Comments Elsewhere

No. I don’t see the need to document every single thing I repeat that I have heard from many sources throughout my life.

I see. So you took the opportunity of Rosa Parks’ recent death to confidently assert, as matters of fact, sensationalist, defamatory rumors about her which you have absolutely no basis for asserting other than half-remembered gossip.

Just because of what I have heard, again, from a few people. Someone even told me it was mentioned on the radio in Texas after her death. Many people think it’s even more admirable that she was already a political operative beforehand. This is based in something.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever bothered to actually read something about Rosa Parks’ life or the Montgomery Bus Boycott? (I mean actually read something, like a book- or chapter-length treatment, from beginning to end.) If not, then you ought to read something about it before you start flapping your yap about it. If so, you ought to know that what the statements about Rosa Parks’ political activism are based on are (1) her civil rights activism throughout the 1950s (she was an organizer and activist for the Montgomery NAACP, and attended the Highlander Folk School (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_Folk_School) in summer 1955, where she was trained in the theory and practice of nonviolent civil disobedience); (2) her friendship with other leading civil rights figures in Montgomery (in particular E. D. Nixon, Clifford Durr, Virginia Durr, but not — for what it’s worth — including Martin Luther King Jr., who had been in Montgomery only 2 years, was known by few people outside of his own congregation, and had practically no involvement in the civil rights movement at all until the Bus Boycott had already begun); and (3) the fact that Nixon, one of Montgomery’s leading Black attorneys, had already been planning a legal strategy for challenging Montgomery’s bus segregation ordinance in court, and was awaiting a test case. (There had been two young Black women — Claudette Colvin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudette_Colvin) and Mary Louise Smith (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Louise_Smith) — who had been arrested under similar circumstances the same year; Nixon and Parks helped organize Colvin’s defense, but Nixon made a controversial decision not to pursue their cases because he was afraid that the white press would make hay of Colvin’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy and rumors that Smith’s father was a drunkard.) However, there is absolutly no evidence at all, from the Durrs, Nixon, Parks, or anyone else, that Parks spent any time intentionally boarding busses in an effort to get arrested. Maybe what you are half-remembering is the fact that E. D. Nixon spent the better part of a year trying to prepare his legal strategy for a challenge to the segregation statute (Claudette Colvin was arrested in March; Mary Louise Smith was arrested in October; and Rosa Parks was arrested in December). Or maybe whatever dude you happened to hear this from just isn’t a very reliable source.

Jason Ditz:

I don’t think it makes a huge difference either way, but there’s something a little more romantic about the idea that she didn’t like it, and accepted it, and just one day had an epiphany that what was going on had to stop as opposed to riding the bus day in and day out hoping for the chance to make a statement.

Well, she *didn’t8 “ride the bus day in and day out hoping for the chance to make a statement”, or if she did, I’m certainly not aware of any evidence whatsoever to that effect. (She did ride the bus day in and day out hoping to get to work. But the only arguments I’ve heard for any premeditated effort to get arrested contain, at best, nothing more than sheer speculation based on her organizing experience and her friendship with Nixon and the Durrs.) On the other hand, even if she had I don’t see what would have been even un-romantic about that. Lots of times defiance of tyranny takes a long time, and I think perserverance in the effort to stop systematic injustice, even when it’s not pleasant and even when it’s not immediately paying off, is an admirable trait. I also think that seeing that kind of perserverance pay off in spectacular ways is, when it happens, a wonderful, inspiring thing. Don’t you?