Mourning Rosa Parks * and Remembering Her Real Story

from CNN:

"I think that she, as the mother of the new civil rights movement, has left an impact not just on the nation, but on the world," [U.S. Rep. John Conyers] told CNN in a telephone interview. "She was a real apostle of the nonviolence movement... [T]here was only one" Rosa Parks.

*and this from Paul Rogat Loeb's Soul of a Citizen:

Before the day she refused to give up her bus seat, Rosa Parks had spent twelve years helping lead the local NAACP chapter, along with the union activist E.D. Nixon from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, teachers from the local Negro college, and a variety of ordinary members of Montgomery's African American community. The summer before, Parks had attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee's labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she'd met an older generation of civil rights activists and discussed the Supreme Court's recent decision in Brown v. Board of Education banning "separate but equal" schools. During this period of involvement and education, Parks had become familiar with previous challenges to segregation: Another Montgomery bus boycott, fifty years earlier, successfully eased some restrictions; a bus boycott in Baton Rouge had won limited gains two years before Parks was arrested; and the previous spring, a young Montgomery woman had also refused to move to the back of the bus, causing the NAACP to consider a legal challenge until it turned out that she was unmarried and pregnant, and therefore a poor symbol for a campaign. In short, Parks's decision didn't come out of nowhere. And she didn't single-handedly give birth to the civil rights movement. Rather, she was part of an existing broader effort to create change, at a time when success was far from certain. This in no way diminishes the power and historical importance of her refusal to give up her seat. But it does remind us that this tremendously consequential act might never have taken place without an immense amount of humble and frustrating work that she and others did earlier on.
...
Think about the different ways one can frame Rosa Parks's historic action. In the prevailing myth, Parks decides to act almost on a whim, in isolation. She's a virgin to politics, a holy innocent. The lesson seems to be that if any of us suddenly got the urge to do something equally heroic, that would be great. Of course most of us don't so we wait our entire lives to find the ideal moment.

The real story [of Rosa Parks] conveys a far more empowering moral. It suggests that change is the product of deliberate, incremental action, whereby we join together to try to shape a better world. Sometimes our struggles will fail, as did many earlier efforts by Parks, her peers, and her predecessors. Other times they may bear modest fruit. And at times they will trigger a miraculous outpouring of courage and heart-as happened with Parks's arrest and all that followed. We can never know beforehand the consequences of our actions.

*Loeb material added 11/10/05
*emphasis mine