I was actually wondering if you two discussed the hardships that she went through - the things that she knew could happen if she chose to stay seated, and the fact that she decided to do that anyway. But it doesn’t sound like that made it into the discussion? Did you know about the things that she went through and do you think that signing up for that is no big deal?
The whole idea that the importance of your sacrifice is diminished because you’re part of a group is such a strange idea. It’s like saying “who cares about those people who joined the Army to fight in WWII. You’d have to be the President, or a lone wolf who boarded a plane and confronted Hitler on your own to *really *matter.”
Bolding mine. No one “predetermined” Rosa Parks to do anything. She could have chosen to remain a no-arrest-record-having, “good negro” secretary. But instead she made another choice.
You’ve making it sound as if she was carrying out someone else’s orders, when that’s not how it went down at all.
When I was a kid, I was taught that Rosa refused to move to the back, she was arrested, MLK and others bailed her out, which then provided the publicity needed to spurn a massive boycott that proved highly successful and ultimately led Montgomery to change its policies.
While the premediated nature of her actions was not featured in the narrative taught to me–and like I said earlier, it was often implied she was an old lady who refused to move only because she was tired–I never ever had the impression she was a “Lone Hero”. It was always evident to me that in the absence of “Organized Action”, Parks would have just been one more black person locked up over some racist foolishness.
Something similar could be said for Harriet Tubman. As a kid, I was taught that Tubman was an escaped slave who helped other hundreds of other slaves run away over the course of many journeys. But I never was led to believe she was a “Lone Hero”. Obviously her efforts would have been impossible without the organized network of the Underground Railroad and other abolitionists. She was one part of a larger movement, but we remember her because she was literally on the frontlines, had the most to lose (namely, her life), and was the public face of the missions she led.
So I have to scratch my head over this stuff about which narratives are really being promulgated and which are really “romantic” or not. Whether these figures are portrayed as “Lone Heros” or not, I don’t see what any of this has to do with the OP’s premise that what they did was not a big deal.
I kind of have to agree with you. The depiction of Rosa Parks as just a fatigued old domestic worker, too tired one day to comply with the bus driver’s orders, is rather consistent with whitewashing efforts to downplay the kind of black militancy that has never been well-tolerated in this country. There’s also sexism in there as well. It’s easy to cast an old lady (who was actually not old) as a victim of circumstance who needs to be rescued by others (i.e. men).
But if we see Parks as a young black woman deliberately instigating some shit in a calculated manner, then that doesn’t quite fit the picture of justified defiance that good Americans can universally get behind. To be young and so entitled…well, that’s kind of uppity when you get down to it. I can understand an old lady refusing to get up from her seat because…well, she’s old and tired! But not no sassy mouthed secretary!
It’s not cynical to believe these biases contribute to the “old lady” narrative. It’s been around around since the incident occurred, and it’s not hard to see the purposes it has served.
But his point is, understandably for a 14 year old living in 21st Century America, crap. She deliberately put herself in harms way at a time when that meant she could’ve been killed with impunity. It’s great that he felt comfortable presenting a different view in class but he’s missing the actual threat to her safety and life she chose to shoulder.
Some quotes from Parks herself (courtesy of Wikiquote):
“I did not get on the bus to get arrested. I got on the bus to go home.”
Quoted in Rita Dove, “Rosa Parks: Her simple act of protest galvanized America’s civil rights revolution,” Time (1999-06-14)by kurtis
“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
Rosa Parks: My Story, p. 116, Rosa Parks and James Haskins (1992)
“I did not want to be mistreated, I did not want to be deprived of a seat that I had paid for. It was just time… there was opportunity for me to take a stand to express the way I felt about being treated in that manner. I had not planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do without having to end up in jail. But when I had to face that decision, I didn’t hesitate to do so because I felt that we had endured that too long. The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive it became.”
“Parks Recalls Bus Boycott, Excerpts from an interview with Lynn Neary”, National Public Radio (1992), linked at “Civil Rights Icon Rosa Parks Dies”, NPR, October 25, 2005.
I think it’s also a very American thing in general, another facet of that famous individualism. The way some people tell it, you’d think that fight at Little Big Horn only truly involved two guys: the rest were eating popcorn and cheering them on, and the fact that more than one guy died was just hooliganism run out of hand. You don’t talk about, say, “the Carthaginian troops”, you say “Hannibal”. It’s a matter of expression but it builds on the idea of the lone heroic figure and on the notion that to be heroic you need to be alone.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that’s an American thing. We talk about Caesar crossing the Rubicon, but nobody would have cared if it was just Caesar fording a river on his own. It was important because he had an army with him and Roman law forbade armies from entering Roman Italy (and the Rubicon marked the northern border of the province of Italia).
We use individuals as shorthand for organizations so often that frankly only a simpleton would literally think history was truly studded with “Lone Heros”.
For instance, we credit Obama with all manner of things, when it’s really his administration and associated executive branch responsible for what gets done and doesn’t. No one thinks he literally killed Bin Laden, but that doesn’t stop us from saying he did as shorthand. We understand that leaders catalyze actions using their position and influence. The history books then assign them credit for those actions.
“Lone Heroes” may have been an unfortunate word choice above. My wife reminded me it’s more commonly called the Great Man theory of history, in which the coordinated action of bunches of people is downplayed in favor of treating history as the actions of a few Great Men and Women.
The traditional Parks story, in which she just up and decided one day out of the blue to stand up for her rights and sparked a massive social change, is in the Great Man tradition. The true story, in which she worked with the NAACP and the Highland Folk Life Center to analyze and plan successful actions, doesn’t move her into obscurity, but rather it emphasizes that social change comes when lots of people work together, not when a Hero emerges to carry the torch.
The bolded is not mutually exclusive with the non-bolded, though. One day, Rosa Parks did up and decide to stand up for her rights. She wasn’t drafted into it and she wasn’t paid to do it. She wasn’t some sleeper cell agent just waiting for her grand shining moment to “awaken”.
Based on the contributions of some more scholarly posters here, it seems this was actually a spontaneous decision on her part. Not the result of a pre-planned operation hatched by an organization. This was a volitional and principled action taken by an individual that then catalyzed organized action, and it was by no means inevitable she was going to sacrifice her normal life for what she got in return. Do you dispute this characterization? I’m not sure if you do or not.
Yes, she wasn’t a stranger to the NACCP and she’d been trained up activism. I just don’t buy the idea that being socially conscious, educated, and mentally prepared for battle precludes one from being a “Great Man”. Because such a thing would pretty much disqualify every celebrated figure in human history from being “Great”.
But Rosa Parks didn’t give up her future. She went from a seamstress to the secretary of a congressman and a national hero. I think it’s extraordinarily rare, if not unheard of, for people to act in a truly selfless manner. They usually do things because they get something. Not always material things, but also abstract concepts like fame, self-worth, and being important.
Uh…things could have gone very differently for her. Remember, this was only a few months after horrific murder of Emmett Till. I’m pretty sure she didn’t get on the bus that day thinking what a glorious life laid ahead of her if she merely decided not to move.
Things weren’t all rosy for Rosa Parks after her arrest. She lost her job, and her husband quit his job because he was forbidden to talk about his wife at work. She received death threats (and as has been pointed out several times in this thread, she had to take these seriously). She had to leave Mongomery because she couldn’t find a job. She was a hero to many, but was also widely hated. She couldn’t know at the time she refused to move on the bus that she would eventually become an aide to a congressman and a national icon. That wasn’t what motivated her.
Would you piss off white supremacists who have your home address and leave all of your friends behind (no facebook) and look over your shoulder for several years in exchange for the ‘payoff’ of a middle class job as a secretary to a Congressman you don’t know?
I never thought there’d be the day that I would say this, but here’s a pretty balanced discussion about Rosa Parks in this old reddit thread. The thread is about myths born out of misconceived efforts to “set the record straight” about what she accomplished. The OP argues that ideas that are increasingly being touted as givens about the incident (it was staged, premeditated, the product of grand orchestration, not all that groundbreaking because of forerunner cases, etc) are just as false as the tired old lady storyline that we tend to view as the real myth.
A couple posters also theorize that these “backlash myths” probably derive their truthiness from something called second-option bias. Which, upon reading, seems to be a shoe that fits. Now that people are learning the “tired old lady” is inaccurate, they are overshooting in the other direction and portraying her as an activist soldier in a big elaborate chess game.
The truth is in the middle: she was a young activist, not an old lady. She took a principled stand one day that happened to be spontaneous, not premediated or calculated. She served as an ideal test case, but was not positioned in advance to be that test case. She attended a workshop on activism and was a NACCP member, but these orgs did not play any direct role in her deciding to stay seated that day.
So maybe I’m wrong on this. My understanding is that, while her decision that day was spontaneous, it was a long time coming: she’d talked with people about the possibility of serving as a test case, she’d considered how she’d make for a great test case, she’d worked with other activists to come up with some ideas about what would work best. It wasn’t planned on that day that she’d do anything, nor had she even decided that she’d put herself forward as a test case ever–but without the support and analysis and discussion with other activists in advance, it’s likely she wouldn’t have made the move she made.
Reading that reddit, maybe I AM wrong on this. My understanding hinges on the idea that she knew about the plans for a test case and had some discussion about those plans in advance. IOW, did she know that she’d be working with a bunch of other folks to get this thing done, or did she act alone, not knowing she’d have any support?