rn: Znet commentary/ The Real Rosa Parks /Paul Loeb

2000-03-19

Jan Slakov

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 21:48:15 -0000
From: Michael Albert <•••@••.•••>
To: •••@••.•••
Subject: ZNet Commentary/ March 14 / Paul Loeb / The Real Rosa Parks


Here is today's ZNet Commentary Delivery from ZNet Guest Commentator, Paul
Loeb.

If you pass this comment along to others, please include an explanation that
Commentaries are a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet and that to
learn more about the project folks can consult ZNet (http://www.zmag.org)
and specifically the Sustainer Pages
(http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm.

Here then is today's ZNet Commentary...

----------------

THE REAL ROSA PARKS
By Paul Loeb

We learn much from how we present our heroes. A few years ago, on Martin
Luther King. Day, I was interviewed on CNN. So was Rosa Parks, by phone from
Los Angeles. "We're very honored to have her," said the host. "Rosa Parks
was the woman who wouldn't go to the back of the bus. She wouldn't get up
and give her seat in the white section to a white person. That set in motion
the year-long bus boycott in Montgomery. It earned Rosa Parks the title of
'mother of the Civil Rights movement.'"

I was excited to hear Parks's voice and to be part of the same show. Then it
occurred to me that the host's description--the story's standard
rendition--stripped the Montgomery boycott of all its context. Before
refusing to give up her bus seat, Parks had spent twelve years helping lead
the local NAACP chapter, along with union activist E.D. Nixon, from the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, teachers from the local Negro college,
and a variety of ordinary members of Montgomery's African American
community. The summer before, Parks had attended a ten-day training session
at Tennessee's labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander
Center, where she'd met an older generation of civil rights activists and
discussed the recent Supreme Court decision banning "separate-but-equal"
schools. During this period of involvement and education, Parks had become
familiar with previous challenges to segregation: Another Montgomery bus
boycott, fifty years earlier, successfully eased some restrictions; a bus
boycott in Baton Rouge won limited gains two years before Parks was
arrested; and the previous spring, a young Montgomery woman had also refused
to move to the back of the bus, causing the NAACP to consider a legal
challenge until it turned out that she was unmarried and pregnant, and
therefore a poor symbol for a campaign. In short, Parks didn't make a
spur-of-the-moment decision. Rosa Parks didn't single-handedly give birth to
the civil rights efforts, but she was part of an existing movement for
change, at a time when success was far from certain. This in no way
diminishes the power and historical importance of her refusal to give up her
seat. But it does remind us that this tremendously consequential act might
never have taken place without all the humble and frustrating work that she
and others did earlier on. And that her initial step of getting involved was
just as courageous and critical as her choice on the bus that all of us have
heard about.

People like Parks shape our models of social commitment. Yet the
conventional retelling of her story creates a standard so impossible to
meet, it may actually make it harder for us to get involved. This portrayal
suggests that social activists come out of nowhere, to suddenly take
dramatic stands. It implies that we act with the greatest impact when we act
alone, or at least when we act alone initially. It reinforces a notion that
anyone who takes a committed public stand, or at least an effective one, has
to be a larger-than-life figure--someone with more time, energy, courage,
vision, or knowledge than any normal person could ever possess. This belief
pervades our society, in part because the media tends not to represent
historical change as the work of ordinary human beings, which it almost
always is.

Once we enshrine our heroes on pedestals, it becomes hard for mere mortals
to measure up in our eyes. However individuals speak out, we're tempted to
dismiss their motives, knowledge, and tactics as insufficiently grand or
heroic. We fault them for not being in command of every fact and figure, or
being able to answer every question put to them. We fault ourselves as well,
for not knowing every detail, or for harboring uncertainties and doubts. We
find it hard to imagine that ordinary human beings with ordinary flaws might
make a critical difference in worthy social causes.
Yet those who act have their own imperfections, and ample reasons to hold
back. "I think it does us all a disservice," says a young  African-American
activist in Atlanta named Sonya Tinsley, "when people who work for social
change are presented as saints--so much more noble than the rest of us. We
get a false sense that from the moment they were born they were called to
act, never had doubts, were bathed in a circle of light. But I'm much more
inspired learning how people succeeded despite their failings and
uncertainties. It's a much less intimidating image. It makes me feel like I
have a shot at changing things too."

Sonya had recently attended a talk given by one of Martin Luther King's
Morehouse professors, in which he mentioned how much King had struggled when
he first came to college, getting only a 'C', for example, in his first
philosophy course. "I found that very inspiring, when I heard it," Sonya
said, "given all that King achieved. It made me feel that just about
anything was possible."

Our culture's misreading of the Rosa Parks story  speaks to a more general
collective amnesia, where we forget the examples that might most inspire our
courage and conscience. Apart from obvious times of military conflict, most
of us know next to nothing of the many battles ordinary men and women fought
to preserve freedom, expand the sphere of democracy, and create a more just
society. Of the abolitionist and civil rights movements, we at best recall a
few key leaders--and often misread their actual stories. We know even less
about the turn-of-the-century populists who challenged entrenched economic
interests and fought for a "cooperative commonwealth." Who these days can
describe the union movements that ended 80-hour work weeks at
near-starvation wages? Who knows the origin of the social security system?
How did the women's suffrage movement spread to hundreds of communities, and
gather enough strength to prevail?

As memories of these events disappear, we lose the knowledge of mechanisms
that grassroots social movements have used successfully in the past to shift
public sentiment and challenge entrenched institutional power. Equally lost
are the means by which their participants managed to keep on and eventually
prevail in circumstances at least as harsh as those we face today. As
novelist Milan Kundera writes, "The struggle of man against power is the
struggle of memory against forgetting."

Think again about the different ways one can frame Rosa Parks's historic
action. In the prevailing myth, Parks decides to act almost on a whim, in
isolation. She's a virgin to politics, a holy innocent. The lesson seems to
be that if any of us suddenly got the urge to do something equally heroic,
that would be great. Of course most of us don't, so we wait our entire lives
to find the ideal moment.

Parks's real story conveys a far more empowering moral. She begins with
seemingly modest steps. She goes to a meeting, and then another. Hesistant
at first, she gains confidence as she speaks out. She keeps on despite a
profoundly uncertain context, as she and others act as best they can to
challenge deeply intrenched injustices, with little certainty of results.
Had she and others given up after her tenth or eleventh year of commitment,
we might never have heard of Montgomery.

Parks's journey suggests that change is the product of deliberate,
incremental action, whereby we join together to try to shape a better world.
Sometimes our struggles will fail, as did many earlier efforts of Parks, her
peers, and her predecessors. Other times they may bear modest fruits. And at
times they will trigger a miraculous outpouring of courage and heart--as
happened with her arrest and all that followed. For only when we act despite
all our uncertainties and doubts do we have the chance to shape history.
Paul Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a
Cynical Time (St Martin's, 1999, $15.95, www.soulofacitizen.org), and of
Generation at the Crossroads, Nuclear Culture, and Hope in Hard Times