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Rosa Parks, R.I.P.
From the New York Times:
Rosa Parks, a black seamstress whose refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., almost 50 years ago grew into a mythic event that helped touch off the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's, died yesterday at her home in Detroit. She was 92 years old.
For her act of defiance, Mrs. Parks was arrested, convicted of violating the segregation laws and fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. In response, blacks in Montgomery boycotted the buses for nearly 13 months while mounting a successful Supreme Court challenge to the Jim Crow law that enforced their second-class status on the public bus system.
The events that began on that bus in the winter of 1955 captivated the nation and transformed a 26-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. into a major civil rights leader. It was Dr. King, the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, who was drafted to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization formed to direct the nascent civil rights struggle.
"Mrs. Parks's arrest was the precipitating factor rather than the cause of the protest," Dr. King wrote in his 1958 book, "Stride Toward Freedom. "The cause lay deep in the record of similar injustices."
Her act of civil disobedience, what seems a simple gesture of defiance so many years later, was in fact a dangerous, even reckless move in 1950's Alabama. In refusing to move, she risked legal sanction and perhaps even physical harm, but she also set into motion something far beyond the control of the city authorities. Mrs. Parks clarified for people far beyond Montgomery the cruelty and humiliation inherent in the laws and customs of segregation.
That moment on the Cleveland Avenue bus also turned a very private woman into a reluctant symbol and torchbearer in the quest for racial equality and of a movement that became increasingly organized and sophisticated in making demands and getting results.
"She sat down in order that we might stand up," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said yesterday in an interview from South Africa. "Paradoxically, her imprisonment opened the doors for our long journey to freedom."
Please take the time to go here and read the whole obituary.
God bless Rosa Parks, and may she rest in peace.
dailykos poster jre sets the record straight...
Rosa Parks, Misremembered
by jre
Tue Oct 25, 2005 at 12:43:13 AM PDT
Rosa Parks died yesterday at age 92. Over the days to come, we'll hear a lot of very-much deserved prasie for Parks' refusal to abide bigotry and her courage in the service of a cause. Unfortunately, we'll also hear a new round of recitations of the stubborn myth that Parks was an anonymous, apolitical woman who spontaneously refused to yield to authority and in so doing inspired a movement.
The truth, as Aldon Morris wrote in his book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, is that a decade earlier:
"...in the 1940s Mrs. Parks had refused several times to comply with segregation rules on the buses. In the early 1940s Mrs. Parks was ejected from a bus for failing to comply. The very same bus driver who ejected her that time was the one who had her arrested on December 1, 1955...She began serving as secretary for the local NAACP in 1943 and still held that post when arrested in 1955... In the early 1940s Mrs. Parks organized the local NAACP Youth Council... During the 1950s the youth in this organization attempted to borrow books from a white library. They also took rides and sat in the front seats of segregated buses, then returned to the Youth Council to discuss their acts of defiance with Mrs. Parks."
This history is not hidden. But the NY Times' obituary describes Parks' arrest nonetheless as an event which "turned a very private woman into a reluctant symbol and torchbearer...". Parks was certainly reluctant to see too personal valoration of her as heroine distract from the broader movement. But she was not private about her politics. And her refusal to give up her bus seat was nothing new for her. As she would later tell an interviewer, "My resistance to being mistreated on the buses and anywhere else was just a regular thing with me and not just that day."
The myth of Parks as a pre-political seamstress who was too physically worn out to move has such staying power not because there's any factual basis but because it appeals to an all-too popular narrative about how social change happens in America: When things get bad enough, an individual steps up alone, unsupported and unmediated, and spontaneously resists. And then an equally spontaneous movement follows. Such a myth makes good TV, but it's poor history.
Movement-building takes hard work, no matter how righteous the cause or how desperate the circumstances.
The pivotal moments of the 60's civil rights movement, as Morris recounts in his book, were not random stirrings or automatic responses. Most of them were carefully planned events which followed months of organizing and were conceived with an eye to political tactics and media imagery. There were even some long meetings involved.
That shouldn't be seen as a dirty little secret, because strategic organizing and planned imagery shouldn't be seen as signs of moral impurity. Organizations, like the people in them, each have their faults (Ella Baker was frequently and justifiably furious with the sexism and condescension of much of CORE's leadership). But the choice of individuals to work together and find common cause in common challenges doesn't become less pure or less honest or less noble when they choose to do it through political organizations. And there's nothing particularly progressive about a historical perspective in which Rosa Parks' defiance of racism is made less genuine by the knowledge that she was secretary of the NAACP.
The myth of Rosa Parks as a private apolitical seamstress, like the myth of Martin Luther King as a race-blind moderate, has real consequences as we face the urgent civil rights struggles of today. Seeing acts of civil disobedience like Parks' as spontaneous responses to the enormity of the injustice justifies the all-too common impulses to refuse our support for organized acts of resistance and regard organized groups as inherently corrupt. Those are impulses people like Rosa Parks had to confront and overcome amongst members of her community long before she ever made national headlines for refusing to give up her seat on the bus.
http://www.dailykos.com/hotlist/add/2005/10/25/34313/055/displaystory//
from a commenter on the same dailykos diary...
Another interesting, little reported fact that I read in the newspaper this morning- to say that Rosa refused to give up her seat so a white man could sit in it is not quite correct-
In those days, busses in Montgomery had three sections- the first four rows were reserved for whites, blacks were in the back, and there was a middle section, where blacks could sit, until a white person wanted to sit in that section, when the blacks had to clear out.
(Apparently, it was not enough to have blacks in back, whites in front- the folks in charge back then didn't want the blacks anywhere near the whites- when the front rows were filled with whites and a black man wanted to ride the bus, he would have to pay his fare up front, then step back out of the bus and walk back around to the back door of the bus to get on, so that he wouldn't walk past the whites seated in front!)
Anyway, that day, the front section was full, and a white went to the middle section where four blacks were sitting. By the rules, they all had to leave and go to the back of the bus, even though only one seat was needed. Three of the four did so, but Rosa, the fourth, refused.
So it wasn't just that she refused to give her seat to a white man, she refused to empty the section so a white man could sit in a section without blacks.
by pdq on Tue Oct 25, 2005 at 06:26:10 AM PDT
http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2005/10/25/34313/055/56#56
Two more excellent points from commenters on the diary:
One more point:
Rosa Parks provided the perfect test case for challenging Montgomery's segregated bus policy because she was a model citizen, above reproach, active in her community, and educated in the type of nonviolent direct action taught at the Highlander Folk School. Not long before the day she was marched off that bus and into history, another young African American woman had also refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.
Her name was Caludette Colvin, she was 15, pregnant, and cursed the bus driver. Nobody knows where she is now.
Yes, history is never as simple as it is taught in elementary school, or in the MSM. Yet that should not take away from the fact that Rosa Parks was the right person in the right place at the right time; and as this diary so competently illustrates, she was ready.
That's one of the questions MLK used to pose to people: What if tomorrow the burden falls upon you? Will you be ready and willing to take it up? On this day, that is a good question for us all to ask ourselves.
by MHB on Tue Oct 25, 2005 at 04:28:53 AM PDT
Excellent question
I remember this, from one of my PACS program courses as an undergrad.
The case of Colvin shows that nonviolent civil disobedience is not something spontaneous; it occurs only with strong organization, planning, and, in order to be successful, a fully informed understanding of the social structures it is operating against. And therein lies its strength.
by draftchrisheinz on Tue Oct 25, 2005 at 06:10:51 AM PDT