Your son was in the wrong for disagreeing with the teacher and offering his own opinion. There’s no place for that in public schools
I agree with your second point here. Even with a full understanding of the bigger picture of the Montgomery boycott, Parks’ actions were courageous and admirable, and she’s an important figure in the history of the civil rights movement.
But i have some disagreements with your first paragraph, on a couple of separate grounds.
Firstly, i disagree that high school history classes shouldn’t get into the nuances. In fact, one of the clearest trends in history education right now, both at the school level and at the freshman college level, is moving away from the often simplistic big picture in order to focus more on case studies and nuance.
The fact is that cramming all of American history into a class at either the high school or college level is a fool’s errand, and often results in classes that are little more than a litany of big events. Much better, both in terms of increasing historical understanding and encouraging the skills that historical study is supposed to promote (close reading; analysis; synthesis; argumentation; etc.), is a class that spends time of the nuances.
In fact, one of the most widely-respected organizations devoted to improving the study of history at the high-school level, the Stanford History Education Group, has a unit explicitly devoted to the Montgomery boycott.
Many historians believe that these sorts of document-based studies, with their focus on getting at the nuance and the complexity of historical change, are far better than the older skim-it-all-and-learn-the-names-and-dates approach to history education.
My second observation is that, even if we decide that we don’t want to spend too much time on nuance in a high school history class, we can still talk about Montgomery as an event that was far more complex than just the Rosa Parks story. That is, even if all you have time for is the big picture, i think that the collective actions and the long-term commitment of civil rights activists should be central to any big-picture understanding of civil rights movement in America.
If you said to me, “You have two minutes to sum up the boycott and give the students some important information about it,” i would probably use those two minutes to explain that the boycott was the result of long-term planning and then persistent and courageous implementation by a large number of activists in the Montgomery area and beyond. Rosa Parks would definitely be a part of that story, but if my students left the class thinking that the boycott was solely the result of one woman who just got sick of the discrimination one day and refused to give up her seat, i would feel like i’d failed in my job as a history teacher.
Agreed. Dissidents are trouble makers looking to upset and annoy the bourgeois. Their insolence should not be tolerated.
I see her as Jim Nolan from In Dubious Battle by Steinbeck. She was part of the movement and doing her part but at the end of it all she was most valuable as a prop. Part of that is the fantasy that she was just a sweet black lady with tired feet and not one of many people employed by the NAACP to specifically get arrested and generate publicity and gain legal standing to escalate a case to the SCotUS.
Please don’t take me the wrong way, I’m not disputing that she was in fact a sweet black lady and I certainly believe she was on the right side of history. I have nothing bad to say about her but her story is just a story.
Actually he is in 8th grade.
While this was true of many other civil rights cases, the Browns were actually the face of school desegregation because their case had the worst facts (and because their case went before the Supreme Court twice because Topeka basically ignored the original ruling for ten years).
More particularly, Topeka was the only school district of the five which the trial court below had found actually provided equal facilities to black and white students.
[QUOTE=Brown v. Board, fn. 9]
In the Kansas case, the court below found substantial equality as to all such factors. 98 F.Supp. 797, 798. In the South Carolina case, the court below found that the defendants were proceeding “promptly and in good faith to comply with the court’s decree.” 103 F.Supp. 920, 921. In the Virginia case, the court below noted that the equalization program was already “afoot and progressing” (103 F.Supp. 337, 341); since then, we have been advised, in the Virginia Attorney General’s brief on reargument, that the program has now been completed. In the Delaware case, the court below similarly noted that the state’s equalization program was well under way. 91 A.2d 137, 149.
[/QUOTE]
If Brown had not been among the cases consolidated for hearing, the court might well have failed to produce a majority (and certainly unanimity) on its primary holding: that even equal systems were prohibited.
That’s what makes what she did heroic. It’s all very well to be defiant when you know you’re going to come out well at the end of it. It takes a lot of courage to do what she did knowing full well that getting “arrested or beaten up” - or worse - was a very real possibility. And the fact that others before her had done the same thing and gotten arrested just brought that home.
That she was part of a carefully crafted endeavor rather than just some old lady with tired feet doesn’t diminish the fact that she could still have ended up bloody or in jail at the end of the day. What would it take for any of us to risk the same?
I don’t think anyone’s questioning her bravery or integrity, only pointing out that when the popular myth of her as a lone actor is dispelled, the true situation is a little less romantic than otherwise thought.
Right.
I also disagree that the “real heroes” were those that organized the boycott. They were extremely vital, no doubt. But they didn’t have to break any laws to play their part. Their faces and names weren’t printed in the papers, and their reputations weren’t put on the line in the same way that Rosa Parks’ was. They were community organizers, not symbols of defiance.
If anything, the “real heroes” were those who greatly inconvenienced themselves for weeks on end by abstaining from the bus. I don’t know if that magnitude of self-sacrifice, cooperation, and dedication to a cause could be replicated at the community-level today. This feat will never stop being impressive to me.
I disagree that this is a popular myth. Even the crappiest of schools teach that MLK and others were involved in the events surrounding Rosa Park’s arrest and subsequent boycott.
The myth I most commonly see is that Rosa Parks was less of a provocateur or more of a little old lady with sore feet or a tired back.
When people call her a “prop” or “just the face” or say 'I’m sure she was a sweet lady, but . . . " it is questioning her bravery or integrity. Yes, it takes MORE bravery to walk into a shit-storm knowing full well what you are doing, but that’s almost never the follow-up remark.
And of course of I’m simplifying here. MLK and others took a huge amount of flak during the boycott and even had their homes bombed. My main point is that Rosa Parks’ actions took her image from “safe and upstanding” to “law-breaking militant” in a way that didn’t happen for others involved in the movement.
This brings to mind a relevant essay by Paul Graham:
Part of the essay delves into the problem of unpopular opinions being shouted down with accusations "that’s racist” or “that’s offensive,” while the opinion’s merit (or lack thereof) goes unexamined. Rather than being cowed by such accusations, one may counter by pointedly asking the accuser whether he agrees or disagrees with the offensive/racist opinion, and why (with more clarity: don’t say “why do you think it’s racist?” Instead, say “never mind whether it’s racist or not, do you think it’s true?)”. For kids in grade school, on either side of the argument, this may serve as a growth moment in which they learn to pursue constructive discussion instead of trying to shut it down.
Fair enough. What I was trying to get at is that the myth involves this little old lady getting on the bus and refusing to move, because by God, she’s the equal of everyone on the bus and won’t be pushed around on account of being black.
In reality, she was already deeply involved in the civil rights movement and was actually an employee of the local NAACP chapter.
It still took big brass balls to do what she did, but it’s not as “romantic” as the myth would lead you to believe- more ballsy, less folksy, I suppose.
It’s like hearing about some guy’s amazing first aid and help to survivors of an auto accident that allowed several people to live who might have otherwise died. Sounds pretty astounding, until you find out that the guy was a medic in Afghanistan for 3 tours, and then it makes more sense. He still did something really amazing, and those people lived, but it’s a little less incredible considering that he’s not just some joe off the street, but rather a trained first responder.
But the second part doesn’t disagree with the first. She was the equal of everyone on the bus. She did refuse to be pushed around on account of being black.
Rosa Parks was intelligent and better educated than most black women of her time, but she still worked low paying jobs and occasionally worked as a maid for white people. Like many black people the only time in her life she’d made a decent wage was in WW2 when she was a typist at the local military base; the rest of her life she usually had to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Her husband was a barber who also did other work on the side. They weren’t indigent, but they were far from financially independent.
When she refused to give up her seat, KNOWING that they were going to use her for a test case (unlike Colvin she wasn’t 15 and pregnant, unlike the professor from Alabama State she didn’t have ties to the Communist party, unlike the minister she didn’t have a scandalous private life, etc.) she knew she was the right person for the test case. She didn’t have any major scandals, she didn’t have children who could be threatened, and she was intelligent and well spoken. She also knew that her life was about to take a serious nosedive. I’ve sometimes wondered if she’d known just how much if she still would have done it.
She was immediately fired. Her husband was fired soon after: the excuse for firing her husband was that there was a policy against discussing the Bus Boycott at his job (a barber shop on the military base) and somebody asked him how his wife was doing and he said “She’s fine”- in other words, contrived. A woman who had worked hard from the time she chopped cotton as a little girl on her grandfather’s farm was now without income and living on handouts- a powerful blow to her pride.
And then there were the death threats: so many on the phone that they had the line disconnected, and also by mail, and also cars driving by her house with people holding guns. She had to live in the back of the house with plyboard over the front windows and even then hope nobody had snuck into the back yard.
She was called every kind of name and spit at by good white Chrisjuns when she appeared in public. The only work she could get was working as a maid for Virginia Durr (also a hero of the Civil Rights era, but not an easy woman to get along with even by the admissions of her own children). And ultimately she was pushed aside by the chauvinism as men took the lead in the Civil Rights movement itself.
Her life in Montgomery became so unbearable that she, her husband (who developed a serious drinking problem beginning around this time), and her mother moved in with her brother in Detroit. The house they moved to was a very modest 4 BR 2 ba. townhouse already occupied by her brother, his wife, and most of their thirteen children. May sound like a minor enough adjustment, but when you’re coming from a very quiet life, probably pretty close to hell, and of course she had to say goodbye to all of her lifelong friends and relatives in a time when there was no facebook and long distance was damned expensive.
So basically her refusal to give up her seat destroyed her life as she knew it.
Now later she was an icon who got huge ovations, but that was much later. There would be paraprofessional jobs that only paid a living wage and still continual jeers and death threats until then. She never became rich, mainly because she donated most o the money she received from speaking fees to her organization. She continued to live in a working class area of Detroit, where as an elderly woman she was mugged by an armed burglar.
Long story short: she risked her life in keeping her seat and sacrificed a lot more than the price of a fine.
Well, she also wasted bus fare.
I think it’s actually more incredible when you understand that she knew and understood what she was signing up for. But the fact is that the vast majority of the time people who start the conversation with “The Rosa Parks situation was staged” want to end with “So she really wasn’t brave, or special. Really, why do we make such a big deal out of these people? They didn’t do all that much”. It’s about discounting the significance and the tremendous contributions of the civil rights movement, and to downplay the evils of segregation. It’s not about a passion for historical accuracy.
Anyone who wants to have a wider discussion has to deal with the fact that those folk have tainted the discussion, and needs to distance themselves from a predictable, trite argument. That’s the conversation the OP needs to have with his son.
Yeah, the motivation is important. Attempting to move beyond simplistic historical explanations is one thing; doing it out of a desire to minimize or discount or even ridicule the accomplishments of the civil rights movement is something else altogether, and i think you’re right that, for some people at least, this is the underlying goal.
You see similar stuff in discussions of Martin Luther King. There’s a poster on this very message board who has made a little hobby of starting threads, often around MLK Day, focusing on King’s infidelity and on accusations of plagiarism. Of course, his only motivation in doing this is to provide a well-rounded and historically accurate assessment of King’s life and contributions. :rolleyes:
I think that, in the case of Parks, giving the whole story about the organization and the lead-up to the boycott actually makes Parks, if anything, seem even more admirable. Anyone can decide, on the spur of the moment, that they’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. Sometimes such actions are largely a product of emotion, and don’t involve a lot of thought, or calculations of risk and reward. But for a black person to actively decide, in the segregationist South of the 1950s, to violate segregation laws in the hopes of getting arrested and sparking an extended conflict with the forces of “law and order” took real courage.
And it was especially courageous because they knew that beatings and violence and intimidation and job losses and even murder could result from taking such decisions. While the outcome of the Montgomery protest and the broader civil rights struggle might look inevitable to us in 2016, and it might seem like Rosa Parks was always a famous and widely-respected person, it didn’t look like that in Alabama in 1955. And, as Sampiro makes clear, even after the country as a whole came to recognize her contribution, Parks herself did not live the life of celebrity luxury that modern Americans, in the age of reality TV, often assume goes along with national fame.
Edit:
Another thing wrong with the “tired old lady” story? Parks wasn’t old. That day on the bus, she was 42.
This also makes me question whether the OP’s son was being a good faith participant in class or if he was being an arrogant prick. You know, the kind of kid who tries to make a point by totally missing the point.
And I also question whether his classmate really called him a racist or if his comment was more nuanced than that.
At any rate, education starts at the home, so the real failure in pedagogy here is not with the teacher. It’s with the OP, who somehow doesn’t know how to put the significance of Rosa Park’s heroicism in the context of 1950’s Jim Crow. This should not even be a thread.