Comments Elsewhere

Thus Jeremy:

Um, literal — she was MLK’s mistress. What, dead people automatically deserve respect no matter what? or is it that black people deserve respect no matter what? Sorry, I don’t play that game. I meant exactly what I said — it cuts the coolness factor in her actions because she was a slick political operative and not a tough-as-nails old broad.

A few questions.

1. Do you have any particular evidence for the sensationalist claim that Rosa Parks was having an affair with Martin Luther King Jr. before (or for that matter, after) her arrest on December 1, 1955? If so, what is this evidence and where can documentation of it be found?

2. Rosa Parks herself repeatedly explained her actions in interviews and in writing. She was neither just a tired old woman nor a political plant — her refusal to move was an intentional act of political defiance but it was not premeditated. (Here’s what she said about it: “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or any more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in…. There had to be a stopping place, and this seemed to have been the place for me to stop being pushed around …. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen, even in Montgomery, Alabama.” But she also said that she hadn’t gotten onto the bus intending to get arrested; in fact, that if she had seen that the driver was James Blake — a notoriously nasty bus-driver, and the same driver who, 12 years before, had thrown her off the bus for refusing to get off and re-enter through the back entrance after she had paid up front — she wouldn’t have gotten on. You can find this information in many places, including Lynn Olson’s 2001 history of women in the civil rights movement, Freedom’s Daughters). Were you aware of Ms. Parks’ own testimony about her reasons? Do you have any overriding reasons to doubt it?

3. Why would it “detract from the coolness factor” if it turned out to be true that Rosa Parks refused to move because she thought that government-enforced segregation was wrong, and she intended to help end part of it through an act of political defiance? Is deliberate resistance to tyranny somehow less admirable than refusing to move because you’re tired?