Editor: With our “Black Lives Matter and the Education
Industrial Complex” issue about to be published, we thought we would reprint
this little article from the Southern Poverty Law Center, that once again reminds us that social movements are always long collective persistent struggles. Our issue on "Black Lives Matter" is just the latest in an enduring struggle. We thank the SPLC for permission to reprint it.
Rosa
Parks, #MeToo, and the nature of the struggle
From the Southern Poverty Law Center
Three and a half years before Rosa Parks sat down, Pfc.
Sarah Keys refused to get up.
Keys was in the Army and traveling home on furlough.
When a new bus driver took the wheel in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, he
demanded that she give up her seat to a white Marine.
Keys refused. So the driver emptied the bus, directed
the other passengers to another vehicle and barred Keys from boarding it. She
was charged with disorderly conduct and jailed, paying a $25 fine.
She filed a complaint — and in a milestone for civil
rights, she won.
The Interstate Commerce Commission's regulatory
decision in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company came down just months before
Rosa Parks refused to give up her own seat on a city bus in Montgomery,
Alabama.
But it is Parks, not Keys, who is remembered as a
"first" in a protest that "seemed to arise spontaneously,"
as Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore writes for The New York Times.
This narrative of Parks as a guileless seamstress
merely exhausted from a long day's work does a disservice to the many other
women who waged similar protests — of whom Keys was just one — as well as to
Parks herself, who was in fact a trained activist.
But the biggest disservice of such a narrative is to
Americans seeking to understand protest. As Gilmore writes:
Our textbooks and national mythology celebrate moments when single acts of civil disobedience, untainted by political organizations, seemed to change the course of history. But the ideal of the "good" protest — one that materialized from an individual's epiphany — is a fantasy. More often, effective protest is like Mr. Kaepernick's: it's collective and contingent and all about long and difficult struggles.
Parks knew that, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott was
neither the first nor the last protest she undertook to advance civil rights.
More than a decade earlier she led a national campaign
against sexual assault on black women. As DeNeen Brown recounts for The
Washington Post, Parks was dispatched in 1944 by the NAACP to investigate the
brutal gang rape of 24-year-old Recy Taylor.
As Parks discovered, Taylor had been kidnapped on her
way home from church and raped in the woods by six different white men. She was
eventually discovered staggering down the road by her father.
The lawyer representing the alleged rapists reportedly
offered her husband $600 to silence her. "Nigger — ain't $600 enough for
raping your wife," the lawyer said.
When a grand jury refused to indict the men, Parks was
undeterred. She launched the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy
Taylor, flooding the South with fliers and lawmakers' offices with letters.
Her campaign succeeded in prompting Alabama's governor
to order another investigation of Taylor's rape. The result of that
investigation: another grand jury that again refused to indict the suspects.
Parks and Taylor had come up against a justice system
familiar to too many women: one that, even armed with both witnesses and a
confession, failed to hold any of the six perpetrators accountable. The men
were never prosecuted.
More than 70 years after Recy Taylor's rape, a day of
reckoning appears to have arrived for sexual predators in all fields. Parks'
campaign reminds us again of the nature of the struggle.
To integrate public transportation, it took Sarah Keys
as well as Rosa Parks.
To win the fight against sexual assault, it will take
more than one protest, one campaign, or one person.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was neither the beginning
nor the end of Parks' activism, and today, for all of us, the march continues.
