Ah-ha, what's that fuss, Rosa Parks moves to the back of the bus

At 92.

RIP Rosa.

it's amazing how someone so unintentionally ends up as one of the greatest americans.

In 1994, Rosa Parks was attacked and mugged in her Detroit home by Joseph Skipper. She had a total of $53 stolen from her. The incident created outrage throughout America after Parks admitted she had asked Skipper "Do you know who I am?" Before beating her, Skipper (an African American, himself) was reported to have stated he did know who Rosa Parks was but didn't care.

Holy shit.

Many blacks did far more then merely sit on the bus around the same time, and weren't recognized in anywhere near the same measure.

Whatever. It's too bad that she died, though.

Parks allowed herself to be the vehicle/prop/leading role in a lengthy legal strategy to win basic human rights for black people in Alabama. I suggest you do something similar and see how "whatever" it feels.

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmjustice5.html

With double-jeopardy protecting them from being retried, the two later boasted about the murders in a Look magazine interview.

Although it was long believed that Bryant and Milam acted alone (both are now deceased), new evidence — much of it provided by a recent documentary about the case by Keith Beauchamp — indicates that numerous other individuals may have been involved — and several of those implicated are still alive. In May 2004, the Justice Department, calling the 1955 prosecution a "grotesque miscarriage of justice," reopened the murder investigation.

"I understand that the culture required something to rally around at the time, but I never really saw what she did as that daring, or whatever."

This is a pretty idiotic statement, but here I go...

...When viewed in a contemporary context, no she didn't do anything that special. However, the southern United States was a very different place in 1955. It's not that she just refused to give up her seat. What she did was important because she refused to let herself be humiliated, trod upon and treated like a second-class citizen which was how all black people were made to feel at that time.

Seriously, read a book.

RIP, Rosa. :-(

Thank God for Rosa Parks. Her actions helped lead a movement that changed life for the better for people such as my parents. May she RIP.

Many blacks did far more then merely sit on the bus around the same time, and weren't recognized in anywhere near the same measure.

Dr. Moribus is more on track here.Although there had been many similar incidents and arrests before hers the NAACP decided to use her as a test case for challenging Jim Crow. She was involved, knew people, and when asked if she'd go all the way with them she said yes.

I'm not downplaying her importance in American history b/c I think the courage to agree to be the test case and all the work she put in afterwards is praiseworthy. But yes, her role in sparking the eventual downfall of Jim Crow was a measured decision.

I know this b/c each year I taught we had to read her autobiography in class.

"I wish I was a slave, I would FUCK somebody up! Tell ME to bale the motherfucking cotton... I would've been on the street and shit: 'Bale that cotton!' -- SUCK MY DICK, MASTER!!! SUCK MY MOTHERFUCKING DICK!!!"

RIP Rosa, we're better for you.

REALLY REALLY important what Sam and Morbs underline up there -- she was not some random person who just decided one day, "hey! I'm going to sit in the FRONT!" altho this is the noble, one-woman-against-the-world story that is always told

The truly revolutionary acts are those which are so self-evidently right that afterwards, we are bemused that they seemed so revolutionary to some, when to use, they just seem so right. Therein lies the legacy. Such people remake the world to conform to their bravery.

I think this sentiment is a bit asinine for this thread.

RIP Rosa. :(

Washington - US President George W Bush on Tuesday paid homage to the late Rosa Parks, the courageous black seamstress whose defiance aboard a city bus half a century ago sparked the US civil rights movement and helped Martin Luther King jun rise to national prominence.

Speaking at Bolling air force base here, Bush said the United States "honours the memory of one of the most inspiring women of the 20th century, Rosa Parks."

Parks died at her home in Detroit, Michigan on Monday at the age of 92.

On December 1 1955, Parks was jailed and fined $14 for refusing to give up her seat in the middle of a Montgomery, Alabama city bus to a white man who wanted to sit in her row.

At that time, front rows were for whites only, and blacks had to abandon their seats in other rows when all front-row seats were taken and whites were left standing.

Her arrest launched the 382-day Montgomery bus boycott that ran from December 5 1955 to December 20 1956.

During that time, black workers walked to their jobs or paid black-owned taxi companies 10 cents - the same amount as the bus fare - to get to work.

"Her show of defiance was an act of personal courage that moved millions, including a young preacher named Martin Luther King," Bush recalled.

"Rosa Parks's example helped touch off the civil rights movement and transformed America for the better.

She will always have a special place in American history, and our nation thinks of Rosa Parks and her loved ones today," Bush said.

Parks allowed herself to be the vehicle/prop/leading role in a lengthy legal strategy to win basic human rights for black people in Alabama. I suggest you do something similar and see how "whatever" it feels."

I KNOW there are those who did far more for the civil rights movement then she did who get absolutely no credit... for anything. I never said she was insignificant, just that she should be less significant then others who deserve more. An ignorant sow like you just accepts that cultural heroes are immediately more significant and important than others who are not recognized.

"More white people did far more than whack a puck around some ice, but were they recognized as much as Wayne Gretsky has been? The OUTRAGE.

To say that Wayne Gretzky did nothing more than "whack a puck around some ice" is the same as saying that Van Gogh merely threw some paint at a canvas or that Shakespeare just wrote a few measly plays. The man was a genius the likes of who will never be seen again in pro hockey, and the Oilers teams of the 80's were some of the greatest ever!

As far as whether or not Rosa Parks deserved all of the credit she recieved, every movement needs a symbol. Why should it matter that it was her? Furthermore, in light of the role she played in terms of bringing African-Americans' struggle for equality into the mass consciousness; few others did as much, or were as significant.

Reading this morning about the DC funeral for Rosa Parks, I solidified an impression I've had about the way her death has been covered. It strikes me

1) that she's treated almost exclusively as an individual hero, rather than as one photogenic activist in a huge grassroots movement.

2) that this (point [1]) demonstrates the limitations (possibly unavoidable) of media in this country (possibly anywhere).

Things I've read about her calls her a hero and a saint and what all else, but doesn't acknowledge that she would have been nothing -- literally nothing, in the public eye or in the history books -- had she not been supported by a huge group of community leaders and activists who were willing to commit enormous amounts of time and energy and to sacrifice enormously in order to, slowly, win their rights.

The way the story is getting told, the casual reader would be excused for thinking she was just a common woman who got sick of segregation and was lucky enough to be able to say so at the precise moment when the TV cameras were on (so to speak). It would seem very significant to her biography that she was, at the time that she took her sit (so, again, to speak), the secretary of the local NAACP, but fact is omitted from many articles. The one I just read read in Newsweek, for example, doesn't mention that, but it does mention that in 1994 she was robbed by a crack addict. What irony? Didn't that guy realize he was robbing the woman who'd single-handedly saved him from Jim Crow?!?

Which brings me to my second point. It really seems that that sort of sensationalism -- which is more interested in robbery than in grassroots organizing -- is inherent in most versions of popular media, and it seems that those media that are a bit more mature (NYT, Washington Post, and NPR being the ones that I sampled) still place enormous emphasis on Parks's individual heroism over her role within an organic movement.

And that sort of coverage, I think, has palpably negative effects. The casual reader from two paragraphs ago would be excused for feeling that Parks was some combination of superhuman and lucky. The reader has no ability to stand up for what she believes in, meanwhile, since she's neither such a saint as Parks nor is she in a situation where she can instantly and obviously display the contradictions of something she disapproves of. This ignores -- just to repeat myself -- that Parks act would've resulted in nothing more than arrest had it not been for the tens of thousands (or whatever number) of people who were part of her movement.

Which is not to say that the journalists writing about her want to trivialize the civil rights movement in favor of a rock-star view of history. Of course not. But I think that, intentional or not, that's what happens.

Also, just because something isn't shocking doesn't mean we can't talk about it, otherwise we'd have to delete ILX.

Yeah, the camera pulled back to show that it was from a State of the Union speech during the Clinton Administration, but for a few moments there ...