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October 28, 2005
Rosa Parks, Progressive Christian Activist
by Faithful Progressive
When Rosa Parks, the beloved mother of the civil rights movement, died this week universal praise and honor was bestowed on her. She was a woman Time magazine ranked as one of the 100 Most Influential of the 20th Century. Unfortunately, we still heard some of the same myths that serve to at once to belittle her achievement and to misinform those who would follow her path as a Christian peacemaker. I heard at least three TV tributes that used the fairy tale that she was just a tired little old lady who didn't want to stand up on that fateful day in Montgomery when she sparked the civil rights movement. Ms. Parks herself hated this version of her story, commenting, "The only tired I was, was tired of giving in...I knew someone had to take the first step and I made up my mind not to move. Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it." As the poet Rita Dove writes in the Time tribute, "Parks was 42 years old when she refused to give up her seat. She has insisted that her feet were not aching; she was, by her own testimony, no more tired than usual. And she did not plan her fateful act: "I did not get on the bus to get arrested," she has said. "I got on the bus to go home."
The real story of Rosa Parks is far more interesting and perhaps more threatening to the staus quo and the powers that be: she was a progressive Christian Activist. This was true both before and after she led the Montgomery Bus Boycott. According to historian Douglas Brinkley, by "...1955 she was already a veteran civil rights activist, married to a charter member of the NAACP's Montgomery chapter, and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the many black churches whose congregants organized and fought to desegregate the South.”
According to this profile in the Academy of Achievement: "The couple joined the local chapter of the NAACP and worked quietly for many years to improve the lot of African-Americans in the segregated south. "I worked on numerous cases with the NAACP," Mrs. Parks recalled, "but we did not get the publicity. There were cases of flogging, peonage, murder, and rape. We didn't seem to have too many successes. It was more a matter of trying to challenge the powers that be, and to let it be known that we did not wish to continue being second-class citizens."
Rita Dove writes that Ms. Parks was the ideal candidate to change this status: "At the news of the arrest, local civil rights leader E.D. Nixon exclaimed, "My God, look what segregation has put in my hands!" Parks was not only above moral reproach (securely married, reasonably employed) but possessed a quiet fortitude as well as political savvy — in short, she was the ideal plaintiff for a test case."
The rest, is of course, history. The Academy article continues, "The bus incident led to the formation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, led by the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The association called for a boycott of the city-owned bus company. The boycott lasted 382 days and brought Mrs. Parks, Dr. King, and their cause to the attention of the world. A Supreme Court Decision struck down the Montgomery ordinance under which Mrs. Parks had been fined, and outlawed racial segregation on public transportation."
Still, we cling to the fairy tale of the tired little old lady, rather than the engaged Christian activist with deep roots in her church and in the NAACP. Why? Some of us want to believe that change comes easier than it really does. There were no doubt many boring meetings and organizational efforts prior to that fateful day on a bus--and these laid the groundwork for what came from it. When the time came, people were organized and developed a very specific agenda: the legal challenge and the Bus Boycott. Rosa Parks was not just a tired and dignified old lady, she was a progressive Christian activist whose faith led her to move mountains. God bless you, Rosa Parks, and thank-you for a lifetime of steady effort to make the world a place more worthy of God's unending love.
• Saturday: Parks' body will lie in state at her church, St. Paul AME in Montgomery, Ala.
• Sunday: 10:30 a.m. service at St. Paul AME; the casket then will be flown to Washington, D.C.
• Sunday: Parks' body will lie in state at the Lincoln Memorial from 6 p.m. to midnight.
• Monday: Memorial service at 1 p.m. at the Historical AME Church. Then the casket will travel back to Detroit. The body will lie in state at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History from 9 p.m. Monday to 5 a.m. Wednesday.
• Wednesday: 11 a.m. funeral at Greater Grace Temple, Detroit.
Posted by Faithful Progressive at October 28, 2005 02:37 PM
Comments
Amidst all the eulogies and panagerics for Ms. Parks, I fear that she may be turned into a marble statue, as has happened to Dr. King. I hope that in the midst of our national gratitude for her courage that we don't use our memorials as a way to insulate the status quo from her witness; especially now in this time of reaction and retrenchment. May her memory bless us and continue to challenge us.
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