An Actress Gets to Portray an Icon

When Angela Bassett met Rosa Parks--the “mother” of the civil rights movement whom she portrays Sunday in the CBS television movie “The Rosa Parks Story”--back in 1994, she remembers feeling like a star-struck kid.

Bassett was overwhelmed not because Parks, who celebrated her 89th birthday on Feb. 4, was so iconic or intimidating, but because this demure Southern-born woman--whose courageous if simple act of disobedience had helped alter the course of U.S. social and political history--was so unremarkably normal, so sweet and unaffected.

“I had to go to the restroom to pull myself together,” Bassett, who had just played Tina Turner in the 1993 biopic “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” recalled of their meeting at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference event in Atlanta. “She was just so dear, and just beautiful. I never thought that one day I would have the opportunity to portray her.”

That opportunity surfaced four years later, during a chance encounter with the film’s executive producer, former Los Angeles political activist Willis Edwards, who was in town with Parks to develop an authoritative movie about her life.

“We were at the Beverly Hilton Hotel with Mrs. Parks. Angela was there for some award. I saw her in the lobby and I said, ‘Angela, we are going to be doing the Rosa Parks story, and I really would hope that you would consider playing Rosa Parks,’” said Edwards, now a vice president with the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in Detroit.

Bassett was politely receptive. “As an actor, you hear those kinds of things, and it’s years before they happen, if they happen. So I had forgotten about it,” she said.

Meanwhile, Edwards, along with co-producers Elaine Eason Steele and Pearl Devers, had made some serious decisions about how Parks’ story must be told. The piece was to focus on Parks’ life and not on the disparate aspects of the civil rights movement as a whole; even in its most virulently emotional scenes, there were to be no racial epithets.

Steele, co-founder and current board president of the Parks institute, said, “We had been approached by movie companies in the past, but they all wanted to fictionalize [Rosa Parks’ life].... We were just not for that. Willis knew what we wanted, and he was the first contact.”

Bassett, who plays Parks from her late teens to middle age, drew on memories of their meeting at the dinner to replicate her quietude and dignity. “[Parks] is very different from a lot of characters that I’ve played that, perhaps, chew up the scenery a bit,” Bassett said. “I was trying to be truthful to Mrs. Parks even though [with] my own personal drama, I would want to be bigger than life. I was always trying to be honest to her and not trying to make it more dramatic than perhaps it needs to be.”

Parks’ story unfolds not from her vantage point as a civil rights pioneer, but from her perspective as loving wife and companion to Raymond Parks (Peter Francis James), a Montgomery, Ala., barber and activist who disapproves of his wife’s involvement in the movement that would make her an international figure. Bassett, who is also an executive producer of the film, requested director Julie Dash (“Daughters of the Dust”) and credits Dash (working from a script by Paris Qualles) for her ability to capture the ideal pacing and tone.

“I’d seen some of Julie’s work before, and l loved the images that she frames. I think that she’s an artist that way,” Bassett said, adding that she also selected her co-star James based on his stage work in New York.

“The Rosa Parks Story” was shot on location in Montgomery, the cradle of both the Confederacy and the civil rights movement. The film co-stars Cicely Tyson as Park’s mother, Leona. Dexter King, son of the slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., plays the role of his then-26-year-old father. Parks’ childhood friend Johnnie Carr and Los Angeles actor Nick LaTour, son of boycott leader and local NAACP President E.D. Nixon, have cameos in the film, as the 381-day bus boycott they witnessed unfolds on screen.

Bassett dismissed any concerns the movie won’t find much of an audience because it is airing opposite the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics. “I don’t think there is any competition,” Bassett said. “What we’re doing is artistic and what they’re doing is athletic. When Julie did her research, she found out there were articles in Russian and Chinese that spoke of Mrs. Parks, and that this woman--this black woman--in America had said, ‘Nyet, non, no.’ If there was interest then, why not today?”

In the end, the filmmakers hope to reveal a side of Parks that few could have anticipated. “Many people are aware of Mrs. Parks as this icon of the civil rights movement, and yet we are not aware of her as a living, breathing human being,” Bassett said.

“We have her up on a shelf. And Mrs. Parks has always maintained, as she says in the piece, that ‘I didn’t do anything big. I’m just an everyday person, a human being just like everyone else. And what I did, the simplicity of it, we are all capable of doing.’”