Enough Rosa Parks

I'm not a big fan of Rosa Parks. Everything I have seen points to her as a fellow traveler or perhaps a useful idiot of Communists. I'm not happy with the selection of this one person for sainthood, when there were so many people laboring for civil rights all over the place. I have the same objection to every city having an MLK blvd. Pick a civil rights leader from your home state. You have one, they worked as hard, and some of them too were martyred by klansmen or their allies. Show me a George Washington Carver monument, school, or street in Missouri (he was born near Diamond Grove MO) and I'm much happier. There is a constellation of black civil rights heros, from the gradualist Carver to duBois to the Black Nationaist Garvey, just to pick some more or less contemporary figures. That constellation is much richer in its conflict and contradiction than is any unified view of one figure, something that often just amounts to a hagiography. Especially when someone like Parks is reduced to the dignified seamstress with tired feet, rather than the political activist that she was.

Its complicated in that so many opponants of the civil rights were racists, and were inclined to throw around the communits lable rather freely. However, its worthwhile to note that the racists can be right in calling Communists "Communists" and the Communists can be right calling the racists "racists". An error in one or many areas does not mean they cannot be right about others. The Communists were eager to advance the civil rights cause, but not wholey because they sought equity, but because in part because they wanted to disrupt American society. Its this last part that is a taint. The very nature of a fellow traveler or useful idiot (depending on whether or not you understood the Communist role) is that they advance the cause of the Communists because some other cause you support is also advanced. Learning how to do useful things without Communists was a neccessary and useful development for unions and other Left organizations. The civil rights movement never made that leap, and its more recent history has floundered I think in part because of this inability.