I've been a little remiss with the Black History Month linkage the last few days. It's partly because there's a certain level of frustration looking at what passes for fact and what needs to be corrected.
And it's not like the things we're talking about happened that long ago. It's been fifty years since the Montgomery Bus Boycott...and maybe 45 years since the misrepresentation of it began. And it's so think you get nonsense like this
In my own experience, a black woman named Rosa Parks was just tired one day of being told to sit in the back of the bus. So she refused to move, and she touched off a revolution of freedom across the American South.
from people who should know better. Nonsense like this
Initiating a protest against these conditions was not on Parks' mind as she stepped aboard a municipal bus on Thursday, December 1, 1955. She had finished her day's work at the Montgomery Fair Store and had boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus as she headed to her home in Cleveland Court. Because the bus was crowded she sat in the middle section. At the third stop, at the Empire Theater, a white male patron boarded the bus and was left standing. The "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement" later affirmed that her decision to remain seated was not based on physical fatigue. Parks maintained that her action was the result of long years of anger and frustration over the treatment blacks received under Montgomery's segregationist laws and customs. She was simply tired of blacks being pushed around.
Parks' arrest set in motion long years of planning for such an event by the local civil rights organizations and civic groups.
published by Alabama, when in fact the truth is
The roots of the bus boycott in Montgomery began years before Rosa Parks' arrest. The Women's Political Council (WPC), a group of black professionals founded in 1946, had turned their attention to Jim Crow practices on the Montgomery city buses in 1953. In a meeting with Mayor W.A. Gayle in March 1954, the Council's members outlined their wishes: a city law that would make it possible for blacks to sit from back toward front and whites from front toward back until the bus was filled, a decree that black individuals not be made to pay at the front of the bus but go to the rear to enter, and a promise that buses stop at every corner in black residential areas as they did in white communities. When little resulted from this meeting, WPC president Jo Ann Robinson reiterated the Council's requests in a 21 May letter to Mayor Gayle, asking him to "Please consider this plan, and if possible, act favorably upon it, for even now plans are being made to ride less, or not at all, on our buses."
Of course, we don't design the syllabi. What passes for the official Black history is very comforting to the average mainstreamer. We celebrate the first Black this and that, which makes heroes of those whose only desire is to get along...though many of those firsts chose to be first as an act of defiance. I've always thought Black History Month was like being blind for 11 months and trying to see a year's worth of stuff in four weeks. How much of what you see would you remember, be able to use?
How many students know that denying accusations of internal racism from Communist governments was as important (if not more important) a reason for the Brown vs. Board of Ed. decision as any consideration of justice? What would they learn if the "coincidence" by which mainstream recognition of Black American's rights only ever happened when it advanced mainstream interests as well, became common knowledge?
Why would we not teach our kids that the seminal movement of the 20th century was not an outburst keyed by one tired woman, but was instead a long-planned event executed with discipline and determination? Which do you think is the more empowering message: that white folks will listen when you make an emotional scene, or that you can see a problem, make a plan to address it and actually force change?
What do you conclude when you learn the Greatest Generation that has so much more wealth than the Black community was subsidized, and those subsidies specifically excluded Black folks through a combination of law and custom? What do you conclude when you see the numerous instances of Black advancement that were physically destroyed (Red Summer), the lives taken and destroyed...and see that it was necessary to repeat over and over because Black folks just kept overcoming?
And who do you suppose benefits most from the standard education containing only the particular facts it does?