Many of us watched with horror the national spectacle that unfolded to commemorate the death of 92-year-old Rosa Parks on October 24, 2005. The first woman to lie in state at the Nation’s capital (and the 31st person overall since 1852), Parks who died in Detroit had first been flown to Montgomery for a service attended by Condoleeza Rice who affirmed that “I can honestly say that without Mrs. Parks, I probably would not be standing here today as Secretary of State”. She was then brought to Washington DC accompanied by the National Guard and a bus trailing her coffin. President and Mrs. Bush “solemnly” laid a wreath on her coffin. Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito went to pay his respects to Parks along with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist who proclaimed that “Rosa Parks bold and principled refusal to give up her seat was not an intentional attempt to change a nation, but a singular act aimed at restoring the dignity of the individual.” Her body was then shipped back to Detroit for a massive 7-hour funeral celebration where a parade of speakers and singers from Bill Clinton to Aretha Franklin to John Conyers praised her, and thousands of people who had taken the day off from work waited outside to see a horse-drawn carriage carry Mrs. Parks’ coffin to the cemetery.
Three months later, we were treated to a reprise when 78-year-old Coretta Scott King died on January 30, 2006. Her six-hour funeral was attended by Presidents Bush 1 and II, Clinton, and Carter — along with a slew of civil rights legends – and 10,000 people. But Harry Belafonte – longtime friend of the Kings who has been sharply critical of the Bush Administration (as had King herself) – was not allowed to speak. King had laid in state in the Georgia Rotunda, the first woman and African American to do so. On the day of her funeral, flags were flown at half-mast to honor the “grace and beauty in all the seasons of her life (Bush 11).” “In all her years,” President Bush told mourners at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, “Coretta Scott King showed that a person of conviction and strength could also be a beautiful soul… This kind and gentle woman became one of the most admired Americans of our time.”
But the women who emerge in these memorials bear only a fuzzy resemblance to Rosa Louise Parks and Coretta Scott King. Described by the New York Times as the “accidental matriarch of the civil rights movement,” the Rosa Parks who surfaces in the deluge of political and media commentary is, first and foremost, “quiet”. “Humble” “dignified” and “soft-spoken”, she was “not angry” and “never raised her voice.” A similar image of a “kind and gentle” Coretta Scott King dominates the public media. An “obedient” “beautiful” King who was principally her husband’s “helpmate” looms large.
An accidental matriarch? A helpmate?
Where in this public spectacle is the Rosa Parks who helped organize around the Scottsboro case in the 1930s and voting rights in the 1940s, who was the secretary of the NAACP and attended Highlander Folk School, who worried when she was in jail about the women in the cell with her who were too poor to afford bail, who worked with Robert Williams and Malcolm X as well as Martin Luther King, who fought for racial justice in Detroit and throughout the nation for more than fifty years? One day noted rather than seven decades of activism.
Where is the Coretta Scott King who attended Antioch College and was active in the peace movement before marrying Martin Luther King Jr., who was an accomplished singer when she met him and whose talents helped raise money for the movement, who spoke up earlier and more forcefully against American involvement in Vietnam than her husband, who spent another three decades after King’s assassination speaking out against poverty, working for peace and social justice around the world, for gay rights and attention to AIDS – not simply seeking to uphold her husband’s legacy and agitating for a federal holiday for her husband?
Not angry?
Why must Rosa Parks, a woman who spent her 70-years of adult life as an activist –who insisted that her most famous moment was not “accidental” but who also tried to push the conversation of the black freedom movement away from that December day – become an accidental matriarch in death to salve this nation’s troubled conscience? Where is the resolve that compelled her to act – the righteous anger that Parks herself described when she wrote, “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
Where is the Coretta Scott King who at a march of welfare recipients in 1968 criticized a society “where violence against poor people and minority groups is routine.” She continued, “I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence…Ignoring medical needs is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence. Even the lack of will power to help humanity is a sick and sinister form of violence. “ Where is the Coretta Scott King who saw her marriage as an emotional and political partnership and pushed to make it so, disrupting many prevalent conceptions of marriage in the 1950s and 1960s?
American hero?
Where is a public accounting for the decades where these women were not treated like heroes? Of the economic repression visited on the Parks family (who was forced to move to Detroit when neither she nor her husband could find work anymore in Montgomery) and on nearly all black people who chose to resist discrimination, economic justice, and racial terrorism? Where was the National Guard or the FBI when the Parks and Kings—-these celebrated “American heroes”– were receiving regular death threats? Why was it that instead the Kings were treated to near-constant FBI surveillance for “national security” reasons and an anonymous tape sent to Coretta Scott King herself by the FBI on the eve of her husband receiving the Nobel Prize?
Quiet?
Where is the critique of a society — and a movement — which has continued to keep these women quiet? From the first mass meeting in Montgomery in December 1955 to the 1963 March on Washington (where she was asked to stand up but not say anything), to the much-discussed visit of Nelson Mandela who had to recognize Parks on his own, pulling her out of the recieving line and chanting “Rosa Parks”, (because she hadn’t been asked to say anything), to Andrew Young’s celebration of her quietness in his eulogy, what must be recognized is that her iconic status has rested on this determined woman having to be quiet. Similarly, where is the criticism of a movement that would render Coretta Scott King’s importance singularly as Martin Luther King’s wife — refusing to let her walk with Martin at the March on Washington — and of Martin Luther King himself, whose own views of women were too often to treat them as helpmates?
1.
These public and publicized memorial celebrations seek to remind Americans of a set of interlocking truisms — that racial injustice was rampant in the South (but not the rest of the nation) back in the day, that Rosa Parks’ individual act and Martin Luther King’s individual leadership caused the civil rights movement, that the country then banded together and addressed segregation and now can unite and honor the “American heroes” of the civil rights struggle confident of our own righteousness. These interlocking myths deny the long history of resistance and widespread opposition to the black freedom movement which for decades rendered Parks’ and King’s extensive political activities “un-American”. They spin a teleology of national progress toward a color-blind American democracy—all the more useful in a post- 9/11 world where the United States seeks to trumpet its freedoms and democracy for all the world.
The images of these dignified women were used to cover up the travesties of Katrina, a shell game where the Jim Crow South obscures the Superdome, where an old woman on a bus distracts from the people stranded on rooftops, where the racial and economic injustices that seered our past are used to blind us to these injustices in our present.
At a time when the Pentagon has forbidden photographing the coffins of returning dead soldiers from Iraq, the myriad pictures of these women’s coffins helps paper over 2500 Americans dead in a “volunteer” Army for an unjust War that has killed another 35,000-40,000 Iraqis.
In this post-civil rights moment, the nation needs this positivist retelling of the past — similar to the Reagan funeral — to evoke the power of remarkable individuals (so as to erase a history of collective action) and to affirm the distant reality of racial terror in the past to obscure the truth of racial injustice in the present. These memorials promote a children’s story of social change so improbable (one woman sat down and the country was galvanized) as to diminish our ability to envision a movement today. And they consign Parks’ and King’s critique of American society to distant history when both women had continued to speak out and work for racial injustice in our own time.
The public circus around their deaths intersected with the real psychic and historical need to pay tribute to these women and the political struggles they waged — to honor their achievements and (implicitly) those of other women whose contributions to the Civil Rights Movement have not been widely recognized. Indeed, we still need a memorial that honors these women not for their quietness and gentleness but for their courage and tenacity to take steps day after day after day — summoning the courage to stride out ahead and also to continue marching when many had decided the struggle was over. We need a memorial to demonstrate that political change is not individually-inspired or accidental. We need a memorial to women who understood that the movement was not a matter of one shining day but about individual acts of conscience bearing fruit through years of sustained organizing and collective action. We need a memorial that shows the “how” of the civil rights movement (by what tactics, strategies, and collectivities a movement is built and sustained) — a concept all but erased in the public spectacle that surrounded these funerals. If we understand how it was done, we can understand how it could be done again. And that would be the most fitting memorial to the legacies of Rosa Louise Parks and Coretta Scott King.
Jeanne Theoharis is associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College of CUNY. She co-edited Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside of the South, 1940-1980 (2003) and Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America (2005) with Komozi Woodard. She recently co-authored Not Working: Latina Immigrants, Low-Wage Jobs and the Failure of Welfare Reform (2006) with Alejandra Marchevsky.
From July, 2006