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Rosa Parks,
Arrested for Civil Disobedience
Please see All of Marc Morial's MaximsNews columns below.*
UNITED NATIONS - 26 October 2005 / www.MaximsNews.com/ It
may be difficult for many people under 50 today to
fully grasp the courage Rosa Parks displayed 50
years ago while sitting on a Montgomery, Alabama
public bus. After
all, one might think, all she did was say no. In
fact, Rosa Parks, who died October 24 at age 92 in
her adopted hometown of Detroit, did far more.
For,
as she well understood and her tormenters
immediately realized, her refusal to give up her
seat in the middle of a bus to a white male rider
and move to the “colored section” at the back
was an unacceptable transgression of the South’s
established, pervasive order of racial
segregation—if you’re black, get back: one
that could be punished by any force, including
murder. Remember,
earlier that same year of 1955 a fourteen-year-old
black Chicagoan, Emmett Louis Till, visiting
relatives in a small Mississippi town, had been
brutally kidnapped, tortured, and murdered for
having wolf-whistled at a white woman—and his
killers had brazenly been acquitted by an all-white
jury. So,
when Rosa Parks said no, and the city police were
called to arrest her, she had, literally, put her
life at risk. But
she had done something else, too.
She had lit the match—the resulting 381-day
Montgomery Bus Boycott—to the nonviolent
mass-action movement for racial justice that was to
transform America.
In
the 1940s Americans had gone abroad to fight a war
to make the world safe for democracy.
Rosa Parks’ act—her “individual
expression of a timeless longing for human dignity
and freedom,” in Martin Luther King Jr.’s
words—signaled that now the war for democracy
would be waged at home in the most dramatic way
possible. It
is, of course, an exaggeration to say that Rosa
Parks alone, or even largely, “made” the Civil
Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. She
was not the “mother” of the Movement.
As she herself constantly pointed out, many,
many blacks (and some whites) in Montgomery and
elsewhere throughout the country had been working
diligently for years awaiting the “right
moment.” Some,
like Thurgood Marshall and the “Brain Trust” of
the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, worked in the legal
sphere, challenging the network of laws supporting
segregation. Others,
including activists in Montgomery, had been
preparing to challenge the public superstructure of
racism on public transportation, in parks, beaches,
swimming pools, and at the polls. Rosa
Parks was part of that network of civil rights
activists in Montgomery.
Indeed, she and her husband, Raymond, had
been involved in civil rights work since the 1930s,
and she herself was secretary of the Montgomery
chapter of the NAACP. So,
in that sense, she was as good a
“representative” of the will of African
Americans to grasp their full American citizenship
as can be found in the twentieth century or any
other. Nonetheless,
as she told the story in later years, she had not
been looking that day, December 1, 1955, to
jump-start the Movement in Montgomery all by
herself. She
simply wanted to get home from her job as a
seamstress at a department store to prepare for a
full evening of civic work. But
when the bus driver demanded her seat, Rosa Parks
made her stand. As she explained in her 1992 autobiography, My Story. “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 being old then.
I was forty-two.
No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving
in.” Parks
was bailed out the very night of her arrest—while
the leadership of the local NAACP and the black
Women’s Political Council were leafleting the
black community with calls for a bus boycott, and
prevailing upon a young minister, newly arrived in
town, named Martin Luther King, Jr. to take the
presidency of the new effort. A
year later, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated
Alabama’s racist public transit statutes. The
struggle took a bitter economic toll on the Parks’
and the ever-present threat of violence forced them
to move from the South. America itself is indebted to U.S. Representative John
Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, for his steadfast
support of the Parks (Mr. Parks died in 1977) for
the last four decades.
According
to Rosa Parks’ obituary in the New
York Times, she would recount with amusement
that in later years children often wanted to “know
if I was alive during slavery times. They would equate me along with Harriet Tubman and Sojourner
Truth and ask if I knew them.” Chronologically
speaking, the children were wrong, of course. But
I’d say that in connecting Rosa Parks to those two
legendary freedom fighters of an earlier time, the
children got an important facet of their American
history exactly right.
Marc Morial's Columns in MaximsNews
Rosa Parks -- Humanity at its Best... 26 October 2005 Hurricane Katrina’s Continuing Crisis—and Opportunity... 16 September 2005 After Hurricane Katrina... 7 September 2005 Hurricane Katrina... 31 August 2005 The Supreme Court Nomination... 7 July 2005 Ex-Felons and Voting Rights... 24 June 2005 Vicente Fox's Foolish Words 24 May 2005 Reject the Nuclear Option 11 May 2005 Kenneth B. Clark 4 May 2005 The State of Black America 11 April 2005 The Main Event in American History 16 February 2005 Never again! 1 February 2005 Jack Johnson, American 27 January 2005 The Mississippi Arrest: Bending Toward Justice... 11 January 2005 Reforming America's Obsession with Incarceration... 7 December 2004 A Pre-Election Snapshot of Black America... 26 October 2004 Issues for the Candidates -- and for Us... 19 October 2004 The "Routine" Tragedy in the Sudan... 2 September 2004 A Wonderful Life... 26 August 2004 America, We Have A Problem... 19 August 2004 Looking Forward; Leaving No One Behind... 28 July 2004 Empowering Communities, Changing Lives... 8 July 2004 July: The Other Black History Month... 30 June 2004 Justice for History's Sake—and Our Own... 24 June 2004 Let America Be America The Beautiful... 16 June 2004 Quiet Activism on The Movement's Front Lines... 8 June 2004 Vernon
Jarrett, Dreamer and Doer Buddy Fletcher's Gift... 26 May 2004 The Murder of Emmett Till: Still Seeking Justice... 20 May 2004 The Meaning of the Brown Decision... 12 May 2004 The Complexity of Black Achievement... 4 May 2004 USA Today's Con Artist... 27 April 2004 The
"Moving Target" of Black Educational
Progress Elaine Jones: Energized by Adversity... 6 April 2004 The Urban League in Washington: Bringing Reinforcements... 30 March 2004 The Pain of Those Left Behind... 17 March 2004 Deeply Desiring Denial... 9 March 2004 One Step Forward; Two Steps Back... 3 March 2004 Innocent of the Crime, But Almost Executed Anyway... 24 February 2004 Civil Rights: America's Unfinished Business... 17 February 2004 What Will They Do Now? 2 February 2004
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