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Well the article mentions one of my favorite protests, the Montgomery bus protests/boycott, that was ultimately started by Rosa Parks, history may remember her
by will_brown 9y ago
Well the article mentions one of my favorite protests, the Montgomery bus protests/boycott, that was ultimately started by Rosa Parks, history may remember her as some grand civil rights leader, but that wasn't her intent she was just a tired black woman going home from work who refused to give up her seat to a white person. That was a successful protest/boycott without a bunch of middle class people or engaging Washington.
The majority of the article is about the Vietnam War, but do a search and you won't find either Muhammad Ali or even the word "draft". Muhammad Ali was an outspoken, black, Muslim who refused the draft, again history might pretend he had the love and support of the people, but he didn't at least at the time. The War still had the full support of the American people, and Ali was persecuted, striped of his championship title/livelihood, labeled Anti-American in the media, he was also prosecuted by the Government, and convicted of draft dodging and sentenced to 5 years of prison. But he continued to fight, the Country began shifting its attitude about the War and the draft, and Ali prevailed in the Courts.
Obviously Ali wasn't alone, just look at some of the most famous 1st Amendment cases at the time. The Government prosecuting a guy for wearing a jacket that read "Fuck the Draft" in a Courtroom trying to chill his speech, eventually the Supreme Court agreed that was protected speech. Or the Government prosecuting protesters for burning their draft cards, ultimately they lost and the Supreme Court ruled burning draft cards is not protected speech. All these anti-war protests were done majorly by students, granted to your point their message and goal was much clearer than protests of today. Never mind the individual wins and loses, they were done by students, not middle class, and still they won overall because there hasn't been a draft in the US since, because its become politically untenable. Students, racial minorities, religious minorities...not the middle class.
- dTal 9y ago>history may remember her as some grand civil rights leader, but that wasn't her intent she was just a tired black woman going home from work who refused to give up her seat to a white person. Such is the popular image, but it is incorrect. She was the secretary of her local NAACP chapter, and she certainly was making a stand for civil rights. From her autobiography: "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 forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
- rrauenza 9y agoI haven't found a good citation yet, but my understanding was that it was carefully planned and she was chosen. This gets into it a little ... http://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719889/before-rosa-parks-there-was-claudette-colvin http://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719889/before-rosa-parks-th... When asked why she is little known and why everyone thinks only of Rosa Parks, Colvin says the NAACP and all the other black organizations felt Parks would be a good icon because "she was an adult. They didn't think teenagers would be reliable." She also says Parks had the right hair and the right look. "Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle class," says Colvin. "She fit that profile." David Garrow, a historian and the author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, says people may think that Parks' action was spontaneous, but black civic leaders had been thinking about what to do about the Montgomery buses for years.
- dTal 9y agoAccording to Parks herself it was a spontaneous act: "I did not think about [being the test case for the NAACP] at all. In fact if I had let myself think too deeply about what might happen to me, I might have gotten off the bus. But I chose to remain."[1] There's a lot of propaganda chaff around Rosa Parks. It seems that it was neither carefully planned, nor a completely spontaneous act of rebellion. She and a great many other people had been seething about the buses for years, and on that day she had simply had enough. I suspect the "carefully planned NAACP sting operation" narrative arose as a backlash to the equally inaccurate "totally random uninvolved old lady stands up for herself" narrative. [1] https://contexts.org/articles/telling-stories-about-rosa-parks/ https://contexts.org/articles/telling-stories-about-rosa-par...
- skybrian 9y agoThe New Yorker article says that the organizers were waiting for the right opportunity to come along, and this was it. Seems reasonable?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lidl_shidl 9y ago> history may remember her as some grand civil rights leader, but that wasn't her intent she was just a tired black woman going home from work who refused to give up her seat to a white person STOP. SPREADING. LIES. Parks herself: > People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true
- will_brown 9y agoParks 1956 radio interview, listen to her own words and learn: https://www.democracynow.org/2005/10/25/rosa_parks_1913_2005_we_air https://www.democracynow.org/2005/10/25/rosa_parks_1913_2005...