The Rosa Parks myth

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 10:51 AM on October 25, 2005.

Whether by indolence or ideology, the myth of Rosa Parks as an essentially apolitical seamstress and "a reluctant symbol and torchbearer," as the Times obit puts it, persists.

jre deflates this myth with a passage from Aldon Morris' The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement:

"in the 1940s Mrs. Parks had refused several times to comply with segregation rules on the buses. In the early 1940s Mrs. Parks was ejected from a bus for failing to comply. The very same bus driver who ejected her that time was the one who had her arrested on December 1, 1955...She began serving as secretary for the local NAACP in 1943..."

jre doesn't believe that the persistence of the spontaneous and solitary reaction myth is merely accidental:

"The myth of Parks as a pre-political seamstress who was too physically worn out to move has such staying power not because there's any factual basis but because it appeals to an all-too popular narrative about how social change happens in America: When things get bad enough, an individual steps up alone, unsupported and unmediated, and spontaneously resists. And then an equally spontaneous movement follows. Such a myth makes good TV, but it's poor history."

(Campus Progress; hat tip: August J. Pollak)

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Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.