Thanks to Jordan Baker for reminding me that Rosa Parks deserves an entry. At least.
We should all know the story, at least the basic story, about Ms. Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white man and launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. Ms. Parks maintained then and over the years that she was "just tired," and didn't want to move. It's great mythology, and has fed into the perception that her action was spontaneous, an isolated incident that triggered a massive movement.
That's only half the story, and it's a story that gets told because anti-communism shrouds the latter half of the 20th century in the U.S.A, and it was a tool that racists used against the growing Civil Rights movement. The sad truth is that when Republicans and Democrats refused to touch racial issues, the Left, including communists, fought for racial equality. Left organizations and institutes provided a meeting ground for Civil Rights activists. Racists used those connections to tar the Civil Rights movement as a "communist front," which it clearly wasn't, but the legacy of that Cold War tactic is that Marxist involvement is effaced.
Ms. Rosa Parks was not simply a tired department store worker in Montgomery, Alabama. She had been active for years in the NAACP and voter registration drives and had attended seminars at the Highlander Folk School, a labor and civil rights organizing camp in Tennessee that contained its fair share of Marxists (and also has an extensive FBI file). In fact, the Montgomery Bus Boycott had been in the works for nearly a year by the time Rosa Parks made the monumental step that changed the course of Civil Rights in the United States.
Ms. Parks deserves honor as a great American and bears testament to the historical tendency that progress in the United States comes from the Left and not the Right.
6 comments:
Was she ever involved in the US communist movement?
It depends on what you mean by involved. I can't for certainty say she was a Party member, but she was familiar with it, had trained with Party members, and was involved in a broad coalition that included a heavy dose of Marxists (to distinguish between official CP and Marxists in general).
The charge of "Communism" was levelled at most Civil Rights leaders because it was a powerful smear. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and other white singers had been labelled Communists and seen themselves blacklisted -- and they too were on the forefront of civil rights activities.
My main point is that it was the Left agitating for Civil Rights, while the Right fought a rear-guard action to protect entrenched power.
To me it doesn't matter if she did it because she was an activist or because she was "just tired." And at the end of the day, doesn't activism indicate that one is just tired of the way things are?
"That you have despaired, there is much to honor in that-- For you have not learned how to submit; You have not learned petty prudence." - Nietzsche
(Nobody start on the "pro-Nazi" rant. He wrote good stuff. And the subject was Rosa.)
And thank you, Mass (and Jordan) for acknowledging her passing. I'm sure she got a front seat on the bus to Heaven.
CCG-I'm a big Nietzsche fan so don't worry about the pro-nazi Nietzsche rant -- I know better. N was devastating to the racist German nationalists of his time...
Mass, glad you "get it" about poor Fred.
I think Jesus must be pretty annoyed about being misused by the Bush administration, too. But Jesus still has a working PR department and poor Fred, alas, has only you and me...
I am down with Fred.
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