Rosa Parks

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Her courageous action galvanized a yearlong community boycott and helped usher in a new chapter of the Black freedom struggle. Her bus stand was part of a lifetime of courage and political activism. Born in Tuskegee and raised in Pine Level, Alabama, Rosa Parks spent nearly twenty-five years of her adult life in Montgomery, tilling the ground for a broader movement for racial justice to flower. Joining a small cadre of activists in transforming Montgomery’s NAACP into a more activist chapter, she served as secretary of the branch for most of the next twelve years and in the late 1940s was elected secretary for the Alabama state conference of the NAACP. Through the organization, she pressed for voter registration, documented white brutality and sexual violence, pushed for desegregation, and fought criminal injustice in the decade after WWII. Coming home from work that December evening, she was asked by bus driver James Blake to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus. “Pushed as far as she could stand to be pushed” she refused and was arrested. That act of courage galvanized a year-long community boycott of Montgomery’s segregated buses, catapulting a young Martin Luther King Jr. to national attention and leading to the Supreme Court’s decision ordering the desegregation of Montgomery’s buses. Parks’s act and the bus boycott it produced is often seen as the opening act of the modern civil rights movement which rippled across the South and culminated in the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Facing continued death threats and unable to find work, the Parks family was forced to leave Montgomery eight months after the boycott’s end for Detroit, where her brother and cousins lived. While the public signs of segregation were thankfully gone, she didn’t find “too much difference” between the extent of housing and school segregation they encountered in the North from that of the South. And so she spent the second half of her life fighting the racism of the North. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, when she died in October 2005 she became the first civilian, the first woman, and the second African American to lie in honor in the US Capitol. In February 2013, a statue in her honor was installed in the US Capitol’s Statuary Hall, the first full statue of a Black person to be put there. Parks is arguably one of the most known and regarded Americans of the 20th century. Yet the story that is regularly told and taught is clouded with myth and misinformation—wrongly asserting that Parks was tired, old, meek, middle-class, and/or an accidental actor. On top of these distortions of her bus stand, most people would be hard-pressed to go beyond that courageous moment on the bus to anything else about her life. Corresponding to this tendency, although children’s and young adult books on her abound, scholarly work focused on Parks is surprisingly thin. Scholars of civil rights history, postwar American history North and South, and American politics have largely not paid in-depth attention to Parks in order to investigate other activists in Montgomery, earlier struggles than the bus boycott, and other movements outside of Montgomery. While this provides needed and important dimensions to our knowledge of the period, it leaves our knowledge of Parks’ history incomplete—until Jeanne Theoharis’s ground-breaking biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Parks herself wrote an autobiography aimed at young adults that serves as one of the best accounts of her bus stand, the activism that lead up to it, and the boycott that ensued.

Introduction

In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal famously identified the “American Dilemma,” an inherent tension between widespread faith in equal opportunity on one hand and discrimination against African Americans on the other. This book traces a similar phenomenon in northern public schools, which promised an equal education for all and then consigned Black children to second-class facilities. This paradox generated the African American dilemma, or the question of whether school integration or separate, Black-controlled schools in a legally desegregated system would more effectively advance the Black freedom struggle. This book offers a social history of northern Black debates over school integration in the North. It chronicles an extraordinary range of Black educational activism in the North stretching from the common school era to the present, and analyzes how this work—much of it carried out by women and youth—inspired the larger civil rights movement and created substantially more equal public schools.

“The Epitome of Black Masculinity”: Isaac Hayes, Black Moses, and the Long Freedom Struggle

Isaac Hayes provides a vital public figure through which scholars can analyze, evaluate, and more fully understand the comprehensive nature of the black freedom struggle as it progressed into the 1970s. Hayes merged the integrationist political objectives of mainstream civil rights organizations and leaders with the notions of racial pride, assertiveness, and autonomy that characterized the popular appeal of the black power movement. Hayes, through his “Black Moses” persona and LP of the same name, moved those freedom struggle promises and opportunities into the cultural realm, where he personified African American artistic self-determination. In doing so, he demonstrated that the contemporary conceptualization of black masculinity was not monolithic, as Hayes introduced and embodied an ideal that countered the prevailing notion of black manhood which pervaded popular culture and remains a central component of popular memory concerning black power. Most importantly, Isaac Hayes embodied a model of black masculinity that contradicted the prevailing “black macho” ideal. “Black Moses,” therefore, embodied the freedom of African Americans to move beyond contemporary racial classifications in a cultural capacity and presents scholars with an intriguing model through which to examine the evolution, possibilities, and accomplishments of the post-1960s American black freedom struggle.

News from the Field

Applications, nominations invited for C&RL editorTracing Race at Iowa State UniversityProject Outcome for Academic Libraries releases new case studyDOAJ leads collaboration to improve preservation of OA journalsOCLC, Washington State University creating digital stewardship training coursesProQuest debuts Black Freedom Struggle websiteEBSCO releases 2021 Serials Price Projection Report

Media, Criminal Injustice, and the Black Freedom Struggle

Since the mid-20th century, media outlets have driven publicity for newsworthy events and shaped content for their receptive audiences. Commonly, massive movements seek publicity to attract attention and participation for protests, demonstrations, slogans, and unfortunate events. For instance, the black freedom struggle of the 1950s through the 1970s took advantage of their traumatic narratives of oppression to attract national and international attention. Many African Americans who experienced dastardly components of a racist criminal justice system were, in turn, earning respect and power from their freedom-seeking counterparts by commodifying the emotion that fueled black liberation efforts.[i] Media, therefore, became a tool for exposing the nation to racist law enforcement and legal action. Ultimately, black freedom struggle activists deployed media depictions of their policing, arrest, and imprisonment to be used as movement publicity, earning increased participation and advancing movement motives through this subsequent growing interest. [i] Colley, Zoe A. Ain't Scared of Your Jail: Arrest, Imprisonment, and the Civil Rights Movement. University Press of Florida, 2012. 4.