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Jewish World Review Oct. 27, 2005 / 24 Tishrei, 5766 Remembering the seamstress By Clarence Page
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Ask not what Rosa Parks did for us; ask what we can do in her memory.
Every school child should know about the mother of the modern civil rights movement, who died Monday at age 92, even if the vagaries of the nation's public schools mean that far too few children of any race have any idea of who this woman was.
They should know about the seamstress who knit together a civil rights movement by the simple act of refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a public bus in Montgomery, Ala., in December, 1955.
They should know how, after Mrs. Parks was convicted and fined $10, plus $4 in court costs, a new civil rights group formed in town and elected on Dec. 5 the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., a young minister from Atlanta, as its president.
They also should know how four decades later, the woman who survived Ku Klux Klan violence in the South was beaten and robbed by a black man in the North.
Mrs. Parks was hit in the face and robbed of $53 by a man who broke into her bungalow in Detroit in 1994, when she was 81 years old. She had moved to Detroit with her husband, Raymond, who died in 1977, at the urging of relatives who feared for their lives.
It was a sad epilogue to the civil rights era that the woman who "sat down in order that we all might stand up," as the Rev. Jesse Jackson described her, would live to be beaten down again by a black thug in the North.
Sad episodes like that illustrate how, for all of the progress that we African Americans have made since the day Mrs. Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus, we still have what some civil rights movement preachers have called "a mighty long ways to go."
The best way for us to remember Mrs. Parks is not to dwell on past glories of the movement, but to see how the movement's lessons might best be applied to the problems that limit black opportunities and achievement today, especially for those left behind in areas of high crime, low-income and dwindling hope.
Hurricane Katrina reawakened many to the persistent existence of poverty, particularly black urban poverty like that which visibly trapped so many New Orleans residents. But the poor, not all of them black, have always been with us in America's cities. We Americans have only done a better job of hiding them in recent years.
If anything, Mrs. Parks became a crime target because she had not escaped or built a security wall of some sort between herself and young men like her assailant who, for whatever reasons, grow up inadequately socialized.
We have seen overall crime go down since the early 1990s for various reasons, including improved community policing, neighborhood regentrification and soaring imprisonment rates. But, during the same period, the proportion of young men who grow up fatherless, untutored, unsocialized and prone to commit crimes has continued to grow.
Problems associated with race have changed in America and so must the remedies. More job and educational opportunities have opened up, but too many of our young people are poorly equipped to take advantage of them.
If the only tool that you have is a hammer, the great psychologist Abraham Maslow once said, all problems begin to look like nails. If our only tools and role models for activism come from the civil rights era (marches, sit-in's, boycotts, etc.), we will be poorly equipped to handle problems that have more to do with culture, education and economics than with civil rights.
I think the best way to remember Rosa Parks is not to think five decades into the past, remembering where we were, but to think five years into the future, imagining where we could be and planning how we are going to get there.
Mrs. Parks didn't wait for a black Moses to come and save her. She showed how much of a change a single courageous and determined person can make in the world, if they care enough.
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Comment on Clarence Page's column by clicking here. © 2005, TMS |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
