Ambivalent Frames: Rosa Parks and the Visual Grammar of Respectability

Abstract

This article analyzes iconic photographs of Rosa Parks, arguing that these images are structured by a highly ambivalent visual grammar of respectability. This visual grammar at the same time facilitated Parks’s powerful transnational visibility as an icon of the Civil Rights Movement and worked towards reassuring viewers of the persistence of white patriarchy. The iconography of respectability thus has participated in the propagation of a sanitized public memory of the movement that elides, among others, Parks’s lifelong political involvement and the role of other Black women activists.

Keywords:

• Black feminism
• Civil Rights Movement
• Montgomery bus boycott
• photography
• politics of respectability
• Rosa Parks
• visual culture

Notes

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Rev. 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 86.

Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 6.

Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 34–35.

Peter Applebome, “Our Towns: The Man Behind Rosa Parks,” New York Times, December 7, 2005, www.nyt.com (accessed April 20, 2016).

Ibid.

Nicole Fleetwood describes Parks as “the embodiment of what Evelyn Higginbotham calls ‘the politics of respectability’” (34).

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 187.

Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 13.

Paisley Harris, “Gatekeeping and Remaking: The Politics of Respectability in African American Women’s History and Black Feminism,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 1 (2003): 217.

Ibid., 213.

Ibid., 214.

Susana M. Morris, Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).

Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 69–96.

Jasmine Nicole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 70.

Ibid., 72.

Ibid., 74.

Marisa Chappell, Jenny Hutchinson, and Brian Ward, “‘Dress modestly, neatly … as if you were going to church’: Respectability, Class, and Gender in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” in Gender and the Civil Rights Movement, edited by Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 85–86.

Sarah K. Kramer, “Before Rosa Parks, a Teenager Defied Segregation on an Alabama Bus,” NPR, March 2, 2015. www.npr.org (accessed April 10, 2016).

Rosa Parks and Jim Haskins, My Story (New York: Penguin, 1992), 157–58.

Ibid., 157–59.

The photograph of Rosa Parks and UPI journalist Nicholas C. Criss can be viewed on the homepage of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. It is currently titled “Seating arrangements Mrs. Rosa Parks, 43, woman whose arrest on December 1st, 1955, touched off a year-long bus boycott by the Negro community here, gazes out of the window from a seat far forward in the bus she boarded here December 21st, as the boycott came to an end. Mrs. Parks was arrested originally when she sat in bus forward of white passengers.”

Parks and Haskins, My Story, 107.

Ibid., 14–17.

Cf. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, 72.

Ibid., 76.

Martin A. Berger, “Rosa Parks Fingerprinted, Montgomery, Alabama, 1956,” in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, edited by Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 76–78.

Douglas Brinkley, Rosa Parks (New York: Viking, 2000), 155–57.

“Alabama Deputy Discovers Civil Rights Era Artifacts,” NBC News, July 23, 2004. www.nbcnews.com (accessed April 20, 2016).

Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, edited by Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 354.

Ibid., 361.

Michel Foucault as qtd. in Paul Lashmar, “How to Humiliate and Shame: A Reporter’s Guide to the Power of the Mugshot,” Social Semiotics 24, no. 1 (2014): 66.

Claudine K. Brown, “Mug Shot: Suspicious Person,” in Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, edited by Deborah Willis (New York: New Press, 1994), 137.

Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, 193–95.

Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 346.

Parks and Haskins, My Story, 116.

Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston: Beacon, 2013), x. Italics in the original.

Ibid., xii. Tellingly, Theoharis uses none of the iconic photographs of Rosa Parks in her book. She instead includes images of Parks as a public orator and as a leader of protest marches.

Parks’s personal papers, which have been made accessible to the public by the Library of Congress since 2015, further substantiate these claims.

Parks and Haskins, My Story, 59.

Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, xii.

Cf. Martin A. Berger, Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

Bernice M. Barnett, “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class,” Gender and Society 7, no. 2 (1993): 177.

Ibid.

Maegan Parker Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 5.

It followed two busts of African Americans, one of King and one of Sojourner Truth.

Architect of the Capitol, “Rosa Parks,” Architect of the Capitol, www.aoc.gov (accessed April 10, 2016).

Berger, Seeing through Race, 6.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katharina M. Fackler

Katharina M. Fackler is an assistant professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Graz. In 2015, she completed her Ph.D. project on visualizations of poverty and class in the 1960s at the University of Regensburg.