I’m not at all trying to downplay what she did - I’m saying that the way it went down sort of busts the myth*, and sets it in a braver, more ballsy light, but less “romantic” in the sense of a stirring myth.
The myth I’d always heard was essentially that Parks was a lone actor on the bus, and refused to give up her seat, and it was this sort of unsolicited spark that started the bus boycott and fired up the civil rights movement from there.
Having her work for the NAACP and deliberately picking a fight was braver, but less of a stirring sotry in the sense that everyone knew she was doing it, and were ready to pounce. It wasn’t a lone random spark, it was someone with a lighter starting the fire.
I missed the part of the thread where the teacher did something wrong. Your kid says something, the teacher asks him to explain his viewpoint, and then what? What happened to make you say this?
I can understand a know-it-all eighth grader sincerely believing that what Rosa Parks did wasn’t a big deal, because she was part of a larger movement. He’s young and this is ancient history for him, so he likely doesn’t truly understand that she knowingly put her life at risk, which is always a big deal. An adult is old enough to know better, though.
And what people are saying is that this is wrong. It doesn’t make it “less stirring”. It makes it more stirring. But I guess it depends on your vantage point, right? People who take inspiration from stories like Parks’ aren’t going to feel any less inspired because she wasn’t a victim of her own impulsiveness. They are gonna be inspired by the fact that she deliberately set out to fuck the system, at much risk to herself.
And not everyone knew she was doing it. The white establishment sure as hell didn’t, otherwise they wouldn’t have fallen into the trap the movement set for them. And obviously, lots of people today still don’t know her actions were deliberate and premeditated. Her plan was something only a few people knew, by design. Because again, the key to getting community support was her reputation as a wholesome, law-abiding pillar.
MLK Jr. was very deliberate in his civil disobedience. He protested always knowing he was going to get arrested and thrown in jail. And so did everyone in his circle.
The man has a holiday named after him for some reason.
Sure, Rosa Parks was an activist. Another activist was Fannie Lou Hamer. She was a sharecropper, but she was also one of those “rabble-rousers” trying to get people to vote. And for her efforts, she was beaten so badly by the police that she had permanent kidney damage. If we can say that Fannie Lou Hamer was a real America hero, why shouldn’t we give the same glory to Rosa? Both women made the world pay attention.
In our 21st century mindset, “activist” connotes a certain image. Maybe we think of some Birkenstock-wearing, Whole Foods-shopping, whiny liberal type who majored in feminist studies–I don’t know. But “activist” is not a title that automatically comes with full salary and benefits. It’s just a description of a certain kind of person. You can be mealy-mouthed and unemployed and still be an activist.
Seems to me that knowing that Rosa Parks was an activist rather than a passive bystander should make her more deserving of respect, not less.
The role of Emmett Till’s murder in the Bus Boycott is not well known, but there is one. On the Sunday before she was arrested, Parks had been to a special church service where one of the relatives present when he was abducted talked about it, they had seen photographs of his body, and they read aloud from the Look magazine article in which his murderers, who were acquitted barely a month after the murder and in spite of a mountain of evidence, bragged about killing him. Till was murdered in late August and was still very much in the news at the time.
Significance:
1- This was WHY she was willing to say “To hell with this”- it galvanized her (this wasn’t her first run-in with an A-hole bus driver- it wasn’t even her first encounter with THAT one, but she had been hoping the cup would pass to another)
2- She knew full well she lived in a time and place where she could LITERALLY be murdered in front of a dozen witnesses and her killers walk free and even profit from it. (Till’s murderers got $5,000 from Look magazine- far more than either had ever earned in a year; a black war hero in Mississippi was shot in the face with a shotgun on the courthouse lawn in front of witnesses the same year and his death was ruled an accident.)
I’ve often wondered if Till’s murder might have had another significance for her. Pretty much every old black woman I have ever talked to in any depth about that era has stories about the white men who sexually preyed on black women for sport. Rape was a common occurrence. Light skinned black women were particularly vulnerable, and Rosa Parks was very light-skinned; even if she was never raped I have no doubt at all she would’ve been far more than we would call sexually harassed at some point in her life. However, not one white man went to prison for raping a black woman in mid 20th century Alabama, same in Mississippi, and yet the rumor that Emmett Till whistled at a white woman got him abducted, tortured, murdered, and thrown in a river. That is a visceral homicidal anger to me as a white man in the 21st century; can you imagine how powerful the rage must have been in a very intelligent self respecting black woman who had likely had more crude advances from white men in her day than she could count.
It took serious guts to do what she did, and rage can bolster courage, and I’ve often wondered if the Till service that week might have pushed her over the edge of her fear and into history,
As an aside, the Southern Poverty Law Center offers a free documentary to schools on the Birmingham Childrens Crusade. In resonates really well with kids - because these were kids - and shows how many people were involved and made heroic gestures.
I would highly recommend you send a link to the teacher and administration and suggest they get a copy for their review and perhaps integration into the Civil Rights curriculum.
How was his son correct? It’s been pointed out several times that Rosa Parks risked her life and gave up her future to be the “test case”. It wasn’t a little thing and she was every inch a hero.
Forget it, its so much easier to assume the teacher was the ignorant, irrational one in the story instead of the son of the OP. Who, lest it be forgotten, also affirmed the absurdity that what Rosa Parks did was “no big deal”.
I’m interested to know whether the OP used the information in this thread to start the in depth conversation on Rosa Parks with his son, that the teacher supposedly failed to.
Contrary to what some have suggested here, Rosa Parks was not pre-selected by the NAACP to be a test case. She herself said that she made her decision on the spot not to move to the back of the bus. She also said that she wasn’t aware when she boarded the bus that the bus driver was one she had trouble with years earlier.
Rosa Parks was an NAACP secretary, and she knew they were looking for a test case. Given her character and standing within the organization it was pretty obvious once she was arrested that hers would be that case. That doesn’t mean she was chosen by the NAACP for this task.
She deserves credit not just for her actions that day, but for being a civil rights activist for most of her adult life. She worked for the NAACP before the incident, and continued to do civil rights work for years afterwards despite the hardships that the bus case brought to her. She had trouble finding work because of the public attention her activism brought, yet she didn’t back away from it.
I will say that I’ve read a bunch of children’s books on Rosa Parks, and I’ve never seen one that talks about her history with the NAACP or the Highlander Folk Center. The mainstream narrative in elementary school materials is very much the Lone Hero narrative, rather than the Organized Action narrative.
And yeah, if you approach things from a highly individualistic point of view, the Lone Hero narrative is more romantic. IMO it reinforces a pernicious idea: if you want to fight injustice, do it alone, that’s the best way. The true narrative, in which people without power get together and organize and figure out how to take power, has its own romanticism, the romanticism of La Marseillaise (maybe a bit less bloody). I make sure my students know that Rosa Parks wasn’t just fed up, she was smart and strategic, and that that’s the best way to get things done. She’s a wonderful role model if you know what she really did.
If you want to be really cynical–and I get more and more cynical as I age–I think you can also argue that white people in general are a lot more comfortable with the idea of a lone respectable black woman taking a stand on sheer emotion than with the idea that black people organized and coordinated a world-changing movement.
That might be a bit too cynical. People have this idea that protest needs to be a spontaneous event to be sincere. Look at the Occupy events that had such a diffuse leadership and agenda that aside from starting a conversation about inequality accomplished nothing. They were happy to be unfocused when it would’ve been better to be organized.
I think there’s a lot accuracy to that. The Highlander Folk School was investigated by the FBI and accused of Communism; this was, and even today to a lesser degree still is, a common response to activists getting organized.
And that’s all I was trying to say- the facts essentially explode the Lone Hero narrative that is promulgated to most schoolchildren, or at the very least was for a very long time.
I wasn’t trying to say that by busting the myth, it somehow made her less brave, or less worthy- far from it. If anything, it takes a lot more courage to decide to do something like that ahead of time, rather than on the spur of the moment. But that’s not what the myth was about.
It’s like if that Chinese guy who stopped the tanks in 1989 had been part of a group, and that was his predetermined job. Doesn’t make the guy any less brave, but it does explode the Lone Hero myth that’s grown up around him, as he was an intentional part of a larger whole. In essence, it shifts the focus onto the organization, not the individual.
Well basically I told him history has alot of depth to it and schools really cannot go into any one person or incident that deeply. They can basically only skim over things ala “The Civil War was about slavery” type. Plus one has to be careful about how they discuss famous historical figures.
I guess I’ve taught the kid to be willing to stand their ground and argue points but I discussed their are times and places for everything and often its just best to go along with the crowd.