There’s probably no civil rights figure whose story was more clouded by myth. Rosa Parks, who died yesterday, has been interpreted and reinterpreted over the years. Maybe this was because her role in the movement was both as a human and as a symbol, a woman remembered for one defiant act that could be read in different ways.
On the one hand was the perception that she was an ordinary woman whose feet were tired that day in 1955 and who just spontaneously refused to give up her seat. Parks herself kept refuting this version, writing in her biography, “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 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
But there were also those who inflated her role, claiming that she single-handedly started the civil rights movement, as if there had been no previous history of blacks taking legal action to change racist laws and her moment of defiance was a kind of immaculate conception.
The truth lies somewhere in between, and we were happy to see that with so many possible pitfalls the press did a nuanced job eulogizing Parks today.
The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times all note that Parks had been an activist long before she made her stand on the bus. Parks was an active member of the local NAACP — in itself an act of defiance in Alabama — and her husband, Raymond, had collected money for the defense of the Scottsboro boys. Before her arrest, the NAACP had considered pushing to trial another case of a 15-year-old girl who wouldn’t give up her seat, a case they eventually backed away from when the girl turned out to be pregnant. Parks knew what she was getting into when she refused to move. Earlier that year, she had attended an interracial leadership conference at the Highlander Folk School. She had even had a run-in with that same bus driver twelve years before.
But if her action was not quite the spontaneous impulse of a regular working woman, it also wasn’t quite a premeditated move meant to ignite a mass movement. Surely, Parks could not have expected that her arrest would spark the Montgomery bus boycott or turn Martin Luther King into a national figure.
What the obituaries capture is that, in the end, Parks’ historical significance rests in the fact that she was a convenient symbol, a perfect person to use as a test case and to build a struggle around. As Taylor Branch has written in his magisterial history of the civil right movement, Parting the Waters, “Rosa Parks was without peer as a potential symbol for Montgomery Negroes — humble enough to be claimed by the common folk, and yet dignified enough in manner, speech, and dress to command the respect of the leading classes.” Or as the Los Angeles Times obit put it, she was “the ideal plaintiff.”
It’s reassuring to see that, at her death, the press is capable of taking a complex look at Parks’ life without adding more mythology to the storyline.
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.