The Real Rosa parks
We learn much from how we present our heroes. A few years ago, on Martin Luther King. Day, I was interviewed on CNN. So was Rosa Parks, by phone from Los Angeles. "We're very honored to have her," said the host. "Rosa Parks was the woman who wouldn't go to the back of the bus.
She wouldn't get up and give her seat in the white section to a white person. That set in motion the yearlong bus boycott in Montgomery. It earned Rosa Parks the title of `mother of the Civil Rights movement.'"
I was excited to hear Parks' voice and to be part of the same show. Then it occurred to me that the host's description--the story's standard rendition and one repeated even in many of her obituaries-- stripped the Montgomery boycott of all of its context. Before refusing to give up her bus seat, Parks had been active for twelve years in the local NAACP chapter, serving as its secretary. The summer before her arrest, she had attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee's labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she'd met an older generation of civil rights activists, like South Carolina teacher Septima Clark, and discussed the recent Supreme Court decision banning "separate-but-equal" schools. During this period of involvement and education, Parks had become familiar with previous challenges to segregation. Another Montgomery bus boycott, fifty years earlier, successfully eased some restrictions; a bus boycott in Baton Rouge won limited gains two years before Parks was arrested; and the previous spring, a young Montgomery woman had also refused to move to the back of the bus, causing the NAACP to consider a legal challenge until it turned out that she was unmarried and pregnant, and therefore a poor symbol for a campaign.
In short, Rosa Parks didn't make a spur-of-the-moment decision. She didn't single-handedly give birth to the civil rights efforts, but she was part of an existing movement for change, at a time when success was far from certain.
We all know Parks's name, but few of us know about Montgomery NAACP head E.D. Nixon, who served as one of her mentors and first got Martin Luther King involved. Nixon carried people's suitcases on the trains, and was active in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the union founded by legendary civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph. He played a key role in the campaign. No one talks of him, any more than they talk of JoAnn Robinson, who taught nearby at an underfunded and segregated Black college and whose Women's Political Council distributed the initial leaflets following Parks's arrest. Without the often lonely work of people like Nixon, Randolph, and Robinson, Parks would likely have never taken her stand, and if she had, it would never have had the same impact.
This in no way diminishes the power and historical importance of Parks's refusal to give up her seat. But it reminds us that this tremendously consequential act, along with everything that followed, depended on all the humble and frustrating work that Parks and others undertook earlier on. It also reminds us that Parks's initial step of getting involved was just as courageous and critical as the stand on the bus that all of us have heard about.
People like Parks shape our models of social commitment. Yet from responses to talks I've given throughout the country, most citizens do not know the full story of her involvement. And the conventional stripped-down retelling creates a standard so impossible to meet, it may actually make it harder for us to get involved, inadvertently removing Parks's most powerful lessons of hope.
This conventional portrayal suggests that social activists come out of nowhere, to suddenly take dramatic stands. It implies that we act with the greatest impact when we act alone, at least initially. And that change occurs instantly, as opposed to building on a series of often-invisible actions. The myth of Parks as lone activist reinforces a notion that anyone who takes a committed public stand, or at least an effective one, has to be a larger-than-life figure--someone with more time, energy, courage, vision, or knowledge than any normal person could ever possess. This belief pervades our society, in part because the media tends not to represent historical change as the work of ordinary human beings, which it almost always is.
Once we enshrine our heroes on pedestals, it becomes hard for mere mortals to measure up in our eyes. However individuals speak out, we're tempted to dismiss their motives, knowledge, and tactics as insufficiently grand or heroic. We fault them for not being in command of every fact and figure, or being able to answer every question put to them. We fault ourselves as well, for not knowing every detail, or for harboring uncertainties and doubts. We find it hard to imagine that ordinary human beings with ordinary flaws might make a critical difference in worthy social causes.
Yet those who act have their own imperfections, and ample reasons to hold back. "I think it does us all a disservice," says a young African-American activist in Atlanta named Sonya Tinsley, "when people who work for social change are presented as saints--so much more noble than the rest of us. We get a false sense that from the moment they were born they were called to act, never had doubts, were bathed in a circle of light. But I'm much more inspired learning how people succeeded despite their failings and uncertainties. It's a much less intimidating image. It makes me feel like I have a shot at changing things too." Sonya had recently attended a talk given by one of Martin Luther King's Morehouse professors, in which he mentioned how much King had struggled when he first came to college, getting only a `C,' for example, in his first philosophy course. "I found that very inspiring, when I heard it," Sonya said, "given all that King achieved. It made me feel that just about anything was possible." Our culture's misreading of the Rosa Parks story speaks to a more general collective amnesia, where we forget the examples that might most inspire our courage, hope, and conscience. Apart from obvious times of military conflict, most of us know next to nothing of the many battles ordinary men and women fought to preserve freedom, expand the sphere of democracy, and create a more just society.
Of the abolitionist and civil rights movements, we at best recall a few key leaders--and often misread their actual stories. We know even less about the turnof-the-century populists who challenged entrenched economic interests and fought for a "cooperative commonwealth." Who these days can describe the union movements that ended 80-hour work weeks at nearstarvation wages? Who knows the origin of the social security system, now threatened by systematic attempts to privatize it? How did the women's suffrage movement spread to hundreds of communities, and gather enough strength to prevail? As memories of these events disappear, we lose the knowledge of mechanisms that grassroots social movements have used successfully in the past to shift public sentiment and challenge entrenched institutional power. Equally lost are the means by which their participants managed to keep on and eventually prevail in circumstances at least as harsh as those we face today.
Think again about the different ways one can frame Rosa Parks's historic action. In the prevailing myth, Parks decides to act almost on a whim, in isolation. She's a virgin to politics, a holy innocent. The lesson seems to be that if any of us suddenly got the urge to do something equally heroic, that would be great. Of course most of us don't, so we wait our entire lives to find the ideal moment.
Parks's real story conveys a far more empowering moral. She begins with seemingly modest steps.
A Seat on the Bus, A Seat at the Table
by Barbara Crafton
To the end of her life, Rosa Parks was beautiful: her radiant smile, the knowing snap of her black eyes, the braided coronet of her hair that went from coal black to white over the years. Her clothes were classic and understated, and you never saw a photograph of her in which she was not elegant.
But these things were details, not at all her main focus in life. She had more important things to think about than her hair or her clothing, and she thought about those important things for as long as she could think at all. The dangerous act of integrating the seating arrangements on Montgomery's public transportation was begun by this slight young woman and carried forward by thousands of people who walked, drove, bicycled, even skated to work and school -- got there any way they could that did not involve taking a city bus, and did it there for more than a year.
A lovely young woman, looking younger than her 42 years. A very young Dr. King -- we forget how young he was when all this was going on: he was only 39 when he was killed in 1968. We forget how young and how human they were: not supermen and superwomen, not without fault and not without error -- just human beings who understood their own worth and were brave enough to claim what they knew was theirs by right. And smart enough to know that the rightness of their cause would not by itself ensure its success, but that sheer numbers would, that you can't run a bus system if nobody rides the bus.
Depending on how you count, Mrs. Parks either had no children or millions of them. "The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement," she is often called, although she herself usually brushed that title aside. She was more interested in the movement. She knew that the movement had many fathers and many mothers, that it was in its unity that its strength and its future lay.
And in its children. Mrs. Parks feared that young people would take their freedoms for granted, would not remember what it had cost to win them. That their parents would be embarrassed to tell them how they used to live, about the colored restrooms and drinking fountains, the restaurants in which they could not eat, the car trips they planned carefully, carefully, so that there would be a colored motel to stay in, a colored gas station on the way, a place to pull over and have a picnic of food they brought themselves because there might be no place for a black person to buy any. About being cautioned never to look a white person in the eye. About yielding, always yielding, always giving place, no matter what.
White people didn't know the strength of the black community. Didn't know about its dedicated teachers, doctors, ministers, merchants and business people. Did not know about its reverence for education and civility. Did not know how self-sufficient it had been forced to become, and what that self-sufficiency would mean for the system of American apartheid that was beginning to show cracks.
But on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat on a city bus to a white man who demanded it, they were about to find out.
Copyright © 2005 Barbara Crafton: For more information about the "Almost-Daily EMos," contact: http://www.geraniumfarm.org
She goes to a meeting, and then another, helping build the community that in turn supported her path. Hesitant at first, she gains confidence as she speaks out. She keeps on despite a profoundly uncertain context, as she and others act as best they can to challenge deeply entrenched injustices, with little certainty of results. Had she and others given up after her tenth or eleventh year of commitment, we might never have heard of Montgomery.
Parks also reminds us that even in a seemingly losing cause, one person may unknowingly inspire another, and that person yet a third, who may then go on to change the world, or at least a small corner of it.
Rosa Parks's husband Raymond convinced her to attend her first NAACP meeting, the initial step on a path that brought her to that fateful day on the bus in Montgomery. But who got Raymond Parks involved? And why did that person take the trouble to do so? What experiences shaped their outlook, forged their convictions? The links in any chain of influence are too numerous, too complex to trace. But being aware that such chains exist, that we can choose to join them, and that lasting change doesn't occur in their absence, is one of the primary ways to sustain hope, especially when our actions seem too insignificant to amount to anything . Finally, Parks's journey suggests that change is the product of deliberate, incremental action, whereby we join together to try to shape a better world. Sometimes our struggles will fail, as did many earlier efforts of Parks, her peers, and her predecessors. Other times they may bear modest fruits. And at times they will trigger a miraculous outpouring of courage and heart--as happened with her arrest and all that followed. For only when we act despite all our uncertainties and doubts do we have the chance to shape history.
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, winner of the Nautilus Award and named the #3 political book of fall 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association, and winner of the Nautilus Award.
His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. Contact at www.paulloeb.org or sympa@onenw.org
Actress Cicely Tyson
Reflects on the Life of Rosa Parks
Actress Cicely Tyson -- well known for her portrayal of "Miss Jane Pitman" among other roles -- told Archbishop Desmond Tutu on November 6 that civil rights leader Rosa Parks was "strong even in death." Tyson -- who eulogized the recently deceased Parks at three memorial services in Montgomery, Detroit, and Washington D.C. -- said she was deeply moved as she viewed Parks' body.
"I've never seen a face that showed more strength," Tyson told a lunch gathering honoring Tutu. "The strength in this woman's being was oozing out every pore. I maintain the reason was that King Jesus was her Driver. She was not to be moved; she was like a tree planted by the river." In life, Parks consistently told the story of her historic 1955 arrest, for refusing to yield her bus seat, "in a quiet and humble" manner, Tyson said. Parks died October 24 at age 92 in her Detroit home.
Tyson, who joined Pasadena's All Saints Church in welcoming Tutu, said she found particularly poignant the placement of Parks's casket in the U.S. Capitol rotunda, and the crowds who lined the streets in homage. "It's a journey I would not have missed," Tyson said, "and I am so honored to have been part of it."
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