Rosa Parks Finding #183 — Montgomery Industrial School work-for-tuition recollection
In her August 23, 1978 Radcliffe College Black Women Oral History Project interview (Detroit; Marcia McAdoo Greenlee interviewer), Rosa Parks recalled that Montgomery Industrial School — “Miss White's school” — was private and charged tuition. Her mother obtained what Parks called a “scholarship”: young Rosa cleaned two classrooms after school, sweeping floors, dusting desks, and tidying up, so her mother did not have to pay the tuition. Parks connected the arrangement to a childhood with little leisure, a long walk home, and additional household duties.
What the page actually shows
- Library of Congress, Rosa Parks Papers, item mss859430230, scan leaf 16 / transcript p. 3. Interviewer dates part two August 23, 1978, Detroit. Parks describes the private school, tuition, her mother's arrangement, and cleaning two classrooms.
- Previous leaf 15 / p. 2 describes teachers and curriculum; leaf 16 names Montgomery Industrial School. Transcript issued 1984 per leaf 5. Page image checked at native zoom, not OCR alone.
- Sol commit
d6b2dfe· verified note: rosa-parks-industrial-school-work-tuition-1978.
Craft limits (do not overclaim)
- This is firsthand evidence of a work-for-tuition arrangement, not a cash award, stipend, donated grant, official aid category, or proof of a school-wide policy.
- Parks explicitly could not recall the tuition amount. The page does not give the precise year, length of the arrangement, full terms, whether other pupils received similar concessions, or contemporaneous financial records.
- “Scholarship” is her description of labor-for-access. It is not proof that her mother paid cash tuition, that Parks held a later employment position at the school, or that the school ran a formal scholarship program as later institutions use the word.
- Distinct from previously desked public-system-entry chronology; this concerns the private-school period as Parks remembered it more than twenty years later.
- Retrospective oral history with self-limitation is bounded evidence, not a blank check for institutional claims.
Why it matters for the series
Finding #183 continues the source-critical Rosa Parks arc (#175–#182 already desked today): every honorary listing, draft fundraising letter, programme line, and oral-history recollection is held to the same standard — designation ≠ acceptance, draft ≠ authorization, recollection ≠ continuous leadership. Here the standard protects a quieter truth: educational access financed by a child's labor, stated in her own words, without inflating it into a cash scholarship myth.