Free The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis Page B

Having her casket on view in the Capitol honored Parks as a national dignitary while reminding mourners that their experience was sponsored by the federal government. Look how far the nation has come, the events tacitly announced, look at what a great nation we are. A woman who had been denied a seat on the bus fifty years earlier was now lying in the Capitol. Instead of using the opportunity to illuminate and address current social inequity, the public spectacle provided an opportunity for the nation to lay to rest a national heroine
and
its own history of racism.
    This national honor for Rosa Parks served to obscure the present injustices facing the nation. Less than two months after the shame of the federal government’s inaction during Hurricane Katrina, the public memorial for Parks provided a way to paper over those devastating images from New Orleans. Burying the history of American racism was politically useful and increasingly urgent. Parks’s body brought national absolution at a moment when government negligence and the economic and racial inequities laid bare during Katrina threatened to disrupt the idea of a color-blind America. Additionally, in the midst of a years-long war where the Pentagon had forbidden the photographing of coffins returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, Parks’s coffin was to be the one that would be seen and honored.
    Friends and colleagues noted the irony of such a misappropriation. Many bemoaned the fact that some of the speakers at the memorials didn’t really know Mrs. Parks, while many friends and longtime political associates weren’t invited to participate. Some refused to go or even to watch, seeing this as an affront to the woman they had admired, while others felt troubled but attended nevertheless. Still others used the events to pay tribute to the greatness of the woman they had known. Regardless, they saw the nation squandering the opportunity to recommit itself to the task of social justice to which Parks had dedicated her life.
    The public memorial promoted an inspirational fable: a long-suffering, gentle heroine challenged backward Southern villainy with the help of a faceless chorus of black boycotters and catapulted a courageous new leader, Martin Luther King Jr. into national leadership. Mrs. Parks was honored as midwife—not a leader or thinker or long-time activist—of a struggle that had long run its course. This fable is a romantic one, promoting the idea that without any preparation (political or psychic) or subsequent work a person can make great change with a single act, suffer no lasting consequences, and one day be heralded as a hero. It is also gendered, holding up a caricature of a quiet seamstress who demurely kept her seat and implicitly castigating other women, other black women, for being poor or loud or angry and therefore not appropriate for national recognition. Parks’s memorialization promoted an improbable children’s story of social change—one not-angry woman sat down and the country was galvanized—that erased the long history of collective action against racial injustice and the widespread opposition to the black freedom movement, which for decades treated Parks’s extensive political activities as “un-American.”
    This fable—of an accidental midwife without a larger politics—has made Parks a household name but trapped her in the elementary school curriculum, rendering her uninteresting to many young people. The variety of struggles that Parks took part in, the ongoing nature of the campaign against racial injustice, the connections between Northern and Southern racism that she recognized, and the variety of Northern and Southern movements in which she engaged have been given short shrift in her iconization. Parks’s act was separated from a community of people who prepared the way for her action, expanded her stand into a movement, and continued with her in the struggle for justice in the decades that followed. 9
    This limited