Rosa Parks

"My resistance to being mistreated on the buses and anywhere else was just a regular thing with me and not just that day."

--Rosa Parks, Interview with Aldon D. Morris, Oct 14, 1981

It is hard to get out from under the myth that Rosa Parks performed her famous act of civil disobedience because she was a simple working woman who finally just got fed up with segregation. In today's obituary from the New York Times E. R. Shipp is definitely trying.

Mrs. Parks was very active in the Montgomery N.A.A.C.P. chapter, and she and her husband, Raymond, a barber, had taken part in voter registration drives.

At the urging of an employer, Virginia Durr, Mrs. Parks had attended an interracial leadership conference at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., in the summer of 1955. There, she later said, she "gained strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks but for all oppressed people."

But as she rushed home from her job as a seamstress at a department store on Dec. 1, 1955, the last thing on her mind was becoming "the mother of the civil rights movement," as many would later describe her. She had to send out notices of the N.A.A.C.P.'s coming election of officers. And she had to prepare for the workshop that she was running for teenagers that weekend.

"So it was not a time for me to be planning to get arrested," she said in an interview in 1988.

Shipp emphasizes that Parks was active in the NAACP, but quickly pulls back whatever that might imply about her intent as activist. Parks' resistance, as Shpp presents it, was without political intent; it was still just an unsophisticated act of born from fatigue and frustration. A couple of paragraphs later, Shipp sets out once again to upset the powerful myth of Rosa Parks, but the myth takes over a second time.

That moment on the Cleveland Avenue bus also turned a very private woman into a reluctant symbol and torchbearer in the quest for racial equality and of a movement that became increasingly organized and sophisticated in making demands and getting results....

Even in the last years of her life, the frail Mrs. Parks made appearances at events and commemorations, saying little but lending the considerable strength of her presence. In recent years, she suffered from dementia, according to medical records released during a lawsuit over the use of her name by the hip-hop group OutKast. Over the years myth tended to obscure the truth about Mrs. Parks. One legend had it that she was a cleaning woman with bad feet who was too tired to drag herself to the rear of the bus. Another had it that she was a "plant" by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The truth, as she later explained, was that she was tired of being humiliated, of having to adapt to the byzantine rules, some codified as law and others passed on as tradition, that reinforced the position of blacks as something less than full human beings.

"She was fed up," said Elaine Steele, a longtime friend and executive director of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. "She was in her 40's. She was not a child. There comes a point where you say, 'No, I'm a full citizen, too. This is not the way I should be treated.'"

In "Stride Toward Freedom," Dr. King wrote, "Actually no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, 'I can take it no longer.'"

Shipp will not have us believe the most simplistic version of the myth, that Parks sat down and refused to stand up again because her feet hurt. But it is still only a variation on this theme to say that Parks was frustrated and just couldn't take it any more. In this view, Parks is an everywoman reacting to racism (and sexism) as any person today would. While there is an element to this thinking that encourages all of us to resist racism and sexism, it also deprives Parks of political thought, and it removes Parks' political thought and action from the context of the community life and the political movement that were the supports for her activism.

In his book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change, from which I took my epigraph, Aldon D. Morris describes Rosa Parks' history as a civil rights activist in more detail.

Mrs. Parks, like others steeped in the protest tradition, had a long history of involvement with protest organizations. She began serving as secretary for the local NAACP in 1943 and still held that post when arrested in 1955. In the late 1940s the Alabama State Conference of NAACP brances was organized, and Mrs. Parks served as the first secretary for that body. The position brought her into contact with such activists operating on the national level as Ella Baker, A. Philip Randolph, and Roy Wilkins. In the early 1940s Mrs. Parks organized the local NAACP Youth Council, which fizzled out after a few years. However, she and other local women reorganized the Council in 1954-55, with Mrs. Parks as the adult adviser. During the 1950s the youth in this organization attempted to borrow books from a white library. They also took rides and sat in the front seats of segregated buses, then returned to the Youth Council to discuss their acts of defiance with Mrs. Parks. Mrs. Parks had scheduled a NAACP Youth Council workshop to be held on December 4, 1955, but her arrest on December 1 canceled that function. (49-50)

Back in 1978, in an interview with Morris for his book, civil rights leader Septima Clark did not see Parks' public reticence as a sign of reluctant participation in the Black liberation movement. Instead, Clark explains that

Rosa Parks was afraid for white people to know that she was as militant as she was. (149)

Clark is speaking of the time that she spent with Parks at the Highlander Folk School in 1955, just a few months before she sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Clark continues:

She didn't want to speak before the whites that she met up there [at Highlander], because she was afraid they would take it back to the whites in Montgomery. After she talked it out in that workshop that morning and she went back home she decided that, "I'm not going to move out of that seat." (149)

White people tend to have problems with Black militancy. It makes sympathetic liberals uncomfortable and it can be downright dangerous among white supremacists, whether they be Klansmen, police, politicians, or bankers or business people.

I don't believe that Shipp is trying to perpetuate the myth that deprives Rosa Parks of political thought and isolates her from the movement she dedicated herself to. The myth helps people insulate themselves from the reality not just of segregated buses but of a white (and male) dominated power structure. The myth helps people avoid discussing institutionalized racism still in wide evidence today. The myth keeps people today from knowledge of how change was won yesterday—which might inspire more people to work for change in the present. Most people, including myself, have a need to shield themselves from the realities that surrounded Rosa Parks' great moment in history. A commitment to change means a commitment to continuing to examine the present and reexamine the past, to challenge the assumptions that allow the lives of some to be devalued for the benefit of others.

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Further Reading

MLK, Communist Training Schools, Cindy Sheehan, and Rosa Parks (I, II)