FAREWELL ROSA PARKS

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Rosa Lee Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, died today. She was 92.

Mrs. Parks died at her home of natural causes, said Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.

Mrs. Parks was 42 when she committed an act of defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title "mother of the civil rights movement."

At that time, Jim Crow laws in place since the post-Civil War Reconstruction required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public accommodations throughout the South, while legally sanctioned racial discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighborhoods in the North.

The Montgomery, Ala., seamstress, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was riding on a city bus Dec. 1, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.

Mrs. Parks refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge, but Mrs. Parks was jailed. She also was fined $14.

Speaking in 1992, she said history too often maintains "that my feet were hurting and I didn't know why I refused to stand up when they told me. But the real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that kind of treatment for too long."

Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by a then little-known Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.

"At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this," Mrs. Parks said 30 years later. "It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in."

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There are two enormous problems with the way the Civil Rights Movement is taught in public schools today.

First, the schools tend to water down the actual politics of key leaders. For instance, when teaching Martin Luther King, the "I have a dream speech" is pretty much the centerpiece of the unit. It's all about little black and white children holding hands on the playground and how wonderful it is that we can all be friends now. While true and uplifting, such a skewed narrative completely misses the true substance of Dr. King's philosophy and leadership. So, too, with Rosa Parks. She is often portrayed as something of a victim, a tired, middle-aged, working woman who simply needed to sit down, but, unfortunately, the only open seat on the bus was in the white section. Parks was no victim, no sweet little woman who accidentally kicked off the Movement. Rather, she was a deliberate activist, trained in activism at the Highlander Folk School, and completely conscious of the political ramifications of her actions. If all you know about Parks is what you were taught in school, then you might infer that the whole Civil Rights Era came about by happenstance. Not true. Parks was looking for a fight and she got it. And she won.

Which leads to my second point.

It wasn't really Parks who won the civil rights fight. Nor was it King, or Medgar Evers, or Malcolm X, or Stokely Carmichael, or any of the other scores of charismatic leaders lionized by history books. It was tens of thousands of individuals doing the dangerous, often life-threatening shit work of organizing, demonstrating, and keeping up pressure on the corrupt system of American apartheid in the South for years and years. Movements aren't really about leaders. They don't create movements: people create movements--leaders simply lend their faces and voices, speaking for the many. But public school history units are absolutely enamored with leaders. Again, if all you knew about the Civil Rights Movement is what you learned in school, you'd think that a few key individuals were able to whip up anger and resentment, and rode those feelings toward real social change. History, as taught by the schools, suggests that we have to wait for change until strong leaders come along. Not true. Change can happen right now, if only the people insist on it. And Rosa Parks would have been the first one to agree.

Farewell, Ms. Parks.



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