I saw the news as i returned home from teaching my night class. Interestingly enough, I had talked about Rosa parks a couple of classes back, using her story as an example of how interest groups (such as the NAACP) can influence public policy.

The Washington post pulled its long-written obituary out of the files and ran it. It is every bit the hagiographic piece that one would expect. I was particularly struck by this analysis.

Parks said that she didn't fully realize what she was starting when she decided not to move on that Dec. 1, 1955, evening in Montgomery, Ala. It was a simple refusal, but her arrest and the resulting protests began the complex cultural struggle to legally guarantee equal rights to Americans of all races.

Within days, her arrest sparked a 380-day bus boycott, which led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that desegregated her city's public transportation. Her arrest also triggered mass demonstrations, made the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. famous, and transformed schools, workplaces and housing.

Hers was "an individual expression of a timeless longing for human dignity and freedom," King said in his book "Stride Toward Freedom."

"She was planted there by her personal sense of dignity and self-respect. She was anchored to that seat by the accumulated indignities of days gone and the boundless aspirations of generations yet unborn."

She was the perfect test-case plaintiff, a fact that activists realized only after she had been arrested. Hardworking, polite and morally upright, Parks had long seethed over the everyday indignities of segregation, from the menial rules of bus seating and store entrances to the mortal societal endorsement of lynching and imprisonment.

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.

I wish that the article got more at the truth -- Rosa Parks wasn't some tire woman caught up in events -- given her history of activism, she was intended to be a test case. Her arrest was not a random event, but rather a calculated one. That does not make her any less heroic, and I would argue that it actually makes her more heroic. She intentionally put herself on the line, and was not simply a pawn who let events swirl out of control around her..

Farewell, dear Rosa, rest well, and may choirs of angels sing you to your heavenly reward.

Posted by: Greg at 11:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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