Rosa Parks, 1913-2005May your tired feet find rest, Rosa.
The weak have become strong. The last have finished first. You have moved from the back to the front. Take your place in the driver's seat.
When you make it to your final destination, dance. Step out the front door and dance.
11 comments:
May we all find the courage to live free.
I remember when I used to ride the bus, circa 1987, the seats in the back were the much-desired premium "cool" seats, and were very literal rungs on the proverbial adolescent social climbing ladder. There was a clear delineation from the Mathletes at the front to the cheerleaders at the very rear seat, with every gradation in between.
(If a band geek was caught in the last five rows or so, he was told to get up and move to the front, which he inevitably did. A weird irony.)
I like to think that this was all a tribute to Parks.
For the record, I only got to the second to back row, and that wasn't until my final bus riding year.
her feet weren't tired.
“I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day,” she wrote in her autobiography. “No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
In fact, I'm reminded of the old spiritual,
I don’t feel no ways tired.
I’ve come too far from where I started from.
Nobody told me the road would be easy.
But I don’t believe, he’s brought me this far to leave me.
Much love and respect to someone whose courage I can't fathom. Rest well, dear lady.
I certainly wouldn't do anything to besmirch her character or diminish her importance as an icon in the civil rights movment, but the story about her not giving up her seat because her feet were tired has been around a long time. Doesn't make it true, I understand; and I don't have the time or interest in the question to spend hours searching out the facts of the matter. I recognize she said in a 1992 (I believe that's the date) autobiography that the tired feet story was apocryphal; but that was after decades of people questioning her importance as a civil rights figure. Maybe she wanted to point to the bigger issue that the tired feet story had obscured. Maybe the tired feet story was concocted by white supremacists. I hope not. I like the tired feet story.
I don't think tired feet is any less of an argument for not giving up the seat than some high-minded, calculated rights move. In fact, I think it's better. "I'm a person. I think I'll sit here because my feet are tired. I shouldn't have to move because of my skin color." To aggressively deny such a motive is to imperil her historical position. If the tired feet story turns out to be true - which it never will, since no one could ever say for sure but her - such a denial will turn on the denier and suggest that she was not heroic, since the denier has portrayed it as unheroic.
She was not the first black woman to be arrested for not moving to the back of the bus. She may have said at some point that her feet were tired. Maybe her feet were tired and she was making a point. Doesn't matter to me. None of those things matter to me.
She was important for doing what she did.
The tired feet story is a good one.
If she said she wasn't physically tired, she probably has her reasons for that.
I suppose we all feel somewhat tired at the end of the day.
Maybe she was quite tired. As I was thinking about this yesterday, one image that I liked was the idea that she was about as tired as a veteran marathon runner hitting mile 22 with 4.2 miles left to go. Somewhat tired, but also somewhat resolute and filled with the energy and determination to go as far as she had to on that day.
However tired her feet may have been, she certainly would have expended less energy by standing up than she did by standing her ground. When she resisted, I'm certain she foresaw the probability of a fight.
Rosa's feet may, or may not, have gotten the rest they desired in this life. The soldier more often battles for his childrens' sake than his own, and doubtless millions of feet have (and will have) rested thanks to Rosa' restlessness.
I heard earlier today on NPR that she will be the first woman whose body will lie in state in the Capitol rotunda -- an honor historically reserved for presidents and war heroes. Sounds about right.
BY LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@herald.com
''Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good.'' -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Her feet were not tired. At least, no more so than usual.
She always hated that leg end so let us, in this, the week of her death at age 92, set the record straight. And while we're at it, let's correct another misconception: It's not precisely true that she refused to give up her seat to a white man. The seats next to her and across the aisle were empty, vacated by black people who had already heeded the bus driver's command to get up. So there were places for the white man to sit.
But under the segregation statutes of Montgomery, Ala., no white man was expected to suffer the indignity of sitting next to a black woman or even across from her. So driver J.F. Blake asked again. And Rosa Parks, this soft-spoken 42-year-old department store seamstress just trying to get home from work, gave him her answer again. She told him no.
Her feet were not tired. Her soul was exhausted.
Leonard Pitts' weighs in.
Leonard (or whoever is speaking for him), I am altogether prepared to side with you on the tired feet issue; but, please, if you are going to dispel myths, give us more to go on than your word. I still want to know where the tired feet story came from. No one seems to be able to say, yet most of us grew up hearing that version of the story.
I hope your little MLK quote is not designed to suggest that I am cooperating with evil by propagating the tired feet story.
If it bothers you, do your job and find the facts. That's all I'm saying.
There was a great segment about this on "On the Media" this week (NPR show, my favorite, but I don't think KSMU carries it -- you can listen at http://www.onthemedia.org/). They interviewed a professor of African-American studies from the University of Wisconsin, and his explanation was that the tired-seamstress legend lives -- and is so important to us -- because one, we want our heroes to be apolitical, and two, we need our black folks, even the heroic ones we admire, to be meek and mild.
So we cling to the picture of the tire, humble seamstress instead of celebrating the close friend and secretary to the president of the Montgomery NAACP who had been an activist for 13 or 14 years by the time she was arrested. We'd prefer that the boycott be spontaneous, and not something the NAACP had been planning to do as soon as someone suitably, well, photogenic was arrested. Rosa Parks apparently made a habit of bucking Jim Crow laws, so it's not likely she was just abnormally tired the day she got arrested. But she looked the part - dignified, well spoken, non-threatening - so the boycott proceeded. Parks later became a black nationalist and follower, for a time, of Malcolm X. (This all according to the professor -- I haven't tried to verify any of it on my own, but it seems reasonable to take him at his word, given that he's a scholar in the field and all.)
I absolutely understand why the boycott organizers needed to package their movement in the most palatable way possible. But 50 years later, I'd much rather we got the full picture of Rosa Parks. And George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King and all our other heroes.
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