For years—despite what she wrote in her autobiography—the refusal of Rosa Parks to follow the orders of a driver on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus and change seats to accommodate a white passenger was mischaracterized as a spontaneous protest undertaken because she was tired. When she died 10 years ago, at age 92, that myth got debunked in a few places. Today, on the 60th anniversary of her protest, Justin Taylor at The Washington Post added a bit to that debunkery, taking on five myths related to the civil rights icon:
4. Rosa Parks refused to stand up because she was tired.
Parks sought to set the record straight: “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I was at the end of a working day. . . . No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” She later said she couldn’t have lived with herself if she had given in and stood up.
To attribute her action to fatigue would have pointed to weakness rather than to the source of her strength. She insisted that the power to love her enemies came from God: “God has always given me the strength to say what is right.”
In other words, she was not just a black woman who had had an extra bad day. She was a black woman fed up with Jim Crow laws forcing blacks to sit in the back of the bus, to use separate drinking fountains, restaurants, hotels, and to enter those establishments where they were allowed through the back door. And she was willing to take the risks that went with making public objections to segregation in one of the darker recesses of Dixie. People got killed for doing that. Because she was fed up, by the time she refused to move to another bus seat in late autumn, 1955, she had for years been part of a civil rights movement that was determined to break down racist barriers that made a mockery of the post-Civil War Amendments to the Constitution. As Aldon Morris wrote in his 1986 book Origins of the Civil Rights Movements:
[I]n 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 and still held that post when arrested in 1955 … In the early 1940s Mrs. Parks organized the local NAACP Youth Council … During the 1950s the youth in this organization attempted to borrow books from a white library. They also took rides and sat in the front seats of segregated buses, then returned to the Youth Council to discuss their acts of defiance with Mrs. Parks.
Despite Morris’s book and Parks’ autobiography published six years before her death, The New York Times helped keep one myth alive in her October 2005 obituary:
“That moment on the Cleveland Avenue bus also turned a very private woman into a reluctant symbol and torchbearer in the quest for racial equality and of a movement that became increasingly organized and sophisticated in making demands and getting results.”
Josh Eidelson responded at Generation Progress:
Parks was certainly reluctant to see too personal valoration of her as heroine distract from the broader movement. But she was not private about her politics. And her refusal to give up her bus seat was nothing new for her. As she would later tell an interviewer, "My resistance to being mistreated on the buses and anywhere else was just a regular thing with me and not just that day."
The myth of Parks as an apolitical worker too tired to get up certainly created some sympathy for her. But that myth unfortunately distorts how social change actually comes about in America. The idea that it’s all about an individual acting spontaneously, unsupported, out of which a spontaneous movement is created works as a script, but it fails as reality. Ask anyone who’s done it and you’ll hear that actual movement-building is hard work, requiring commitment over the long haul.
Throughout his book, Morris explains how key moments in the civil rights movement were not random acts of unconnected individuals. Most were carefully planned after months of organizing and persuading. They were carefully developed tactics with a focus on media imagery. Movement building was, as it is today, filled with long meetings and not-infrequent arguments about how to proceed. Easy enough under such circumstances, as also happens today, for people to burn out or simply give up before any victory can be achieved.
Eidelson again:
The myth of Rosa Parks as a private apolitical seamstress, like the myth of Martin Luther King as a race-blind moderate, has real consequences as we face the urgent civil rights struggles of today. Seeing acts of civil disobedience like Parks' as spontaneous responses to the enormity of the injustice justifies the all-too common impulses to refuse our support for organized acts of resistance and regard organized groups as inherently corrupt. Those are impulses people like Rosa Parks had to confront and overcome amongst members of her community long before she ever made national headlines for refusing to give up her seat on the bus.
Those are words worth remembering for our struggles today.