Rosa Parks film screening in Detroit puts spotlight on importance of Black history
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“The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks," the first full-length documentary about the civil rights icon, is coming to the city where she spent most of her life.
The film will be shown Saturday at the Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The free event (tickets are no longer available) coincides with the birthday of Parks, who died in 2005 at age 92.
“The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks," which premiered last year at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, corrects the narrow public image of Parks as a tired seamstress whose refusal to give up her seat on a segregated bus in 1955 sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a landmark moment in the civil rights movement.
In reality, Parks fought tenaciously and courageously against racism for most of her life and was “a soldier from birth,” as her great-nephew Lonnie McCauley, who’ll appear at the screening, says in the film.
The documentary combines interviews and archival footage with the thoughts and opinions of Parks herself, which are shared through film and audio clips of her speaking and excerpts from her writings read by actor LisaGay Hamilton.
"Rebellious Life" was directed by filmmakers Johanna Hamilton (“1971”) and Yoruba Richen (“The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show”) and inspired by the award-winning 2013 biography of the same name by Jeanne Theoharis, who served as a consulting producer. Noted journalist Soledad O’Brien was an executive producer.
O'Brien will moderate a panel discussion after the screening that features McCauley, Hamilton, Richen, and Theoharis, along with Detroit NAACP branch president Rev. Wendell Anthony, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, former Detroit City Council member JoAnn Watson and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten.
The event is taking place early in Black History Month. It also is happening at a time when a number of states are putting limits on what can be taught about racism and its history.
On Wednesday, controversy flared over the College Board's release of the official curriculum for an Advanced Placement course in African American Studies pilot program that has drawn criticism from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The DeSantis administration said earlier this month that it would block the course from being taught in the state, a move that drew sharp criticism from the White House.
“It is incomprehensible,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “Let’s be clear. They didn’t block AP European history. They didn’t block our art history. They didn’t block our music history.”
Speaking by phone, AFT president Weingarten says that while DeSantis and other GOP conservatives like former education secretary Betsy DeVos "are attempting to censor history and deny our young people access to historical Black figures like Rosa Parks, we are making sure that people have access and people understand who Rosa Parks was and her importance in not only history but in today’s world.”
Pointing out her union's long history of supporting and participating in the civil rights movement, Weingarten said the AFT plans to give away 1,000 books about civil rights leaders at the screening as part of its Reading Opens the World campaign, along with hundreds of copies of Theoharis’ biography of Parks. Those books are in addition to the 100,000-plus free books distributed in the Detroit region last year as part of the AFT’s Reading Opens the World Campaign.
The AFT also will be giving more more books to Detroit’s Southeastern High School, which returned to virtual learning in January after a burst pipe caused severe damage that flooded classrooms.
"Rebellious Life" explores how Parks immersed herself in community organizing and teaching in Alabama. Handling a variety of assignments for the NAACP's Montgomery branch over the years, she worked on voter registration, led the branch's youth group and investigated brutal attacks against Black women (including one that was the basis for the 2017 documentary “The Rape of Recy Taylor”).
The film also gives a thorough, nuanced picture of Parks’ deep involvement in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. She knew that the NAACP needed to find the right plaintiff in order to file a successful lawsuit, ideally a sympathetic woman beyond reproach. She also understood that once detained by the police, she would have no way of knowing what would happen next or whether she would be beaten.
Parks lost her job and endured death threats after the boycott. She reached out to her brother living in Detroit and moved to the Motor City in 1957. Here, she continued her activism against the same sort of problems that existed in the South — racism, police brutality, economic inequality and segregation, if the more informal kind.
In a clip of Rev. Jesse Jackson eulogizing Parks at her funeral at Detroit’s Greater Grace Temple, he makes it clear that she deserved more credit for her role in history. "She sat down to test the law. She was a freedom fighter,” said Jackson. “A seamstress, that’s irrelevant. She didn’t get locked up for sewing. She was a militant.”
The DFT screening is being presented by Soledad O'Brien Productions, the American Federation of Teachers, the League, Freep Film Festival and Friends of Detroit Film Theatre.
"Rebellious Life," is available online at Peacock, NBC's streaming site.
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Rosa Parks film will be screened in Detroit, her longtime home
