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"If I could sit down for justice, you can stand up for children." Mrs. Rosa Parks sent this statement to the 250,000 child advocates who gathered in Washington, D.C. for the first Stand for Children Day in 1996. The crowd was thrilled and honored to receive these words of support from the "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement," whose decision to give in to arrest rather than give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama on Dec. 1, 1955 sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and the era of nonviolent civil rights protest that transformed our nation. Her moral witness encouraged us as it has thousands of others. When she passed away on Oct. 24 at age 92, we lost one of our great lanterns.
In his book She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, educator and author Herbert Kohl explains that most Americans today know a widely-accepted mythical version of Mrs. Parks’s heroism--an account he calls "Rosa Was Tired." In this story, Mrs. Parks was a quiet, elderly Black woman who one cold winter day felt very tired on her way home from work, and decided to sit down at the front of the bus. The driver immediately had her arrested for sitting in the Whites-only section, Dr. King led Montgomery’s Black community in springing up in outrage to boycott the buses, and the rest is history.
But not only is this simplified version inaccurate, it downplays some of Mrs. Parks’s true importance as an effective activist who was already a community leader in the struggle for justice years before she refused to move on the Cleveland Avenue bus. As Mrs. Parks herself would say in her autobiography, a key part of the myth is that she sat down that day because she was "old and tired." "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."
Mrs. Parks had been fighting against "giving in" for a long time. She would later write that as a young girl being raised by her mother and maternal grandparents in rural Alabama, "I was raised to be proud and it had worked for me to stand up aggressively for myself." When she married her husband, barber Raymond Parks, in 1932, he was helping the N.A.A.C.P. raise money for the trials of the "Scottsboro Boys," nine young Black Alabama men who had been accused of raping two White women on a train in 1931. Mrs. Parks appreciated that Mr. Parks was one of the first men she could talk to about racial concerns. In the 1940s the Parkses worked together in a voting-rights group. Mrs. Parks joined the N.A.A.C.P. in 1943, and as the volunteer secretary for the local chapter and a coordinator of its Youth Council, she worked closely with chapter president E.D. Nixon and was well-established in Montgomery’s civil rights community.
Mrs. Parks also worked as a seamstress and domestic for Clifford and Virginia Durr, a White couple who were two of the most prominent White supporters of civil rights in the city. Several months before her arrest, at the Durrs’ suggestion and with their sponsorship, she had gone to an interracial civil rights training workshop and leadership conference at the Highlander Folk School near Knoxville, Tennessee.
| | So on the evening of her arrest, when a bus driver asked her and three other Black passengers to move from their seats in the middle of the bus because the White section was full and a White man had boarded with nowhere to sit, Mrs. Parks had already been quietly working for equality for a long time, and she was ready for a fight.
The rest of Montgomery’s Black community was ready too. To outsiders the boycott may have seemed to materialize overnight, but of course that was not the case. Several years earlier, Black women had organized the Montgomery Women's Political Council, led by JoAnn Robinson, partly to focus on the poor treatment of Black bus passengers. The Women’s Political Council and the N.A.A.C.P. had been waiting for a long time for the right chance to challenge the segregated buses. They just needed the right case, and with the well-respected and sympathetic Mrs. Parks, already one of their own leaders, of course they had the perfect opportunity.
The groups were prepared to immediately begin organizing the community for a boycott, and JoAnn Robinson was also successful in convincing Montgomery’s established Black leaders that her church’s young pastor, who was new to town and not well known, was the right person to lead it--the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Plans that had already been laid for how to proceed with a possible court case and organize an effective carpool system quickly fell into place. So what may have seemed like a spontaneous event was actually helped at every turn by much quiet preparation and planning.
In the years after she became a national icon, Mrs. Parks, who founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development to serve underprivileged youths, was always concerned about Black children’s needs. In 1997, a year after the first Stand for Children Day, Mrs. Parks was the honorary co-chair of Stand for Healthy Children with Rosie O’Donnell, which was key to the passage of the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to provide 5 million children health coverage. Once again, her continuing moral witness was an inspiration to all of us as she came to Washington to help launch the 1997 Stand for Healthy Children despite her frailty. But so was her important example of systemically working together with others for a long time to lay the groundwork for change, and, when the right moment came, being willing to step forward and take a risk to fight for what she believed.
In their beautiful new children’s book Rosa, poet Nikki Giovanni and illustrator Bryan Collier give a new retelling of Mrs. Parks’s story. Our children deserve to be taught about Mrs. Parks’s true heroism and leadership, and this book is a wonderful way to begin. And each of us needs to follow her urging that "if I can sit down for justice, you can stand up for children." I hope you will stand up for health coverage for every child in 2006 and stand up to political leaders who don’t join us.
Editor’s note: Marian Wright Edelman is CEO and Founder of the Children's Defense Fund and its Action Council whose mission is to Leave No Child Behind and to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start, and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. |
