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.

I hardly see how it’s defamatory to have been a civil rights organizer. It just detracts from the mystique.

Read back a bit before you shoot off your replies. It’s not defamatory to claim that someone was civil rights organizer. Especially not when that’s demonstrably true. What is defamatory is asserting without any evidence whatsoever that Rosa Parks was having an affair with Martin Luther King Jr. before (or for that matter after) her arrest in 1955. Which is what you made clear you were doing in the passage that I quoted.

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.

No, because I don’t find it interesting. It was just a comment on an inner thread of a message board. Get a grip. I even said on that thread that I am not sure at all.

It’s no sin not to read about things you don’t find interesting, but it is totally irresponsible to go around making confident assertions about the topic if you haven’t done anything in particular to make yourself less than ignorant about it. If you didn’t know what you were talking about, then why did you talk about it?

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?

Actually, the only good thing to have happened was that the government stopped forcing segregation. They immediately began forcing integration which is almost as bad, and they got to take the credit for “ending institutional racism” — as if they were just victims of the status quo previously.

I’m not sure what “forcing integration” has to do with Rosa Parks or the Montgomery Bus Boycott — the bus boycott first sought better treatment for blacks on segregated busses, and then an end to bus segregation, by means of a voluntary boycott; the legal case (culminating in the Supreme Court’s Browder v. Gale decision) did nothing more than strike down city and state segregation laws concerning public transportation. As it happens, I think that any honest accounting of what Jim Crow meant for blacks, as compared with what the rights-violating portions of antidiscrimination law mean for whites, ought to make it incredibly obvious that government-enforced integration — though bad — is not even remotely as bad as Jim Crow was. But in any case the shift from Rosa Parks’ legacy to the legacy of the Freedom Movement as a whole — however mixed that may be — is just a change in subject.

As for the government taking undue credit, well, what else is new? Governments lie and aggrandize themselves without basis all the time. That’s not the Freedom Movement’s fault, let alone Rosa Parks’s personally. So I don’t see how it has anything to do with how we should or shouldn’t remember her.