In the popular mythology,
Rosa Parks was an anonymous individual, a quiet type who one day just snapped and refused to go to the back of the bus. She was a good little woman who just couldn't take it anymore and, though her spontaneous action, launched a revolution.
Of course, that's bullshit.
Continued...
It's a compelling story, but the fact is, Parks was both conscientious - a longtime activist whose action on Bus No. 2857 was willful and long-planned - and a lowly foot soldier in a revolutionary mass movement. She was hand-picked by
E. D. Nixon, the brilliant successor to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters'
A. Philip Randolph and architect of the modern Civil Rights Movement who also hand-picked Martin Luther King, Jr. and directed the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
It's pleasing to think of Parks not as a calculating rabble-rouser - an actor or change-agent, in Ivyspeak - but as an ordinary person whom chance or the Holy Spirit made an avatar of racial justice. But to do so is to deny her and the larger movement their agency. Rosa Parks was neither a dumb Forest Gump figure who stumbled into history nor a lonely David taking on the Goliath of segregation. Her story - and the real story of the Civil Rights Movement - is too complicated for Hollywood or Rockefeller Center, and so they've sanitized it, rounding the edges and shoehorning a sweeping narrative into such cherished cultural notions as the primacy of the individual, the subaltern woman, the dumb, "dignified" Negro and the inevitability of justice in American democracy.
The fact is, without conscientious, well-coordinated collective action by thousands of Blacks and whites, we'd still have segregation de jure and not the de facto variant we suffer today. The fact is that alone, we are weak, and the system won't work unless together, we make it.