Rosa Parks Was Not the Beginning

If things continue upon their present course--which "things" have that interesting habit of not always doing--somewhere in an elementary school 50 years from now, a teacher will stand before a class and tell her students the story of the day in 2003 when a courageous black woman, grown weary of the lies of the Bush administration, stood up by herself in the United States Congress and cast the single vote against the Iraq War Authorization, thus sparking a national movement that eventually led to both the collapse of neoconism as well as the end of the stranglehold of the radical religious right on the government of the country.

Fifty years from now some of you will almost certainly be around, and you will remember these days, and you will say patiently (but a little wearily, because you've grown tired of correcting this particular mistake) that yes, what Barbara Lee did was absolutely courageous and no, you don't want to minimize its historical importance or how much it inspired people at the time, but she was, after all, only part of a greater thing going on in opposition to Bush and the neocons and the war, and it is that thing going on of people and opinions and actions and accomplishments which must be studied and talked about if one is to understand the history of those (these) times.

But history loves the simple tale, if for nothing else in that it is so simple to tell.

And so, this week, upon the death of the dear Ms. Rosa Parks, we must suffer through the recitation of the story--once more--about the courageous little Alabama black woman who got tired one day coming from work and refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man, thus on-and-on, you know the rest of the tale.

And at the risk of being accused of kicking dirt on the freshly dug grave of a beloved national and civil rights movement icon, we are forced to say, once again, that no, that's not exactly how it happened, and that it doesn't take away anything from Rosa Parks to tell it right.

At the time of Ms. Parks' historic act in the mid-1950s, there were a number of African-American organizations in Montgomery--some of them based in the black church, some of them with ties to the union movement, some of them based in the black business or educational establishments--that had long been working to end racial segregation in public accommodations in that city. Rosa Parks herself was secretary of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which had membership from all of those factions.

As the story is told by those who were there at the time, in refusing to give up her seat, Ms. Parks actually repeated an action that had been taken several weeks before by another young black woman.

Black Montgomery leaders briefly considered making that earlier action a test case, but decided against it when they learned that the young woman had a child out of wedlock. Afraid that Montgomery's white segregationist establishment would pound on that single fact--"niggers dropping babies without fathers"--to turn local and national attention away from the issue of segregation, the black leaders searched around for someone who could not be attacked on such "moral" grounds.

Rosa Parks was chosen, and the refuse-to-give-up-her-seat-on-the-bus incident was restaged so that she could be arrested, and the black bus boycott instituted as a "spontaneous" response of outrage.

Personally, I think that either action--the spontaneous one of the earlier black woman as well as Ms. Parks' planned demonstration--took equal courage in Montgomery in the mid-1950s, but that's just me.

And it is also interesting to see how little things have changed in human nature in the past 50 years. In the mid-1950s, just as it is today in 2005, it was easy to get people distracted from issues, muddying the waters with one moral issue--having a child out of wedlock--in order to cover up another one--oppressing a group of people because of their race.