"Rosa Parks was a plant"

[Nova Land]

A well-referenced article which might give you guys a little more perspective. It's not "web-friendly", e.g. no hyperlinks, but if you really want to, you can look up the sources he mentions.

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=169

That's a good article. Thank you for posting that.

A sentence in that article brought something to mind I'd like to mention:

Parks was also friends with (and occasional seamstress for) Clifford and Virginia Durr, white, upper-crust New Deal progressives who had been active in civil rights efforts...

Parks' friendship with Virginia Durr is not directly related to the thread topic, but it's a fascinating and uplifting bit of history which is well worth looking up and reading about. I believe their relationship is covered (briefly but well, if I'm remembering the right book) in Douglas Brinkley's biography of Rosa Parks, and there are probably other books which cover it also.

 

[Rolfe]

That's a good article. Thank you for posting that.

Thanks from me also. A great read, highly educational.

Underlines what I was remarking on earlier - for a great political victory, it's usually necessarly for some actual politics to be going on. Often for quite some time.

In hindsight, it may appear that the boycott’s success was inevitable. In fact, its effectiveness was the result of leaders’ decisions about tactics and strategies and their capacity to mobilize thousands of ordinary people in a complex, year-long grassroots challenge to the city’s political and economic establishment.

Rolfe (longtime member of a political party that has finally won national office after 70-odd years of patient, slow advance).

PS (still reading). I see that the actual quote from Rosa makes her state of mind quite clear.

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true,” Parks later explained. “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. . . . No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

The more I read of this, the more I like and admire the woman.

 

[Nova Land]

... I had only heard the basic tale that Rosa was a tired seamstress and didn't want to move, and whaddayaknow, that sparked the whole civil rights uprising.

This discussion has enlightened me to nuances I was quite unaware of, and while I can see that the "conspiracy" wan't quite what qayak portrayed it as, I can also realise that there was a lot more going on there than meets the uninformed eye...

Yes. This is why I think it is good for people to turn a skeptical eye on well-known historical narratives, and see if what is common knowledge actually is true. Much of what is taught in our schools, and portrayed in tv or movie version, is simplified and inaccurate. It's good to try to straighten the record out.

That's one reason why I think it does matter whether the claim qayak is making is true or not. As you note, there are a number of details in the commonly-held impression of the Rosa Parks story that are not accurate. It is important to correct the things which are not true and to hold on to the things that are.

To me, skepticism is just as much about examining things and accepting the claims that are true as it is about examining things and rejecting the claims that are false. Being excessively willing to dismiss things which happen to be true is as bad as being excessively willing to believe things which happen to be false.

There are enough aspects of the Rosa Parks story (as commonly held) which are inaccurate, and which it would be good to correct in the version that young people are taught. Getting carried away and trying to correct things which were right in the first place does a disservice to those trying to correct the things which were not right.

That's what I believe qayak is doing. By spreading a modern myth -- that Rosa Parks was selected to refuse to give up her seat, in order to create a situation around which blacks could be mobilized to resist segregation -- he makes it harder for those who would like to de-mythify the story so that people can appreciate the events as they actually happened.

 

[Rolfe]

It's odd that qayak hasn't joined this thread. I can easily imagine that his point of view was a sincere misunderstanding, simply taking the demythologising of the Rosa Parks story a bit further than the facts will sustain.

Even when I first read his original statement, my initial reaction was, really?, well, good for her, this is a far more interesting tale than the common version. Now the version I'm seeing from this thread (and even more so from Foolmewunz's link) is even more interesting and nuanced than the simple "she was a plant".

Parks did not single-handedly “spark” the bus boycott. She was part of a network of organizations and activists (including many women) who had the leadership capacity and resources—telephone lists, mimeograph machines, access to teachers, clergy, and others—to act strategically. Although legend has framed the Montgomery boycott as a spontaneous outburst of protest, it was rooted in the experiences of Parks and other activists, who had learned valuable lessons from their mentors in the labor and civil rights movements. Indeed, the success of any movement for social change depends on the often invisible day-to-day work of unsung grassroots leaders who make important choices about strategy, tactics, fund-raising, developing new leaders, cultivating allies, deciding when to engage in lawsuits and elections and when to resort to protest, picking battles they can win, and knowing when to compromise.

I realise that her political activism was of a far more important kind for the human race as a whole than my own, and far more dangerous too, but having taken part in just such a network of activists, with computers and mail-merges and so on, I can immediately understand something of what it was like. It all makes wonderful sense, in a way that the trite tale of the "tired seamstress" really doesn't.

Thank you for this thread, Nova Land.

Rolfe.

 

[Foolmewunz]

I agree with almost everything you wrote, with one major exception: your sentence in which you say: "Qayak's contention that Rosa Parks was "selected" is partially accurate."

No. A statement that Rosa Parks was selected after the fact to be the focus of a campaign, such as the statement you make, would be correct. But that isn't the statement which qayak made.

Qayak's statement was that Rosa Parks was selected beforehand. That is the point of his post. That is the contention which he claimed was supported by the passage from Rosa Parks' memoir which he reproduced in his post.

If I am misreading qayak's post, I apologize. But to me, what he wrote seems fairly clear. I am not willing to change his statement in order to create an area of agreement. If he is wrong -- and used deceptive techniques, such as misrepresenting a passage from Rosa Parks' memoir in order to make his point sound more credible that it is -- then I believe that needs to be pointed out.

We're in agreement. My paragraph, as a whole, merely says she was NOT PRE-SELECTED. She was "selected" (or to be more accurate, her case was chosen), after she had been arrested and they saw that the timing was right.

I am disagreeing with Qayak's post as strongly as you are - merely wording it differently. Everything I've read about the events of the two or three days right after the incident indicates that they had no plan in place. It took quite some time for them to even get word that she'd been arrested, and I believe it was well into the evening before they even got together the bail.

None of the above indicates any sort of pre-planning. As I mentioned earlier, there weren't even any reporters/photographers at the scene, at the jail, or at the home when she returned that evening. The NAACP knew enough about publicity to have arranged for coverage if they had plotted this particular moment and this particular person as the touchstone for their actions.

 

[Carnivore]

In my opinion: neither.

Yes, she was opposed to segregation, and the bus seating was a result of segregation laws. But I don't think it was segregation per se which made Rosa Parks angry enough to refuse to obey the bus driver that day. Segregation was a side effect of a larger problem, white supremacy -- a belief that blacks were less-than-human and deserved to be treated that way.

Separate but equal was a lie (as were many of the other rationales and code phrases used by racists, such as states rights. The intent of segregation was not to treat blacks as separate, it was to treat blacks as inferior.

The treatment of blacks was not so much about keeping blacks and whites separate -- although that was definitely a part of it. It was about showing blacks how little they mattered. It was about subjecting them to a thousand indignities, constantly. Little things, like calling black men "boy". Little things, like whites calling blacks by their first name, but demanding that blacks address them by a title and last name. Little things, like making blacks enter through the back of the bus -- and then driving off sometimes after they'd paid their fare but before they'd been able to reach the back entrance.

If Rosa Parks had gotten on the bus and sat in the white section, that would have indicated a conscious effort to challenge the segregation laws. But she didn't. She got on, paid her fare, and sat in a seat which according to the rules of the game she was allowed to sit in. And then additional white passengers got on, and the driver wanted to take her seat away from her. He (and the white passengers) were saying, in effect, You don't matter. We're better than you. We are first-class citizens; you are second-class at best. We're people, you're trash.

That's the kind of thing that black people had to put up with all day, every day. And that, I believe, is what Rosa Parks was protesting when she refused to give up her seat. Not segregation per se, but the attitude of white supremacy which underlay segregation.

The bus driver and the white passengers probably didn't even realize how obnoxious their behavior was. It was something they just took for granted they were entitled to do. But they were behaving like jerks; and that, in my opinion, is what Rosa Parks was fed up with and reacting to. This was not a calculated, pre-planned action. It was the action of someone who'd had enough of being insulted and degraded and wasn't going to quietly acquiesce to it this time.

Thanks for that answer. I am aware that "separate but equal" was a fiction that allowed racism to remain a part of the fabric of society and it's institutions. The simple everyday examples of ritual degradation listed in this thread are sickening.

My question was purely to do with Mrs Parks' tactics once she had decided not to move. I'd wondered whether she was going to try to sue the bus company for example, as they were applying segregation in a way that may have been illegal, (albeit in common with widespread custom and attitudes). I had assumed she would have something in mind given her involvement with the Civil Rights movement.

I have no trouble believing that she was finally pushed too far and reacted spontaneously, it's just with her background I would think she would have at least some idea where her stand would lead at the time she made it.

Anyway, my original question seems to have been answered in this thread. When the opportunity arose, she was going to play for all the marbles.

 

[CurtC]

I thought it was common knowledge that her actions were pre-planned...

It may well be. A lot of mistaken beliefs are "common knowledge". That's why it's important to check the facts and verify things before passing them along. Even the things which are common knowledge or that everyone knows.

I completely agree. In fact, I agree so much that I think it goes without saying, which is why I guess I didn't say it. When I said that I thought it was common knowledge, I was in no way defending it as being true. I was, however, contrasting my impression from that of several posters here who had been unaware of that meme.

Sure I'd like to know the true story of how she came upon that role. But there seem to be some people (not posters here, but people referred to in cites) for whom her motivation seems to make a difference in how we view what she did, and I don't get that. She did the right, admirable thing, whether it was a spontaneous decision or the result of months of planning.

 

[Nova Land]

It's odd that qayak hasn't joined this thread....

That's partly my fault. I should, as a simple courtesy, have sent qayak a PM, either shortly before beginning this thread (to let him know I was thinking of starting such a thread) or immediately after (to let him know such a thread had been started). I did bump the thread in which his post originally appeared, raising questions about his post and posting a link to the thread I was starting here -- but by then the Michael Moore thread in which his post appeared had been dormant for several days, so I should not have assumed he would see that post.

I'm short on sleep this week -- hence, the excessive wordiness and awkward sentence constructions in my posts -- and as a result my judgment is a bit off. I have just sent him a PM to let him know of the existence of this thread, on the theory that it's better to do so late than never.

I hope qayak will come and post in this thread, in particular to answer the question of whether he had or had not read Rosa Parks memoirs before posting the passage from them. But I know it often takes me a week or more (often much more) before I manage to write and post something, so it would be unreasonable for me to expect others to be quicker to respond. And this may not be a topic he feels like spending time on.

In starting this thread, I had not meant to personalize this as much as I have. But people "quoting" things which they haven't actually read is a pet peeve of mine. It appears very likely to me that is what qayak did, and in consequence I have wound up harping on that point more than I intended do. I'll try to ease up on that; I've already expressed my feelings on the subject, so there is no need for me to keep repeating it in this thread.

 

[Nova Land]

My question was purely to do with Mrs Parks' tactics once she had decided not to move. I'd wondered whether she was going to try to sue the bus company for example, as they were applying segregation in a way that may have been illegal...

Sorry, I badly misunderstood the question you were asking.

The question about what she was thinking at the time is a good one. I have no way of knowing for sure, but my guess is that she was not thinking at all along the lines you suggest.

The world is considerably different today than it was just a few decades ago. Protest -- even protests in which people break the law and get arrested -- are so commonplace today that it may be hard to understand how different it was then.

Protest was widely held to be a disreputable activity. At best, you were regarded as being a nutcase; but many people, especially in the south, assumed more sinister motives. It was, after all, common knowledge that real blacks were not dissatisfied with the way things were, and that protests were the result of outside agitators trying to stir things up in order to cause trouble and bring about a Communist takeover.

Those who engaged in organizing were at a high enough risk of being bullied, beaten, or worse in consequence of their activities. And by organizing, I am simply referring to activities such as blacks talking to their neighbors about their rights. Those who actually engaged in acts of defiance, such as Parks was doing in refusing to get up when ordered to do so, were almost guaranteed unpleasant consequences.

The main thoughts going through her mind at the time she refused to give up her seat were unlikely, in my opinion, to be about tactics she might use to win this struggle. I strongly suspect her main thoughts were about what might happen to her -- in the next minutes, in the next hours, in the next days and weeks -- if she refused to get up, and ways in which she might survive what was to come.

 

[Carnivore]

Sorry, I badly misunderstood the question you were asking.

The question about what she was thinking at the time is a good one. I have no way of knowing for sure, but my guess is that she was not thinking at all along the lines you suggest.

The world is considerably different today than it was just a few decades ago. Protest -- even protests in which people break the law and get arrested -- are so commonplace today that it may be hard to understand how different it was then.

Protest was widely held to be a disreputable activity. At best, you were regarded as being a nutcase; but many people, especially in the south, assumed more sinister motives. It was, after all, common knowledge that real blacks were not dissatisfied with the way things were, and that protests were the result of outside agitators trying to stir things up in order to cause trouble and bring about a Communist takeover.

Those who engaged in organizing were at a high enough risk of being bullied, beaten, or worse in consequence of their activities. And by organizing, I am simply referring to activities such as blacks talking to their neighbors about their rights. Those who actually engaged in acts of defiance, such as Parks was doing in refusing to get up when ordered to do so, were almost guaranteed unpleasant consequences.

The main thoughts going through her mind at the time she refused to give up her seat were unlikely, in my opinion, to be about tactics she might use to win this struggle. I strongly suspect her main thoughts were about what might happen to her -- in the next minutes, in the next hours, in the next days and weeks -- if she refused to get up, and ways in which she might survive what was to come.

You're right. I was making assumptions about Mrs Parks' thought process based on my own worldview and my impression of the later stages of the Civil Rights movement.

However, what you suspect about what she was thinking seems to me to go hand in hand with consideration of the future of the cause she believed in. Undoubtedly, fear and concern for her future must have been uppermost in her mind - to an extent that is difficult for me to imagine.

So given the certainty of severely negative consequences for herself - consequences that would probably be long term and affect her whole family - why did she make her stand? Was she was behaving irrationally? Did she just snap after too much abuse? I'm sure that was part of her decision, but I cant believe she was completely divorced from knowledge of the consequences of her choice. I think therefore, she came to her decision - in the face of dangers that would have me literally puking with fear - because she believed it was worth it.

As I see it, she decided to sacrifice her personal safety because it would serve as an example to her people and help her cause. She just wasnt going to take this [rule8] any more. If she was considering herself at all, she had to know the smart thing to do was just get up and move - but she didnt. To me, that says she must have been considering at least in general terms what her action would mean for her cause. The way I see it, she made a hero's choice that day.

 

[Rolfe]

That's partly my fault. I should, as a simple courtesy, have sent qayak a PM, either shortly before beginning this thread (to let him know I was thinking of starting such a thread) or immediately after (to let him know such a thread had been started). I did bump the thread in which his post originally appeared, raising questions about his post and posting a link to the thread I was starting here -- but by then the Michael Moore thread in which his post appeared had been dormant for several days, so I should not have assumed he would see that post.

Actually, I saw your post that you were starting this thread, and looked for the thread, but couldn't find it as I was looking in Politics. I only came across it here by chance - I don't visit CT very often. So maybe he just doesn't know the thread is here.

I think (from the dizzy heights of knowing nothing about the affair apart from what I've read here) that he might have a grain of truth in what he's saying. It's an interesting scenario.

There had been a success in outlawing school segregation, and the black activist movement was talking about organising a boycott of buses as the next move. However, a "test case" was necessary. The first cases considered were rejected because of various failings or flaws in the people involved. (Incidentally, I find it interesting that all the refuse-to-move people mentioned as being considered as possible candidates were female - nice trick, use the ingrained sexism of the society and its consequent distaste for roughing up women to your advantage!)

So, if you're an activist and a leader of activists involved in this movement, you know what's going on. I would imagine that tactics had been discussed - how do we get the word out to people that a boycott is on, can we rely on its being sufficiently supported, how do people get to work if this drags on, that sort of thing. So an outline feasibility plan would be in place.

What it needs is a suitable test case. And for whatever reasons, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith were neither of them considered suitable. At this point, you aren't human if you aren't casting your mind around as to what sort of person might make a good case, and then progressing on to think, well, who do we know who might fit? Or, could I do it?

Now whether this was ever discussed aloud, I don't know. It may have been discussed unofficially over a cup of tea, even if not officially, in committee. Knowing political activists, I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least a bit of speculation.

What I suspect is that there was a fairly clear view among the activists of what sort of person would fit the bill, and quite probably even an unofficial sort of "short list" of candidates - quite possibly not even spoken aloud, just sort of a number of people seeing the obvious, or even these people themselves simply self-identifying as candidates. Rosa Parks - married, respectable, respected, middle-aged, female - she may have been one of several or indeed many, but I suspect the thought had crossed someone's mind. And I think it had probably crossed hers.

Now I'm not suggesting that Rosa was in any way officially elected, or nominated, or anything like that. And I'm not suggesting that anyone at all had any idea what was going to happen on that particular bus. Events tend to show that nobody was ready to leap into action the minute it happened. But the basic plan was indeed there, and Rosa knew it.

The explanation of the bus system given by Foolmewunz is quite fascinating. The front four rows were reserved for whites. However, once they were filled, another white coming on would trigger an evacuation of row 5. Must have happened all the time.

Now, if I was caught in that system, and didn't want my journey disturbed, or didn't want the humiliation of being summarily ejected from my seat, I think I'd try to sit as far back as I could when I first boarded the bus. (I even wonder if it might not have been good southern courtesy for the men to allow the women the rear seats so as to spare them the hassle, but that's pure speculation, nobody has mentioned that ever happening.) But where did Rosa sit?

Row 5.

OK, I have no evidence at all that she had any choice in the matter, maybe all the other seats closer to the back were already filled when she boarded (except, the story rather implies that there were still spare seats.) I have no evidence at all that Rosa deliberately chose to sit there because that was the seat with the highest chance of triggering an incident. I merely observe that this was the seat she was on.

If Rosa Parks herself stated that when she boarded that bus she had no thought in her head about the bus boycott that the activists (of whom she was one) were discussing, I would believe her. If she stated that when she decided not to give up her seat she had no thought in her head about the bus boycott, I would believe her. Sometimes events do just happen.

However, think about it. She is a veteran civil rights activist, committee member and leader. This bus boycott has been actively discussed, but the provisional plans have not been able to be progressed for want of a suitable test case. Rosa was smart enough to realise that she would eminently qualify as a test case, even if there had been no open discussion of the matter. And Rosa sat in the very seat with the highest probability of being asked to move.

I wonder how many times she'd done just that before the evening of Thursday, December 1, 1955? Knowing that if she went through with it her life would be turned upside down, made very unpleasant indeed, and that she'd probably lose her job.

My own view is that there's a fair probability that Rosa Parks planted herself.

The woman was a heroine of the first water, and I wish I'd had the privilege of shaking her hand.

Rolfe.

PS. Didn't see Carnivore's post until I'd posted this. I see we're thinking along much the same lines.

 

[Nova Land]

I'd meant to get back to this thread sooner, but as usual I'm very slow. I'm away from home this week, but e-mailed myself some unfinished notes before taking off. Here are a few posts from those notes (with more to follow):

... The explanation of the bus system given by Foolmewunz is quite fascinating. The front four rows were reserved for whites. However, once they were filled, another white coming on would trigger an evacuation of row 5. Must have happened all the time.

Now, if I was caught in that system, and didn't want my journey disturbed, or didn't want the humiliation of being summarily ejected from my seat, I think I'd try to sit as far back as I could when I first boarded the bus. (I even wonder if it might not have been good southern courtesy for the men to allow the women the rear seats so as to spare them the hassle, but that's pure speculation, nobody has mentioned that ever happening.) But where did Rosa sit?

Row 5.

OK, I have no evidence at all that she had any choice in the matter, maybe all the other seats closer to the back were already filled when she boarded (except, the story rather implies that there were still spare seats.) I have no evidence at all that Rosa deliberately chose to sit there because that was the seat with the highest chance of triggering an incident. I merely observe that this was the seat she was on.

An interesting theory, but an incorrect one. Rosa Parks did not deliberately take a seat which she knew she might be asked to leave. When she got on the bus there was only one (black) seat left, and that's the one she took.

Here's part of an interview with Parks in which she describes why she took the seat she did:

I was arrested on December 1st, 1955 for refusing to stand up on the order of the bus driver, after the white seats had been occupied in the front. And of course, I was not in the front of the bus as many people have written and spoken that I was -- that I got on the bus and took the front seat, but I did not. I took a seat that was just back of where the white people were sitting, in fact, the last seat. A man was next to the window, and I took an aisle seat and there were two women across. We went on undisturbed until about the second or third stop when some white people boarded the bus and left one man standing. And when the driver noticed him standing, he told us to stand up and let him have those seats.

I'll quote more from your post another time, because there are several false assumptions in it -- but that will have to wait until I have considerably greater computer access time than I do at the moment.

 

[Nova Land]

Meanwhile, here are a couple more excerpts from the same interview quoted in previous post:

Interviewer: Did the public response begin immediately?

Rosa Parks: Actually, it began as soon as it was announced. It was put in the paper that I had been arrested. Mr. E.D. Nixon was the legal redress chairman of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, and he made a number of calls during the night, called a number of ministers. I was arrested on a Thursday evening, and on Friday evening they had the meeting at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King was the pastor.

A number of citizens came and I told them the story, and it became news about my being arrested. My trial was December 5th, when they found me guilty. The lawyers Fred Gray and Charles Langford, who represented me, filed an appeal and, of course, I didn't pay any fine. We set a meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church on the evening of December 5th, because December 5th was the day the people stayed off in large numbers and did not ride the bus. When they found out that one day's protest had kept people off the bus, it came to a vote and, unanimously, it was decided that they would not ride the buses anymore until changes for the better were made.

That certainly doesn't sound like a boycott had been planned ahead of time. Rather, it sounds like the plans developed as things went along. An ad hoc group formed in reaction to Parks' arrest. The ad hoc group came up with a one-day boycott to call attention to her trial. It was only because of the surprising success of the one-day boycott that a longer boycott was decided on. I don't think anyone involved expected the one-day event to be such a runaway success -- nor do I think anyone could have predicted its success in advance. For the NAACP to have planned this in advance, they would have needed to be psychic.

Here's more, also from the same interview:

Interviewer: When you refused to stand up, did you have a sense of anger at having to do it?

Rosa Parks: I don't remember feeling that anger, but I did feel determined to take this as an opportunity to let it be known that I did not want to be treated in that manner and that people have endured it far too long. However, I did not have at the moment of my arrest any idea of how the people would react.

And since they reacted favorably, I was willing to go with that. We formed what was known as the Montgomery Improvement Association, on the afternoon of December 5th. Dr. Martin Luther King became very prominent in this movement, so he was chosen as a spokesman and the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association.

So Parks had no idea when she refused to give up her seat where this might lead.

Such is history. Meticulous plans laid out in advance, which work out almost perfectly -- with the occasional hitch thrown in, for dramatic suspense -- make for great fiction. But real life is more often a series of unexpected events, one leading into the next. That appears to have been the case here.

 

[Nova Land]

... and tomorrow, I hope to post Yes! It is a conspiracy theory! in which i will spotlight and quote from some of the people who have been promulgating this myth.

 

[Nova Land]

Yes! It is a conspiracy theory!

The notion that Rosa Parks’ action was planned in advance dates back at least to the 1950s and probably to the 1950s. It was promulgated by opponents of the civil rights movement, notably by the John Birch Society.

The earliest published version I’ve turned up is Alan Stang’s 1965 book It’s Very Simple: The True Story of Civil Rights, a John Birch Society publication which was widely used to promote a distorted version of history in which the civil rights movement was a communist conspiracy. But Stang’s book was not the start of this; it was designed to lend respectability and credibility to a conspiracy theory which was already in wide circulation among racists and racist sympathizers many years before his book appeared.

This is a problem with a lot of history from that time period – much of the most interesting material appeared in leaflets, pamphlets, newsletters and magazines which did not generally get preserved. Mimeographs were cheap, but did not produce the kind of materials most libraries were inclined to collect. Today one can see the cleaned-up face which was put on some of the extremist views of the time – but not the raw version which the person in the street back then experienced.

The cleaned-up face in recent times has been Samuel Francis. He died a few years ago, but his writings continue to be used as the basis on which a new generation of racists attempt to rewrite history. I’ll post some excerpts of Francis' articles – and excerpts from some of Francis’ echoers – in a follow-up post when time permits.

 

[Nova Land]

I composed the following post before taking off last week, intending to post it at the start of the trip, but did not have time to post it previously.

There are a number of good books about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. I'll be passing by several good libraries where I hope to spend some time during this trip, and am planning to look up Rosa Parks: My Story (her 1992 autobiography, written with Jim Haskins) and Rosa Parks (Douglas Brinkley's excellent recent biography). These books should contain answers to some of the questions raised in this thread.

I checked online catalogs, and the Herbert Kohl book Should We Burn Babar? which RSLancastr mentioned will be in one of the libraries, so I'm looking forward to reading that as well. (But alas, even though Lies my Teacher Told Me is in the collection of one of these libraries, it's in the reserve section, and I don't have a card there.)

What I especially would like to look up, but which is not available at any of the libraries I was planning to visit, is Rosa Parks' more recent book Quiet Strength. I think it is likely that this (rather than her 1992 book) is where the passage qayak quoted comes from. But I hope to to have time to visit at least one good second-hand book store, so there's a fair chance i could come across this book there.

There are two other books dealing with Rosa Parks which I'd really like to read. One will be easy to locate; the other looks like it is going to be very hard to find. But that's a long story, so I’ll detail that in another post.

Follow-up note.

I was wrong on several points. Should We Burn Babar has eluded me, as has Rosa Parks: My Story. My main library-time day will be this coming Sunday, though, and I am hopeful of finding and having time to read them then.

Lies My Teacher Told Me was surprisingly easy to find. I only had time to skim it quickly, but enjoyed what I saw. (There is not much about Rosa Parks specifically, but it makes many good general points which apply to the Rosa Parks story.)

An unexpected delight was coming across a second-hand copy of Virginia Durr’s book Outside the Magic Circle for $1.50. It’s a great book, and that’s a lot cheaper than making library photocopies would have been. I’ll be typing up the material related to Rosa Parks, to excerpt and post here, when I get home.

A Thunder of Angels is another book I was able to browse briefly, and am hoping to find again Sunday to make more notes and copies from. It’s an excellent history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott which appears to have answers to a number of questions.

The two books i referred to which I expected to be very hard to find are Samuel Francis' posthumous Shots Fired: Sam Francis on America's Culture War (edited by Peter Gemma) and John Egerton's Speak Now against the Day. The former is indeed going to be hard to find, but the latter is extremely easy. Details about why these books are of interest in a future post.

 

[Nova Land]

I think I have time to get in one more quick post today before my library computer time is up. Won't have much time to edit this, so hope it's coherent. This is from notes I composed earlier and e-mailed myself at the start of this trip concerning the book Shots Fired: Sam Francis on America's Culture War.

The nearest library listed as having this is several hundred miles away from anywhere I'll be. It's from a small publisher, so I doubt it will turn up in any second-hand book store I'm likely to visit. And this is definitely a book I want to find either in a library or second hand; I do not want to contribute anything to the publisher's pocket.

Shots Fired... is a book of various essays, magazine articles, and newspaper columns by Samuel Francis. Some of the material included is about Rosa Parks, and this appears to be a major source for the myth that when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat she was actually playing a part in a well-planned operation. (And not just any old well-planned operation -- it was a well-planned communist operation! The real purpose was to bring Martin Luther King to prominence and gain him control over the civil rights movement...)

From his publisher's web site comes this comment of praise for the book:

"Reading through SHOTS FIRED is to experience the all too brief illusion that a great writer and patriot is still among us. For instance, Sam Francis's splendid column exposing Rosa Parks as a professional agitator planted on her famous bus by a pinko training school in Tennessee, of which she was an alumna, could have been filed a month ago--or this week."

Here's a typical echo of Samuel Francis from American Renaissance:

In December, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the white section of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. This has been described as a solitary act of inspiration, but she had been carefully selected and trained to be a pretext for a bus boycott by blacks.

Here is how one right-wing blog describes the book:

It is instructive ... to read Francis’s accounts of how Big Business and its tame media appease the NAACP...

The Church of Martin Luther King continues to be America’s established creed, backed up by a governmental infrastructure of terror and coercion that no Spanish Inquisitor in his most surreal dreams could have imagined. This, moreover, despite the fact that King’s plagiarism, sexual squalor, and Communistic fellow-travelling have been matters of public record for a quarter of a century, thanks in part to Francis’s own efforts. In one of [Samuel Francis'] 2003 columns, “A Little Real Black History”, Francis not only puts King in his place (that place being somewhere between Che and Ho Chi Minh); he also reveals the similar Red sympathies of King’s female counterpart, Rosa Parks. Mrs. Parks’s Stalinist minders knew that what mattered for their cause was not that Mr. and Mrs. Average White America be persuaded to believe in Stalinism -- an unlikely prospect at the best, or worst, of times -- but simply that they be taught to loathe their own history, their own culture, and finally their own race...

Here's a description of Rosa Parks' role in the conspiracy from American Renaissance. Samuel Francis was a regular contributor to American Rennaissance. This article was written after Samuel Francis died, but I believe it (and other items found in American Renaissance) were echoes of what he had written about her.

"The Rosa Parks Madness", by Jared Taylor

The myth that has grown up around Rosa Parks is of an exhausted Montgomery seamstress who, in 1955, was too tired to give up her seat and move to the colored section so a white man could sit down. According to the myth, this spontaneous act sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and launched the civil rights movement. In the miles of column inches that greeted the news of her death, there were only hints of what really happened.

In fact, Parks’s decision to keep her seat was carefully planned by the NAACP, for which she had worked for 10 years as a secretary. Her arrest did help start the bus boycott, but she played no role in organizing it. And though the boycott has gone down in folklore as a great blow for freedom, it did not even succeed; it was a court order that integrated Montgomery’s buses....

The NAACP had been planning a bus boycott for years, and was waiting only for the right person to act as figurehead. Far from being an accidental hero, Parks was carefully groomed for her role. A white integrationist, Virginia Durr, had paid for Parks to attend civil rights strategy seminars at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. The school, known to be rife with Communist sympathizers, was under FBI surveillance.

Moreover, Parks’s role was strictly limited: keep her seat and hold her tongue...

No evidence or citations provided. This is proof by echo chamber, in which a number of right-wing sources take a story and parrot it to each other until they become convinced that, because they've heard it so often, it must be true.

 

[fuelair]

http://www.grandtimes.com/rosa.html
http://teacher.scholastic.com/rosa/interview.htm
http://www.qm21.com/article1.html
http://www.montgomeryboycott.com/bio_rparks2.htm

Various articles about why/what Rosa Parks did and (may have) thought the day of the arrest. Last one is closest look at possibility of pre-plan and says not likely. Best available on immediate search.

 

[theprestige]

Let's be honest. It is uncomfortable to question this historic incident, and the agenda of those behind it, as segragation was so ugly and we are fortunate someone stood up for equal rights.

Wait, what?

Events like this were planned and carried out repeatedly by the Freedom Riders. That is an openly-acknowledged, generally-acclaimed fact.

If Rosa Parks had been part of a similar planning effort, I don't think anybody would be at all uncomfortable saying so.

The only thing uncomfortable about quarky's assertion is that it isn't supported by facts.

 

[332nd]

Necromancy...