Rosa Parks Dead at 92 by KTK

Rosa Parks, an active NAACP leader in the city of Montgomery Alabama who kicked off the bus boycott that, arguably, ignited the Civil Rights Movement and launched Martin Luther King, Jr. to prominence, died last night at 92.

Her story is well-known, but often distorted. The Washington Post, today, described her as a “dignified African American seamstress” who “didn’t fully realize what she was starting when she decided not to move on that Dec. 1, 1955, evening”. But in the same story, they go on to note:

She was an activist already, secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP. A member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church all her life, Parks admired the self-help philosophy of Booker T. Washington — to a point. But even as a child, she thought accommodating segregation was the wrong philosophy. She knew that in the previous year, two other women had been arrested for the same offense, but neither was deemed right to handle the role that was sure to become one of the most controversial of the century. . . .

[She and her husband] shared a passion for civil rights; her husband was an early defender of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of young African Americans whom rights advocates asserted were falsely accused of raping two white women. . . .

At her husband’s urging, Parks finally earned her high school degree in 1933, when fewer than 7 percent of blacks had graduated from high school. About the same time, she was finally allowed to register to vote — on her third try. She briefly was able to see past the racial separation of the times when she worked at Maxwell Air Force Base, where segregation was banned.

“I could ride on an integrated trolley bus on the base,” she told biographer Douglas Brinkley, “but when I left the base, I had to ride home on a segregated bus. . . . You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up.”

She was a volunteer secretary to E.D. Nixon, president of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, while working as a seamstress and housekeeper to a white couple, Virginia and Clifford Durr. The Durrs became her friends, and they suggested — and sponsored — her attendance at a training workshop on racial desegregation at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., in the summer of 1955.

So a few months later, in the winter of 1955, when Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, it was with the knowledge of both the everyday indignities of segregation and the building momentum of the civil rights movement. . . .

She was bailed out that night, and her boss at the NAACP asked if she would be the test case for a lawsuit. She discussed it with her husband and mother and then agreed. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Women’s Political Council mimeographed 35,000 handbills calling for a bus boycott.

It hardly sounds like she didn’t know what she was doing. Her actions on that particular evening were spur-of-the-moment, but they came as part of a concerted strategy by the NAACP to create a test case and challenge the segregation laws. Parks was steeped in activism and was an officer of the local NAACP chapter, which brought the actual court case that overturned the law. The protest campaign had been long planned and was set into action as soon as Parks was arrested. But this poor and poorly-educated black woman is always painted as “dignified” and as making no more contribution to claiming her own rights than to simply refuse to give up her seat (she was often said to be so tired that night she couldn’t bring herself to move – which she explicitly disavowed). In fact, she was an activist in an activist group, and gained her own and others’ rights the only way they are ever gained – by taking them.

(The WaPo article does have a good description of the actual events of that fateful night, and of Parks’s difficult life and occasional later snubs.)

Too many heroes are now icons of the past. She is another.