She knew that in the previous year, two other women had been arrested for the same offense, but neither was deemed right to handle the role that was sure to become one of the most controversial of the century.
I found this really interesting; I hadn't known that. I also hadn't known that she and her husband were politically active already in antisegregation, & her husband being "an early defender of the Scottsboro boys". The problem I'd always had with Parks being used as a symbol for the civil rights movement was that she always seemed to me as being portrayed as a passive and politically naive resister, an old woman, non-threatening.
They quote her in the article saying something to this effect:
I thought back to the time when I used to sit up all night and didn't sleep, and my grandfather would have his gun right by the fireplace, or if he had his one-hoss wagon going anywhere, he always had his gun in the back of the wagon," she wrote. "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 no 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.
I find that really creepy, actually.
Creepy how?
She worked as an icon because it would be hard to attack her in the media and in discussion as some kind of rabble rouser. I imagine the two that got arrested before made a production out of it. What was needed, I suspect, and what the movement got, was a woman who was just going to take a simple human action that any reasonable person would take, and was simply going to be quiet and strong willed about it. No kicking and screaming, profanity, etc. Just a clear example the world could easily understand of just how absurd and unfair and irrational segregation was.
To build on a question from the other thread: I think this is why the current brand of protesting as brought to you by anti-globalization folks, PETA, ELF, and even the anti-Bush anti-war people is that the protests and dialogue don't have a simple focus for people to seize on. Also, too much profanity and too many celebrities. The problem with celebrities is that it's hard to take, say, Sean Penn seriously as a self-proclaimed expert on Foreign Policy. Or Barbara Streisand or even Bono, although I have a little more respect for him than the others. So my advice to protesters of this era is: get a simple message you all can agree on and repeat it mercilessly, avoid recycling people like Joan Baez, etc. because it's a cliche, and for God's sake hire a consultant to come up with your chants. Every time I hear someone trying to lead a chant, it's like they lifted a page from a Chilton's manual and are reading it aloud. Horrible.
The most recent semi-successful protest I can think of was the woman camped out at Crawford on behalf of her son who was KIA in Iraq. That one was going OK (regardless of my personal opinion) and what I think killed it was when people supposedly smarter than her took over and muddled the message - when it was simply a mom looking to talk to the President, it had meaning, but when suddenly there was obviously big money and political interests behind it, it stopped being meaningful or having the ability to attract people who weren't already of that point of view.
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Topic: Rosa Parks is dead (Read 8569 times)