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Boca Ciega High School graduate Angela Bassett, who portrays Rosa Parks in a film that airs tonight, has some similar family ties and a personal understanding of racial division.
By ERIC DEGGANS, Times TV Critic
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 24, 2002
When it came time for Angela Bassett to play legendary civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, she didn't have to work hard to remember what life in a segregated city felt like.
That's because Bassett, a Boca Ciega High School graduate who grew up in the city's Jordan Park housing project, had seen firsthand how Central Avenue separated the two St. Petersburgs of her childhood: one black and the other white.
"My world was in the South Side," said Bassett, 43, during a conference call with reporters to promote CBS-TV's biopic, The Rosa Parks Story. "We had our black stores, black churches, black schools and a black community . . . and you thrived in those. Around age 12 or so, busing came into being, and it felt like we were bused way across town. That was a whole new exposure."
Bassett eventually made the best of her new circumstances, learning a love for acting during an Eckerd College program for high school students in the mid 1970s and earning admission to Yale University to study drama.
Still, her Florida background, with its eerie parallels to Parks' life, may have provided the most material for the actor. Like Parks, Bassett shared a bond with her great-grandfather, the Rev. Stokes (Parks' bond was with her grandfather, a former slave) and was raised by a strong mother who insisted there was no mountain her children couldn't climb.
"I remember when I was young, and I got a C on my report card; I knew she was going to be upset about that," Bassett said of her mother, Betty Bassett, a former state employee who still lives in St. Petersburg.
"I made sure I had my argument together," she added. "A "C' was average, so I figured, as long as I stayed in the middle, I was okay. I presented my argument. . . . She looked me in the face and said: "I don't have no average children.' "
Bassett breaks into a tiny laugh. "I was really proud of that. I remembered that through the rest of my growing up and education, pursuing my dreams and desires. Being average -- being mediocre is not an option that you should be proud of."
It's somehow fitting that Bassett should wind up playing Parks, a humble woman with an average life who showed uncommon guts and courage just when history needed her most.
CBS' movie offers a moment similar to Bassett's report card epiphany, when Parks' mother, played by Cicely Tyson, is shown taking her daughter to a school for black girls run by a group of white, Quaker women. Told that she can achieve anything she chooses, young Rosa is shown learning lessons of pride and confidence that will serve her well later.
Despite the fact that February is designated Black History Month, such biopics rarely air on major TV networks during this time, usually a major ratings period for broadcasters.
But with the Winter Olympics airing on NBC through tonight, ratings for the month are skewed so badly that networks can take chances on movies that may have a more focused appeal.
It doesn't hurt that this project stars Bassett, an Oscar-nominated actor (What's Love Got to Do With It?) who also serves as executive producer for The Rosa Parks Story. In fact, Bassett's presence was very likely the difference between making and not making this movie.
"In the feature world, I'm still very much a hired hand. . . . It's a world of Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts and Mel Gibson," she said. "You hear these terms all the time . . . "bankable stars.' But because I have name and face recognition, it's easier for me to go on the smaller screen. And from CBS' standpoint, they said if I had not agreed to do it, the project wouldn't have happened."
On the surface, there's not much to Parks' story before her landmark bus ride. Known as a polite, God-fearing, shy woman, Bassett plays Parks as a woman so bashful, her future husband came calling three times before she would even talk to him.
Employed as a seamstress, she lived at home with her mother and brother, even after getting married. But she had a rebellious streak and a finely tuned sense of justice that led her to join the NAACP as a volunteer secretary and return to the voter registration office in Montgomery, Ala., several times (back when they made black people take complex tests to register).
This background and perspective serves as the focus of CBS' movie, which outlines the growing frustration and anger that prompted Parks' refusal to give up her seat to a white bus passenger Dec. 1, 1955.
More than a spur-of-the-moment decision, Parks' protest came after joining the NAACP (which regularly displayed a banner sign noting "a black man was lynched today") and enduring numerous indignities common for black people living in the segregated South.
Besides facing the humiliating tests required when seeking voter registration, black people couldn't try on shoes in stores (as the movie shows, they had to bring in a piece of paper with outlines drawn around the soles of their current shoes for clerks to match to a new pair).
According to the film, Parks was even ejected from a city bus before her historic protest, forced off over her refusal to enter the front door, pay her fare, exit and then re-enter from the back (as was customary back then for black passengers) during a rainstorm.
Her husband, Raymond, had helped raise money for the Scottsboro Boys, a group of young black men falsely accused of gang raping two white women in 1931. Her grandfather, who used to wait for the Ku Klux Klan's night riders at his home with a loaded shotgun, tells Bassett's Parks, "Don't ever be afraid to fight for what's right . . . and hate will be a word for other people."
"I didn't really know -- and perhaps I speak for others -- I didn't know that much about her . . . about the influences that helped to shape the individual that she was," said Bassett, who has only met Parks once, during an awards dinner in 1994. "Today, we're so used to . . . seeing her as this icon; the seamstress whose feet were tired. Maybe that's easier to swallow than this person who said, "I am tired of this treatment.' "
Besides featuring a black woman as star and executive producer, The Rosa Parks Story also boasts another Hollywood rarity: a black woman as director.
Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) helmed The Rosa Parks Story, leading a production that filmed throughout Montgomery in the same spots where, 40 years earlier, the city's black residents took a landmark stand for their own civil rights.
Seeing how the lazy, Southern atmosphere of Montgomery suffuses the movie, it's hard to believe Bassett when she says budget concerns almost prompted CBS to film in the movie in Vancouver, Canada (where U.S. dollars gain 30 percent in value, because of the exchange rate).
State officials lobbied hard -- and crafted cost-saving measures for the production, according to Bassett -- to bring the production to Alabama, which had already been the setting for films shot elsewhere such as Forrest Gump and HBO's Boycott.
Bassett now says such connection to Parks' actual home and community was vital.
In Montgomery, "The air is different, the people are different, the sensibilities are different," said Bassett. "Canada is the place that slaves ran to (in escaping U.S. racism) . . . they didn't have the history. To be able to stand in the spot where Mrs. Parks stood before she got on that bus . . . there was really a sense of pride and power."
Bassett seems to excel at playing reserved, almost meek women who find the will to make a difference, from Betty Shabazz in Spike Lee's Malcolm X to Katherine Jackson in the TV movie The Jacksons: An American Dream to the Oscar-nominated performance as singer Tina Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It?
In The Rosa Parks Story, Bassett expertly portrays a passion that simmers just beneath Parks' mild-mannered exterior that compels her to stand against injustice, even when it angers Raymond.
The tension between the couple rises as Rosa becomes a symbol of civil disobedience in the struggle to end segregation -- with Martin Luther King Jr. (played by his son, Dexter Scott King) shown lauding Rosa Parks during a historic church meeting that kicked off the Montgomery bus boycott.
"I think all these women start out vulnerable, and they find their strength in the journey of their life," Bassett said. "If you can remain in a relationship with someone who oppresses you and then break out of that (like Turner), that's a strong, powerful thing."
Bassett has been on a journey of her own since moving to Los Angeles in 1988. Regarded as the best-kept secret in Hollywood until Malcolm X and the Jacksons' movie both debuted in 1992, she has since balanced heavyweight roles in films such as Waiting to Exhale, Contact and How Stella Got Her Groove Back with less successful fare such as The Score, Supernova and Vampire in Brooklyn.
Now married to Law & Order: Criminal Intent co-star Courtney Vance, Bassett recently has dabbled in television, also serving as executive producer and star last year for the Showtime movie Ruby's Bucket of Blood.
"I chose these two projects because I was interested in the stories and the kind of work I would get to do as an artist," she said. "And since I'm from the big screen, you can ask, "Can we do that (scene) one more time?' And they always say yes."
Of course, there are some problems with The Rosa Parks Story. It covers well-trod ground, recounting the inequities of Jim Crow-era Alabama in a way we have seen before. And because many of us know how the story ends, many plot points -- Will the boycott succeed? Will Rosa face a prison term for her acts? -- lack suspense.
Among the actors, Tyson is wasted as Parks' mother, Leona, who by necessity is something of a tangential character, used mostly for comic relief and brief side comments.
And as Parks herself has said on many occasions, she was an average woman who took extraordinary action. Much as we want to like Parks (and we want to like Bassett as Parks), her life is perhaps a bit too ordinary to sustain a two-hour TV movie.
Still, the film is likely to serve as the biggest TV alternative for those who choose to skip the Winter Olympics' closing ceremonies, introducing a whole new audience to Parks' story and accomplishments.
"It has the ability to reach every household, as her action did," Bassett said. "I enjoy watching many different cultures and lives (on TV). . . . I look in the eyes and I see the heart. And I think there are probably a lot more people out there like me."
- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report, which includes information from Times files.
The Rosa Parks Story airs at 9 tonight on WTSP-Ch. 10. Grade: B.