by Jack Lee
Today is Martin Luther King Day and we are on the eve of the Barack Obama inauguration, and it is right that we should celebrate this day by recalling an important moment in the early civil rights days.
This is the story of Rosa Parks. She was a poor, tired, black seamstress that dared to take a seat in the front of a Montgomery, Alabama bus on December 1, 1955 and in so doing she became the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement”.
The bus driver asked her to move to the back under the state’s Segregation law, but this little lady had just finished a long day at work and she slumped into her seat and would go no further. Although she was exhausted, she summoned up her courage and refused the repeated orders of the bus driver to move to the back and for that she was arrested. This terrible injustice quickly came to the attention of NAACP leaders and four days later Martin Luther King arrived in town and launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott. After 381 days, the Supreme Court ordered the city buses integrated!
This was a milestone in American history and it forever changed segregation in the south.
There is a second part of the story that is probably worth telling because, well, it’s the true version, not the myth you just read:
Rosa Parks had spent 12 years helping lead the local NAACP chapter. The summer before, Parks had attended a 10-day training session at Tennessee’s labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she’d met an older generation of civil rights activists and discussed the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision banning “separate but equal” schools. Rosa Parks became a secretary for the NAACP and this bus incident was planned in order to attack the segregation laws.
So, Rosa Parks didn’t just accidentally stumple into a moment taht would change history. It had all been pre-planned and she was part of an existing movement for reform in segregation laws. And there’s nothing wrong with this! Nothing!
The true story should in no way diminish her contributions to the civil rights movement or the importance of that fateful day. The more ordinary a person is the more we embrace their acts of courage, as in the Rosa Parks case. But, then we lose sight of the many others who were with her behind the scenes, quietly fighting for civil rights who also part of this event. I know there is always the temptation to glorify a good story to make it even better. It’s just our human nature. History has thousands of examples of where we’ve done this, but care must be taken to preserve history as it really happened.
Rosa Parks and her civil rights colleagues drew attention to a great inequity and injustice and for that we should all celebrate and embrace this true story. Rosa Parks is gone now, but we should honor her memory through truth and tell her story right!