Rosa Parks: Countering the Master Narrative

Lesson by Jesse Hagopian

Myles Horton, second from left, and Rosa Parks, third from left, are among a group meeting at the Highlander Library in Monteagle, Tenn. Undated. Nashville Banner Archives, Nashville Public Library.

With a short video and readings with competing viewpoints, students will learn about master narratives and counter-narratives and how they apply to Rosa Parks’ life. This activity can be introduced before watching the film or reading the book, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.

Introduction

Rosa Parks is one of the best known, yet least understood, figures in U.S. history. Parks’ defiance of the Jim Crow laws of Montgomery, Alabama, when she rode the bus on December 1, 1955, is legendary. As Dr. Jeanne Theoharis wrote in A More Beautiful and Terrible History, “When asked to name a ‘most famous American’ other than a president ‘from Columbus to today,’ high school students most often chose Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.” However, along with Parks’ canonization has come a softening of what she fought for, omissions in her lifetime of work in the Black Freedom Struggle, and a master narrative that uses her story to represent ceaseless American progress. As Theoharis says about King and Parks, “These two freedom fighters have been turned into Thanksgiving parade balloons — floating above us larger than life; unthreatening, happy patriots. Asking little of us, they bob along proud of our progress.”

Many across the ideological spectrum embrace Rosa Parks — at least a distorted version of her memory. So many of the popular accounts of Parks imagine her as an accidental heroine, a quiet seamstress, simply too tired to move from her seat on the bus that fateful day. Even accounts of Parks’ life that reject that deeply problematic narrative often omit the fact that she was not only a lifelong activist, but also a political strategist, an organizer against sexual violence, a supporter of the Black Power movement, an admirer of Malcolm X, a believer in Black people’s right to self-defense, and so much more.

When Mrs. Parks died on October 24, 2005, congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle rushed to pay tribute to the “mother of the Civil Rights Movement.” Republican Condoleezza Rice said at the public viewing of Parks’ body in Montgomery, Alabama, “Without Mrs. Parks, I probably would not be standing here today as Secretary of State.” Republican Senate majority leader Bill Frist attended the Washington, D.C., ceremony with Parks’ coffin lying in honor at the Capitol rotunda and said Parks’ defiance of Jim Crow laws was “not an intentional attempt to change a nation, but a singular act aimed at restoring the dignity of the individual.” Senator Hillary Clinton spoke of the importance of “quiet Rosa Parks moments.” The New York Times described Parks as the “accidental matriarch of the Civil Rights Movement.” Theoharis dispels these master narratives in her book, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks:

The Rosa Parks who surfaced in the deluge of public commentary was, in nearly every account, characterized as “quiet,” “humble,” “dignified,” and “soft-spoken,” she was “not angry” and “never raised her voice.” Her public contribution as the “mother of the movement” was repeatedly defined by one solitary act on the bus on a long-ago December day and linked to her quietness. Held up as a national heroine but stripped of her lifelong history of activism and anger at American injustice, the Parks who emerged was a self-sacrificing mother figure for a nation who would use her death for a ritual of national redemption.

The narrative of national redemption that was constructed around Parks erased the truth about her life and the broader Black Freedom Struggle. It concealed the fact that she and others had worked for years before the bus boycott in struggles for racial justice that were critical to the boycott’s eventual success. The master narrative telling of Parks’ life is used to denigrate struggles for racial justice today suggesting that in the United States, the way to undo injustice is to be quiet and patient and the problem will be resolved. This distorted telling of her life ignores, in the words of Theoharis, “her 40 years of political work in Detroit after the boycott, as well as the substance of her political philosophy, a philosophy that had commonalities with Malcolm X, Queen Mother Moore, and Ella Baker, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.”

This lesson is designed to help students understand the master narratives they have been taught about Rosa Parks. They will also learn counter-narratives that can help them not only better understand her life, but also glean lessons for the struggles for racial and social justice today.