Rosa Parks

Although I initially did not expect to learn anything "new" from this presentation, Ms. Lucky did succeed in dispelling some common myths regarding the life and actions of Rosa Parks. She stressed the fact that Rosa Parks, like Martin Luther King Jr., is often seen as more of an iconic symbol of the Civil Rights Movement than an actual person. She explained that this view,

From this presentation, I learned several things. For example, I never knew that Rosa Parks had not seated herself in the white section of the bus. Rather, she was seated in the back (Black section) of the bus. The concept of "Rolling Segregation" meant that in the event that the white section of the bus became filled, black passengers would be asked to relinquish their seats for the white passengers. Furthermore, the entire row of black passengers would be required to move and the row would become a white row. The black passengers would be expected to stand, even if all other seats in the row were empty. Rosa simply remained in her seat in the black section despite the bus driver's request that she stand so a white man could sit in her row.

Another commonly accepted "myth" is that Rosa's sole reason for not relinquishing her seat on that fateful day was because she claimed to be tired. In an excerpt Ms. Lucky read from Rosa's autobiography, I learned that this was not so. Rather, Rosa explained that what she had said was "I am tired of them [white people] treating us this way."

Ms. Lucky also shared with us a poem written by Rita Dove entitled "The Enactment." In this poem, Dove explains that the Parks incident was, in fact, planned. Parks was the ideal test subject for this act of passive resistance because she was well-mannered, shy, gainfully employed, married, law-abiding, well-connected, and of appropriate age. This brings me to another commonly-misunderstood fact: Parks' age at the time of