Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks died yesterday at the age of 92.  One of my regrets in life is that I’ve managed to see Richard Nixon and Hunter Thompson live yet I passed up a chance to see Rosa Parks accept an award from the Children’s Defense Fund when I was in Washington D.C. in the mid nineties.   This may have been one of her last public appearances. While she led a long active life, Rosa Parks is remembered for one act of defiance, her refusal to give up a seat in the colored section of the bus to a white man when the white part of the bus happened to be full.  Parks is often called the mother of the Civil Rights movement, something that tends to minimize individuals like Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells Barnett, Harriet Tubman,, and others who came before her and Fannie Lou Hamer (one of her contemporaries).  For whatever reason, she became a maternal icon in our culture.  In that iconography, she turned into this innocent seamstress who one day just had enough and happened to stand up for her dignity.  After that seemingly single act of giving birth, she was then more or less put on permanent maternity leave from being an activist or an individual with anything much to say beyond that act.
At least that’s the way our culture tends to remember her.

It’s worth noting that Rosa Parks died in Detroit.  After Montgomery, she couldn’t find work.  After many years, she found employment as an aide for Representative John Conyers for close to twenty years.  The iconography also tends to gloss over the fact that Parks was the secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP and she was a trained activist before that day. She had worked on the Scotsboro Boys case as early as 193 and as youth advisor to the NAACP actively campaigned for better library facilities for black youth in Montgomery   She was not the first black person to refuse to give up her seat on a bus.  She was the first one the NAACP threw its national resources behind since Homer Plessy and the Creole Society challenged streetcar segregation in New Orleans at the end of the 19th century.  It’s notable that President Bush passed over these aspects of her history in calling her an “icon” today and saying that she made America “better” and thus suggesting that her work was completed.

Many people remember that Montgomery was the moment that brought Martin Luther King to national prominence.  Too many forget that at the end of his life, King had broadened his cause from desegregation to poverty and his opposition to the war in Vietnam.  To him it was all connected. I doubt that he saw the journey ending just because the US has a Ferragamo clad Secretary of State whose father was one of his supporters.    

I visited Detroit on two occasions in the late nineties.  The most segregated schools in America are in northern cities.  Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Cleveland have public high schools that are entirely black.  Few of those schools do well academically.  At the time, the running story was the state of Michigan offered free tuition to state universities for any Africa-American student who had better than a 3.0 gpa.  The city of Detroit supposedly had one African-American male who qualified for the scholarship.  I never confirmed it, but if it was an exaggeration it likely wasn’t far off.  The local schools generally didn’t welcome outside visitors or even observations by parents.  The African- American administrators claimed that parents might show up at schools drunk or high and embarrass their children and cited that as their reason for not having a visitation policy.

In 1994, a young black man came into Rosa Parks's Detroit area home and hit her and robbed her after realizing who she was. She personally forgave him after he was sentenced to prison. One thing is clear to me from reading interviews with Rosa Parks, she was about much more than a seat on a bus.  She didn’t stop the work after she won her court case and I’m certain that she was convinced that America had a long ways to go.  The best way to honor Rosa Parks’s memory is to recognize that the bus that may have started its route in Montgomery in 1955 still has a way to go and that we must continue that work.