Content Warning: Racism and sexual assault
Thanks to the outdated, Eurocentric history curriculum of most public schools in America, there isn’t a lot that we know about the Civil Rights movement. The history we grew up with only scratches the surface, especially when it comes to leaders in the Civil Rights movement like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.
Rosa Parks’s story, or at least the one we’re used to hearing, is palatable and appropriate for audiences of all ages. She was a sweet old lady on a bus who refused to give up her seat for a white man when the white-only section of the bus was filled. As a result of ignoring the bus driver’s demands to move, she was unjustly arrested. Her activism earned her a reputation as the “first lady of civil rights.”
But this only part of what happened. Parks had actually protested on this bus before by the same exact driver. And she knew that being arrested was a possibility, which was especially dangerous for a woman of color in the South. People often assume that the mugshots and photos of Parks being fingerprinted were taken the same day as her arrest, but were images actually captured after her famous protest. The arrest cost Parks her physical and emotional health.
This story also paints her activism as passive and quiet when in reality she fought hard for equality her entire life. Parks’s activism started long before her iconic Montgomery bus moment. Rosa Parks was a champion for black rights, more specifically the rights of black women, ever since she was young. Parks demonstrated anger for how racist her peers were as a child, and would even stand up to white bullies despite her grandmothers’ warnings advising against it. Parks told her grandmother that she “would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated and not be allowed to say ‘I don’t like it.’”
In adulthood, Parks fought against white supremacy by supporting black men falsely accused of brutality and rape. She was also committed to speaking out against black women who were victims of sexual assault. One of her most noteworthy cases was the brutal rape of Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black woman, by several white men. The news of this violent attack reached the NAACP office in Montgomery, Alabama, where Parks was registered as an investigator. Parks was assigned to Taylor’s case at the age of 31 to figure out why no arrests had been made in light of the heinous act. Parks herself was nearly a victim of assault by a white male neighbor. When a grand jury refused to indict the men that attacked Taylor, Parks demanded that letters be written to the Alabama governor and hundreds of letters came to his office. Despite the failure to indict the perpetrators twice, Parks’ efforts did not go unnoticed. Although the men were never prosecuted, Alabama lawmakers issued a formal apology in 2012.
History is so often whitewashed that important historical figures of color are too often one-dimensional. There is so much more to black history than we’ve been taught and now that learning about history is in our own hands, it’s our responsibility to learn the whole story.
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