Rosa Parks
My children can’t imagine what it was like before Rosa Parks. They are appalled when we tell them.
I mean that as a tribute to her.
The story for which Rosa Parks is famous is not as I was taught it.
I was five when she refused to move out of the whites-only seats at the front of the bus. I was told that she was a humble Black woman who, after a hard day of work, was too tired to get up. In fact, she was a committed civil rights worker, a secretary in the Montgomery office of the NAACP where she recorded reports of racial discrimination and interviewed African-Americans with legal complaints. (I in fact was taught she was a white family’s maid. Did those telling the story just assume that that’s what black women do?)
It’s a better story the first way, but why?
The mythic version is so powerful because of what it doesn’t say. Obviously, the point wasn’t that she was tired, that she collapsed in the seat and was physically unable to stand up. Presumably she was tired every day. The point of the myth is exactly that this day was like every other except for what happened in Rosa Parks’ heart. On that day like any other, a woman like any other rose above the accepted condition. Like the first photo of the whole earth seen from space, Parks’ refusal to change seats transformed our perspective. What had been presented as an inevitable way of the world Parks revealed as a fragile system with which — suddenly — one did not have to comply. The heroism of non-compliance was, Rosa Parks showed, available to everyone.
That’s why the story works better the more “ordinary” the hero is.
We like stories of ordinary heroes because they tell us heroism is within our grasp as well. (Why we aren’t instead shamed by their implicit denunciation of our own failures to be heroic is beyond me.) But, while stories of the humble becoming heroes may appeal to us, a life like Parks’ is all the more admirable: She didn’t postpone heroism, waiting for the moment to happen to her. She became a worker for civil rights in a time and place where that took daily heroism.
Then, on December 1, 1955, she was tired of complying with a system that degraded her, so she came to a full stop, not knowing the consequences. She demanded the system either acknowledge her dignity or demonstrate its full depravity. It takes a genuine faith in human goodness to think that we will not let a system stand once its corrupt nature has been exposed.
I would be happy to celebrate Rosa Parks Day every December 1. We Americans would be better for explicitly embracing her true story as a mythic expression of our values. [Tags: RosaParks]
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Whether it is true or not, I have read that the original idea for blacks’ refusing to give up their seats on the bus in Montgomery came from a couple of teenage girls or very young women (I forget the details). The powers that be in the civil rights movement felt that an older woman would be a more sympathetic figure. And I’m sure they were right, as the most popular adjective applied to black protesters by white segregationists was “uppity.” When I was a teenager in Alabama in the 1950’s blacks as well as women were expected to “know their place.”
I’m not sure why the Rosa Parks myth included her being a maid, but it seems there may have been some conscious myth-making on the part of the civil rights leaders. And the “maid” element has an underlying truth, even if Rosa Parks herself was a clerical worker. Far and away the majority of black women riding the bus in Montgomery in those days were maids going to work in white people’s homes, and Rosa Parks’ protest spoke for them.
There seems to be another facet to the story. At least according to NPR Tuesday morning, Ms. Parks wasn’t the only black woman to refuse to stand up or change her seat that year. But for whatever reason, her arrest was the one that triggered the boycott. It is said that she was highly regarded in the community, and perhaps that was the reason her arrest brought on the tipping point. Or perhaps the ground had been prepared by those other ladies, whose bravery was mostly unperceived at the time, and who are now unknown to the rest of us.
From what I know of her, Ms.Parks did not welcome fame. Had her arrest been as ignored as the others, and had some following woman’s demonstration precipitated the avalanche instead, Ms. Parks might have been just as satisfied, perhaps happier in that she would not have felt compelled to eventually leave her home.
The actions all those ladies took strikes me as a exemplary depiction of laudable behavior in an age when “hero” is a word that is being thrown around a little too much.
Dr. D, can I have a TypeKey Identity?
Here’s my comment:
I agree that the story we were told — about an ordinary woman, on a day like any other — works well as the “heroic anywoman.” And I believe that story was the one the public could swallow (or choke on) back then. But now I think it’s equally important to tell the “real” story: It takes courage, a sense of purpose, and the will to take action in order to change the way people think. I think the now/current story says that better: Rosa Parks believed in something enough to take action — consciously, not frivolously. And yes, that takes incredible faith in human goodness and justice, IMHO.
The thread on Plastic says she was a seamstress: http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=05/10/25/07120342;cmt=38
Interesting how false things as well as true get remembered in the legend.
My morning paper said she was a seamstress on her way home from doing alterations in a department store. That is the kind of job a competent, well-regarded black woman might get in Montgomery in those days, as the alterations were done somewhere in the back of the stores, out of sight of the white customers. Being a seamstress and being secretary to the NAACP chapter are not mutually exclusive, as it is likely that the NAACP position was unpaid, as is my own current position as secretary to a citizens group of environmental activists.
The young women who’d been booted off the bus system for not going to the back were considered as test cases, but rejected because they weren’t such perfect examples as Rosa Parks was.
(I believe one of them was a bit of a hell-raiser–I forget why the other was unsuitable.)
The person at the focus of that case was going to have to be a Jackie Robinson–someone who was unassailable, unflappable, unmoveable. Rosa Parks was known to fit the bill–the others weren’t.
I prefer the true story tothe myth because the true story tells us what actually works.
It’s a better story the first way, but why?
I don’t agree with the premise. People getting together, reading, organising, arguing, taking action, failing, taking action again, failing again, trying again, and keeping on until one day a mass revolt is triggered and things start to move… That to me is the really heroic story – the heroism of the movement. One ordinary person saying Ah, the hell with this… and triggering a mass revolt is just a story, and ultimately it’s a consoling story: it says that when it all gets too much, things will change more or less of their own accord. The real story of Rosa Parks is that you’ve got to work at it.
Good point, Phil. And not at odds with my post, the point of which was that “a life like Parks’ is all the more admirable.” So, take “better” as meaning the one that catches on.
Good point, Phil. And not at odds with my post, the point of which was that “a life like Parks’ is all the more admirable.”
[checks original post]
Oh. Yeah. Well, I just wanted to register my disagreement with, um… with anyone who misrepresented your argument in that way. Because that would be wrong. Glad we’ve cleared that up.
A 1956 interview I heard the other day also countered the myth that she was in a whites-only section. I was actually astonished to hear it wasn’t the case as I had read in the past. Ms. Parks said that she’d sat in that middle section before, along with other black folk, even when it was standing-room only in the whites section, and never been ordered by the driver to move. When she was told to move on that one fateful day, she said she was surprised that she was being asked to do so.
SOURCE http://www.goodwriters.net/mickeyz72104.html
Get On The Bus: 150 Years After Elizabeth Jennings / 100 Years Before Rosa Parks
Copyright © 2004, Mickey Z. All Rights Reserved.
On the mornings I board the Q101 bus from Queens to Manhattan, it’s not uncommon for the majority of my fellow riders to be people of color. This is an unremarkable observation in 2004 New York where integrated buses are hardly news…thanks to Rosa Parks and her spontaneous act of bravery.
Well, that’s what we’re taught, aren’t we? However, to buy into the Rosa Parks mythology* not only involves ignoring some crucial history about 1955, it erases the name of Elizabeth “Lizzie” Jennings from Big Apple lore.
It was 150 years ago last week that Jennings, a 24-year-old schoolteacher setting out to fulfill her duties as organist at the First Colored Congregational Church on Sixth Street and Second Avenue, fatefully waited for the bus on the corner of Pearl and Chatham. Getting around 1854 New York City often involved paying a fare to board a large horse drawn carriage…the forerunner to today’s behemoth motorized buses. For black New Yorkers like Jennings, it wasn’t that simple.
Pre-Civil War Manhattan may have been home to the nation’s largest African-American population and New York’s black residents may have paid taxes and owned property, but riding the bus with whites, well, that was a different story. Some buses bore large “Colored Persons Allowed” signs, while all other buses-those without the sign-were governed by a rather arbitrary system of passenger choice.
“Drivers determined who could ride,” journalist Jasmin K. Williams explains, adding that NYC bus drivers “carried whips to keep undesirable passengers off.” This unfortunate arrangement was the focus of a burgeoning movement for public transportation equality with Rev. J.W.C. Pennington of the First Colored Congregational Church (where Jennings just so happened to play the organ) playing a major role.
Against such a volatile backdrop, Lizzie Jennings opted for a bus *without* the “Colored Persons Allowed” sign on July 16, 1854. The New York Tribune described what happened next: “She got upon one of the Company’s cars…on the Sabbath, to ride to church. The conductor undertook to get her off, first alleging the car was full; when that was shown to be false, he pretended the other passengers were displeased at her presence; but (when) she insisted on her rights, he took hold of her by force to expel her. She resisted.”
The outraged Jennings told the conductor she was “a respectable person, born and raised in this city,” calling him “a good-for-nothing, impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church.”
The Tribune picks up the story from there: “The conductor got her down on the platform, jammed her bonnet, soiled her dress and injured her person. Quite a crowd gathered, but she effectually resisted. Finally, after the car had gone on further, with the aid of a policeman they succeeded in removing her.”
This would not be the end of it for, like Rosa Parks, Jennings’ behavior was no impetuous act of resistance. “Jennings was well connected,” says Williams. “Her father was an important businessman and community leader with ties to the two major black churches in the city.” Not satisfied with the massive rally that took place the following day at her church, Elizabeth Jennings hired the law firm of Culver, Parker & Arthur and took the Third Avenue Railway Company to court.
In a classic “who knew?” situation, Jennings was represented by a 24-year-old lawyer named Chester A. Arthur…yes, he who would go on to become the 21st president upon the death of James A. Garfield in 1881. The trial took place in the bus company’s home base of Brooklyn-then a separate city-where, in early 1855, Judge William Rockwell of the Brooklyn Circuit Court ruled in the black schoolteacher’s favor…in that 1855 sort of way: “Colored persons if sober, well behaved and free from disease, had the same rights as others and could neither be excluded by any rules of the Company, nor by force or violence,” Rockwell declared.
Jennings claimed $500 worth of damages but as the Tribune put it, “Some jury members had peculiar notions as to colored people’s rights,” and she ended up with $225, plus another $22.50 for court costs. Regardless, just one day after the verdict, the Third Avenue Railway Company issued an order to admit African-Americans onto their buses.
By 1860, all of the city’s street and rail cars were desegregated…and Elizabeth Jennings had married Charles Graham. She was still teaching in New York’s African-American schools. Her struggles, however, were far from over.
Thanks to a July 1863 resolution called the Union Conscription Act, any New Yorker with a spare $300 was able to buy his way out of the Civil War draft. Resentment over such favoritism soon turned into rioting by poor whites. “The crowd’s anger (had) two sources,” explains historian Kenneth C. Davis, “the idea of fighting to free the slaves, and the unfairness of the ability of the wealthy to avoid conscription.” The ensuing “Draft Riots” saw over 70 African-Americans lynched. There were other, lesser-known victims…like Thomas J. Graham, one-year-old son of Elizabeth and Charles. Circumstances surrounded the child’s death remain unclear but author John Hewitt, who has researched Jennings’s life, believes young Thomas died of “convulsions” as the rioting and violence played out on the streets outside his home.
Although calm had yet to be restored to her city, Elizabeth Graham boldly solicited the help of a white undertaker and managed to get her son’s body to Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery for a proper burial.
Elizabeth Jennings-Graham died in 1901…and I seriously doubt many of my co-commuters on the Q101 have ever heard of her.
*Elizabeth Jennings’ spiritual progeny was also “well-connected,” having spent twelve years leading her local NAACP chapter. The summer before she refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, Parks “attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee’s labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she’d met an older generation of civil rights activists and discussed the recent Supreme Court decision banning ‘separate-but-equal’ schools,” writes journalist Paul Loeb. “In short,” he says, “Parks didn’t make a spur-of-the-moment decision.” In her 1991 book, “My Story,” Parks writes: “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 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” END
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>
>NO FLAG ON ROSA COFFIN IS DISCRIMINATION IN DEATH
>URGENT, SEND TO ALL
>
>[email protected]
>
>[email protected]
>
>Rosa Parks deserves a flag draped coffin as do all citizens of
>the United States who pay taxes all their lives. Many countries
>in the world put their flags on the coffins of their departed.
> What Constitutional law says that a citizen of the USA should
>not have a flag on
>their coffin???
>NO FLAG FOR THE COFFIN OF ROSA PARKS.
>ONGOING DISCRIMINATION AS USUAL IN THE USA.
>SHE IS BEING DISCRIMINATED AGAINST IN DEATH.
>ALL FLAGS SHOULD BE LOWERED FOR TEN DAYS OR
>MORE.
> THE WTC DEAD GOT MORE THAN TEN DAYS IN SOME
>PLACES.
>AND I SUSPECT THAT MOST NEVER BATTLED OPPRESSION
>IN THEIR LIVES.
> CITIZENS WHO HAVE PAID TAXES ALL THEIR LIVES
>DESERVE A FLAG
>ON THEIR COFFINS AT DEATH. IT IS AN INSIDIOUS FORM
>OF DISCRIMINATION, OPPRESSIONS, HATE, WHEN THE
>FLAG
>OF THE COUNTRY THEY HAVE SERVED IS DENIED AT
>DEATH.
> The English, and many other countries, always put a flag on
>the dead of their country, whether attached to the hierarchy of
>politics, government, or as dead paid killers with a license to
>kill as in the military, police, or other armed services.
> I WAS GENUINELY DISGUSTED TO SEE THE WOOD
>COFFIN OF ROSA PARKS BEING BORNE BY PALL BEARERS
>UP TO THE CAPITOL
>BUILDING IN DC.
>copy, post, send to others. CORRECT THIS SAME BEFORE
>HER COFFIN LEAVES THE ROTUNDA. HURRY. URGENT.
>
>
>
>
Where was Barack Obama at the services for Rosa Parks? He seemed to be conspicuously absent.
Hello, my name is Lloyd Clements, Jr. and even though I did not know Rosa Parks personally she had a profound impact on my life. I attended the services on October 30 in Montgomery Alabama
at the St. Paul A.M.E. church for Rosa Parks.
This is the church that Rosa Parks when she
lived in Montgomery Alabama.
The church could not take in the hundreds of people that came. I was born
in 1955 the year that Rosa Parks was arrested and grew up in the turbulent 1960’s during the civil rights era. Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee Alabama
which is the town that I grew up in and still live there. Fred Gray, Sr. the famed civil rights attorney represented Rosa Parks when she got arrested in 1955
and Martin Luther King, Jr. as well. He represented my great grandfather and two of my uncles in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and still practices law with
his law firm in Tuskegee today. Rosa Parks was a lady of courage, honor and dignity. When she died I’m sure that the gates of heaven open widely and God
received her with open arms. I would like to say to Rosa Parks thanks for a job well done and you fought a good battle!
bury the woman and shut the hell up!!!!!!!
What’s wrong with “bo” that posted that comment?
Thanks to Sophia Hanifah for giving the link to the interview. I’m listening to it now :). Rosa Parks is the first woman to be honored by lying in the Capitol Rotunda. I’m not sure about what DrTFCarter said…how come she didn’t get a flag on her coffin?
Hello, I’m a student who is writing his master thesis on the legacy of Rosa Parks so I need more informations about her philosophy as Docteur Martin’s was non-violent.