Daniel Kryder
Brandeis University
Pursuing Justice in the Classroom: Reconsidering Rosa Parks
“Think Different.” This phrase might ring a bell from the late nineties, when Apple Computers used it in an advertising campaign that featured John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein and two score geniuses of science, business, politics, and the arts. Questionable grammar aside, [1] no two words better capture my goal in the classroom. But the first order task of motivating students to invest intellectual energy into their lessons is a hard one. This essay offers some ideas about teaching the history of pursuing justice in America by presenting the “birth” of the Civil Rights Movement in a way that is - I hope – provocative and engaging for your students. I begin with the assumption that one's set-up or framing of a lesson is crucial. If we can frame our lessons to motivate our students to care to engage with the great intellectual questions buried in the stories of American history, to hook them, to “think different” about things they think they know or believe, we've gained real leverage in the classroom.
The copy accompanying the Apple campaign – this might appeal to a junior high or high school student for this firm and its promoters seem to understand a thing or two about that age cohort - described those who manage to “think different.”
Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They're not fond of rules
And they have no respect for the status quo.
But Parks was anything but crazy, or a misfit, or a round peg in a square hole. Precisely the opposite, I will argue. Her case – so well known to us that it may appear to offer no hope for intellectual discovery – in fact raises a number of questions that still occupy social scientists today, and which might, if packaged well, energize a high school classroom as well: Who is more likely to attain justice or achieve any goal, a misfit or a joiner? Why do we Americans embrace so many myths about our history? When is devout Christianity a proper component of a demand for justice? What drives history, or indeed current politics: individual decision-making and heroic human action “in the moment,” or vast, uncontrollable, large-scale, slow-moving social, economic, and political forces?
One black and white photograph used in Apple's innovative print campaign was already a familiar one. Rosa Parks sits in a bus, just behind the first bench, clearly in the front section once (or presently?) reserved for whites. She faces out the window, to the viewer's right, her jaw set firmly and her hands folded neatly among the folds of her modest cloth coat. She is riding through Montgomery in front of a white man in a proper suit and tie, who is facing the other direction, as if to suggest that racial inequality offered southerners and all Americans only two choices. Apple aptly posted this image on city buses, covering whole sides of vehicles. [2] It is also the cover art for perhaps the best book on the Movement, Doug McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency . [3] It is an odd choice, most likely the publishers', since McAdam does not mention Parks in the text at all, which analyzes not heroic individuals but the sources and the effects of those strong movement organizations which African Americans had so painstakingly constructed over the first half of the twentieth century.
Historian Douglas Brinkley described the episode in his biography of Parks. [4] She left her home in the Cleveland Courts housing project that day precisely for the purpose of being photographed on a bus, preferably in front of a white man. The activist was not enthusiastic about sitting for such a picture, but understood that journalists and movement members wanted a dramatic image to symbolize their recent hard-fought victory over segregation in the city. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others sat for similar photos that day. Brinkley called the Parks photo “completely a 100 percent staged event.” The man sitting behind Parks is Nicholas C. Chriss, not a local white, but a United Press International reporter based in Atlanta who stepped onto the bus to report on the historic moment but found that he was the only other rider on board. [5]
Even if the scenario is staged, the setting for the photograph rings true: Montgomery, December 21, 1956, the day after the Supreme Court's ruling rendered the city's segregated bus system unconstitutional. [ 6 ] The moment held real meaning for Parks. Chriss reported that she did not offer many words to the reporters assembled there. “She seemed to want to savor the event alone.''
All of us who teach modern American history – and many well-read eighth graders – know her story well. Reduced to its essence: a tired seamstress launched the Montgomery bus boycott, and the boycott in turned launched the Civil Rights Movement. We rightly teach the story to very young people. Consider the version offered by a “level two” reader from “The Wonders of Reading” series:
When Rosa was growing up, African Americans were not allowed to do many things. They could not go many places.
When they rode on a bus, black people had to sit in the back. If the bus was full, black people had to give up their seats.
Rosa did not like the way things were. When she was an adult, she wanted things to change.
One day in Montgomery, Alabama, the bus was very crowded. A white person wanted to sit down.
The bus driver told Rosa to give up her seat. She did not move. The police then took her off the bus. Rosa was arrested.
Rosa's friends were angry. African Americans decided not to ride the bus until the law was changed.
A year later, the law was changed. African Americans could no longer be treated that way. They had the same rights as everyone else on the city's buses. [7]
Although this story, riddled with passive voice constructions and ruled by unnamed dark forces, poses as many questions as it answers, it communicates the simple yet majestic moral power of Rosa Parks quite well, and even provides the basic facts of the case. I begin my lecture on the McAdam book, Political Process , by asking the class to tell me the story of Rosa Parks. Due in part to books like the Wonders of Reading biography – I wave my Xeroxed copy of that volume – I suggest that the story must be familiar to all of them. Asked to list the main elements of the story, the class rather quickly provides a telling that I arrange on the board as a chronological list of abbreviated facts. The assembled comments sound like this (or do once I've polished them up in reply):
In an unprecedented display of courage and resistance in Montgomery, Alabama, one of the most “southern” cities of all, Rosa Parks, a seamstress tired from work, chose to disobey the segregation law governing city buses. Ordered by the driver to vacate her seat so that a white man could use it, she refused. Her arrest sparked the formation of a local protest movement, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. seized the initiative to call for a boycott of the city's buses. The boycott called for the integration of the buses. The boycott eventually defeated the city law, and in doing so launched the Civil Rights Movement, which spread throughout the South to pressure local, state and federal officials to abandon segregation and extend full citizenship rights to African Americans.
The list of stylized facts that I put on the board generally looks like this:
Rosa Parks
This is an outline of a narrative, I tell my class, with a clear beginning, middle, and end, and includes in no. 6 a comprehensive interpretation of the import of the episode. Do we all pretty much agree with this, I ask. Yes. Good, that means we are all in this together, because it is all wrong. I find each of these of stylized facts objectionable, I tell them honestly, either as a matter of fact or of interpretation. As I discuss and ultimately reject each “fact,” I put a big X mark next to it as if I am grading an assignment (you would presumably present such a lesson in your own, less belligerent style, but recall that I began this essay with an emphasis on motivating students, on agitating them, on activating their imagination). I make the tangential point that this is one of the reasons I enjoy doing history: the original historical record produces stories that are much more compelling than the ones I once believed. Do we not as educators have a particular responsibility to attempt to distinguish truth from bullshit, as the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt so elegantly puts it, and to teach others how to as well? [ 8 ]
So, let us closely inspect the “standard” story of Rosa Parks claim by claim.
1. RP - seamstress/common worker, tired, decided to resist X
This was not an unprecedented display of courageous resistance; such defiance by individual African Americans of local segregation ordnances and statutes dates from their passage in the late nineteenth century. Historian Robin D. G. Kelly, among others, has written about all sorts of resistance activity in Birmingham during World War II. [9] Indeed, the black residents of Montgomery had been battling Jim Crow in various ways for decades, and had already built a number of strong local organizations prepared to confront white authorities ever more directly.
Indeed, for several months, the Montgomery NAACP had been considering filing a lawsuit aimed at testing the legality of the segregated city bus system. And Mrs. Parks was not the first black bus rider in Montgomery to refuse to give up her seat. Two other women, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, had refused to sit where instructed in prior months, but NAACP leaders believed these two plaintiffs were less than ideal candidates for a public lawsuit. They decided that the arrest of Mrs. Parks, the organization's secretary, provided the case upon which to base the legal challenge. E. D. Nixon, the president of the local chapter, later explained his thinking.
She was honest, she was clean, she had integrity. The press couldn't go out and dig up something she did last year, or last month, or five years ago. They couldn't hang nothing like that on Rosa Parks.
A seamstress tired from work. To say the least! She was the secretary of the local NAACP from 1943-1957, and was very active in a number of other civic organizations. She always had "a very strong sense of what was fair," she later wrote, ascribing that quality to the teachings of her mother and maternal grandparents. She returned to school after marrying and was one of the relatively few African Americans in the city with a high school diploma. In the forties Mrs. Parks and her husband joined a small right to vote organization called the Voters' League, and she tried to register to vote three times before succeeding in 1945. At the time, she maintained the list of Montgomery's black voters, all 31 of them. The summer before her arrest, she had attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee's labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Folk School, where she participated in school desegregation workshops with other civil rights activists, including Septima Clark, the South Carolina educator. [10] During this period of involvement and education, Parks had become familiar with previous challenges to segregation; a bus boycott in Baton Rouge won limited gains two years before Parks was arrested.
People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that wasn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in. [11]
2. RP refused to give up bus seat to a white man X
It was worse than simply having to give up a seat for a white man. First, Parks did not plan the event. Leaving her $25 a week job as assistant tailor at the Montgomery Fair department store, boarded a bus home. The driver was J. P. Blake, whom she disliked. In 1943, he had ejected her from a bus after she refused to leave and reenter it through its rear door after paying her fare. In December of the same year, she joined the NAACP. Mrs. Parks generally would not ride a bus that Blake drove but, focused on a NAACP youth workshop she would conduct that weekend, she did not immediately notice him.
To be precise, her seat was not needed. In fact, Mrs. Parks was one of four black riders directed to vacate an entire row. Such city buses had 36 seats and Alabama law reserved the first 10 for whites. The last 10 were customarily reserved for blacks. The middle 16 were undesignated and seating there was governed by the white drivers, who directed black passengers to give up their seats if white passengers needed them.
When she boarded, she sat in an empty aisle seat in the eleventh row, at the front of the unreserved section, next to a black man; two black women sat in the other seat on the row. Three stops after she sat down, several whites boarded but the front section was now filled, leaving one man standing. “I want those two seats,” Blake demanded. Custom suggested that all four blacks would now vacate the row and stand in the back so that one white man could sit. The three others complied but Parks did not, and shifted to the window seat.
Blake asked whether Mrs. Parks was going to stand.
"No," she said.
"If you don't stand up, I'm going to have to have you arrested," he told her.
"You may do that," she replied.
This short exchange did indeed trigger the bus boycott. When two police officers arrived, she asked one of them “Why do you push us around? “ He replied, “I don't know, but the law is the law and you are under arrest.” She was taken to police headquarters and then to the city hall for processing. Before she had even called home, word of her arrest had spread through the city's black leadership. E.D. Nixon, a former president of the local NAACP and a white liberal attorney, Clifford Durr, went to the jail to post bond and secure her release.
Other local notables mobilized quickly, including the leadership of the Women's Political Council, who that same night mimeograph a leaflet calling for a leadership meeting on Friday and a boycott to begin the following Monday.
Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus and give it to a white person . . .We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses on Monday in protest of the arrest and trial.
On Monday, December 5, in a trial that lasted five minutes, a city court judge ruled Mrs. Park guilty of violating Alabama state law and fined her $10.
3. MLK seized the initiative to call for bus boycott
King was at first a reluctant warrior. On Friday, Nixon contacted Ralph Abernathy, the secretary of the city's Baptist Minister Alliance, who suggested the meeting be held at the centrally located Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Nixon called the pastor there, a 26-year-old minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to ask for permission to use the facility. “King hesitated,” as David Garrow put it. [12] With a one month old daughter, and with heavy responsibilities at his church, he had only a few weeks earlier declined to be considered for the presidency of the local NAACP. “Brother Nixon,” he said, “let me think about it for a while, and call me back.” King agreed to allow his church to be used only after Abernathy assured him that he would not have to help organize the event. King was one of about 70 leaders at the Friday meeting. When one man rose to leave early during a long droning speech, King whispered, “I would like to go too, but it's in my church.” But the meeting produced a clear consensus in support of the boycott.
Nixon, King, Abernathy and other leader believed the boycott needed a new leader. King, while young, was a fine and articulate speaker, and a Baptist minister, qualities that would appeal to professional blacks and conservative clergy. Very few black rode the buses that Monday, December 5. A leadership meeting that afternoon produced a new organization, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), with a new president, Martin Luther King, Jr. Unfortunately, we have no audio record of the speech he made that night to the meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, as a crowd of 5,000 massed in the streets to listen to the proceedings on loudspeakers. Referring twice to the U.S. Constitution, and once to the Supreme Court, he reminded his listeners that “We must keep God in the forefront. Let us be Christian in all our action.” Protest, he argued, must be guided not by revenge or vindication but by Christian love.
Love is one of the pinnacle parts of the Christian faith. There is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation.
Paradoxically, the city's dense network of pre-existing black organizations actually favored the elevation of this newcomer. Since, unlike Mrs. Parks, he was unaffiliated with any of the pre-existing leadership factions, he was a compromise as well as a consensus choice as the voice of the new movement organization.
4. The boycott called for the integration of the bus system
This is an easy one: no. The Association made three demands: bus drivers would treat all riders with courtesy and respect; black riders would seat themselves from back to front and whites from front to back, with no one required to vacate a seat for another rider; and black citizens would be allowed to apply for the job of bus driver. Eventually, toward the end of the year long boycott, the organization developed its own transit system of carpooling, along with 20 private cars and 14 church-owned station wagons, which carried thousands of people every day. Blacks made up the majority of the bus system's riders in 1955 and thus exercised their considerable economic leverage.
5. The boycott defeated the city law
This is an easy one: no. The city law survived the boycott but was defeated by the Supreme Court ruling holding the city's segregated bus system unconstitutional. On February 1, the MIA filed suit in federal court seeking an injunction against segregated seating on buses. The five women plaintiffs in this case included Colvin and Smith, but did not include Mrs. Parks, who was convicted of violating a state law. On June 5, a three judge federal court voted 2-1 in their favor, but city authorities appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. On November 13, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court ruling. “The universe is on the side of justice,” King declared that day. [13] The Association decided to continue the boycott until the Court's order formally took effect. On December 13, almost exactly a year after he assumed leadership of the boycott, King thanked a mass meeting for their dedication. The boycott lasted 382 days, until December 20, when U.S. marshals served the writs on white officials. The ruling addressed the boycott's demands only tangentially.
6. The Montgomery bus boycott launched the Civil Rights Movement
While this must come as no surprise, I believe that folk wisdom often leaves us with an oversimplified view of history, to wit: Parks made the boycott, which launched the Civil Rights Movement. Consider the Boston Globe's dramatic but misleading summary statement on the effects of her heroism:
[When E.D. Nixon suggested they organize a boycott around her case,] she said yes. "If you think it will mean something to Montgomery and do some good, I'll be happy to go along with it," she said. With those simple words, the modern civil rights movement began. [14]
King himself inscribed a copy of his book "Stride Toward Freedom" to Mrs. Parks, "Whose creative witness was the great force that led to the modern stride toward freedom."
But I've tried to suggest in this essay, with the help of recent work on the organizational backbone of southern black activism, by Kelley, Garrow and McAdam, that the inverse formulation is just as true: the movement made Parks, and the movement made the boycott. One minimal goal for any self-respecting history teacher is simply to get the periodization right. And as a matter of fact, black Montgomery had by 1955 already generated a movement thick with organizations, leaders, and members. One might say that 1955 was the moment when white America discovered that there was a Civil Rights Movement. This interpretation in no way undermines the extraordinary courage and commitment of Rosa Parks; it does provide a more nuanced and complete picture of her rooted ness in a community and suggests that this might make a claim for justice more likely to succeed.
Why don't we tell the story in a way that places heroic human action within the context of broader social forces? Perhaps the story of slowly evolving structures of southern black society is simply too complex. I suppose such choices depend in part on the intellectual level of the students to be taught. Or is it too bloodless? Without an engaging individual who personifies structure, how can one tell a compelling story of a workforce turning away from farm work and toward cities, of waves of families and fortune and fame-seekers gaining new opportunities during World War II, of new social and religious networks bringing into contact workers and a nascent professional class, of slowly rising incomes and levels of education, of civic organizations planning new work emboldened with new resources generated by these sea changes in southern life? King understood this bigger picture and sometimes spoke of it, and even overstated it:
If M.L. King had never been born this movement would have taken place. I just happened to be there. You know there comes a time when time itself is ready for a change. That time has come in Montgomery, and I had nothing to do with it. [15]
Still, myths have their own value. After all, staged photos are not uncommon in our history books nor ineffective in print; the flag-raising at Iwo Jima comes immediately to mind. Sociologist Francesca Polletta has written about the passionate but somewhat misleading narratives constructed by movement activists. She points out that “sit-in” narratives - stories activists told about their participation in direct action campaigns aimed at lunch counters - consistently portrayed protesters' actions as “spontaneous” even when they were not. Movement participants, she argues, consciously and unknowingly construct such myths for good reasons, including, for example, to distinguish themselves from rival activists (in this case, college age African Americans seeking to distance themselves from the more moderate tactics of older blacks in formal organizations like the NAACP) or to create and sustain new norms of behavior that is expected of members and prospective members, such as the willingness to spontaneously resist authorities. [16]
To me, a teacher interested in prompting students to think about how Americans have successfully pursued justice over time, the “Think Different” slogan nicely captures one of my primary goals. But when it comes to pursuing justice, Apple has it wrong. Yes, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a crucial early campaign in the Civil Rights Movement, and the fearless actions of Parks and King activated the conscience of countless well-prepared southern blacks and attracted the attention and support of countless sympathetic whites. Yes, the battle soon intensified throughout the South, forcing local, state and federal officials to reject segregation and extend full citizenship rights to African Americans in 1964 and 1965, almost exactly 100 years after the end of the Civil War. But the power and courage of Parks and King was rooted not only in their rebelliousness but also in their embeddedness – in organizations and in community.
After the boycott, Parks, her husband, and mother moved to Detroit to join her brother, who feared for her safety. "It didn't feel like a victory actually," Mrs. Parks later wrote. "There still had to be a great deal to do." She remained active in the civil rights movement, and eventually joined the staff of Congressman John Conyers, running his Detroit office from 1965 to 1988. Parks died in 2005 at the age of 92, having lived nearly 50 years beyond the day she challenged white supremacy. But her life is capture not so much by “Think Different” as perhaps “Act Together.” Chriss's observation that Parks “seemed to want to savor the event alone” reminds us that within the broad streams of social and political history, individuals still play vital roles, some even of their own making.
[1] One can read the phrase as a demonstration of the impact of unconventional thinking, or as with “Think Big,” as a use of the imperative mood to call one to innovative action.
[2] See http://www.electric-escape.net/node/565 )
[3] Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1955-1970 , University of Chicago Press, 1983.
[4] Douglas Brinkely, Rosa Parks, Penguin Lives series, 2000.
[5] Nor do two other famous images of Parks – a mug shot and a photo of her being fingerprinted - date from December 1, 1955. They record her arrest on February 22, 1956, almost three months into the boycott, along with 100 black activists for violating a state anti-boycott law.
Peter Applebome, “The Man Behind Rosa Parks,” New York Times, December 7, 2005
[ 6 ] The Court handed down the ruling one month earlier, but on December 20 the District Court entered and thus effectuated the order.
[7] Cynthia Klingel and Robert B. Noyed, Rosa Parks , Wonder Books. This book reprints numerous excellent photographs, including a second photograph taken the same day as the well-known “bus” photograph, in which Parks stands smiling. It also includes three photographs from February 22, 1956, the day she was fingerprinted: arriving at the courthouse with E. D. Nixon, being fingerprinted, and standing with Nixon, apparently before addressing reporters. Three additional photos taken on December 21, 1956 - one showing Parks and another African American woman sitting in front of an older white man - are available at the Academy of Achievement website, along with an audio interview of Parks: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/par0int-1.
[ 8 ] Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 2006; and On Truth, Knopf, 2006.
[9] Robin D.G. Kelly, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, Free Press, 1996; see also Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State During World War II, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
[10] Photographs of Rosa Parks at Highlander Folk School in the summer of 1955 are available at http://www.highlandercenter.org/photo-gallery-rosa-parks.asp
[11] Rosa Parks (and Jim Haskins), My Story , reprint edition, Puffin, 1992.
[12] This essay draws heavily on David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Vintage Books, 1988.
[13] Garrow, p. 80.
[14] Mark Feeney, Rosa Parks, “Civil Rights Icon Whose Single Act Sparked a Movement,” October 25, 2005, The Boston Globe, p . B8.
[15] Garrow, p. 56.
[16] Francesca Polletta, “'It Was like a Fever . . . ‘ Narrative and Identity in Social Protest,” Social Problems, v 45, N 2, May, 1998.
EDITOR'S NOTE: For photos of Rosa Parks, see below.
The Rosa Parks “mug shot” appears among these images:
http://www.sites.si.edu/images/exhibits/381/new/index.htm
The picture of her fingerprinting:
http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/gallery?Site=DS&Date=20051025&Category=NEWS&ArtNo=1025001&Ref=PH&Profile=1001&Params=Itemnr=2
Apple's tribute to Rosa Parks after her death. Note that much of the information in the article reprises the stereotyped version of the Rosa Parks story.
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/articles/2005/10/rosaparks/
A large version of the Apple ad appears here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kernelpanic/56236086/in/set-283374/
The bus posters appear in this article
http://www.electric-escape.net/node/565