around the Ku Klux Klan. [It] was something that as a little kid was etched into her brain,” O’Brien says. “I think that made her very untrusting of white people and untrusting of the fact justice could come. It made her a real fighter.”
“She was a supporter of equity and justice in any way that you could get there,” she says. “A lot of that was because of her childhood and what she saw, a lot of the horrors that she experienced.”
Parks' refusal to give up her seat to a white man sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in December 1955.Peacock
By the time Parks was a passenger on that Montgomery bus in 1955, she was 42 years old and had been a civil rights activist for years.The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parksdocuments much of that experience.
For O’Brien, Parks' story cannot be distilled into a single moment. The lesson she wants viewers to take away is that “the fight for equity” is “not accidental.” “It’s lifelong struggle and work,” she says, adding, “It’s people working at the grassroots level for a very, very, very long time very, very hard.”
Parksdied in October 2005at the age of 92, but remained on the frontlines of protests well into her old age, the documentary shows.
Parks meeting Nelson Mandela and his then wife Winnie in Detroit, Mich. in 1990, shortly after the anti-apartheid activist was released from prison in South Africa.Peacock
O’Brien hopes the film will make people “uncomfortable with the true narrative” of the diminutive activist with an “angelic face.”
“She just had this canvas that people would put onto her what they thought. People felt like she was a mild-mannered seamstress and that became the narrative. Even though she was very clear about her stories,” O’Brien says. “She was a real rebel.”
source: people.com
