Paul Loeb
We
learn much from how we present our heroes. A few years ago, on Martin Luther
King. Day, I was interviewed on CNN. So was Rosa Parks, by phone from Los
Angeles. "We’re very honored to have her," said the host. "Rosa
Parks was the woman who wouldn’t go to the back of the bus. She wouldn’t get up
and give her seat in the white section to a white person. That set in motion the
year-long bus boycott in Montgomery. It earned Rosa Parks the title of ‘mother
of the Civil Rights movement.’"
I
was excited to hear Parks’s voice and to be part of the same show. Then it
occurred to me that the host’s description–the story’s standard
rendition–stripped the Montgomery boycott of all its context. Before refusing
to give up her bus seat, Parks had spent twelve years helping lead the local
NAACP chapter, along with union activist E.D. Nixon, from the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters, teachers from the local Negro college, and a variety of
ordinary members of Montgomery’s African American community. The summer before,
Parks had attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee’s labor and civil
rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she’d met an older
generation of civil rights activists and discussed the recent Supreme Court
decision banning "separate-but-equal" schools. During this period of
involvement and education, Parks had become familiar with previous challenges to
segregation: Another Montgomery bus boycott, fifty years earlier, successfully
eased some restrictions; a bus boycott in Baton Rouge won limited gains two
years before Parks was arrested; and the previous spring, a young Montgomery
woman had also refused to move to the back of the bus, causing the NAACP to
consider a legal challenge until it turned out that she was unmarried and
pregnant, and therefore a poor symbol for a campaign. In short, Parks didn’t
make a spur-of-the-moment decision. Rosa Parks didn’t single-handedly give birth
to the civil rights efforts, but she was part of an existing movement for
change, at a time when success was far from certain. This in no way diminishes
the power and historical importance of her refusal to give up her seat. But it
does remind us that this tremendously consequential act might never have taken
place without all the humble and frustrating work that she and others did
earlier on. And that her initial step of getting involved was just as courageous
and critical as her choice on the bus that all of us have heard about.
People
like Parks shape our models of social commitment. Yet the conventional retelling
of her story creates a standard so impossible to meet, it may actually make it
harder for us to get involved. This portrayal suggests that social activists
come out of nowhere, to suddenly take dramatic stands. It implies that we act
with the greatest impact when we act alone, or at least when we act alone
initially. It reinforces a notion that anyone who takes a committed public
stand, or at least an effective one, has to be a larger-than-life
figure–someone with more time, energy, courage, vision, or knowledge than any
normal person could ever possess. This belief pervades our society, in part
because the media tends not to represent historical change as the work of
ordinary human beings, which it almost always is.
Once
we enshrine our heroes on pedestals, it becomes hard for mere mortals to measure
up in our eyes. However individuals speak out, we’re tempted to dismiss their
motives, knowledge, and tactics as insufficiently grand or heroic. We fault them
for not being in command of every fact and figure, or being able to answer every
question put to them. We fault ourselves as well, for not knowing every detail,
or for harboring uncertainties and doubts. We find it hard to imagine that
ordinary human beings with ordinary flaws might make a critical difference in
worthy social causes.
Yet
those who act have their own imperfections, and ample reasons to hold back.
"I think it does us all a disservice," says a young African-American
activist in Atlanta named Sonya Tinsley, "when people who work for social
change are presented as saints–so much more noble than the rest of us. We get a
false sense that from the moment they were born they were called to act, never
had doubts, were bathed in a circle of light. But I’m much more inspired
learning how people succeeded despite their failings and uncertainties. It’s a
much less intimidating image. It makes me feel like I have a shot at changing
things too."
Sonya
had recently attended a talk given by one of Martin Luther King’s Morehouse
professors, in which he mentioned how much King had struggled when he first came
to college, getting only a ‘C’, for example, in his first philosophy course.
"I found that very inspiring, when I heard it," Sonya said,
"given all that King achieved. It made me feel that just about anything was
possible."
Our
culture’s misreading of the Rosa Parks story speaks to a more general collective
amnesia, where we forget the examples that might most inspire our courage and
conscience. Apart from obvious times of military conflict, most of us know next
to nothing of the many battles ordinary men and women fought to preserve
freedom, expand the sphere of democracy, and create a more just society. Of the
abolitionist and civil rights movements, we at best recall a few key
leaders–and often misread their actual stories. We know even less about the
turn-of-the-century populists who challenged entrenched economic interests and
fought for a "cooperative commonwealth." Who these days can describe
the union movements that ended 80-hour work weeks at near-starvation wages? Who
knows the origin of the social security system? How did the women’s suffrage
movement spread to hundreds of communities, and gather enough strength to
prevail?
As
memories of these events disappear, we lose the knowledge of mechanisms that
grassroots social movements have used successfully in the past to shift public
sentiment and challenge entrenched institutional power. Equally lost are the
means by which their participants managed to keep on and eventually prevail in
circumstances at least as harsh as those we face today. As novelist Milan
Kundera writes, "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of
memory against forgetting."
Think
again about the different ways one can frame Rosa Parks’s historic action. In
the prevailing myth, Parks decides to act almost on a whim, in isolation. She’s
a virgin to politics, a holy innocent. The lesson seems to be that if any of us
suddenly got the urge to do something equally heroic, that would be great. Of
course most of us don’t, so we wait our entire lives to find the ideal moment.
Parks’s
real story conveys a far more empowering moral. She begins with seemingly modest
steps. She goes to a meeting, and then another. Hesistant at first, she gains
confidence as she speaks out. She keeps on despite a profoundly uncertain
context, as she and others act as best they can to challenge deeply intrenched
injustices, with little certainty of results. Had she and others given up after
her tenth or eleventh year of commitment, we might never have heard of
Montgomery.
Parks’s
journey suggests that change is the product of deliberate, incremental action,
whereby we join together to try to shape a better world. Sometimes our struggles
will fail, as did many earlier efforts of Parks, her peers, and her
predecessors. Other times they may bear modest fruits. And at times they will
trigger a miraculous outpouring of courage and heart–as happened with her
arrest and all that followed. For only when we act despite all our uncertainties
and doubts do we have the chance to shape history.
Paul
Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical
Time (St Martin’s, 1999, $15.95, www.soulofacitizen.org), and of Generation at
the Crossroads, Nuclear Culture, and Hope in Hard Times