Saint Rosa Parks (2017)
Unassuming and for the people, Saint Rosa is still an enigma. The public doesn't quite know how to handle her legacy so she sits framed on so many mantels--seated, inactive, passive and obscure. Brooklyn College professor, Jean Theoharis's political memoir, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks somewhat stirs this water. At least for the limited none academic audience who have read it, yet so many read this book and still remain on the segregated bus where Parks's life and legacy ends for so many.
How can one read a book like this, yet continue to stay in Birmingham where Parks's life and work certainly covered a lot of territory as secretary for the NAACP, wife, daughter and activist started. Yet the gendered caricature was also created there after booked and fingerprinted Parks was escorted home by a very worried and relieved Raymond Parks, who knew the viciousness of the white south and what was in store for the family if his wife became the public face of civil discontent.
He acquiesced however, to Mr. Nixon and the Durrs discourse and gave his wife his blessings. No one could foresee the way popular thought would be manipulated to see Mrs. Parks as a victim of racial segregation, something she was fighting tangentially--as human rights were what she was after dating back to her youthful scuffles with white boys who dared threaten her, Negro staff who'd sell her to the highest white male bidder and to men who'd threatened her mother on public transportation. Not getting up from her seat was just another aspect of resistance she embodied all her life.
What is the appeal to the public is martyrdom? We crucify our leaders and then hang them to dry on altars rather then burying them and using that space on the mantel to strategize our next move(s).
Mrs. Parks never sat down. Her action and her arrest are but a metaphor. Stasis she was not. Still she was not, if we note the nature of energy and its active and potential force. Both are necessary to action.
So I pick up the Parks poster this semester, this year and start carrying it around. I get questioned as no one is carrying her poster anymore--she has a US stamp, a bust in the White House and besides Kennedy had a major procession at her death.
Students were assigned Theoharis's book to read and essays to write reflecting on Mrs. Parks as revolutionary and rebellious, the second term one she attributed to herself. The grandchild of former slaves, the daughter of a mother who lived in Tuskegee and was in the trenches teaching her folk's children all Parks's life, certainly made an impression on her daughter. Then when she meets Raymond Parks who is active in the anti-lynching movement and is also a man who fights for Negro human rights and through him she is introduced to a vehicle with which to channel her efforts, the NAACP, how is it possible that she could have not been a rebel and a revolutionary?
As a woman, she might have been assigned secretarial duties. As a woman she might have been revisioned as a seamstress rather than depicted as a tailor and the main breadwinner of a family with reversed roles for the spouses--Raymond took care of the home and the his wife's sick mother.
One student responded to my query of his paper that I seemed to take his argument too seriously. I responded that I took everything seriously. His flippant language and assertions that while opposing Jim Crow these same black men discriminated against Parks, was a red herring. What does sexism have to do with the fact that black people were catching hell in the south, that is was the Civil War without the northern soldiers coming to the rescue?
Abraham Lincoln was dead and with him any semblance of support from the white powers that be. They had their United States; the black south was on its own.
If Rosa Parks could bracket the sexist overtones of the emergent movement to move it forward then shouldn't the question be, why did she do so? Clearly, she wasn't afraid to stand in the trenches alone. Her husband Raymond was a different kind of man. He let his wife be herself. He encouraged her and stood by her even when no one knew his story or acknowledged his presence except in calling his wife's name which included his own.
100 years after her birth and eight years after her death in October 2005, we can certainly unpack Parks's legacy and describe the frame that both constrains and ultimately misrepresents this woman so many claim to know.
With her archives and effects in probate, there is so much we shall not know until her life is more thoroughly examined, yet Theoharis deconstructs what is available and carefully shows us a Mrs. Rosa Parks few know.
Parks had much more in common with Malcolm X than Martin Luther King Jr. She was a woman of action and though patient, she was weary of the slow march to democracy for black people. Perhaps she too was a victim of post traumatic stress and slave syndrome, given the nature of the place she lived.
Birmingham, Angela Y. Davis called "bomingham," for all the bombs exploded in public places like the 16th Street church which was one of several sites bombed just that week there.
The Parks's experienced financial loss when Mrs. Parks went public. She was dangerous while undercover, but when she went national, she was public enemy number 1. The death threat, which were not symbolic but real came frequently and as Mrs. Parks husband could not be with her as he had to stay home and take care of his mother-in-law the stress also affected his person and well-being.
When one talks about war veterans and the families of such national heroes, seldom does the conversation include the effects of the battle on those not on the front line. PTSD can happen vicariously. One doesn't have to hear the bomb drop or the see the body dismembered--see the cattle prods used on civil rights volunteers or feel the high powered water hoses turned on children who are washed down Alabama streets to be effected. All black people in the south at that time suffered from PTSD, and that legacy lingers as does the guilt.
It took a lot of persuasion to get President Kennedy to agree to protect the lives of black people fighting the war against segregation and Jim Crow in the south in schools and other public places like libraries and neighborhoods, equal pay on jobs and equal employment opportunities as well. And then he was killed and President Johnson, a southerner, weighed his options and passed the Civil Rights Bill after much negotiation and finessing of the language.
In the meantime, Mrs. Parks was not invited to the White house to witness the signature. She wasn't even a part of the negotiation. For all intents and purposes, she might be the public face of the Civil Rights Movement, a bit more sanitary than Emmitt Tills, whose face Mrs. Parks saw when she refused to move.
She is a symbol, but symbols aren't people. They are figments of our collective imagining and even when they still live we still hold our imagined image as the reality. Sometimes this is done subconsciously, at other times, as with Parks, then and now, it is more feasible to do so.
Books like Theoharis's Mrs. Rosa Parks and Harry Belafonte's My Song, call into question historic memory --how it is preserved and when it is to be trusted. If the Rosa Parks we think we know is just a tiny aspect of the multifaceted woman who lived to be 91, then what about Martin King and other public figures whose lives and stories became a part of the official lore of this nation.
Look at the monuments: King's had him coming out of a mountain. Are these markers a way to silence these stalwart leaders? Coretta Scott King, who was she really? Raymond Parks, why didn't anyone interview him while he was alive to find out what he thought about his wife's work and the battle for human rights. it wasn't over in 1963, 1964 or 1965. It is still not over if the economic gap between black and white American remains the same.
My students think that just because they see a multiracial America that the vision is the reality when the country is still black and white. The TV set has one show and one dial, despite technical advances.
It is always worse for the black citizen. The black immigrant, the black student, the black employee, the black neighbor, the black executive, the black teacher, the black college professor, the black athlete, the black patient, the black artist, the black writer, the black scholar, the black prisoner, the black soldier, the black politician, the black president, the black child, the black woman and the black man. . . .
Nothing has changed. Laws which are not implemented do not exist. This country looks good on parchment, but its in the deeds.
How can one read a book like this, yet continue to stay in Birmingham where Parks's life and work certainly covered a lot of territory as secretary for the NAACP, wife, daughter and activist started. Yet the gendered caricature was also created there after booked and fingerprinted Parks was escorted home by a very worried and relieved Raymond Parks, who knew the viciousness of the white south and what was in store for the family if his wife became the public face of civil discontent.
He acquiesced however, to Mr. Nixon and the Durrs discourse and gave his wife his blessings. No one could foresee the way popular thought would be manipulated to see Mrs. Parks as a victim of racial segregation, something she was fighting tangentially--as human rights were what she was after dating back to her youthful scuffles with white boys who dared threaten her, Negro staff who'd sell her to the highest white male bidder and to men who'd threatened her mother on public transportation. Not getting up from her seat was just another aspect of resistance she embodied all her life.
What is the appeal to the public is martyrdom? We crucify our leaders and then hang them to dry on altars rather then burying them and using that space on the mantel to strategize our next move(s).
Mrs. Parks never sat down. Her action and her arrest are but a metaphor. Stasis she was not. Still she was not, if we note the nature of energy and its active and potential force. Both are necessary to action.
So I pick up the Parks poster this semester, this year and start carrying it around. I get questioned as no one is carrying her poster anymore--she has a US stamp, a bust in the White House and besides Kennedy had a major procession at her death.
Students were assigned Theoharis's book to read and essays to write reflecting on Mrs. Parks as revolutionary and rebellious, the second term one she attributed to herself. The grandchild of former slaves, the daughter of a mother who lived in Tuskegee and was in the trenches teaching her folk's children all Parks's life, certainly made an impression on her daughter. Then when she meets Raymond Parks who is active in the anti-lynching movement and is also a man who fights for Negro human rights and through him she is introduced to a vehicle with which to channel her efforts, the NAACP, how is it possible that she could have not been a rebel and a revolutionary?
As a woman, she might have been assigned secretarial duties. As a woman she might have been revisioned as a seamstress rather than depicted as a tailor and the main breadwinner of a family with reversed roles for the spouses--Raymond took care of the home and the his wife's sick mother.
One student responded to my query of his paper that I seemed to take his argument too seriously. I responded that I took everything seriously. His flippant language and assertions that while opposing Jim Crow these same black men discriminated against Parks, was a red herring. What does sexism have to do with the fact that black people were catching hell in the south, that is was the Civil War without the northern soldiers coming to the rescue?
Abraham Lincoln was dead and with him any semblance of support from the white powers that be. They had their United States; the black south was on its own.
If Rosa Parks could bracket the sexist overtones of the emergent movement to move it forward then shouldn't the question be, why did she do so? Clearly, she wasn't afraid to stand in the trenches alone. Her husband Raymond was a different kind of man. He let his wife be herself. He encouraged her and stood by her even when no one knew his story or acknowledged his presence except in calling his wife's name which included his own.
100 years after her birth and eight years after her death in October 2005, we can certainly unpack Parks's legacy and describe the frame that both constrains and ultimately misrepresents this woman so many claim to know.
With her archives and effects in probate, there is so much we shall not know until her life is more thoroughly examined, yet Theoharis deconstructs what is available and carefully shows us a Mrs. Rosa Parks few know.
Parks had much more in common with Malcolm X than Martin Luther King Jr. She was a woman of action and though patient, she was weary of the slow march to democracy for black people. Perhaps she too was a victim of post traumatic stress and slave syndrome, given the nature of the place she lived.
Birmingham, Angela Y. Davis called "bomingham," for all the bombs exploded in public places like the 16th Street church which was one of several sites bombed just that week there.
The Parks's experienced financial loss when Mrs. Parks went public. She was dangerous while undercover, but when she went national, she was public enemy number 1. The death threat, which were not symbolic but real came frequently and as Mrs. Parks husband could not be with her as he had to stay home and take care of his mother-in-law the stress also affected his person and well-being.
When one talks about war veterans and the families of such national heroes, seldom does the conversation include the effects of the battle on those not on the front line. PTSD can happen vicariously. One doesn't have to hear the bomb drop or the see the body dismembered--see the cattle prods used on civil rights volunteers or feel the high powered water hoses turned on children who are washed down Alabama streets to be effected. All black people in the south at that time suffered from PTSD, and that legacy lingers as does the guilt.
It took a lot of persuasion to get President Kennedy to agree to protect the lives of black people fighting the war against segregation and Jim Crow in the south in schools and other public places like libraries and neighborhoods, equal pay on jobs and equal employment opportunities as well. And then he was killed and President Johnson, a southerner, weighed his options and passed the Civil Rights Bill after much negotiation and finessing of the language.
In the meantime, Mrs. Parks was not invited to the White house to witness the signature. She wasn't even a part of the negotiation. For all intents and purposes, she might be the public face of the Civil Rights Movement, a bit more sanitary than Emmitt Tills, whose face Mrs. Parks saw when she refused to move.
She is a symbol, but symbols aren't people. They are figments of our collective imagining and even when they still live we still hold our imagined image as the reality. Sometimes this is done subconsciously, at other times, as with Parks, then and now, it is more feasible to do so.
Books like Theoharis's Mrs. Rosa Parks and Harry Belafonte's My Song, call into question historic memory --how it is preserved and when it is to be trusted. If the Rosa Parks we think we know is just a tiny aspect of the multifaceted woman who lived to be 91, then what about Martin King and other public figures whose lives and stories became a part of the official lore of this nation.
Look at the monuments: King's had him coming out of a mountain. Are these markers a way to silence these stalwart leaders? Coretta Scott King, who was she really? Raymond Parks, why didn't anyone interview him while he was alive to find out what he thought about his wife's work and the battle for human rights. it wasn't over in 1963, 1964 or 1965. It is still not over if the economic gap between black and white American remains the same.
My students think that just because they see a multiracial America that the vision is the reality when the country is still black and white. The TV set has one show and one dial, despite technical advances.
It is always worse for the black citizen. The black immigrant, the black student, the black employee, the black neighbor, the black executive, the black teacher, the black college professor, the black athlete, the black patient, the black artist, the black writer, the black scholar, the black prisoner, the black soldier, the black politician, the black president, the black child, the black woman and the black man. . . .
Nothing has changed. Laws which are not implemented do not exist. This country looks good on parchment, but its in the deeds.
posted by Interchange @ 11:12 PM
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