mourn and organize (more rosa parks)

Reading various articles about Rosa Parks these last two days, I'm reminded of something that has always bothered me about the way she is portrayed (and more generally, about the way the history of progressive/civil rights movements is taught in the US, when it's taught at all). The enduring myth of Parks is that she was just an tired woman who got fed up one day, and refused to give up her seat on a bus. But Parks was actually an experienced civil rights activist and a longstanding member of the NAACP; she knew that day when she refused to give up her seat that the movement was looking for a test case to take to the courts. The Guardian's obit is very good on this matter, as is this piece from the Columbia Review of Journalism Daily.

Although the myth is supposed to be inspiring--look what a single, ordinary person can do--I think it can actually be deeply disempowering. By eliding Rosa Parks' background as an activist, as a participant in an organized movement for justice, the importance of organization, of numbers, of planned resistance, as an avenue for change, is concealed. Pretending that her act of resistance was sui generis has the pernicious effect of making it seem extraordinary and impossible to repeat. This is part of a much broader practice of obscuring radical and progressive history in America--everyone learns about Helen Keller in school, but how many learn that she was a feminist and a devoted Socialist? Martin Luther King Jr. is lionized as a leader of the civil rights movement, but his scathing criticism of the Vietnam War is quietly neglected. The history of labor and left activism is largely absent from a lot of public school history curricula. What is left is a shallow faith in the seeming inevitability of progess, with little understanding of the long, hard, contested process of political and social efforts that brought about change--and that shallow faith breeds complacency.

Incidentally, the place where Rosa Parks attended a residential activism workshop on desegregation the summer before the bus boycott was the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee (now the Highlander Research and Education Center). I did a fair amount of reading about Highlander while in the midst of researching my first master's thesis (part of which dealt with the connections between progressive activism and popular music in the US from 1930-1960, i.e. folk music and the labor movement--think Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie--and the role of freedom songs and gospel music in the civil rights movement--the SNCC Freedom Singers, CORE Singers, Cordell and Bernice Johnson Reagon, etc.) Highlander was one of the places where the two were intertwined--it started out as an adult education project of the labor movement in the South and later shifted to a focus on civil rights, and political song was an important part of the community activities and activist workshops. Their programs helped educate and train a crucial mass of young activists who went on to be footsoldiers and organizers in the labor, civil rights, and ant-war movements. Rosa Parks later wrote, "At Highlander I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society…I gained there the strength to persevere in my work for freedom not just for blacks, but for all oppressed people." Joe Hill's famous last words were: Don't mourn; organize." Surely we can do both.