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In Memory: Rosa Parks

Jill

rosa

At 92, Rosa Parks has passed away. There’s probably nothing I can say about her that will do justice to what a remarkable human being she was, and that will fully capture her contribution to the world we live in today. I know many people take issue with Jesse Jackson, but I thought his reaction was appropriate: “She sat down in order that we might stand up. Paradoxically, her imprisonment opened the doors for our long journey to freedom.”

Shy and soft-spoken, Mrs. Parks often appeared uncomfortable with the near-beatification bestowed upon her by blacks, who revered her as a symbol of their quest for dignity and equality. She would say that she hoped only to inspire others, especially young people, “to be dedicated enough to make useful lives for themselves and to help others.”

She also expressed fear that since the birthday of Dr. King became a national holiday, his image was being watered down and he was being depicted as merely a “dreamer.”

“As I remember him, he was more than a dreamer,” Mrs. Parks said. “He was an activist who believed in acting as well as speaking out against oppression.”

She would laugh in recalling some of her experiences with children whose curiosity often outstripped their grasp of history: “They want to know if I was alive during slavery times. They equate me along with Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and ask if I knew them.”

I’m sure there will be many more things written about her in the coming days. Feel free to leave additional links in the comments. While I doubt it will be a problem, any rude, innappropriate or off-topic comments on this post will be deleted.

Thanks to Sumeet for the immediate IM and the enthusiastic “I love that woman!” when it was posted on the Times website.

30 thoughts on In Memory: Rosa Parks

  3. I’m so glad that she lived such a long life – I hope it was happy.

    She was the feminist of the day just a couple of days ago and I wrote about her as part of a feature on my blog where I use the feminist of the day to discuss feminism.

    Although I have to disagree with Marksman2000 – she absolutely didn’t have balls.

  4. I was looking at this sad announcement at Billmon and saw Miss Rosa’s Arrest Picture. This led me to think about the same for Delay last week, and what we might expect in the next few days (I assume federal courts also have blotters). It really, wrenchingly made me thing about what this is all about, and what’s actually important about this fight. And why.

  5. I’m reminded of this scene from when my kids were younger:

    MTV News: blah blah blah Tupac Shakur

    Son: Man, Tupac was a warrior!

    Dad: No he wasn’t, he was a jerk who got killed because he did stupid things.

    MTV News: blah blah blah Rosa Parks

    Dad: Now Rosa Parks, she’s a warrior!

    Son and Daughter: Yeah! She’s cool!

  7. I find it hard to get excited about Rosa Parks. She only became famous because there wasn’t anything in her background that could be used to defame her as distraction from anti-segregation efforts.

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  9. David, the Russian judge gives that troll a 2.3 for lame blatancy.

    I remember back when some young idiot broke into her house and stole stuff. He turned himself in and apologized real fast when the news printed the story of whose house had gotten burglarized.

  10. David Thompson, her arrest was the trigger of the Mongomery bus boycott partly because there wasn’t anything in her background that cold be used to defame her, but her efforts against segregation both before and after her arrest deserve recognition.

  11. Rosa Parks is not a diety and there’s no such thing as an absolute hero, but she was a noble person who did good, and it’s shitty that you’re trying to defame her by saying she was un-defamable. Your doublethink is bullshit.

    My top google search today is “Rosa Parks Bullshit” which I did not write about, but rather posted about Rosa Parks and I use the word bullshit a lot. Sick sad world this.

  12. I find it hard to get excited about Rosa Parks. She only became famous because there wasn’t anything in her background that could be used to defame her as distraction from anti-segregation efforts.

    …And that’s a point against the good woman? Of course anti-segregation activists chose a spokesperson who couldn’t be defamed. Her strength of character isn’t false because it was used in a calculated political strategy, and none of what happened impugns either the sincerity of the original protest or the decades of work that followed.

  13. Today is an excellent day for ppeople to check out this brief excerpt of Paul Rogat Loeb’s book Soul of a Citizen. The excerpt refers to Rosa Parks, and the popular myth that has sprung up around her. Loeb does a great job in the longer version of defusing that myth without doing any disservice to Parks’ true bravery.

    The myth: Rosa Parks was somehow extraordinary, the kind of person whose like we rarely see.

    The reality: Rosa Parks was an impressively brave, committed activist who is justly remembered for her work, and there are thousands like her today.

  14. David, is this some ill-considered attempt to show how independent-minded you are? If all you’re saying is that in the macro-cycles of history, segregation could not have lasted forever, then this is trivially true. If you’re saying that the larger narrative could have read about the same with someone else in that bus seat and the real credit goes to all the black folks in Montgomery who walked every day, then I agree that Rosa Parks is largely a convenient face for the acts of a whole community. And I don’t think she ever disagreed with that. But if you’re just trying to piss all over someone who was prepared to take a personal risk at a time when history needed someone to do just that, then shame on you. The same argument of individual fungibility could be used to ignore the actions of every civil rights protester who sat at a “whites only” lunch counter.

  15. David’s troll just reminds me that I’m glad Sam Francis died before Rosa Parks, because otherwise we’d have to hear (again) his racist attempts to find something in her background to defame her.

  17. David has not yet come to terms with the fact that he will accomplish nothing of value to himself or others in his miserable, fetid little waste of a life. He must therefore lash out cynically at any attempt to honor someone who did accomplish something worthy, and as part of that lashing out he calls such tributes “hagiography,” as he knows full well the unlikelihood that anyone will reflect similarly on the day his body is landfilled, and that bothers him.

  18. O ye bramble-headed thunkwits, I have no love of hagiography. Also, learn to read. That is all.

    I have very little patience with kneejerk anti-hagiography. Like, for example, implying that Rosa Parks was mainly useful to the civil-rights movement because she was schoolmarmish. She did a very brave thing. She continued to do very brave things. She spent her life working very hard to make sure that the kind of casual racism that got her arrested would never gain such a foothold again. Granted, a lot of her fame is due to circumstance: she did that extremely brave thing at a crucial time. That doesn’t make her act of protest any less important, or any less courageous.

  19. He’s not dissing Rosa Parks, you bramble-headed thunkwits. (That’s my new phrase of the day.) He’s saying that there were a lot of people in the civil rights movement who were brave and important just like her, but that we have her being held up for hagiography because at the time she was smear-proof. It’s a critique of (a) the racist shitheads who opposed civil rights for blacks and used smear tactics to make its leaders look bad and (b) the media-driven celebrity culture.

  20. but that we have her being held up for hagiography because at the time she was smear-proof.

    Because, as we all know, flawed, smearable people like Martin Luther King have never ever been hagiographized, and are thus far less well-known than Rosa Parks.

  21. I’m fairly certain that if there were any dirt on her, people like David would be saying “now, let’s not forget that she was a slut/ cheated on her taxes/ advocated violence/ or whatever.” I understand why you resent her being smear-proof. It deprives you of an opportunity to smear her.

    Lots of people behaved with extraordinary courage during the civil rights movement. Lots of people put their safety, their livelihood, and their lives on the line. But that doesn’t in any way diminish Rosa Parks’s courage. And generally, when we eulogize people, we do not point out that lots of other people were equally brave, kind, successful, loved, or anything else. It seems sort un-generous to diminish the accomplishments of the person who has just died.

  22. MLK won through the smears, Chris. He wasn’t immune to them. A lot of other people with similar courage and resolution to Parks weren’t as fortunate.

  23. What Chris Clarke said. Hagiography most often refuses to admit that the saint in question had any skeletons. It doesn’t require a pristine record to flourish.

    And I disagree. While–remember, Robert?–it’s very important not to assume that pointing out insulting beliefs is the same as holding them oneself, I don’t think that’s all that’s going on here.

    He said that she only became famous because there was nothing in her past to discredit her. I consider this insulting both to the civil-rights leaders who “chose” her and to Rosa Parks herself, and I don’t think it’s a valid conclusion to draw from the praise she has received throughout her life. There are a lot of reasons why this woman would become a popular hero: the everyday nature of the famous story is the most obvious.

    He also said that he, personally, found it “hard to get excited” about her. In other words, he is not merely disparaging racist shitheads and the cult of celebrity, but denigrating her achievements. Her protest wasn’t that valuable.

  24. The thing that bothers me about the spin on Rosa Parks is that many accounts focus on the act, as if it occurred in isolation. They don’t emphasize the

    brave committed activist

    part. She was involved in the movement before and after her arrest. I don’t think that takes away from her legacy at all, but adds to it, by emphasizing that she a powerful, political woman engaged in organized resistance.

  25. Yes, absolutely. She was a member of the NAACP for years before her (most famous) arrest, founded the Youth Council of the NAACP, studied at the pro-integration Highlander Folk School, and was arrested several times for refusing to give up her seat to a white person before her historic arrest.

    In the year preceeding her famous arrest, E. D. Nixon, a minister and president of the local NAACP, had been drawing up plans for a mass bus boycott (with other community activists), but didn’t know when to launch it. It almost happened when a 15 year old girl was arrested, but she was pregnant and unmarried, so they decided against exposing her to that kind of scrutiny. When Rosa Parks was arrested a few months later, the boycott was launched, in part because they knew she was such a stand-up citizen and couldn’t be smeared. Note: her refusal to give up her seat was a personally spontaneous act in that she hadn’t received instructions (or even the suggestion) to sit down on that day or any other. She sat down on that day cause she was tired both physically and socially. The decision to launch the boycott was a spontaneous reaction to her arrest, but one based on about a year of planning.

    Anyways, what’s the point of my rambling? I dunno.

    I guess it’s that, although I have a lot of problems with how her act is portrayed (just some innocent old lady sitting down, and every black person sponaneously boycotting busses), I still think she deserves a lot recognition for what she did on December 2, 1955, and the years before and after.

    And I think part of the popularity of the spontaneous-act myth is that, even today, white Americans are terrified of the idea of their black people organizing.

  26. — And I think part of the popularity of the spontaneous-act myth is that, even today, white Americans are terrified of the idea of their black people organizing.

    Or perhaps at least some of us think that ordinary people who have done extraordinary things are very cool people and should be remembered. The thought that someone who (according to the story) didn’t really have an agenda just stood up (or sat down) and said “This isn’t fair and it needs to stop” appeals to the notion of the courageous American, standing up for freedom and against injustice. Hey, look at the legends and stories surrounding our Revolutionary war — plenty of that kind of thing going on there. It’s a very powerful image, and has always been presented in a positive manner in my experience.

    Finding out that it was not AS spontaneous is kind of a downer, but as I generally believe that truth is better than fiction where history is concerned, I’ll keep the truth in mind from here on out. And be obnoxious enough to correct people as necessary.

    It’s not to say that the thought of black/brown people organizing doesn’t scare the beejeebers out of some white people — I think that’s a very valid point, even if it does sadden me greatly — just that there are (hopefully!) other reasons as well that her story had such appeal.

    Just some thoughts….

  28. Yeah, I was being largely facetious with that point, but there is a certain amount of truth to it.

    Partly, the people within the civil rights movement who were int he position o manage its image saw certain tactical advantages in making it look purely spontaneous, precisely for the reasons you brought up. The ordinary person standing up for what’s right is a very powerful (if not especialy realistic) image.

    The ore I study it and think about it, the more I think the image of Rosa Parks as a committed activist is more powerful than that of Rosa Parks as a tired lady who wanted to sit down. Partly because I like people who spend their lives fighting for justice.

    And if you really wanna get into America’s fear of minorities organizing, there’s lots of material out there about the FBI’s repressive action against the Black Power, Chicano, and American Indian movements in the 70s…..

  29. I don’t think that ignoring her career is defensible, but I agree with Laurie. I think the attempt to portray Rosa Parks as a completely average person who did this courageous thing is at least in part driven by a desire to believe that completely average people can become major historical figures by taking a stand against injustice in any place and at any time. Sort of a progressive version of the idea that anyone can grow up to be president.

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