More on Rosa Parks

I can't tell you how happy and grateful I am that my mother-in-law, Old Fogey (a handle that she gave to herself, so don't come crying foul to me) accepted my invitation a couple of months back to help out on the Cracks blog. (I'm going a little out on the limb here, but this may be the only son-in-law/mother-in-law progressive political blog going right now.) She's brought an invaluable and unique perspective to this blog, which is exemplified in her previous post reminiscing about how Rosa Parks affected her life directly.

I listen to a bit of radio, a lot of it delayed through streaming broadcasts or podcasts (downloaded to my Mac and listened to via iTunes as I type away). And yesterday, I was listening to the most recent edition of WNYC's On the Media (heard on NPR stations), which had a segment on coming to grips with the myth and the reality of Rosa Parks (with University of Wisconsin African American historian Tim Tyson) that was pretty eye-opening. Head to the OTM link where you can listen to just the individual segment in Real Player or download the whole show in MP3 format (or subscribe to it via iTunes--it's a great weekly program). Here's a sample (transcribed by lil' ol' me):

Bob Garfield: Who was Rosa Parks when she refused to give up that bus seat in the winter of 1955?

Tim Tyson: She was a very unifying sort of person in the black community because she was a working class woman who made clothing very well. And so she had friends all up and down the social scale. Aideen Nixon was the most important black political figure in Montgomery, and she was his best friend and secretary. He was the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the NAACP, and she was the secretary for both those organizations. She was well aware that they had been anticipating a bus boycott. She had been an activist for 13 or 14 years. She was in the habit of defying segregation on the buses.

[...]

Garfield: And yet, as recently as today, I'm speaking to you on Wednesday, the Washington Post in its appreciation of Rosa Parks referred very much to her as a seamstress and very little to her as an activist. It did nothing to squelch the myth that she was just one woman who on a certain day had had enough. Why do you suppose that that myth endures?

Tyson: I think for some reason, we are unwilling to honor people who are politically active. We want to honor people who just have had enough and spontaneously won't take it anymore. But somehow if they get categorized as active citizens, which would be a positive way of saying it, as trouble makers, which is often the way we think of such persons, then somehow it becomes self-serving, part of a movement which we're less comfortable with. I think that's just an American popular culture narrative that we pick up very quickly. And indeed it started very quickly after the bus boycott. They talked about her tired feet. That gets mentioned a lot more often than it should. She may have been a little bit tired, but that had nothing to do with the decision that she made.

Garfield: In that same Washington Post obituary I read today, there was, it seemed, a palpable sense of disappointment that the myth is in fact a myth. Why are we so reluctant to let it go?

Tyson: There's a sense in which Miss Parks is very important to our post-civil rights racial narrative, because we really want a kind of sugar-coated civil rights movement that's about purity and inter-racial non-violence. And so we don't really want to meet the real Rosa Parks. We don't, for example, want to know in the late 1960s, Rosa Parks became a black nationalist and a great admirer of Malcolm X. I met Rosa Parks at the funeral of Robert F. Williams, who had fought the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina with a machine gun in the late 1950s, and then fled to Cuba, and had been a kind of international revolutionary icon of black power. Miss Parks delivered the eulogy at his funeral. She talks in her autobiography, and says that she never believed in non-violence, and that she was incapable of it herself. And that she kept guns in her home to protect her family. But we want a little old lady with tired feet. You may notice, we don't have a lot of pacifist white heroes. We prefer our black people meek and mild, I think.