Sixty years ago, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Her courageous action galvanized a yearlong community boycott and helped usher in a new chapter of the Black freedom struggle. It’s is now one of the most well-known stories of the civil-rights movement—imparted to school children across the United States. Yet much of what students are taught, and much of what most Americans think they know, about Parks’s activism is wrong. Here are corrections to ten commonly circulated myths about Rosa Parks:

1. Rosa Parks wasn’t meek. Parks had a “life history of being rebellious,” as she put it. As a child, she stayed up with her grandfather as he guarded their house with his shotgun against Klan attack. She picked up a brick when a white kid threatened to punch her. When her grandmother, who worried about her “talking biggity to white folks,” reprimanded her, the young Rosa cried, “I would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated…[and] not be allowed to say ‘I don’t like it.’” In the 1930s and ’40s, Parks took part in dangerous organizing work—both with her husband, Raymond, in defense of the Scottsboro Boys and with E.D. Nixon, a Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organizer who then became president of Montgomery’s NAACP, in seeking justice for lynching, rape, and assault victims. She hated how “a militant Negro was almost a freak of nature to [white people], many times ridiculed by others of his own group.”

2. Nor was she passive in key moments. The summer before her arrest, she had grown tired of meetings with city officials around black community concerns about bus segregation that went nowhere: “We would be given some vague promises and given the run-around.” She refused to go to another meeting: “I had decided I wouldn’t go anywhere with a piece of paper in my hand asking white folks for any favors.” That December evening, when the police boarded the bus to arrest her and asked why she didn’t move, she countered, “Why do you push us around?”

3. She wasn’t the first to be arrested on the bus. A number of black Montgomerians had resisted segregation on Montgomery’s buses. When Viola White did in 1944, she was beaten and fined $10; her case was still in appeals when she passed away 10 years later. In 1950, police shot and killed Hilliard Brooks, a World War II veteran, when he boarded the bus after having a few drinks and refused to reboard from the back door—and the police were called. Witnesses rebutted the officer’s claims that he acted in self-defense, but he wasn’t prosecuted. Emboldened by the 1954 Brown ruling, the Women’s Political Council had written Montgomery’s mayor that there needed to be change on Montgomery’s buses or the community would boycott. Then on March 2, 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to relinquish her bus seat. When a white rider hollered at her that she had to get up, a young girl, Margaret Johnson, responded in her defense, “She ain’t got to do nothin’ but stay black and die.” Police arrested Colvin and charged her on three counts. The black community was outraged and initially mounted some resistance (Parks served as a fundraiser for Colvin’s case), but ultimately decided against a full-blown campaign on Colvin’s behalf, seeing her as too young, feisty, and emotional. (Despite popular belief, Colvin was not pregnant at the time the community decided not to pursue her case but got pregnant later in the summer.) The impact of these incidents accumulated—and Montgomery’s black community was at a breaking point by December 1955.

4. Nor was it her first act of bus resistance. Montgomery’s segregated buses mandated black riders at the back, whites in the front, and a middle section in which both black and white passengers could sit (though not together)—and black people could be asked to move for white passengers. Bus drivers carried a gun. Some Montgomery bus drivers would make black people pay in the front, but then force them to get off the bus, and re-board through the back door (so they didn’t even walk by white passengers). Parks had been kicked off the bus a number of times for refusing to abide by this practice, including by the very driver, James Blake, who would have her arrested on that December evening. “Over the years I have been rebelling against second-class citizenship. It didn’t begin when I was arrested,” she said. “Some people say I was tired” when she refused the bus driver’s order to move to the back of the bus, but, as she explained in her autobiography, “The only tired I was was tired of giving.”

5. It wasn’t just about a seat on the bus. When Blake told her to give up her seat, Parks thought of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy who had been lynched in Mississippi in August, and the recent acquittal of the two men who had killed him. She thought about the many years she’d been fighting for criminal justice for black men wrongfully accused of crimes and for black women who could find no justice after being raped. She later wrote that when the bus driver said he would have her arrested, she mused, “Let us look at Jim Crow for the criminal he is and what he had done to one life multiplied millions of times over these United States.” It was not about a seat next to a white person: “I have never been what you would call just an integrationist. I know I’ve been called that…. Integrating that bus wouldn’t mean more equality. Even when there was segregation there was plenty of integration in the South, but it was for the benefit and convenience of the white person, not us.” Her aim was “to discontinue all forms of oppression.” Hearing of Parks’s arrest and her decision to pursue her case, the Women’s Political Council called for a one-day boycott the day Parks was to be arraigned in court. Buoyed by the success of that first day, the community at a mass meeting that night decided to extend the boycott. A young Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a galvanizing speech and would emerge as the movement’s leader. A separate federal court case was filed, with Colvin as one of the plaintiffs (Parks was not). Three hundred and eighty-two days later, Montgomery’s buses were desegregated.

6. Her courage wasn’t just a one-day thing. And she loved the spirit and militancy of young people. In the 1950s, she organized the Youth Council of the Montgomery NAACP, encouraged its members to take a strong stance against segregation, and following Colvin’s arrest, made her secretary. Parks asked Colvin to tell her story over and over to inspire others. Parks believed in youth leadership, and young people’s need to be heard and treated with dignity. So while she was deeply distraught by the Detroit uprising of July 1967—a turbulent four days sparked by a police raid of a black after-hours bar that brought out the National Guard and witnessed the deaths of 43 people, 33 of whom were black—she understood that “the establishment of white people…will antagonize and provoke violence. When the young people want to present themselves as human beings and come into their own as men, there is always something to cut them down.” When young radicals organized a People’s Tribunal around the police killings of three young black men at the Algiers Motel during the Detroit uprising (after no police were indicted and the media refused to investigate), she agreed to serve on the jury. And when SNCC helped build an independent black political party with local residents in Lowndes County, Alabama, that took the black panther as its symbol, Parks journeyed down to support them.

7. Rosa Parks was not a political carbon copy of MLK. When the Montgomery bus boycott began, Rosa Parks was 42, a seasoned activist, while Martin Luther King was 26, a new minister pastoring his first church. Parks grew up in a family that supported Marcus Garvey, began her adult political life with the Scottsboro defense alongside her husband Raymond, and spent the next decade with E.D. Nixon pushing to turn the Montgomery NAACP into a more activist chapter. Mentored by legendary organizer Ella Baker, she was inspired by the political visions of Highlander Folk School leaders Septima Clark and Myles Horton, when she attended the adult-organizer-training school the summer before her arrest. Throughout her life, she believed in the power of organized nonviolence and the moral right of self-defense and described Malcolm X as her personal hero.

8. She wasn’t a middle-class church lady who dreamed only of heaven and the hereafter. Although Parks was demure in demeanor, the Parks family wasn’t middle class. They lived in the Cleveland Courts projects when she made her bus stand; Raymond was a barber and Rosa an assistant tailor, altering white men’s clothes at Montgomery Fair Department Store. Her bus stand plunged them into a decade of economic instability and deep poverty. In 1965, newly elected Congressman John Conyers hired her to work in his Detroit office. This stabilized the family’s situation, but they never were able to afford to own their own home. Parks was a woman of deep Christian faith, but to her, Christianity required justice and action in this world. “Faith without works is dead,” she wrote.

9. And she spent more than half her life in the North. Eight months after the boycott’s successful end, still unable to find work and facing death threats, she moved with her husband and mother to Detroit, where she lived for nearly five decades. She called “the promised land that wasn’t.” During an interview on the 10th anniversary of the boycott, she remarked, “I can’t say we like Detroit any better than Montgomery.” She didn’t find “too much difference” between the systems of housing and school segregation, job exclusion, and policing from Montgomery to Detroit—so she set about to challenge the racial inequality of the North, alongside a growing Black Power movement. She attended the 1968 Black Power conference in Philadelphia and the 1972 Political Convention in Gary, and visited the Black Panther Party School in Oakland during the 1979–80 school year. “I’m in favor of any move to show that we are dissatisfied,” she explained.

10. And those famous pictures of her being fingerprinted and her mugshot… well, they’re not actually from her first arrest. There was no fanfare around Parks’s bus arrest. While unsure if she would “get off the bus alive,” she didn’t imagine her stand as the prelude to something big. She wrote a colleague a few months later how “startling” the community’s reaction and boycott of the buses was to her. Over the next few months, the city tried to break the boycott. Police harassed boycott leaders, and then, the city indicted 89 of them (including Parks) on an old anti-boycott law. She and E.D Nixon presented themselves for arrest: “Are you looking for me? Well, I am here.” She was photographed being fingerprinted, and her mugshot circulated publicly.

Reckoning with Rosa Parks, the lifelong rebel, moves us beyond the popular narrative of the civil rights movement’s happy ending with the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. It reminds us instead of the long and ongoing history of racial injustice in the United States and the wish Parks left us with—to keep on fighting.

We’re developing a full learning and teaching resource to this end—Learning Rosa Parks through Criminal Justice—launching February 4 (Google it then!). Sixty years later, it’s time to start teaching Rosa Parks right. 

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Jeanne Theoharis, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, is the author of the award-winning The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.

Say Burgin is Lecturer in American History at the University of Leeds.

>via: http://www.thenation.com/article/10-myths-about-rosa-parks/

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December 1, 2015

How history

got the Rosa Parks

story wrong

The quiet seamstress we want
on our $10 bill was a radical
active in the Black Power movement.

Papers from Rosa Parks’s life show the seamstress who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger was a battle-tested activist.

By Jeanne Theoharis

Sixty years ago, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala. Her courageous act is now American legend. She is a staple of elementary school curricula and was the second-most popular historical figure named by American students in a survey. When Republican presidential contenders were asked to pick a woman they wanted pictured on the $10 bill, the largest number of votes went to Parks.

Americans are convinced they know this civil rights hero. In textbooks and documentaries, she is the meek seamstress gazing quietly out of a bus window— a symbol of progress and how far we’ve come. When she died in 2005, the word “quiet” was used in most of her obituaries and eulogies. We have grown comfortable with the Parks who is often seen but rarely heard.

That image of Parks has stripped her of political substance. Her “life history of being rebellious,” as she put it, comes through decisively in the recently opened Rosa Parks Collection at the Library of Congress. It features previously unseen personal writings, letters, speech notes, financial and medical records, political documents, and decades of photographs.

There, we see a lifelong activist who had been challenging white supremacy for decades before she became the famous catalyst for the Montgomery bus boycott. We see a woman who, from her youth, didn’t hesitate to indict the system of oppression around her. As she once wrote, “I talked and talked of everything I know about the white man’s inhuman treatment of the negro.”

Parks was a seasoned freedom fighter who had grown up in a family that supported Marcus Garvey and who married an activist for the Scottsboro boys. She joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943, becoming branch secretary. She spent the next decade pushing for voter registration, seeking justice for black victims of white brutality and sexual violence, supporting wrongfully accused black men, and pressing for desegregation of schools and public spaces. Committed to both the power of organized nonviolent direct action and the moral right of self defense, she called Malcolm X her personal hero.

The Rosa Parks Collection, which opened in February, reveals how broadly Parks has been distorted and misunderstood. Her papers languished unseen for years following her death because of disputes over her estate, the hefty price the auction house put on the archives, and its refusal to allow any scholars to assess the papers before the sale. Last year, the Howard Buffett Foundation bought the archive and gave it to the Library of Congress on 10-year loan.

Though Parks later wrote an autobiography, her notes from decades earlier give a more personal sense of her thoughts. In numerous accounts, she highlighted the difficulty of navigating a segregated society and the immense pressure put on black people not to dissent. She wrote that it took a “major mental acrobatic feat” to survive as a black person in the United States. Highlighting that it was “not easy to remain rational and normal mentally in such a setting,” she refused to normalize the ability to function under American racism.

For her, the frustration began in childhood, when even her beloved grandmother worried about her “talking biggety to white folks.” She recounts how her grandmother grew angry when a young Rosa recounted picking up a brick to challenge a white bully. Rosa told her grandmother: “I would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated and not be allowed to say ‘I don’t like it.’ ”

Parks viewed the power of speaking back in the face of racism and oppression as fundamental — and saw that denying that right was key to the functioning of white power. Parks’s “determination never to accept it, even if it must be endured,” led her to “search for a way of working for freedom and first class citizenship.”

Parks carried that determination into adulthood, though she made clear the impossible mental state it required. She lyrically described the difficulty of being a rebel, the ways black children were “conditioned early to learn their places,” and the toll it took on her personally: “There is just so much hurt, disappointment and oppression one can take…. The line between reason and madness grows thinner.”

In the longest piece of the collection, an 11-page document describing a near-rape incident, Parks decisively uses the power of speaking back. When the document became public in 2011, there was controversy around its release and questions about whether it was a work of fiction. But it does not appear that Parks wrote fiction, and details of the story correspond to Parks’s life. Like the narrator of the story, Parks was doing domestic work during the Scottsboro trial, during her late teens in 1931. It’s written in the first person, though the narrator is unnamed.

In the account, a young Rosa is threatened with assault by a white neighbor of her employer, who was let into the house by a black worker, “Sam.” The heavy-set white man she aptly called “Mr. Charlie” (a term black people of the era used for white people and their arbitrary power) gets a drink, puts his hand on her waist, and attempts to make a move on her.

Furious and terrified, she resolved to resist: “I was ready and willing to die, but give any consent, never, never, never.” When Mr. Charlie said he’d gotten permission from Sam to be with her, she replied that Sam didn’t own her, that she hated the both of them, and that nothing Mr. Charlie could do would get her consent. “If he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body,” Parks wrote, “he was welcome but he would have to kill me first.”

It is significant that Parks’s philosophy of resistance is framed through an experience of sexual aggression. She was committed to women’s rights throughout her life — from working to get justice for black women who had been raped, such as Gertrude Perkins and Recy Taylor, to defending the rights of women prisoners. When Joan Little, a 20-year-old black woman serving a seven-year sentence for robbery, killed a white guard who sexually assaulted her, Parks co-founded Detroit’s Joan Little Defense Committee. Little was acquitted, becoming the first woman in U.S. history to successfully use self-defense against sexual assault in a homicide case.

Parks used this power of speaking back again on the evening of Dec. 1, 1955, when bus driver James Blake ordered her to give up her seat to a white passenger and she refused. Blake chose not simply to evict her from the bus, as he had done in the past, but to have her arrested. Calling attention to the larger power in the system, Parks questioned the arresting officers, “Why do you push us around?” One officer answered, “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.”

After years of activism, Parks had reached her breaking point on the bus that December evening: “I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn’t take it any more.” Her writings reveal the burden that this decade of political activism — which, with a small cadre of other Montgomery NAACP members, had produced little change — had been on her spirit. Describing the “dark closet of my mind,” she wrote about the loneliness of being a rebel: “I am nothing. I belong nowhere.”

Repeatedly in her writings, Parks underscored the difficulties in mobilizing in the years before her bus protest: “People blamed [the] NAACP for not winning cases when they did not support it and give strength enough.” She found it demoralizing, if understandable, that in the decade before the boycott, “the masses seemed not to put forth too much effort to struggle against the status quo,” noting how those who challenged the racial order like she did were labeled “radicals, sore heads, agitators, trouble makers.” Indeed, Rosa Parks was red-baited and received death threats and hate mail for years in Montgomery and in Detroit for her movement work.

Though the righteousness of her actions may seem self-evident today, at the time, those who challenged segregation — like those who challenge racial injustice today — were often treated as unstable, unruly and potentially dangerous by many white people and some black people. Her writings show how she struggled with feeling isolated and crazy, before and even during the boycott. In one piece of writing, she explained how she felt “completely alone and desolate as if I was descending in a black and bottomless chasm.”

Despite the boycott’s successful end, the Parks family still faced death threats and could not find steady work. In August 1957, they left Montgomery for Detroit, where her brother and cousins lived — “the promised land that wasn’t,” as she called it. There, in Detroit, she remained active in various movements for racial, social, criminal and global justice in the decades to come. Mountains of fliers, programs, letters, mailings, meeting agendas and conference programs document the span of her political activism there — though very few writings have survived in her personal papers from these later years.

The few that remain tell us that her radicalism never weakened. “Freedom fighters never retire,” she noted in a testimonial for a fellow activist. As she had for decades, Parks drew sustenance from the militancy and spirit of young people, working in and alongside the growing Black Power movement. Understanding the impact that years of activism with limited results can have on a person, she continued calling for rapid and radical change. In a 1973 letter posted at the Afro-American Museum in Detroit, she noted the impact that years of white violence and intransigence had on the younger generation:

The attempt to solve our racial problems nonviolently was discredited in the eyes of many by the hard core segregationists who met peaceful demonstrations with countless acts of violence and bloodshed. Time is running out for a peaceful solution. It may even be too late to save our society from total destruction.

Writing this after what many mark as the successful end of the modern civil rights movement, Parks clearly believed that the struggle was not over. In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, she continued to press for change in the criminal justice system, in school and housing inequality, in jobs and welfare policy and in foreign policy. She worked in U.S. Rep. John Conyers’s office and spoke outagainst Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court, dismayed by his poor record on civil rights. Sometime in the 1990s, an older Parks doodled on a paper bag (preserved in the collection): “The Struggle Continues…. The Struggle Continues…. The Struggle Continues.”

Much of the memorializing of the Montgomery bus boycott and the civil rights movement misses this side of Parks. Instead, we’ve become content to celebrate her “quiet” bus protest as a historic triumph in a movement that has long since run its course. But listening to Rosa Parks forces us to reconsider our view not only of our civil rights history, but also the demands of our civil rights present. We are forced to reckon with the fact that today’s rebels could be tomorrow’s heroes.

>via: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/01/how-history-got-the-rosa-parks-story-wrong/?tid=sm_fb