“It was very difficult to keep going when all our efforts seemed in vain,” Rosa Parks described her work in the 1940s and early ’50s. Getting her political start with the Scottsboro Boys case in the early 1930s, Rosa Parks was part of a small band of activists in the 1940s that sought to transform Montgomery’s NAACP into a more activist chapter. With union organizer E. D. Nixon, they worked for the next dozen years on voter registration and criminal justice (or the lack thereof) for black people: trying to prevent the legal lynching of black men and seeking justice under the law for black victims of white brutality, particularly black women who had been raped.

Over and over, they tried to find justice — and over and over, there was no justice. People got scared and refused to provide testimony. And when they did stand up, the cases went nowhere. Killers and rapists went free. Black men were executed for crimes they did not commit. Parks and her comrades filed affidavit after affidavit to the Justice Department, and the DOJ turned the other way.

This was dangerous and demoralizing work — there was “almost no way,” according to Parks, to see any progress. Amid that fearsome climate, NAACP comrade Johnnie Carr noted, many people “lost faith in themselves.” But their small crew kept at it, because, as Parks explained, “someone had to do something.” They couldn’t turn away. But she hated how a “a militant Negro was almost a freak of nature to [white people], many times ridiculed by others of his own group.”