& organizer, with an organization behind her.
Her refusal to go to the back of the bus wasn't the spontaneous act of an individual. But that's how it's usually presented. In whose interest is it to present her actions that way?
Since her death, pundits and politicians have all spoken about Parks’ life – incorrectly.
By Josh Eidelson, Yale University
Monday November 7, 2005
In the two weeks since Rosa Parks’ death, just about everyone has had something nice to say about her courageous refusal to yield to bigotry on the bus. Unfortunately, much of what’s been said by politicians or journalists has been deeply misleading or flat-out false. It’s reinforced the 50-year-old myth that Parks was an apolitical woman who one day ambled into history out of simple physical exhaustion and then promptly ambled back out of it again.
...too many people who should know better have instead made statements perpetuating the most stubborn myths about who Parks was and what she did. A few of the major ones:
Bill Frist: “Rosa Parks’ bold and principled refusal to give up her seat was not an intentional attempt to change a nation, but a singular act aimed at restoring the dignity of the individual.”
Parks’ December 1, 1955 civil disobedience was certainly bold and principled, but it was in no way singular. Parks had already been kicked off of buses several times in the decade before for her unwillingness to sacrifice her seat based of the color of her skin. That day in December wasn’t even the first time she had faced down that particular bus driver.
Long before that arrest, Parks had also actively been training others in non-violent resistance as the founder and adult advisor of the NAACP Youth Council, whose members, according to historian Aldon Morris, “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” (Morris explored this at length in his book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement).
All of these pre-meditated actions were aimed at restoring the dignity of the individual by changing a nation whose complicity in the face of bigotry denied it.
Bill Clinton: “This time, Rosa’s War was fought by Martin Luther King’s rules, civil disobedience, peaceful resistance.”
Though King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Parks and other civil rights activists were already versed in the principles of non-violence resistance. Like King, Parks studied non-violent protest at the Highlander School in Tennessee, an integrated movement center dedicated to empowering the oppressed to effect social change through collective action.
Highlander Trainer Septima Clark recalled that it was there that Parks “talked … out” the sketch of her December 1955 arrest, and committed that “I’m not going to move out of that seat.” E.D. Nixon declined requests that he lead the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association, which would lead the boycott, because he thought a minister would be a more effective spokesman. That was when activists decided to approach Martin Luther King.
Mitch McConnell: “Rosa Parks did not set out to become a hero on the evening of December 1, 1955 … it was not inevitable that the struggle would start on that day, in that town, lit by one woman’s courage and devotion.”
The struggle was already well underway. Much of that struggle has been obscured from historical memory, particularly the parts involving long meetings, arduous planning, and formidable internal tensions. Two years before the Montgomery bus boycott, Blacks in Baton Rouge successfully overcame the resistance of bus drivers to partial integration through a mass boycott which provided a model for King and Ralph Abernathy. For four decades before the Montgomery boycott, the NAACP had been organizing trail-blazing legal and educational campaigns for civil rights in the face of violent retaliation. Parks herself had been secretary of the local NAACP since 1943 and secretary of the Alabama State Conference of NAACP branches since the late ‘40s.
New York Times: “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.”
Parks was reluctant about being turned into a symbol. But she showed little reluctance, though, in bearing the torch for civil rights. By the time Parks’ 1955 arrest brought her new national attention, she had already taken on the burdens and opportunities of organizational leadership.
What would catch her by surprise was the raft of stubborn myths about her. “My resistance to being mistreated on the buses and anywhere else was just a regular thing with me,” she later told one interviewer, “and not just that day.” “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired,” she wrote, “but that isn’t true … the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
It’s a shame, in the wake of her death to see the same myths repeated which so bothered her for much of her life: that she was an apolitical seamstress who was too tired to get up; that her action spontaneously and effortlessly generated a movement; that her choice to resist was courageous because it was unmeditated.
These myths are hurting the movement by obscuring the need for well-planned strategic actions with organizational support. Now that Parks is no longer able to call out these myths for what they are, it becomes that much greater a responsibility for the rest of us.
http://www.campusprogress.org/features/633/the-myth-of-rosa-parks/index.phpLet Us Honor Rosa Parks—By Shattering the Myths About Her
by Rick Chamberlin
It is right and good that at this time we should celebrate and honor the life and legacy of Rosa Parks. Her brave, dignified act of civil disobedience on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955 precipitated a nonviolent protest movement that awakened our nation to the widespread injustice of discrimination and segregation.
But as we honor Rosa Parks and bid her soul rest, may we also lay to rest the myths that began to form about her almost immediately after she was arrested 50 years ago. In the long run, I believe these myths could do more harm than good to the unfinished struggle for equality in this country.
Perhaps the most damaging myth about Rosa is that she acted alone. In fact, she worked for years with other social justice and civil rights activists prior to her famous action. She served as a secretary for and was a member of her local NAACP chapter. She attended workshops at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee to study racial desegregation tactics and Gandhian resistance methods. While Rosa parks was led from that bus alone, there were many people behind her when she boarded it. Her decision to refuse to move to the back of the bus so that a white rider could have her seat was made in the context of a community.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1030-27.htmThe Real Rosa Parks
by Paul Rogat Loeb
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...
I was excited to hear Parks's 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'd 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...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...
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...
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1031-32.htmHer husband was also an activist & organizer...
Her resolve to confront the brutal racism in Montgomery Alabama began years before the bus action. As far back as 1943, she made the courageous decision to join the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, where she quickly became secretary. Being active in the NAACP meant taking serious risks. Rosa’s husband, Raymond Parks, was also active in the NAACP. For years he participated in secret meetings, sometimes at their house, around the Scottsboro Case. Members brought their guns to these meetings to protect themselves from the violence of the Klan...
http://www.the-spark.net/np762801.htmlIn 1932, Rosa married Raymond Parks, a barber from Montgomery, at her mother's house. Raymond was a member of the NAACP, at the time collecting money to support the Scottsboro Boys, a group of black men falsely accused of raping two white women. After her marriage, Rosa took numerous jobs, ranging from domestic worker to hospital aide. At her husband's urging, she finished her high school studies in 1933, at a time when less than 7% of African Americans had a high school diploma. Despite the Jim Crow laws that made political participation by black people difficult, she succeeded in registering to vote on her third try.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_ParksAnd, even more forgotten facts:
Well, to begin with, Raymond was a barber alright. But he was an activist way before Rosa had stepped in. So much so that he was raising funds for the National Committee to Save the Scottsboro Boys! Does that sound a bell? So the story begins from here....
It involved the alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on the Southern Railroad freight run from Chattanooga to Memphis on March 25, 1931. And yes, this was a case that the NAACP then during the 30's refused to take up... The Scottsboro Boys, for better or worse, cast their lots with the Communists who, in the South, were “treated with only slightly more courtesy than a gang of rapists.”
Not only (Edgar) Nixon (labor organizer, leader of montgomery brotherhood of sleeping car porters & president of the montgomery naacp), who was on the political left of the things and was conveniently shoved to the history’s closed pages:
{{In the early 1950s, Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson , president of the Women's Political Council decided to mount a court challenge to the discriminatory seating practices on Montgomery's municipal buses along with a boycott of the bus company... Before the activists could mount the court challenge, they needed someone to voluntarily break this bus seating law and be arrested for it. Nixon carefully searched for a suitable plaintiff....}}}
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Nixon...but we need to remember Clifford Durr (1899 – 1975) who was an Alabama lawyer who defended activists and others accused of disloyalty during the New Deal and McCarthy eras. He was the one who represented Rosa Parks in her challenge to the constitutionality of the ordinance requiring the segregation of passengers on buses in Montgomery that launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Who was Durr? He was branded as a communist and was put under FBI surveillance in 1942, because he had defended a colleague accused of left-wing political associations....
http://www.montgomeryboycott.com/bio_durr.htmDurr called the jail when authorities refused to tell Nixon what the charges against Parks were and he and his wife accompanied Nixon to the jail when Nixon bailed her out. Nixon and Durr then went to the Parks’ home to discuss whether she was prepared to fight the charges against her. Parks was then as aforesaid, working as voluntary secretary to Nixon.
And yes, hold on, Durr's wife had employed Rosa Parks as the seamstress.
http://www.saswat.com/blog/radical_is_ideal_rosa_parks.htmlThe standard storyline about Rosa Parks being some tired domestic worker who courageously decided on her own not to go to the back of the bus is bull.
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