Rosa Parks' political journey didn't begin on the bus

Rosa Parks' political journey didn't begin on the bus

Fifty-five years ago, the boycott of segregated public buses in Montgomery, Alabama began, spurred by "Rosa Parks's refusal":http://www.thegrio.com/black-history/commemorating-rosa-parks-courageous-actions.php to move to the back of a segregated Alabama bus. Her defiance of Jim Crow launched a movement that continues to change the world. What spurred this supposedly solitary and spontaneous act of rebellion? According to popular myth and many textbooks, her tired feet kicked off the civil rights movement. The latest rendition of this nonsense comes at the end of John Kander and Fred Ebb's stunning Broadway show, _The Scottsboro Boys_. The Parks character, played by Sharon Washington, refuses when a white bus driver tells her to move to the rear. I just wanted to "rest my feet," the character says. Audience members quickly realize this pretext masks something deeper and still more defiant, since Kander and Ebb present "Parks" as a silent witness to the brutal treatment of nine young black men falsely convicted of raping two white women on a freight train in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931. It is that history of racial and sexual violence, Kander and Ebb suggest, that led Rosa Parks to her iconic moment on the bus in 1955. Though it flirts with the myth, _The Scottsboro Boys_ gets the history (nearly) right. Rosa Parks began her political career in the early 1930s as a militant activist, not a silent witness, around issues of "interracial sexual violence":http://www.thegrio.com/black-history/how-abuse-of-women-was-overshadowed-in-civil-rights-movement.php. She and her husband, Raymond, joined other black activists in secret meetings to raise money for the Scottsboro youths' defense. They sat around a card table covered with guns, plotting to save the young men from Alabama's electric chair. "This was the first time I'd seen so few men with so many guns," Parks remembered fondly, noting with resentment that "black men could not hold meetings without fear of bodily injury and death." When the last of the nine defendants walked out of prison in 1950, Scottsboro symbolized Southern injustice and Montgomery was marching toward the history books. Beginning in 1944 -- when Martin Luther King, Jr. was in high school in Atlanta -- Parks and her allies in Montgomery used the networks they had stitched together during the Scottsboro case to protect black women from the commonplace sexual assaults perpetrated by white men. When a carload of white men in Abbeville, Alabama, kidnapped and gang-raped "Recy Taylor":http://www.thegrio.com/black-history/still-no-justice-for-civil-rights-era-rape-victims.php, a black mother and sharecropper in 1944, the NAACP sent Rosa Parks to investigate. Parks organized the "Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor," which launched an international movement that the _Chicago Defender_ called the "strongest campaign for equal justice in a decade." The Montgomery Improvement Association, which elevated Dr. King and nonviolent direct action to worldwide fame, was a direct outgrowth of this committee, which never had the chance to disband. In 1949, Parks and other activists rallied around a black woman raped by two white Montgomery police officers. Their protests secured a trial and kept the story in the newspapers for nearly two months.