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.

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?

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?