So it turns out Rosa Parks wasn't an inadvertent heroine but a belligerant activist for civil rights! It wasn't that her feet were hurting but that she was one damn angry woman at racist apartheid in the US. Now doesn't she make US history much more interesting than the crap they pawn off in high school!?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/opinion/blow-rosa-parks-revisited.html?_r=0
Thanks, Mary. As you already may be aware, there is even more about the illustrious Rosa Parks:
ReplyDeleteIn the early 1950s, E. D. Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson, president of the Women's Political Council, decided to mount a court challenge to the discriminatory seating practices on Montgomery's municipal buses, along with a boycott of the bus company. A Montgomery ordinance reserved the front seats on these buses for white passengers only, forcing African-American riders to sit in the back. Before the activists could mount the court challenge, they needed someone to voluntarily violate the bus seating law and be arrested for it. Nixon carefully searched for a suitable plaintiff. He rejected one candidate because he didn't believe she had the fortitude to see the case through. Nixon rejected a second candidate because she was an unwed mother, and a third candidate because her father was an alcoholic.
The final choice was Rosa Parks, the elected secretary of the Montgomery NAACP. On December 1, 1955, Parks entered a Montgomery bus, refused to give up her seat for a white passenger, and was arrested. After being called about Parks' arrest, Nixon went to bail her out of jail. He arranged for Parks' friend, Clifford Durr, a sympathetic white lawyer, to represent her. After years of working with Parks, Nixon was certain that she was the ideal candidate to challenge the discriminatory seating policy. Even so, Nixon had to persuade Parks to lead the fight. After consulting with her mother and husband, Parks accepted the challenge.
If memory serves, George W. Bush went to her memorial service when she died. I remember thinking that this fact along with the way the media & gov't eulogized her as an individual acting alone was part of a script to separate her from her people and minimize the power of collective action.
ReplyDelete--- Ann