Reflection 7-22-15

In the chapter that discuses Rosa arks from the book Who Wants
to Start A Revolution, it begins by discussing the legends funeral
service and how she is often remembered as a quite, soft spoken, older
seamstress who was just fed up and refused to give up her seat on a
Montgomery bus. What is often left out of the story is how Rosa Parks
had been radical for over 60 years before her death and never took a
back seat when it came to Civil Rights issues. While the reason for this
stems from many different things, many people have a hard time
believing that someone who is radical can also be respectable. This is
because radicalism is often seen as something that means one is
acting emotionally rather than rationally but people often fail to realize
that these categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Growing up, Rosa Parks often witnessed the advantages of being
white in America and in the south in particular. After she married her
husband she became to be much more active in the fight for Civil
Rights and joined the NAACP in 1943. In 1955, while she was working
as the Alabama NAACP secretary, she refused to move seats for a
white man who got on the bus. She was arrested for this
demonstration of resistance. Prior to this, two other girls were arrested
for refusing to move, one 15 and the other 18. However, the president
of the NAACP thought Parks would be the perfect case to invoke
change in Alabama. Her one act of protest quickly turned into the

Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted an impressive 381 days.

Although she had started this revolution, she was often silenced at
meetings and public events. Women activists were often silenced and
were perceived to take on more of a mothering role. Others in the
Civil Rights movement began to get jealous regarding attention Rosa
Parks was receiving. Additionally, economic pressure, emotional
anxiety, and threats convinced Rosa Parks to move to Detroit where
she stayed until she died. There she worked for John Conyers but still
remained active in radical in the fight.
I found it interesting that portrayal of Rosa Parks as a timid
woman did not only stem from the NAACP wanting to gain more
support and empathy but also because of a system of male privilege
within and outside of the group. Men did not feel comfortable with a
woman getting credit for something as significant as the bus boycott.
This seems very representative of the struggles women face in trying
to make any sort of political change. Men, especially white men, feel
that it is their privilege to have the loudest voice which can often
discourage women from even wanting to participate in these kinds of
conversations.