The long ride home
Civil rights icon Rosa Parks was hardly the passive character being depicted by today’s media
By Leslie Nia Lewis 11/03/2005
I don’t know if it is just the times we live in or something in the American character that compels people to dumb down our heroes.
The death of Rosa Parks, the civil rights icon whose casket was presented this week in honor in the Capitol Rotunda, a tribute that is usually reserved for presidents and Army generals, is a good example of what I’m talking about.
It seems even the right wing now feels comfortable celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, only stripped of his pro-labor, anti-war, anti-oppression message.
Likewise, public school taught me about Rosa Parks, a mild-mannered, unthreatening seamstress with tired feet.
However, Parks was anything but tired and mild-mannered. She was a complex woman, devoutly Christian, widely read and intellectually curious (fundamentalists, take note). She was not an unconditional pacifist. In fact, her love for King did not prevent her from also admiring Malcolm X. She heard Malcolm speak in Detroit one week before his assassination in the Audubon Ballroom in New York, and the program he signed for her that day was a treasured possession. Parks shared Malcolm’s belief in a God that condoned self-defense.
Her God was also feminist. In a correspondence with Pope John Paul II, Parks spoke up about sexism in the Catholic Church: “All men and women are created equal under the eyes of our Lord,” she wrote.
Parks also critiqued the pervasive sexism that she saw inside the Civil Rights Movement. We all remember the soaring oratory of the “I Have a Dream” speech at the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington. But who recalls the fact that not one woman spoke that day? Looking out on the quarter-million people gathered on the National Mall, Parks had no desire to speak, but was disturbed to see consummate organizers such as Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Daisy Bates and Diane Nash Bevel denied the podium.
After Parks’ arrest for defying segregation, she and her husband, Raymond, lost their jobs, could not get new ones and were menaced by constant death threats, forcing them to leave Montgomery for Detroit. Up north, her civil rights work continued. She and King supported a young John Conyers in his run for Congress. After winning, Conyers offered Parks a job as staffer, which she accepted and held for 23 years. Her many years of work with young people inspired her to found the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development in 1987, and Parks regularly led young people on tours of the Underground Railroad, the Trail of Tears and the Freedom Rides.
Parks never stopped growing and learning. In 1994, Tokyo’s Soka University invited Parks to Japan. Parks loved the Japanese, and they adored her, hailing her as a “great spirit” and a “natural Buddhist.” She began studying Buddhism around the same time young people in the Parks Institute introduced her to the Internet. Later in life, Parks became a vegetarian, practiced meditation and continued saying Christian prayers.
Parks was born six years before the Red Summer of 1919 unleashed lynchings and a race war on black soldiers returning from World War I. In 1932, Parks acted as lookout while her husband held meetings in their home on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, the nine young men wrongly accused of rape. Organizing in their defense was an act so dangerous that all participants came to those meetings armed.
On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was thinking of murdered and mutilated 14-year old Emmet Till at the time she refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger.
Looking at people proceed past her casket in Washington, where so much wrong is committed every day against African Americans and other people of color, I couldn’t help but wonder what Parks thought and felt after seeing the devastation unleashed by Hurricane Katrina, seeing her people still so “’buked and scorned” in 2005.
Parks’ dear friend Gerry Branton had noted her failing health and said, “I think Rosa just got tired of living.”
Far from the passive character that she is being depicted as by some historical revisionists, Parks was a fighter who taught America about struggle, transformation and transcendence.
For that we owe her infinite gratitude, for we still have much to learn and a long ride ahead.
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