Rosa Parks, 1913-2005
She was, and always will be, the "simple seamstress" who just didn't feel like giving up her bus seat on that day in 1955. She was, and always will be, the "solitary figure" whose spontaneous defiance and tired feet after a hard day's work helped launch the civil rights movement.
We need her fable in America's story book, like we need George Washington's cherry tree and Paul Revere's ride. It's a story of one woman's courage, and a lesson in the power of one citizen, armed with resolve, to change a nation's erring ways.
Yet the Rosa Parks story everyone knows is as much fable as fact.
The myth is no disgrace to the reality beneath it. But that reality should be remembered, too, because it is a deeper, more mature, American story.
Rosa Parks was neither simple nor solitary. Raised during the dark days of lynching, she was taught by her family to be fearless. She graduated from Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, one of the black-run institutions that rigorously drilled self-sufficiency into black youth in segregated America.
She joined the NAACP in 1943, and worked closely with E.D. Nixon, "the most powerful black man in town," who rose to be head of the Montgomery NAACP. When Nixon became president of the state chapter, Parks served as its secretary. Together they assembled protest marches and organized voter registration drives. Parks attended leadership conferences and Highlander School in Tennessee, a veritable boot camp for civil rights leaders.
Blacks in Montgomery had been testing and defying Jim Crow rules, especially on the buses, since the 1940s; Rosa Parks was among the most persistent (it was said some bus drivers, if they saw her waiting at a stop, simply kept driving).
But when the Supreme Court struck down school segregation in 1954, the black leaders of Montgomery realized the time had come to shift gears from individual acts of defiance to organized action.
They approached the city mayor and warned that a bus boycott loomed. The mayor did nothing. Individual black riders began to flout the Jim Crow rules, and in at least three incidents in 1955 they were arrested for it. But the local NAACP was looking for the perfect case to serve as a base for its challenge. They got it on Thursday, Dec. 1, 1955.
Parks boarded the bus at Court Square about 5:30 p.m. She sat down deliberately in the first row of the colored section. Rush hour riders filled the white seats. When the next white man got on and there was no seat for him, the bus driver asked the first row of black passengers to do what the company rules and Chapter 6, Section 10 of the Montgomery City Code required: give up their seats.
He had to ask twice, the second time with a threat. Three got up and moved to the back of the bus. Rosa Parks stayed put.
Parks, the quiet, middle-aged, diminutive hard-working woman in the cloth coat and eyeglasses, with her hair up in a neat bun, was shouted at and arrested for refusing to give up her seat to an able-bodied white man.
And just like that, the NAACP had its case. Not only would it galvanize Montgomery's black population and moderate whites against Jim Crow injustice, it would subvert the sympathies of the Old South culture by appealing to its respect for courage and courtesy. Presenting Parks' defiance as one woman's spontaneous action banished the cloud of an organized insurgency goaded along by outsiders.
NAACP leaders carefully manipulated her image in the media, creating the "simple seamstress" legend from the start. Parks played her part perfectly. The resulting year-long protest not only brought Martin Luther King Jr. to the forefront of the civil rights movement, it gave us Rosa Parks as an inspiring example of fierce, but nonviolent, resistance.
Soon other black Americans began to adopt her tactics -- truly spontaneously this time -- in the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. Perhaps no other people in modern history has freed itself from repression with less violence and more respect.
We owe that to Rosa Parks, both the myth and the reality.
We need her fable in America's story book, like we need George Washington's cherry tree and Paul Revere's ride. It's a story of one woman's courage, and a lesson in the power of one citizen, armed with resolve, to change a nation's erring ways.
Yet the Rosa Parks story everyone knows is as much fable as fact.
The myth is no disgrace to the reality beneath it. But that reality should be remembered, too, because it is a deeper, more mature, American story.
Rosa Parks was neither simple nor solitary. Raised during the dark days of lynching, she was taught by her family to be fearless. She graduated from Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, one of the black-run institutions that rigorously drilled self-sufficiency into black youth in segregated America.
She joined the NAACP in 1943, and worked closely with E.D. Nixon, "the most powerful black man in town," who rose to be head of the Montgomery NAACP. When Nixon became president of the state chapter, Parks served as its secretary. Together they assembled protest marches and organized voter registration drives. Parks attended leadership conferences and Highlander School in Tennessee, a veritable boot camp for civil rights leaders.
Blacks in Montgomery had been testing and defying Jim Crow rules, especially on the buses, since the 1940s; Rosa Parks was among the most persistent (it was said some bus drivers, if they saw her waiting at a stop, simply kept driving).
But when the Supreme Court struck down school segregation in 1954, the black leaders of Montgomery realized the time had come to shift gears from individual acts of defiance to organized action.
They approached the city mayor and warned that a bus boycott loomed. The mayor did nothing. Individual black riders began to flout the Jim Crow rules, and in at least three incidents in 1955 they were arrested for it. But the local NAACP was looking for the perfect case to serve as a base for its challenge. They got it on Thursday, Dec. 1, 1955.
Parks boarded the bus at Court Square about 5:30 p.m. She sat down deliberately in the first row of the colored section. Rush hour riders filled the white seats. When the next white man got on and there was no seat for him, the bus driver asked the first row of black passengers to do what the company rules and Chapter 6, Section 10 of the Montgomery City Code required: give up their seats.
He had to ask twice, the second time with a threat. Three got up and moved to the back of the bus. Rosa Parks stayed put.
Parks, the quiet, middle-aged, diminutive hard-working woman in the cloth coat and eyeglasses, with her hair up in a neat bun, was shouted at and arrested for refusing to give up her seat to an able-bodied white man.
And just like that, the NAACP had its case. Not only would it galvanize Montgomery's black population and moderate whites against Jim Crow injustice, it would subvert the sympathies of the Old South culture by appealing to its respect for courage and courtesy. Presenting Parks' defiance as one woman's spontaneous action banished the cloud of an organized insurgency goaded along by outsiders.
NAACP leaders carefully manipulated her image in the media, creating the "simple seamstress" legend from the start. Parks played her part perfectly. The resulting year-long protest not only brought Martin Luther King Jr. to the forefront of the civil rights movement, it gave us Rosa Parks as an inspiring example of fierce, but nonviolent, resistance.
Soon other black Americans began to adopt her tactics -- truly spontaneously this time -- in the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. Perhaps no other people in modern history has freed itself from repression with less violence and more respect.
We owe that to Rosa Parks, both the myth and the reality.
Labels: civil rights, Rosa Parks
