There’s a lot of anger these days from progressives on this site and elsewhere directed at President Obama for giving in to Republicans. I don’t want to get into the specifics of whether people are “right” or “wrong” to be angry at Obama. I do want to suggest that Rosa Parks’ story can give us some perspective about how serious and deadly our opponents can be, and about the range of survival skills needed to survive and to overcome such opposition.
“Not Just Another Little Girl” is the title of Chapter 2 of Mrs. Parks’ book. (This is a woman with a strong sense of self.) It’s mostly a series of vignettes from the next few years of her life in Pine Level.
1 – After a 10 year old Rosa defended herself with a brick when a white boy threatened to hit her, her grandmother “scolded me very severely about how I had to learn that white folks were white folks and that you just didn’t talk to white folks or act that way around white people….My grandmother remarked that I was too high-strung and that if I wasn’t careful, I would probably be lynched before I was twenty years old.”
2 – Rosa’s mother taught her to read, and told her stories about slavery times: “I remember she told me that the slaves had to fool the white people into thinking that they were happy. The white people would …treat the slaves better if they thought the slaves like white people.”
“When white people died, their slaves would have to pretend to be sorry. The slaves would spit on their fingers and use it to wet their cheeks like it was tears. They’d do this right in front of the little slave children, and the the children would do the same thing in the presence of the grieving white people.”
3 – When white children rode by in their bus to school, black children would get off the road to avoid the trash thrown at them. “We didn’t have any of what they call “civil rights” back then, so there was no way to protest and nobody to protest to. It was just a matter of survival…so we could exist from day to day.”
4 – “At one point the (Klan) violence got so bad that my grandfather kept his gun…close by at all times….My grandfather wasn’t going outside looking for any trouble, but he was going to defend his home. …I remember that at night he would sit by the fire in his rocking chair and I would sit on the floor right by his chair, and he would have his gun right by just in case.”
5 – “I heard a lot about black people being found dead and nobody knew what happened. Other people would just pick them up and bury them. Sometimes I’m asked how I lived with that kind of fear, but that was the only way I knew and Pine Level was the only place I knew.”
6 – Mr. Freeman was the overseer on the Hudson plantation where Rosa worked as a fieldhand picking cotton, as did all her black neighbors—except one: “Mr. Gus Vaughn…didn’t work for anybody. He didn’t do anything but walk around with his stick and talk big talk. Mr. Freeman couldn’t stand Mr. Gus Vaughn. He’d say, ‘Gus, I don’t like you.’ Mr. Vaughn would answer, ‘There is no love lost,’ and just keep walking.”
“So I saw that there was at least one black man who wouldn’t work for Mr. Freeman. And later on, when I heard white people say that it was the light-skinned black people who had the courage to stand up to whites, I’d always think back and remember Mr. Gus Vaughn who had no white blood.”
When progressives get upset at President Obama for not “taking on” the Republicans, it is, in my view, worth taking a moment to consider the potential costs associated with “taking on” powerful enemies, and to consider the lessons Rosa Parks learned and embodied in taking down the segregated bus system in Montgomery.
