[Reader-list] Civil Rights Pioneer Rosa Parks Dies at 92

[Isaac souweine]

All:

Since a Rosa Parks obit has already been posted to the list, I thought
people might be interested in my letter to the editor in response to
the New York Times obit. Inspiration for the letter was largely taken
from the research for my piece in the Bear Acts edition of the Reader.
For more of the same, see Juan Williams' op-ed on Park's passing in
the Times.

Best,
Isaac

The Times obit can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/national/25parks.html?ex=1131080400&en=605629f10a2bc7f4&ei=5070

My response is here:

To the Editor

By affirming her individual genius while glossing over the context in
which it operated, your obituary for Rosa Parks (Oct. 25) perpetuates
a gap in standard interpretations of her life. In the obituary, vague
causal statements and passive verbs turn Ms. Parks' into an angel of
history, whose single act of civil disobedience magically crystallized
into a movement. Ms. Parks' action "grew into a mythic event", (but
who watered it?); "Ms. Parks clarified for people", (but who mediated
her message?). Such fudging detaches Parks' action from the tradition
of political dissent in which it operated. While the obituary does
well to acknowledge Parks' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement
and describe how her arrest was seized upon by the movement, it fails
to spell out a basic lesson of her story: that an essential piece of
non-violent, communal action is the skillful manipulation of slogans
and images in the creation of political myth.

Juan Williams op-ed is here

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/opinion/31williams.html

On 10/24/05, anupam pachauri <anupam_iase at yahoo.co.in> wrote:
>
> Civil Rights Pioneer Rosa Parks Dies at 92
>
> DETROIT - Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus
> seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights
> movement, died Monday evening. She was 92.
>
> Mrs. Parks died at her home during the evening of
> natural causes, with close friends by her side, said
> Gregory Reed, an attorney who represented her for the
> past 15 years.
>
> Mrs. Parks was 42 when she committed an act of
> defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of
> American history and earn her the title "mother of the
> civil rights movement."
>
> At that time, Jim Crow laws in place since the
> post-Civil War Reconstruction required separation of
> the races in buses, restaurants and public
> accommodations throughout the South, while legally
> sanctioned racial discrimination kept blacks out of
> many jobs and neighborhoods in the North.
>
> The Montgomery, Ala., seamstress, an active member of
> the local chapter of the
> National Association for the Advancement of Colored
> People, was riding on a city bus Dec. 1, 1955, when a
> white man demanded her seat.
>
> Mrs. Parks refused, despite rules requiring blacks to
> yield their seats to whites. Two black Montgomery
> women had been arrested earlier that year on the same
> charge, but Mrs. Parks was jailed. She also was fined
> $14.
>
> Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said he felt a personal
> tie to the civil rights icon: "She stood up by sitting
> down. I'm only standing here because of her."
>
> U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel (news, bio, voting record),
> D-N.Y., lauded Mrs. Parks' mettle.
>
> "I truly believe that there's a little bit of Rosa
> Parks in all Americans who have the courage to say
> enough is enough and stand up for what they believe
> in," Rangel said. "She did such a small thing, but it
> was so courageous for her as a humble person to do."
>
> Speaking in 1992, Mrs. Parks said history too often
> maintains "that my feet were hurting and I didn't know
> why I refused to stand up when they told me. But the
> real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I
> had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We
> had endured that kind of treatment for too long."
>
> Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus
> system organized by a then little-known Baptist
> minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who later
> earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.
>
> Read further at:
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051025/ap_on_re_us/obit_rosa_parks
>
>
> Regards,
> Anupam
>
>
>
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