First I’d like to honor a great figure in the Civil Rights Movement. Those of us active in this new civil rights movement, youth rights, need to recognize and learn from those people who came before us, especially in movements for minority rights and women’s rights. So my hat is off to the great Rosa Parks. In her new home, she’ll never have to give up her seat again. Rest in peace.

Also, I’d like to point out the fact that most people are mistaken about Mrs. Parks’ history. Most people know the simplified story, no doubt told in school, that she was just a tired old woman who just didn’t want to give up her seat, unwittingly sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights Movement. That’s not really true.

Rosa Parks was an active member of the NAACP, in fact for many years she was the Secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama chapter of the organization. From the NAACP website:

Parks, a seamstress, was one of the first women to join the Montgomery NAACP branch in 1943. In addition to serving as the branch secretary, Parks was the youth advisor for several years.

As youth advisor to the NAACP, Parks helped young people organize protests at the city’s main library because the libraries reserved for blacks had fewer books. In the 1930’s, Parks worked with her husband, Raymond Parks, a NAACP activist, for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young African American men pulled off a train, falsely accused and found guilty of raping two white women in 1931.

So she had a long history of agitation for civil rights (and indeed was a youth organizer!) before her refusal to give up her seat on December 1, 1955. Plus, there was more planning behind that refusal than most people recognize. It wasn’t just that her feet hurt from a long day at work, she knew what she was doing. She knew quite well that the NAACP was looking for a good test case to challenge the segregation policy on the city buses. As a squeaky-clean human being, and a history of involvement with the movement, she was an ideal choice.

Parks wasn’t the first woman to refuse to give up her seat in Montgomery either. Had things been just a bit different we would perhaps be remembering a teenaged version of Rosa Parks instead:

Before Rosa Parks, there was 15-year-old Claudette Colvin from Montgomery, AL. In March 1955, this black teen refused to give up her seat in the middle of the bus to a white passenger. Her words? “I do not have to get up. I paid my fare…It’s my constitutional right.” As a result, she was handcuffed and hauled off to jail.

Some activists believed this incident would spark a larger attack on segregated seating, but Colvin’s actions were largely lost to history — possibly because the 15-year-old was pregnant and unmarried at the time of her protest. Nine months later, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and became a household name.

When Colvin turned out to be pregnant the NAACP dropped her case and waited until Rosa Parks replicated Colvin’s heroic act of defiance. Sadly, very few remember Claudette Colvin, or the other many heroic teenage defenders of freedom throughout our history.

More good info on Colvin (read this article):

Some blacks believed she was too young, and too dark-skinned to be an effective symbol of injustice for the rest of the nation. Then, as local civil rights leaders continued to debate whether her case was worth contesting, that summer came the news that Colvin was pregnant — by a married man.

E.D. Nixon would later explain in an oral history, “I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with.” Rosa Parks, for a decade the NAACP secretary who took special interest in Colvin’s case, was “morally clean, reliable, nobody had nothing on her.”

As for why Rosa Parks is remembered as just some unconnected old (she was only 42) woman whose feet hurt and just refused to get up, I don’t have a good explanation. Perhaps that’s just the over-simplified line our dumbed down schools teach all of us, perhaps the Civil Rights Movement wanted the case to seem less manufactured and more spontaneous, or maybe Martin Luther King tried to downplay Parks’ involvement with the NAACP (they didn’t always get along). Who knows. But I’m doing my part to educate all of you folks out there who only know the myth. It behooves us as youth rights activists to learn all the details of movements that came before us.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.