In The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, an often simplified icon of civil rights is given an expansive and deserving tribute
To tell the Truth is a long-running TV show in which a panel of celebrities is presented with three contestants who all claim to be the same person with an unusual occupation or experience. The panel grills each of them and must decide which two are imposters and which one is telling the truth about their identity.
In 1980, three bespectacled African American women appeared on the show, each stating: “My name is Rosa Parks.” Only one of the three voting panelists correctly identified her – today their musings look demeaning and trivial.
But the fourth panelist, entertainer Nipsey Russell, who is Black, said he would have to disqualify himself because he marched with Parks in Selma, adding: “Miss Rosa Parks is 10-foot tall, she’s a legend and a hero in the democracy of the United States, not just among Black people.”
It is a redemptive moment amid the profanity of a civil rights hero being paraded like a curiosity for the cameras. The sequence makes for a memorable opening to The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, the first documentary feature about Parks, streaming on Peacock from Wednesday.
Based on a biography by Jeanne Theoharis, the film is a riposte to popular culture’s reductive habit of framing a person’s life and legacy in a single headline – in Parks’s case, the quiet seamstress who refused to give up her seat on a crowded bus to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, one winter evening in 1955.
This one action is what she is known for in countless school textbooks and even an episode of the BBC’s science fiction series Doctor Who. After her death in 2005, the New York Times called her “the accidental matriarch of the civil rights movement”.
But there was nothing accidental about it, the 96-minute documentary contends, demonstrating her activism was sweeping and expansive. It predated the bus incident, spanned decades and was inextricably bound with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Black politicians in Washington.
