Post by fury2g on Nov 7, 2005 16:02:38 GMT -5
The Truth About Rosa Parks
It has come down to us as a single moment of moral courage. Tired from a long day of work, a quiet seamstress would no longer accommodate injustice. An isolated instance of dignified refusal, which seemingly wrought a moral revolution. In the treacherous landscape of American race relations, Rosa Parks achieved iconic status by defying the laws of segregation in Alabama. And with her passing we have lost a vital link to the tumultuous history that brought our present world - with all of its opportunities, shortcomings and ambivalent progress -- into being.
But history -- even the history of genuine moral heroes -- is rarely that simple. Rosa Parks was anything but a passenger on the tides of history. Nothing of her history is as simple as it would seem. She was a reserved, even shy, person who joined the NAACP at a time when membership was literally life-threatening. She married Ray Parks, a gun-carrying barber and longtime NAACP activist, whose gun-toting actively challenged racial injustice in Alabama. And while her actions were brave; they were not unique. December 1, 1955 was not the first time a black person had refused to obey the segregation laws of public transportation. It was not even the first time Parks had refused.
The history of segregation is the history of African Americans resisting segregation.
During one twelve-month period in the 1940s, the city of Birmingham witnessed some 88 cases of blacks who refused to obey the segregation laws on public transportation. Five months prior to Parks, fifteen year-old Claudette Colvin had refused to give up her seat for a white passenger. She had been ejected and arrested and the local NAACP considered bringing a suit that would challenge segregation on the city's buses, but Colvin was pregnant and unmarried. E.D. Nixon and other activists thought she would not be a sympathetic example. Another young black woman, Mary Louise Smith, was arrested shortly after Colvin; but Nixon thought her dilapidated home and alcoholic father would be a public relations liability.Parks was the product of a vital community of activists who decided to end segregation. Her grandfather kept a shotgun by his side for dealing with threats posed by the Klan. Ray Parks had raised money for the Scottsboro Nine, African American teens falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931. Her white friend Virginia Durr, once a raging racist, had become a bitter opponent of segregation and arranged for Parks to attend non-violent activism classes at the famed Highlander Folk School. Parks herself had attempted to register to vote twice, and was told that she had failed the exam. The third time she made a copy of her answers with the intention of suing the state if she "failed" with the right answers. She passed. In 1943, Parks -- then a secretary for the NAACP -- boarded a Montgomery bus but refused to exit and re-enter through the backdoor as the law required. The driver seized her and physically threw her off the bus.
History though, is always a matter of timing: A combination of factors made her 1955 refusal a powder-keg moment in civil rights history. Just a year earlier, the Supreme Court had handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the segregationist politicians had responded with the "Southern Manifesto," in which they declared their intent to resist integration at all costs. Her impromptu sit-in brought tensions that had been simmering for years to a boil. And contrary to the popular retellings, her actions that day were not staged -- though they did come at the time when a coalition of activists and local lawyers were planning an assault on the structures of segregation in Montgomery. In the early hours, the local civil rights community found itself scrambling to respond to her arrest and imprisonment. Nor was the idea of boycotting segregated buses, which grew from Parks' arrest, unique. The 26 year-old Martin Luther King Jr., and the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association, called upon the Rev. TJ Jemison for advice. Jemison had organized a two-week boycott of the buses in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1953. Together they formulated a plan by which people would pay the MIA, who would then dispense funds for travel to the drivers in the carpools -- in order to avoid tickets for operating unlicensed taxi cabs.
None of these details diminish the extraordinary braveness it required for Parks to stare down an infuriated white bus driver -- the same one who had thrown her off his bus twelve years earlier -- and demand that her humanity be recognized. Southern bus drivers carried guns and routinely dealt out extreme violence. (During World War II, one black soldier who would not comply with Jim Crow seating was bludgeoned with a rifle butt and had his eyes gouged out.) Rosa Parks was literally risking her life for the community.
But the best way to recognize her contributions is not as the exploits of a solo revolutionary, but as the public face of an enduring tradition of resistance. In honoring her life, we honor the hundreds of other anonymous sojourners whose unheralded actions hastened the end of American apartheid.
Article from JelaniCobb.com
It has come down to us as a single moment of moral courage. Tired from a long day of work, a quiet seamstress would no longer accommodate injustice. An isolated instance of dignified refusal, which seemingly wrought a moral revolution. In the treacherous landscape of American race relations, Rosa Parks achieved iconic status by defying the laws of segregation in Alabama. And with her passing we have lost a vital link to the tumultuous history that brought our present world - with all of its opportunities, shortcomings and ambivalent progress -- into being.
But history -- even the history of genuine moral heroes -- is rarely that simple. Rosa Parks was anything but a passenger on the tides of history. Nothing of her history is as simple as it would seem. She was a reserved, even shy, person who joined the NAACP at a time when membership was literally life-threatening. She married Ray Parks, a gun-carrying barber and longtime NAACP activist, whose gun-toting actively challenged racial injustice in Alabama. And while her actions were brave; they were not unique. December 1, 1955 was not the first time a black person had refused to obey the segregation laws of public transportation. It was not even the first time Parks had refused.
The history of segregation is the history of African Americans resisting segregation.
During one twelve-month period in the 1940s, the city of Birmingham witnessed some 88 cases of blacks who refused to obey the segregation laws on public transportation. Five months prior to Parks, fifteen year-old Claudette Colvin had refused to give up her seat for a white passenger. She had been ejected and arrested and the local NAACP considered bringing a suit that would challenge segregation on the city's buses, but Colvin was pregnant and unmarried. E.D. Nixon and other activists thought she would not be a sympathetic example. Another young black woman, Mary Louise Smith, was arrested shortly after Colvin; but Nixon thought her dilapidated home and alcoholic father would be a public relations liability.Parks was the product of a vital community of activists who decided to end segregation. Her grandfather kept a shotgun by his side for dealing with threats posed by the Klan. Ray Parks had raised money for the Scottsboro Nine, African American teens falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931. Her white friend Virginia Durr, once a raging racist, had become a bitter opponent of segregation and arranged for Parks to attend non-violent activism classes at the famed Highlander Folk School. Parks herself had attempted to register to vote twice, and was told that she had failed the exam. The third time she made a copy of her answers with the intention of suing the state if she "failed" with the right answers. She passed. In 1943, Parks -- then a secretary for the NAACP -- boarded a Montgomery bus but refused to exit and re-enter through the backdoor as the law required. The driver seized her and physically threw her off the bus.
History though, is always a matter of timing: A combination of factors made her 1955 refusal a powder-keg moment in civil rights history. Just a year earlier, the Supreme Court had handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the segregationist politicians had responded with the "Southern Manifesto," in which they declared their intent to resist integration at all costs. Her impromptu sit-in brought tensions that had been simmering for years to a boil. And contrary to the popular retellings, her actions that day were not staged -- though they did come at the time when a coalition of activists and local lawyers were planning an assault on the structures of segregation in Montgomery. In the early hours, the local civil rights community found itself scrambling to respond to her arrest and imprisonment. Nor was the idea of boycotting segregated buses, which grew from Parks' arrest, unique. The 26 year-old Martin Luther King Jr., and the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association, called upon the Rev. TJ Jemison for advice. Jemison had organized a two-week boycott of the buses in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1953. Together they formulated a plan by which people would pay the MIA, who would then dispense funds for travel to the drivers in the carpools -- in order to avoid tickets for operating unlicensed taxi cabs.
None of these details diminish the extraordinary braveness it required for Parks to stare down an infuriated white bus driver -- the same one who had thrown her off his bus twelve years earlier -- and demand that her humanity be recognized. Southern bus drivers carried guns and routinely dealt out extreme violence. (During World War II, one black soldier who would not comply with Jim Crow seating was bludgeoned with a rifle butt and had his eyes gouged out.) Rosa Parks was literally risking her life for the community.
But the best way to recognize her contributions is not as the exploits of a solo revolutionary, but as the public face of an enduring tradition of resistance. In honoring her life, we honor the hundreds of other anonymous sojourners whose unheralded actions hastened the end of American apartheid.
Article from JelaniCobb.com