My children can’t imagine what it was like before Rosa Parks. They are appalled when we tell them.
I mean that as a tribute to her.
The story for which Rosa Parks is famous is not as I was taught it.
I was five when she refused to move out of the whites-only seats at the front of the bus. I was told that she was a humble Black woman who, after a hard day of work, was too tired to get up. In fact, she was a committed civil rights worker, a secretary in the Montgomery office of the NAACP where she recorded reports of racial discrimination and interviewed African-Americans with legal complaints. (I in fact was taught she was a white family’s maid. Did those telling the story just assume that that’s what black women do?)
It’s a better story the first way, but why?
The mythic version is so powerful because of what it doesn’t say. Obviously, the point wasn’t that she was tired, that she collapsed in the seat and was physically unable to stand up. Presumably she was tired every day. The point of the myth is exactly that this day was like every other except for what happened in Rosa Parks’ heart. On that day like any other, a woman like any other rose above the accepted condition. Like the first photo of the whole earth seen from space, Parks’ refusal to change seats transformed our perspective. What had been presented as an inevitable way of the world Parks revealed as a fragile system with which — suddenly — one did not have to comply. The heroism of non-compliance was, Rosa Parks showed, available to everyone.
That’s why the story works better the more “ordinary” the hero is.
We like stories of ordinary heroes because they tell us heroism is within our grasp as well. (Why we aren’t instead shamed by their implicit denunciation of our own failures to be heroic is beyond me.) But, while stories of the humble becoming heroes may appeal to us, a life like Parks’ is all the more admirable: She didn’t postpone heroism, waiting for the moment to happen to her. She became a worker for civil rights in a time and place where that took daily heroism.
Then, on December 1, 1955, she was tired of complying with a system that degraded her, so she came to a full stop, not knowing the consequences. She demanded the system either acknowledge her dignity or demonstrate its full depravity. It takes a genuine faith in human goodness to think that we will not let a system stand once its corrupt nature has been exposed.
I would be happy to celebrate Rosa Parks Day every December 1. We Americans would be better for explicitly embracing her true story as a mythic expression of our values. [Tags: RosaParks]
Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with:
politics Date: October 25th, 2005
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