October 26, 2005

"Rosa Parks died!” The news hit hard.

This hero of the civil rights movement, whose name has become synonymous with courage, this woman whose visage adorns classrooms in schools across the country, this subject of 10,000 student profiles, including my daughter’s, has taken on mythic proportions.

But it’s important to note that she was not just a tired black woman who, out of the blue, decided to make a stand.

No, she was a product of a civil rights movement that was already aborning.

This is not to diminish her act of personal bravery, and the dignity with which she carried it off.

One person does make a difference.

But so, too, does an organized movement for social change.

And Rosa Parks was a part of such a movement, long before the evening of December 1, 1955.

“Mrs. Parks, forty-two years old at the time of her arrest, had been an active member and occasional officer of Montgomery’s NAACP chapter since 1943,” David Garrow writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Bearing the Cross.” She had worked “on a number of voter registration drives.” And in the summer of 1955, she spent two weeks at Highlander, the school for activists, in Tennessee.

Nor was she the first to challenge the racist seating on buses in Montgomery.

Since 1949, the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery had set its sights on overturning that policy, Garrow writes.

A year and a half before Parks’s arrest, the NAACP chapter had discussed boycotting the bus system. And on March 2, Garrow writes, “an incident occurred that galvanized the long-smoldering black sentiments.

A fifteen-year-old high school student, Claudette Colvin, refused a driver’s demand that she give up her bus seat, well toward the rear of the vehicle, to allow newly boarding whites to sit down. Policemen dragged Colvin from the bus, and word spread quickly.”

The NAACP chapter wanted to make a test case out of Colvin, but when they found out she was pregnant and unmarried, the leaders of the chapter concluded that “Colvin would be neither an ideal candidate for symbolizing the abuse heaped upon black passengers nor a good litigant for a test suit.”

Parks had no such problems. And the NAACP and the Women’s Political Council quickly seized on her as the ideal plaintiff.

But they were not content to use the legal system.

Instead, they took their cause to the streets.

“We had planned the protest long before Mrs. Parks was arrested,” said Jo Ann Robinson, president of the Women’s Political Council, as quoted in Garrow’s book. “There had been so many things that happened, that the black women had been embarrassed over, and they were ready to explode. . . . Mrs. Parks had the caliber of character we needed to get the city to rally behind us.”

According to Garrow, the first leaflet they used to rally the community to boycott the buses specifically noted the past abuses.

“Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. . . . This has to be stopped. Negroes have rights, too.”

Rosa Parks’s death is a reminder not only of a more overtly racist time, but also of a time of great progressive agitation, a time of hope that, by organizing together against injustice, people of goodwill could redeem the promise of America.

We need more of that agitation today, for the promise is not yet redeemed.

And yes, we need more acts of consummate individual courage, which have the power to inspire even 50 years later.

As Rita Dove marvels in her poem “Rosa,” from “On the Bus with Rosa Parks”:

“How she sat there,
the time right inside a place
so wrong it was ready….
Doing nothing was the doing.”