(Warning–I’ve been up all night meeting a deadline, so don’t hate me if this doesn’t always make sense)
Business pending…should have a piece on Page 2 later today. I’ll do a new post to let you know of that one.
Rosa Parks died yesterday. Her most noteworthy contribution to the Movement, refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955, was the catalyst for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It’s become cliche to talk about that, but we can’t remember this–only Jackie Robinson integrating Major League Baseball was a more important in forcing whites to respect both the humanity and economic power of black folks in America. And maybe more significantly, that introduced the world to the most important person born in this country, Martin Luther King.
But the discussion will invariably turn to one question–didn’t she just sit her ass down?
Well, that’s how it was phrased by Cedric the Entertainer in “Barbershop.” That line caused a big hullabaloo, and Parks’ people jumped on it. They would have us believe that Mrs. Parks herself was incensed by the movie, but I don’t believe for a minute that she saw the movie. Anyway, the biggest reason I didn’t understand the big deal was that I’d heard that question many times before.
So was it a big deal? Considering how many black people don’t stand up to white people now, it’s tough to sell that a middle-aged woman doing that in 1955 wasn’t a big deal. Yeah, it was big. Was she first to do that? Surely not.
Was she the first person to do so and call Martin Luther King the next day? Maybe so.
But I stopped a few minutes ago and talked about the power of the boycott. In economics–particularly game theory–we talk about something called a prisoner’s dilemma. In a prisoner’s dilemma game, players have the choice of cooperating or defecting (basically, the model is treated as though two inmates are being interrogated in different rooms and the cops are trying to get one of them to roll on the other). The trick in most interactions is creating a situation where people won’t defect, where they won’t roll. It would have been very easy for folks to roll in Montgomery. It would have been really easy for someone with a car to not pick someone else up because he was running late for work. It would have been easy for someone to sneak onto the bus for a host of reasons.
But for nearly 400 days, folks stayed true to the cause. Could we get that to happen now? Probably not.
And while this wasn’t entirely Mrs. Parks’ work, she played a significant role in making this happen. For that, she deserves our thanks.
For me, the trick will be keeping thoughts on her separate from thoughts on those that have handled her affairs. The people that furthered the lawsuit against OutKast should be ashamed of themselves. I still find that to be generational bias at its worst, and I’m amazed those clowns had the audacity to sue for $5 million dollars on behalf of a woman that was pushing 90 years old. Yeah, she needed the money, right?
Anyway, with Parks passing, we’ve lost another important figure from the Movement. King, Hosea, Abernathy, Malcolm, Huey, and a host of others are no longer with us. Many of the Panthers are still around, as are many from the old guard in Atlanta.
Oh, and Jesse. Can’t forget about Jesse.
But in twenty years, we’ll have to remember the movement through nothing more than documentaries and museums. We will no longer have faces to see, faces marked by perserverence and still tinted with hope. It’s not like any of us could just go knock on Mrs. Parks’ door and ask her to tell us stories about the old days, but the chances to hear some of these stories told in the first person is slipping away fast.
A time for an increased awareness of race in this country is important. We don’t just need to check history to see how far things have come. We need to peep that history so we don’t overestimate that change. We need to peep that history because much of today’s bullshit is the same as yesterday’s.
We need to peep the history because, in the end, that’s all we’ve got.
And by we, I mean we. White folks, dogs, cats, everybody–peep game on this. We’re coming up on a time when people will treat the Movement like it’s ancient history.
And since we still need to keep moving, we can’t let that happen.
5 thoughts on “RIP Rosa Parks”
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I’m a little surprised that this topic hasn’t had more comments. Even if she did just “sit her ass down”, that was enough for a whole lot of people to stick to one goal for an awful long time. Even if you were to ignore the merits of the cause, that’s still a hell of an accomplishment.
This is a very interesting topic. I too am somewhat surprised by the lack of response.
Ms. Parks is a hero in the movement. But I think her heroism is based on her being the “right” type of person to support.
I suspect there were dark skinned less articulate sisters who encountered this same dilemma on the Montgomery transit system. They probably refused to move, and their punishment was adminisitered by the vigilante squad that passed for law enforcement in “the Gump”.
Their plights were probably ingored because they didn’t have MLK or MLK jr on speed dial.
Ms. Parks made a tremendous contribution to the movement, but it is sometimes overstated by her handlers and some other civil rights vets.
First Ossie, now Rosa…I told my students yesterday that I felt like we were losing something vital, like an entire generation was disappearing.
As I was lamenting the loss, one of my students said, “Who’s Ossie Davis?”
Another asked, “Rosa Parks was still alive? I thought she died a long time ago!”
These are 10th graders (read: not that much younger than us). The generational gap isn’t big enough to make that alright. So tragic, I wanted to cry. To them, the movement is already ancient history. So much so that whenever they get on public transportation, they head straight to the back. Don’t even pass Go.
And that’s just sad.
(By the way, I much prefer the original version of Barbershop, in which Cedric yells, “Martin Luther the King…was a HO!”. They edited that out after like the second week in theaters. But it was funny as hell, irreverent or not.)
Yes, there were people before Rosa who took a stand — er, I mean — a seat. But there was a concentrated effort to make sure the person the community backed was above reproach. There had been other instances in which black leaders looked and decided that, for whatever reason, the person wasn’t the right one to support.
Indeed, if you look at the hell Rosa and Raymond Parks caught after the boycott began, you can see she was the right person to support.
There’s a reason she had lived in Detroit all those years.
There’s so much we are losing and I’m trying to make sure the young people around me know about it.
People, encourage the young people around you to pick up a book and READ. I find it generally helps if they see YOU doing it.
Rosa Parks was truely an amazing person, refusing to give up her seat on a bus. Though I’m a white, she really fascinated me. This is a great thing topic to talk about.