The Journal of Microsociologies a Journal of the American Sociological Association Active Dying “Or Does It Explode? Collecting Shells in Gaza”

Home , Aurelia Browder, Claudette Colvin, Fred Gray (attorney), Gary Alan Fine

Rosa Parks Photograph by Andy Clarno 2009 • June Volume 72 Volume • Number 2 The Journal of Microsociologies A Journal of the American Sociological Association Active Dying “Or Does It Explode? Collecting Shells in Gaza”

Social Psychology Quarterly June 2009 Vol. 72 No. 2 pp. 95–197

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY QUARTERLY Periodicals postage paid PMS color is 354 (ISSN 0190–2725) at Washington, DC and 1430 K Street NW, Suite 600 additional mailing offices Washington, DC 20005 2009 • June • Number 2 CHECK OUT 72 Volume http://www.asanet.org/spq SPQ Visited Lately? Have You SPQ SNAPS The Journal for Readers Has Online! More The Journal of Microsociologies We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think about our efforts to provide more accessible versions of our print articles. SPQ Snaps are designed to make our articles into teaching tools, not just research archives. Assign one to your class, and let us know whether the students find it clear, inter- texts with community psychology social our provide us Help both. or esting, it can use. A Journal of the American Sociological Association Social Psychology Quarterly Formerly SOCIOMETRY The Journal of Microsociologies EDITOR GARY ALAN FINE DEPUTY EDITORS JANE MCLEOD————LISA TROYER It’s Here... EDITORIAL BOARD AMY BEST MICHAEL P. FARRELL CHRISTINE HORNE NIKKI KHANNA ALISON J. BIANCHI JEREMY FREESE RUTH HOROWITZ KATHRYN LIVELY TONY BROWN NOAH FRIEDKIN JENNIFER C. HUNT MICHAEL MACY KATHY CHARMAZ DAVID R. GIBSON MONICA KIRKPATRICK REUBEN A. MAY The 2009 Guide C. ANDRÉ CHRISTIE- ELLEN GRANBERG JOHNSON ROBIN SIMON MIZELL TIM HALLETT WILL KALKHOFF BRENT SIMPSON to Graduate RANDALL COLLINS DOUGLAS HARPER SATOSHI KANAZAWA MARIO LUIS SMALL ROBERT CROSNOE STEVEN HITLIN GRACE KAO PEGGY A. THOITS ALICE EAGLY THOMAS HOLTGRAVES JACK KATZ DAVID G. WAGNER Departments

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CONTENTS

OPENINGS ANDY CLARNO 95 Or Does It Explode? Collecting Shells in Gaza

ALAN SICA 99 Social Psychology’s Neglected Past: Review Essay of Gustav Jahoda, A History of Social Psychology from the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment to the Second World War

TWO ON COLLECTIVE MEMORY THOMAS DEGLOMA 105 Expanding Trauma through Space and Time: Mapping the Rhetorical Strategies of Trauma Carrier Groups

BARRY SCHWARTZ 123 Collective Forgetting and the Symbolic Power of Oneness: The Strange Apotheosis of Rosa Parks

ARTICLES DEREK A. KREAGER AND JEREMY STAFF 143 The Sexual Double Standard and Adolescent Peer Acceptance

JASON RODRIQUEZ 165 Attributions of Agency and the Construction of Moral Order: Dementia, Death, and Dignity in Nursing-home Care

TOBIAS SCHRÖDER AND WOLFGANG SCHOLL 180 Affective Dynamics of Leadership: An Experimental Test of Affect Control Theory

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NOTE: Additional details on preparing and submitting manuscripts to SPQ are published in the ASA Style Guide (2nd. ed., 1997) available from the American Sociological Association. Social Psychology Quarterly 2009, Vol. 72, No. 2, 123–142 Collective Forgetting And The Symbolic Power Of Oneness: The Strange Apotheosis Of Rosa Parks BARRY SCHWARTZ University of Georgia

Oneness refers to the convention of recognizing a single individual’s performance and ignoring others, including those who may have performed as well. Although oneness is an adaptation to cognitive deficits, it cannot be explained by them. If long-term and working memory were more capacious, society’s need for ideals to establish realm-specific standards and meanings would tend to limit recognition and renown to one individual. The apotheosis of Rosa Parks is a case in point. Her celebrity and the obscurity of others who risked and accomplished more than she are two aspects of the same social process. Revealing oneness to be a social imperative, this case study leads to a broader understanding of collective forgetting.

ollective forgetting refers to what is get into people’s minds, as I might through a unregistered in the imagination of indi- massive interview project, but by searching Cviduals, unchronicled in research mono- out and analyzing the symbolic forms— graphs and textbooks, and/or uncommemorat- words, images, objects—by which people rep- ed by monuments, relics, statues, and ritual resent her to themselves. The second question observances. A metaphor for failure to trans- is why have so many men and women whose mit information about the past, collective for- conduct was more consequential than Mrs. getting refers not only to people’s forgetting Parks’s been uncommemorated and thereby events they once knew but also to having forgotten? What does society gain from their never known them in the first place. Joining oblivion? the adjective “collective” to forgetting does The significance of this question inheres not imply an emergent “social mind” or that in its premises. William Goode (1978) every member of a society forgets the same observed many years ago that “winners in var- thing; it means that remembering and forget- ious kinds of competition, even when they are ting, knowledge and ignorance, are distributed marked off from the losers by minute differ- unevenly among different communities, ences in performance, or, (as in science) by groups, and individuals. Events and people of narrow differences in the time of discovery or comparable significance are also remembered achievement, seem to be given far greater differently within these same communities, amounts of prestige than those differences groups, and individuals. Therefore, two new would appear to justify”(66). Exchange theory questions arise, the first of which concerns convinces Goode that the “market” for excep- America’s most prominent civil rights heroine: tional people is limited. Given a wide array of stellar performers whose differences are bare- Rosa Parks. Why is her renown as great as it ly noticeable, people have no incentive to is? In this essay I make many statements about learn about and admire all of them. In Goode’s what different people think of Rosa Parks, words: “The gap between the most highly how they feel about her, and judge her. Like ranked and the somewhat less esteemed is Clifford Geertz (1983), I do so not by trying to partly created by the commonsensical unwill- ingness of most people to buy any worse com- I would like to thank James M. Balkwell, Bernice modity, to admire any less competent person, Barnett, James Dowd, Michael Feige, Mark Jacobs, and than the one they rate the highest, if the choice Abraham Tesser for useful suggestions on earlier drafts. is without cost” (73–4, emphasis in original). Direct correspondence to Department of Sociology, University of Georgia, 113 Baldwin Hall, Athens, GA Because it usually costs less (in terms of atten- 30602; [email protected]. tion) to admire a field’s best (a single task) 123 124 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY QUARTERLY than to admire its first and second best (a mul- make it irretrievable by working memory tiple task), Goode’s explanation of why the (Vockell 2006). magnitude of reward is often out of proportion However, working (short-term) memory to achievement is persuasive; however, his is beset by limits of its own. It can attend to no argument skirts the related questions of (1) more than several objects at once and can per- whether people are unwilling or unable to form efficiently one task at a time. George admire slightly less adept performers, and (2) Miller (1956) was the first psychologist to why these performers not only fail to receive investigate these limits. As a sender transmits due credit but are often forgotten altogether. more information, the receiver’s knowledge increases at first but soon levels off. This COGNITION AND MEMORY: CAPACITY LIMITS plateau, according to Miller, represents the receiver’s channel capacity—the largest Acclaim results from attention, and the amount of information (sounds, tastes, dots, understanding of attention requires a theory of discrete letters, and numbers) he or she can mind. George Herbert Mead (1934:25, differentiate. For cognitive discrimination emphasis added) explained: problems, human channel capacity averages Our whole intelligent process seems to lie in the seven units of information; however, Miller attention, which is selective, of certain types of never generalized this number to all tasks. stimuli. Other stimuli which are bombarding the Moreover, his “magic number 7” might well system are in some fashion shunted off. We give be composed of two smaller “chunks” of three our attention to one particular thing. Not only do and four units (Cowan 2005:23–5). we open the door to certain stimuli and close it Direct demonstration provides the most to others, but our attention is an organizing process as well as a selective process.|.|.|.Here accurate measure of cognitive limits. The pari- we have the organism as acting and determining etal cortex, according to recent magnetic reso- its environment.” nance image (MRI) studies, becomes more active as more objects (visual images, con- Mead brings to the problem of attention a cepts, plans, people, and other chunks of conception of mind that transcends Goode’s information) are added to working memory, calculus of cost, reward, and profit. But what but once its limit of four objects (on average) is to be said of attention itself? Because atten- is reached, the adding of more objects to the tion, in Mead’s time, could not be located in task causes no further increase in cortex activ- any one part of the brain, he had to take on ity (Marois 2005; see also Ricoeur 2004).1 faith the “parallelist” assumption that “What Working memory’s limit also causes the most takes place in consciousness runs parallel to recently received information to be best what takes place in the central nervous sys- remembered (Cowan 1995:9) and the forget- tem” (Mead 1934:19). Today, however, we can ting of irrelevant memories to enhance the better explain how attention limits the range of remembering of relevant target memories objects which individuals can attend and (Kuhl, et al.). remember. This essay’s second premise is that indi- Two premises frame our present under- viduals adapt to the limits of their long- and standing. First, the central nervous system’s capacity to organize, store, and retrieve information is severely limited. Although human 1 Structural as opposed to cognitive limits are described long-term memory is almost infinite (during by Randall Collins (1998). Collins observes that the num- an average lifetime it will have accumulated ber of philosophical schools involved in conflict at any given time generally varies between three and six. The more than five times the information con- lower limit is set by the existence of conflicting groups tained in all the printed material in the world whose claims are resolved by a third group taking a medi- [Marois 2005]), much of this material fades ating position; the upper limit is set by audiences’“attention space.” For more than six schools to compete against from disuse, is “overwritten” by more recent- one another is to overload the outsider’s capacity to follow ly acquired knowledge, or coded in a way to the arguments. THE SYMBOLIC POWER OF ONENESS 125 short-term memory by “heuristic” strategies, this forgetting contributes to understanding of enabling them to ignore most of the informa- the boycott itself. In the third and fourth section to which they are exposed. History buffs, tions of this paper, Rosa Parks’s case clarifies therefore, can name all American presidents, the determinants and functions of oneness, but few vice-presidents. The typical baseball including condensation, the Matthew Effect, fan can identify last year’s division winners in representation of cultural ideals, schematic both American and National leagues, but he distortion, and resentment among the forgot- probably knows few if any of the respective ten. Rosa Parks is the perfect specimen for this second-place winners. Olympic (first place) study, for few other people is the ratio of gold medal recipients are far more likely to be renown to achievement so high. In the conclu- remembered than (second and third place) sion, this finding is generalized to other prob- recipients of silver and bronze medals. The lems of collective forgetting. typical Miss America enthusiast will remember last year’s winner but not the runner-up. Oneness Political and academic scenes are similar: Oneness is a confusing term beset by con- despite extensive training in understanding the tradictory definitions: in the popular realm it structural context of events, American social concerns singularity and uniqueness; in many scientists seem inclined vastly to exaggerate religious belief systems, it is the condition of the role of one person, the president, in caus- being at one with fellow believers and tran- ing national successes and failures. In science, scendent powers. In this essay, oneness refers literature, and artistic award ceremonies, all to the recognizing of one exceptional individ- nominees are known but winners alone are ual and the ignoring of others, many of whom remembered. However, this tendency toward may have performed as well as or better than “oneness” cannot result exclusively from cog- the one acclaimed. Oneness is loosely related nitive limits. to Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s (1973, 1974) concepts of “availability” and Preview “anchoring.” These heuristics rely so heavily Forgetting results not only from efforts to on one person or event that they frequently suppress painful, dissonant, or ignoble experi- bias assessment and decision-making. ence, as constructionists (Bodnar 1992; Oneness, as an adaptation to cognition’s Zerubavel 2003; Connerton 2008) assert, but limits, is always “realm-specific.” In baseball, also from the consignment to oblivion of wor- for example, separate awards are given for thy and noble actions. To forget reflects not being the “Most Valuable Player,” for the high- only virtuous actors’ failure to find sponsors est batting average, most home runs, most to institutionalize their memory, as agency- strikeouts, most wins, lowest earned run aver- oriented investigators (Fine and McDonnell age, and other offensive and defensive 2007) would claim, but also from the necessi- achievements. Beauty pageants produce a ty of excluding virtuous actions from memory. general winner (Miss America) and winners in To find advantage in the forgetting of virtue various subcompetitions (talent, bathing suit, seems absurd, but our capacity to remember evening gown, congeniality). In the academic and comprehend the most virtuous, the ideal, world, awards are given in different disciplines depends on our doing so. and subdisciplines for the most distinguished The analysis proceeds in five steps. First, careers, books, and articles. The Pulitzer cognition’s limits are related to the tendency to Prizes, Academy Awards, Tony Awards, and simplify complex historical information into Nobel Prizes are also examples of single one event or the achievement of one person. awards given within different realms of Second, the story of the rise of Rosa Parks is achievement These awards not only reflect summarized, but it includes those forgotten societies’ need for multiple exemplars to artic- protestors who contributed as much as she to ulate multiple ideals, but also the convention the Montgomery bus boycott and shows how of exemplifying each ideal by one person. The 126 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY QUARTERLY periodic (usually annual) acclaim of such Fifth, the singling out of winners rein- exemplars enlarges their prestige ritually. forces or undermines social structures. Among individualistic communities, “winner- Contingencies take-all” situations are most common, while egalitarian communities believe the singling The relationship between nature and con- out of winners undermines group solidarity vention, between cognitive capacity limits and and individual esteem.2 Differentiation of a the practice of limiting recognition to single field also affects the feasibility of single recipients, requires several qualifications: awards. Between 1902 and 1949, for example, First, working memory’s limit, according 85 percent of Nobel Prizes in physics were to most investigators, is four (Cowan 2005); given to single recipients; 2 percent to 3 recip- therefore, nature alone cannot account for the ients. Between 1950 and 1999, single recipi- phenomenon of oneness. ents received only 26 percent of the awards; 3 Second, cognitive limits can be transcend- recipients received 38 percent. In six of the ed at will. Baseball experts, for example, pos- first seven years of the twenty-first century, sess vast knowledge of many categories of three recipients shared the prize. Physics pro- offensive and defensive performance. This is duces more winners as it becomes a more possible because their working memory complex and innovative science. It should be encodes every relevant chunk of new informa- noted, however, that the Nobel Committee has tion, transfers it to long-term memory, where never awarded its prize to more than three it is identified meaningfully through typing, physicists in any one year—a number well classification, and schema, then stored with within the working memory’s limits. relevant existing information. The constant Sixth, the media through which informa- interplay between efficient encoding and tion is transmitted restricts the amount any organizing of information in working and individual can possess. A history text can long-term memory distinguishes “experts” devote only a limited number of pages to a from “novices” (Ericsson and Kinch 1995: given event; a newspaper or magazine, only so 239–40). many columns; television and radio stations, Third, many individuals are motivated to only so many minutes (Hilgartner and Bosk acquire vast knowledge in one or more realms 1988). Media limits add to the effect of cogni- of activity (usually occupational); this means tive limits. Finally, when no single representative can that oneness is the default option, not the sole be selected to symbolize a field of activity, the option, for human cognition. But individuals pool of “contestants” can be condensed into a mastering one or more bodies of knowledge single unit and identified by their number. The cannot master all there is to know. They, too, Little Rock Nine, namely, the three boys and are “cognitive misers” because they oversim- six girls chosen by the NAACP to integrate the plify reality by ignoring its “details;” but they Little Rock Central High School in 1957, is a are also “motivated tacticians” because their relevant example. Nine individuals are easy to deliberate ignoring of information allows forget, but when condensed into one name them to attend to the most relevant and com- they are readily remembered. plex tasks. Short cuts, no less than prolonged Not all events in the collective memory attention to complex problems, are tactically are symbolized by a single person or group. In motivated (Fiske and Taylor 1991:13). the sport of baseball, for example, pairs and Fourth, the more knowledge one has of trios often represent something special about a the achievement realm within which a person team or an achievement. The Boston Braves of is recognized, the more likely he or she will know of others who have accomplished at least as much or more. Selecting one person 2 Robert Frank and Philip Cook (1995) believe the United States, more than any other nation, deserves to be for recognition is therefore most likely to pro- called a “winner-take-all” society. For a related but better mote insider resentment. documented analysis, see Seymour M. Lipset (1996). THE SYMBOLIC POWER OF ONENESS 127 the late 1940s depended heavily on two pitch- includes a sample of the unknowns that ers, Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain—hence marked the final decades of bus segregation. the cautious war cry: “Spahn and Sain, and July 1944. Irene Morgan (Anon 2001) pray for rain.” Likewise, early twentieth-cen- refused to go to the back of a bus traveling tury baseball fans represented the difficult from Virginia to Maryland. Her case went to double-play by its supposed virtuosi, “Tinker the Supreme Court, which ruled segregation to Evers to Chance.” In other fields, including in interstate travel to be unconstitutional (June entertainment, duos and trios are recognized 3, 1946). individually (Sonny and Cher), as are World June 1953. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a War II’s best known American leaders, one-day bus boycott, followed three weeks Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and MacArthur later by a seven-day boycott, resulted in partial (although these men represented separate desegregation of city buses. realms of activity [politics and the two the- May 21, 1954. Jo Ann Robinson, presi- aters of war]). Future work will determine dent of Montgomery, Alabama’s Womens’s whether duos and trios are exceptions to, or Political Council, complained in a letter to different forms of, oneness. Mayor W.A. “Tacky” Gayle about humilia- The concept of oneness describes a tions endured by black bus passengers nonuniversal but powerful tendency for indi- (including herself) and warned of a boycott viduals and groups to simplify complex com- against Montgomery’s bus company. parisons by choosing one prominent per- June 22, 1954–July 14, 1955. Sarah Mae former or entity. This tendency is reinforced Flemming filed suit against her removal from by memory’s limits, but such a hindrance does a Columbia, South Carolina bus. Her case not itself limit recognition. Why, then, does a failed, but on appeal the Fourth Federal Circuit conventional limit—particularly the recogni- Court ordered Columbia’s buses integrated. tion of one person—exaggerate a natural limit Bus companies in 16 other Southern cities which, although severe, permits the recogni- integrated in compliance with the court ruling. tion of several people? Why is human conven- Montgomery maintained its segregated buses, tion so stingy, why does it remember so few arguing that the Flemming decision applied to and forget so many, what social realities does Columbia alone and, in any case, did not it reinforce, and how does the answer to these explicitly deny that the Plessy-Ferguson (sep- questions bear on our general understanding arate but equal principle) applied to public of collective forgetting? Rosa Parks, as noted, transportation. is the case in point. March 2, 1955. In Montgomery, Alabama, Claudette Colvin refused to move to the back THE RISE OF ROSA PARKS of a segregated bus; she was arrested, convicted, and fined. Forgotten Events and Protesters April 19, 1955. Aurelia Browder of Throughout the Jim Crow era, many Montgomery refused to take her legal bus African Americans rebelled against segregat- seat; she, too, was arrested, convicted, and ed seating in public transportation, but their fined. number vastly increased after World War II. October 21, 1955. Mary Louise Smith of By the mid–1950s, defiance of bus segrega- Montgomery was arrested, convicted, and tion had become common. A host of unrecog- fined for violating the city’s bus segregation nized men and women (“invisible leaders,” as code. Several days later, Suzi McDonald was Bernice Barnett [1993] calls them [see also arrested and fined for the same offense. Barnett 1995; Hendrickson 2005]), preceded December 1, 1955. Rosa Parks was arrest- Rosa Parks. “Invisible leaders” are in fact ed, then convicted and fined for refusing to quite visible to scholars whose business it is to surrender her seat to a white passenger. Next search for them; it is to the general public that day, the Montgomery bus boycott, planned for they are unknown. The following chronology a single day, went into effect. 128 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY QUARTERLY December 3, 1955. Activist leaders of December 21, 1956. The NAACP marked Montgomery’s black community formed a the desegregation order by asking Rosa Parks new entity, The Montgomery Improvement to pose for a photograph on a city bus. (A UPI Association (MIA), in order to distance them- reporter, sometimes taken for an irate white selves from conservative ministers and avoid passenger, agreed to sit behind Mrs. Parks legal entanglements with the local NAACP [Figure 1].) branch.3 The Association appointed Martin Because pictorial information is more Luther King, Jr. as its president. readily remembered than verbal (MacInnis December 5, 1955. Several hours after and Price 1987), this photograph reinforced Rosa Parks was fined, thousands gathered for the public’s belief in Rosa Parks as the mother a meeting at a local church under the black of the civil rights movement. It also takes us to community’s new (MIA) leadership. King’s the nub of the problem. Why did the NAACP speech electrified the audience, which voted choose Rosa Parks to represent a boycott in to extend the boycott indefinitely. which so many played equally important February 1, 1956. Realizing that the boy- roles? Why did it not include Aurelia Browder, Claudette Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, and cott had failed to achieve its modest goals of Suzie McDonald—the successful plaintiffs improving courtesy and convenience within a whose suit ended bus segregation every- segregated transportation system, attorney where? These very questions presuppose the Fred Gray convinced his MIA colleagues to presence of agents— “reputational entrepre- bring legal suit against the city. He named neurs,” as Gary Fine (1996) calls them, pro- Browder, Colvin, Smith, McDonald, and one moting Rosa Parks’s reputation and renown other woman, Jeanetta Reese, as plaintiffs (Lang and Lang 1991), but the activities of against Montgomery’s mayor, claiming that these admirers cannot explain her fame. Her bus segregation violated their 14th fame, indeed, makes the success of her pro- Amendment (equal protection) rights. Jeanetta moters a problem rather than an explanation. Reese had also been ejected from a Montgomery bus for refusing to give up her Singling Out Rosa Parks seat,4 but she removed her name from the suit after receiving threats on her life. When two or more investigators make an February 21, 1956. Rosa Parks, among identical discovery within a short time span, eighty-nine other black resisters, was arrested Robert Merton (1957) observes, credit is and fingerprinted for violating the city’s anti- assigned to the person who makes the discovery first. If this priority rule is generalized to boycott law. social movements, then one must recognize June 5, 1956. Six months after the filing that Rosa Parks was last, not first, to challenge of the Browder v. Gayle suit, the three-judge Montgomery’s bus segregation practice. After Fifth Federal Circuit Court ruled against the Claudette Colvin was arrested in March 1955, city of Montgomery and its mayor. The city Jo Ann Robinson, president of the Women’s immediately appealed to the Supreme Court. Political Council, E.D. Nixon, director of the November 13, 1956. The US Supreme Montgomery NAACP, and attorney Fred Gray Court upheld the district court ruling. Five thought the youngster would be a good plain- weeks later (December 20) federal marshals tiff in a lawsuit to end bus segregation and a served the enforcement order. good symbol to mobilize Montgomery’s heretofore compliant (King 1958) black com-

3 For detail, see Fred Gray 1995. Gray’s advice turned munity. But the plan fell through. Although a out to be prescient. On June 1, 1956, Alabama’s attorney member of the NAACP youth organization, general claimed that the NAACP had not followed proper Miss Colvin was pregnant with a married registration requirements and barred it from conducting man’s child. In October of 1955, eighteen- business in the state (Glennon 1991). 4 Dates of arrest for Reese and MacDonald are year-old Mary Louise Smith refused to give unknown. up her bus seat, but her father’s alcoholism THE SYMBOLIC POWER OF ONENESS 129

Figure 1. Rosa Parks contemplates boycott victory. © Bettman/ CORBIS ruled her out as a plaintiff and symbol. To the ever, did Robinson, Nixon, and Gray believe extent that Colvin and Smith deviated from they had found the plaintiff and symbol they what Barnett (2007) calls “the cult of black sought. At the time, Rosa Parks seemed to women’s respectability and womanhood,” have the attributes needed to be an effective their arrests, according to E.D. Nixon, would plaintiff and symbol: (1) she had no skeletons be less likely to impress a court and arouse the in her closet and (2) as NAACP secretary, she indignation of Montgomery’s African was better known throughout the black com- Americans (Raines 1977). Little personal munity than any of the other arrested women, information on Suzie McDonald, who was 78 including Browder (King 1958; Williams at the time of her protest and arrest, is avail- 1987; Parks 1992). able; however, the Montgomery police had Besides being secretary of the also arrested Aurelia Browder, an NAACP Montgomery branch of the NAACP, which member and activist. Browder worked for she joined in 1943, Rosa Parks was a coun- years as a seamstress, then finished high selor in its youth group, a devoted church school, entered college, and graduated with member, well-known and liked in the black honors with majors in mathematics and sci- community, acquainted with resistance lead- ence. Not until Rosa Parks was arrested, how- ers and attorneys. Because she had occupied a 130 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY QUARTERLY legal bus seat—to be relinquished only to a Supreme Court’s bus desegregation decision standing white passenger—the NAACP could was indispensable (Gray 1995; Burns 1997). not have known beforehand about Mrs. Parks’s Nevertheless, Rosa Parks emerged as the decision to make her protest. Nevertheless, symbol of the struggle and the victory. they assisted her with legal aid immediately, beginning with bail within hours of her arrest, When Rosa Parks Became a National and assembled considerable numbers to Celebrity accompany her to court. “When they messed Two problems must be distinguished: the with her, they messed with the WRONG first is to find the basis for Rosa Parks’s ONE” was often repeated during the days fol- renown; the second is to explain why that lowing Rosa Parks’s arrest (Durr 2006:108, renown was accorded to no resister but her. emphasis added). But this arrest plays a minor The first problem is easiest to solve because part in the boycott’s history. Rosa Parks was an insider. Not only local The full story of the Montgomery bus elites, including E.D. Nixon and Vernon Johns boycott is the story of black representatives but also Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph confronting Montgomery municipal officials, Abernathy, who would soon become national even as their homes are bombed and their fam- celebrities, knew her and were impressed by ilies threatened; of black attorneys countering her quiet dignity. Fred Gray wanted Rosa city and state legal maneuvers; of weekly Parks to be lead plaintiff in his federal case, meetings in churches (also bombing targets) but her December 5th conviction was still to reinforce the motivation of the protestors; pending in the Alabama appeals court and of ordinary people struggling to maintain their could not be heard in a federal court until the livelihood by pooling resources and support- state had acted. To wait might postpone the ing one another. In these stories Rosa Parks case indefinitely; therefore, Gray moved for- plays no visible role. Reverend Robert Graetz, ward with Aurelia Browder. white minister of Montgomery’s black Two contingencies made Rosa Park’s Lutheran congregation and active boycott sup- insidership relevant to her renown. First, and porter, reports: “Sadly, Mrs. Parks had very crucially, the city of Montgomery invited the little to do with the boycott. Once it was past Montgomery Improvement Association, rep- the beginning, she faded into the background” resented by a twelve-person committee, to (Graetz 1991:113). Between her February negotiate a compromise. At the first meeting, arrest and the November Supreme Court deci- three days after the boycott began, protesters sion, Rosa Parks traveled the country on presented their demands—more driver cour- speaking engagements, but she had no part in tesy, first-come, first-serve seating for blacks the front line of battle, as did Graetz. Besides from the back of the bus to the front, and the making his own fundraising trips, Graetz hiring of black drivers for buses serving main- served as secretary of the Montgomery ly African-American communities. None of Improvement Association, was particularly these demands required the integration of city hated by white segregationists, lived under buses, but the mayor’s committee refused to continual surveillance, suffered nightly tele- accept them. Negotiations resumed on phone threats on his children’s lives, and December 17 and December 19, but the city, endured an attempted murder and two bomb- again, offered no concessions, and negotia- ings (Graetz 1991). tions ended.5 If the city had agreed to the pro- Fred Gray, Montgomery Improvement testers’ modest demands, modeled after rules Association’s attorney, was also exposed to a in other segregated Alabama cities, the boy- wide range of harassment. While threatened with disbarment and summoned for review of his draft status by Montgomery’s Selective 5 Negotiations between the city and the Montgomery Improvement Association are described in detail by Service Board, Gray designed and executed Martin Luther King, Jr., the Association’s spokesman the Browder vs. Gayle action. His role in the (King 1958). THE SYMBOLIC POWER OF ONENESS 131 cott would have ended, and Rosa Parks would 1955—the first 4 weeks of the boycott. For the have been forgotten. entire year of 1955, there was no mention of Montgomery’s “Get Tough Policy” was other bus resisters. In January 1956, the sec- the second contingency affecting Rosa Parks’s ond month of the boycott, Rosa Parks’s name place in history. After eight days of investiga- appeared three times. During the February tion, a grand jury found that 90 protesters had enactment of the “Get Tough” policy, the num- violated an “anti-boycott” law adopted ber of Rosa Parks mentions rose to 46, then decades earlier to prevent labor collusion fell to 21 in March and 6 in April.6 February’s against local business establishments. The peak followed the filing in federal district indictments named many prominent black cit- court of the Browder vs. Gayle suit to end seg- izens, including attorneys, political leaders, 24 regation of Montgomery’s buses. clergymen, and Rosa Parks. Each defendant chose to exercise his or her right to be tried by Apotheosis a judge. Not until March 21 did the state begin In early 1956, no one knew or could have its first prosecution, that of Martin Luther known how brilliantly the light of the mass King. Defense attorneys brought in witnesses media would soon shine on Rosa Parks and to describe the bus company’s treatment of how much more intensely it would shine as African Americans, and national press ser- decades passed. Indeed, when Rosa Parks died vices broadcast their testimony. King was con- in her Detroit home in October 2005, fifty victed, but 89 cases remained. years after the boycott, state and local estab- Meanwhile, membership in the segrega- lishments reacted with unprecedented defer- tionist White Citizens Council doubled; ence. Following the pattern of a “royal Montgomery’s mayor and police commission- progress,” the ceremonial form by which er added themselves to the number while other kings and queens take possession of their segregationists began a program of intimida- realm (Geertz 1983), the NAACP moved her tion and violence against the city’s black citi- body to Montgomery’s St. Paul A.M.E. zens (Walker 2007). The government with- church, where she had been a member. Many drew licenses from taxi drivers who lowered officials, including the U.S. Secretary of State, rates for boycotters, ticketed automobiles car- participated in the service. Throughout the rying them to work, forbade carpools to pick city, the first row of seats on all buses up passengers on public property, and tried remained empty in her memory. From unsuccessfully to disrupt the boycott by Montgomery, her body was flown to the broadcasting false information about its reso- Baltimore-Washington International Airport, lution. named after Thurgood Marshall, with whom As Rosa Parks faced more charges, more Fred Gray consulted during the legal battle. Americans watched her. She refused to pay the The motorcade, accompanied by a symbolic $14 fine imposed for her December 1, 1955 1955-era bus, carried her remains to the U.S. violation and on February 22, 1956 was sen- Capitol Rotunda, where they were placed in tenced to 14 days in jail. Appealing to the state. Emergency legislation, initiated by the State Supreme Court, she was released on Michigan House delegation led by John bond. She was also arrested on the antiboycott Conyers and signed by the president, provided charge, fingerprinted under the eyes and cam- for this honor, previously reserved for presi- eras of the press, and indicted. At this time, dents, statesmen, and military heroes. After when the state’s mass prosecutions dominated signing a bill authorizing a statue of Rosa national attention, Rosa Parks’s name Parks to be erected in the U.S. Capitol appeared most frequently in the media. In one Building, the President of the United States newspaper source, Newspaperarchive.com, a large but imperfectly representative collection of small town and medium-size city newspa- 6 These counts were made in September 2006. Since pers, 21 articles mentioned Rosa Parks then, Newspaperarchive.com has added additional news- between December 1 and December 31, papers and issues to its existing holdings. 132 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY QUARTERLY ordered all flags to be flown at half-staff; he tells who is worth remembering and why. and other federal officials visited the Rotunda Collective forgetting, then, is relative to one’s privately to pay their respects. Then the great reference frame. Neither history nor com- Rotunda doors were opened and tens of thou- memoration is a privileged site for knowing sands wound their way around the military the past because each represents the past dif- guard and coffin. ferently: the former chronicles it; the latter Mrs. Parks’s remains were next moved to publicly celebrates it. History, in its pure form, Detroit’s Greater Grace Temple for a seven- is inclusive of every significant facet of an hour service. Entertainers, including Aretha event; commemoration, in its pure form, is Franklin, civil rights leaders, and political and selective, highlighting an event’s most signifi- business leaders attended, as did Michigan’s cant moral feature. two senators and many House members, black That commemoration, not history, pre- politicians from many states, and prominent serves Rosa Parks’s oneness was never more white figures including Bill Clinton, Hillary evident than when she lay in state in the U.S. Clinton, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, and Bill Capitol Rotunda. She was honored so spectac- Ford, CEO of Ford Motor Company. Her body ularly, according to CNN’s announcer Gary was finally placed on a gold-trimmed horse- Nurenberg 2005), because the remarkable drawn carriage for the seven-mile procession gains of the civil rights movement resulted to the cemetery. The release of scores of doves from the will of “one woman on one bus in coincided with her arrival and entombment. Montgomery fifty years ago.” Joseph Lowery (2005) agreed: “Yes, she sat down so we could Commemoration: Primary Vehicle of Oneness stand up .|.|.|.She was the one woman whom God chose to do extraordinary things.” The affirmation of Rosa Parks’s renown is These quotations are eulogistic, not his- far more evident in commemorative forms torical, statements, and their distinctive fea- than in historical statements. History involves ture is redundancy. The list would be tedious the recording of events over time; commemo- were it not produced by such a wide array of ration is the lifting from the historical record people—black and white, liberal and conserv- of events that best symbolize society’s ideals. ative, Southern and non-Southern. “Rosa The source materials of history are written, Parks proved one person can make a differ- printed, oral, and visual documents; commem- ence.|.|.|.Her single act of defiance changed oration employs icons, statues, monuments, America for the better,” said businessman and shrines, place names, eulogies, and ritual author Paul Lawrence Vann (2005). In observances. History informs; commemora- Reverend Al Sharpton’s (2005) view, “she sin- tion inspires and motivates (Schwartz 2001). gularly on December 1, 1955, tore down the History and commemoration, each per- walls of American segregation and apartheid.” forming its own function, constitute collective Rosa Parks also “single-handedly changed the memory. In 2006, for example, there was only landscape of the South.|.|.|.She showed that one Nobel Prize chemistry winner, but the his- one individual can move a community to tory of chemistry preserves the accomplish- action.” U.S Representative Arthur Davis ments of all its researchers. In the field of race (2005) of Alabama, at least, believed as much. relations, history texts tell more about U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan Claudette Colvin, Mary Smith, and Aurelia (2005), likewise, declared that “With a single Browder than do commemorative media, act, she changed the course of history.” The which barely recognize them at all. As noted, list is long and the point unchangeable: “She “invisible leaders” (Barnett 1993) are quite taught us all that one person.|.|.could spark a visible: anyone writing a term paper or essay world of change.” “In one single day, Rosa on any one of them can find plenty of pub- Parks made the world face the cause of equal- lished information. But such information is ity, civil rights and justice.” “Her lonely act of available only to those who have reason to defiance sparked a movement that ended legal look. For most people, commemoration alone segregation in America.” Thus spake THE SYMBOLIC POWER OF ONENESS 133

Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul except by connecting them to some concrete Anuzis (2005), California Governor Arnold object of whose reality we are vividly aware” Schwarzenegger (2005), and U.S. Senator (251). This “concrete [singular] object,” Rosa Diane Feinstein of California (2005). Parks, helps represent morally and emotional- Some observers insist that Rosa Parks was ly what the civil rights movement meant to its not the only person, not even the central per- beneficiaries. Promoting attachment rather son, in the civil rights movement (Loeb 2005); than enlightenment, the image of Rosa Parks but they list none of the others and offer no encouraged commitment to the civil rights explanation for why they have been forgotten. movement as an undifferentiated whole. She They ignore the main problem: what is there was, as Sherry Ortner (1973) would define in the nature of commemoration that prevents her, the civil rights movement’s “summarizing all significant activists from sharing the symbol.” renown bestowed on one? Walter Bagehot ([1872] 1978), however, Because commemoration could not per- was the first to discuss oneness as a summa- form its function if it were not selective, the rizing symbol. Writing in the early 1870s, outpouring of attention on Rosa Parks would Bagehot, a Briton, assessed the role of the have been impossible if she had to share the monarch in the English constitution (37): spotlight with other women, including those [W]e have whole classes unable to comprehend who risked as much, enjoyed less protection, the ideas of a constitution—unable to feel the and displayed as much courage. What if the least attachment to impersonal laws. Most do federal government had to organize spectacu- indeed vaguely know that there are some other lar funerals for the entire cast of resisters? institutions besides the Queen, and some rules by CNN announcer Carol Lin, present at the which she governs. But a vast number.|.|.dwell Capitol Rotunda when Mrs. Parks laid in state, more upon her than upon anything else, and raised this question simply and clearly: therefore she is inestimable. Such is the mentali- “Really, I think people are grasping what it ty of the “vacant many” who “have but hazy must have been like for this woman back in notions as to obeying laws without a queen” 1955 to be so brave” (italics added). Many (39). women back in 1955 were brave, but if all Bagehot’s condescension toward the ordi- these women received their due, grasping nary people of Great Britain, his belief that the “what it must have been like” would be diffi- Queen is necessary as “a visible symbol of cult. Multiple commemoration rites—the unity to those still so imperfectly educated as making of the calendar into something resem- to need a symbol” (45) should not blind us to bling a sequence of funeral and award the similarity between the single monarch and announcements–would make incoherent the single civil rights heroine. If reverence for the very ideal these rites were meant to affirm. Queen is a substitute for political understanding, then admiration for Rosa Parks may DETERMINANTS OF ONENESS reflect the “vacant many’s” understanding of Condensation the long story of the Montgomery bus boycott–and, beyond that, the civil rights move- The sole figure of a black woman who ment. To grasp these events, the people must refused to give up her seat to a white passen- revere the one person they can envision, not ger is more easily representable than all the the many they cannot envision. To grasp Montgomery women who worked on behalf of events in this way, however, is to find them civil rights. Foreshadowing a fundamental meaningful, not necessarily true. premise of cognitive psychology, Emile Durkheim ([1915] 1965) declared: “we are Matthew Effect unable to consider an abstract entity, which we can represent only laboriously and confusedly, In the first phase of her public career, the source of the strong sentiments which we Rosa Parks symbolized a local resistance cam- feel. We cannot explain them to ourselves paign, but as her renown grew she became dis- 134 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY QUARTERLY sociated from local protest and situated on the rewards accumulated while other resisters national scene. The mother of a bus boycott watched. became the “mother of the civil rights move- However, as Rosa Parks’s renown grew, ment.” As the media broadcast the image of she and her husband lost their jobs. Why no Rosa Parks, it grew, as Edward Sapir (1930) one was willing or able to help them is a ques- would have said, “deeper and deeper roots in tion rarely raised, let alone answered. She had the unconscious and diffused its emotional always wanted to live outside Montgomery, quality to types of behavior or situations but no one can say why she moved to Detroit apparently far removed from [its] original when she did. Rosa Parks’s friend and sup- meaning” (493). porter Virginia Durr (2006) simply notes: Robert Merton’s (1968) “Matthew Effect” “Poor woman, she finally had to go to Detroit, describes the process which broadened Rosa she could not make it here after she got sick.” Parks’s symbolic power. The Gospel of Mrs. Parks’s sickness is undefined, and she Matthew (25:29) is Merton’s source: “For unto found work after leaving Montgomery. Mrs. every one that hath shall be given, and he shall Durr also makes a peculiar comment about her have abundance, but from him that hath not old friend’s character: “she was such a fine shall be taken away even that which he hath.” and firm person, not exactly concrete but at The Matthew Effect is actually a variant of least mighty firm asphalt” (152). All that can what general systems scholars call “postive be said for certain, then, is that Rosa Parks feedback,” a process that creates new mean- was unable to convert her renown into finan- ings by converting initial responses into virtu- cial benefit. Even after moving to Detroit, where part of the Parks family resided, she ous cycles (Buckley 1967). Observers react found no suitable employment and had to toward the beneficiaries of recognition in accept a guesthouse supervisor job at ways that exaggerate their initial prestige and Hampton (Virginia) College. She returned to cause competitors to be forgotten. The benefi- Detroit when the college administration ciary is invited to events, seated next to lead- refused to provide living quarters for both her ers, and asked to judge the merit of others’ and her husband. She eventually found a traits and achievements. (For a listing of seamstress job at a small shop in Detroit, and awards and symbols of academic recognition, for seven years, 1958 to 1965, worked while see Boring 1959) The Matthew Effect thus accepting invitations to speak around the vindicates earlier reward decisions, regardless country and receiving awards, including hon- of whether or not they were the wisest. orary membership in the recently formed The fate of Rosa Parks exemplifies the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. power of the Matthew Effect. Merton’s Nobel Her extraordinary renown remained indepen- Prize winners, however worthy of their recog- dent of her precarious personal life, which nition, accomplished real things; Rosa Parks’s shows that the Matthew principle is not a gen- recognition was based on ascribed, not eral reward machine. achieved, status. Nevertheless, her initial Rosa Parks’s rewards were largely sym- recognition set off a virtuous cycle: she bolic, but by early 1964 her influence had accompanied Martin Luther King, Ralph grown to the point where she convinced Abernathy, E.D. Nixon, and other leaders on Martin Luther King to renounce his political trips around the country to raise funds for the neutrality and campaign on behalf of African- Montgomery Improvement Association. American Democrat John Conyers for the Invited to national NAACP meetings, she met House of Representatives. King’s support led for the first time such celebrities as A. Philip Conyers to victory, and Parks worked for him Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Eleanor as a secretary and receptionist, even while Roosevelt. Highlander School in Tennessee, maintaining her busy travel schedule, until she where she once studied nonviolent resistance, retired at age 75 in September 1988 (Brinkley recruited her to teach a course on reform tac- 2000). Her renown continued to grow even tics, as if she were the boycott’s tactician. Her after retirement: she was invited to appear THE SYMBOLIC POWER OF ONENESS 135 around the country and the world, met with Eviatar Zerubavel (2003) have so much to say. heads of state, including Pope John Paul, and That she was the mother of the Civil Rights she received the Presidential Medal of Movement is false. That she was first to chal- Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal. She lenge bus segregation in Alabama is false. found places named for her: 21 streets in 14 That she spearheaded the struggle against states; 32 public and commercial establish- Montgomery’s white establishment is false. ments in 13 states. Not one comparable site is That hers was a “test case” against segregation named for the other bus segregation resisters.7 is false. It was Martin Luther King, Jr., E.D. Nixon, and Ralph Abernathy, not Rosa Parks, FUNCTIONS OF ONENESS who mobilized the black community to resist Up to now, we have described the rise of bus segregation. It was Fred Gray who devised Rosa Parks’s singular prestige and placed it in the law suit that ended bus segregation. It was the context of the resistance movement from Aurelia Browder whom Gray chose for his test which it arose. Rosa Parks personified a spe- case. cific realm of activity—active resistance Given the limits of human cognition, how- against the everyday agents of bus segrega- ever, complete information confuses. If we tion. She stood with and for the black commu- saw all there was to be seen of the 13-month nity’s ordinary men and women. Martin boycott, if we experienced the long walk to Luther King, Jr. also achieved renown, but he work by everyone unable to find a ride, if we did no walking or carpooling; he boycotted no heard and read what every participant said buses. King dominated the realm of boycott about the boycott and how it affected them, if leadership. While Rosa Parks’s apotheosis we could grasp every aspect of it, the result sent Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, and would be not understanding but perplexity. other women into obscurity, King overshad- The action of a single individual, on the other owed Ralph Abernathy and left in darkness hand, is easy to grasp and remember. Nothing E.D. Nixon, Fred Gray, Robert Graetz, and makes this clearer than the way human nature other indispensable leaders. and society protect us from remembering too The problem, however, remains: why is much. remembering the one and forgetting the many so necessary to collective memory? To Oneness: Font of Idealism explore this problem Rosa Parks’s state funeral, again, provides the best example. When Nature limits the power of cognition, but someone dies, according to Emile Durkheim society alone can press these limits to the ser- ([1915] 1965), the group feels a loss and vice of oneness. If a single person, by dint of reacts by ritual assemblage. Sentiments are unusual achievement, separates himself from intensified when affirmed collectively; sorrow others, then he is symbolizing, within a given becomes exalted and amplified as it migrates realm of action, a transcendent ideal. from mind to mind. Each person “is carried “Singling out” and “setting examples,” there- along by the others; a veritable panic of sor- fore, do more than reward individuals; they row results” (Durkheim [1915] 1965:446). perform moral functions;8 they provide the But Rosa Parks’s ritual was more than a mat- community with concrete exemplars of its ter of crowd contagion. standards, virtues, and powers. Society is Rosa Parks’s renown reflects mainly on the illusions of achievement about which collective memory constructionists, including 8 That morality and sentiment are constituents of cognition and oneness, including the oneness of Rosa Parks, John Bodnar (1992), John Gillis (1994), and is a classical insight originating in antiquity (logos, pathos, and ethos). In more recent times, this trichotomy has been developed by Parson’s (1951) analysis of cognitive, cathectic, and evaluative modes of orientation, and 7 Information is drawn from www.melissadata.com and expanded by Norbert Schwartz’s (1998) discussion of the www.referenceusa.com. “warmer” and “more social” aspects of cognition. 136 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY QUARTERLY indifferent as to who stands for its defining express a culture’s most valued traits and ideals, as long as these are represented. achievements. The underlying structure of the ideal is its singularity. According to the Standard College Oneness, Schema, and Reality Dictionary (1963), an ideal is “1. a thing con- What is owed to the principle of oneness ceived as an ultimate object of attainment. 2. a can be known by imagining the result of our person or thing taken as a standard of perfec- doing without it. Remove Rosa Parks, and the tion.” As an “ultimate object of attainment” or average person will have a much vaguer “standard of perfection,” the ideal can only be notion of both the origins of the civil rights conceived as a single thing and only repre- movement and the ideals that drove it. Remove sented as such. As an adjective, too, an ideal Rosa Parks, and the story of a wronged inno- “1. conforms to an absolute standard of excel- cent is replaced by tedious details about car- lence; embodying or exemplifying perfection; pools, pickup points, fundraising, weekly 2. representing the best of its kind” (665). In MIA meetings, petty internal disputes— these representative statements the ideal is details which conceal the meaning of the larg- never plural; it is a unique model to which er struggle. people orient their aspirations and conduct. Rosa Parks’s story is “schematic” (Fiske It may be said, without twisting the term and Taylor 1991; Bartlett [1932] 1995; too much, that there is something “sacred” DiMaggio 1997) because it simplifies the about ideals and their symbols. In modern Montgomery protests and aligns them with societies, the sacred, according to Emile classical stories of oppressed people’s struggle Durkheim, surrounds every individual, and for justice. A humble seamstress finishes a modern societies are sustained by what he day of hard work, boards a bus, pays her fare, calls the “cult of the individual” ([1911] takes a seat, is ordered to move to the back of 1974:58–9). The wider the diffusion of sacred- the bus when a white passenger appears, and ness, the more individuals are entitled to ritu- refuses because she is tired of a lifetime of al displays of respect (Goffman 1967). But if humiliation. She is arrested, tried, and fined. “objects become sacred and judgments Montgomery’s longsuffering black communi- attribute value when they reflect a social ty, angered by her arrest, boycotts the city’s ideal” (Durkheim [1911]1974: xxv, 92–3), buses for a year, forcing the white government then this ideal must dramatize the gap between to relent and desegregate. Such is the schema ordinary and extraordinary events and beings. abstracted from Rosa Parks’s conduct. People To separate these two realms so fiercely, it is who cannot remember the bus boycott as a true, makes them incommensurable, while in whole can retrieve the schema in which its ele- reality the difference between them is often a ments are stored. A mild woman’s run-in with matter of small degree—or even judgment an angry bus driver in a Jim Crow city sums it error. Nevertheless, society cannot do without up.9 this difference, this oneness, because it cannot The story makes for a self-flattering as sustain itself without creating ideals in its var- well as concise account: segregation is con- ious spheres (Durkheim [1911] 1974). This is quered by the iron will of a tyrannized com- why, “in the present day as in the past, we see munity, exemplified by a black seamstress, not society constantly creating sacred things out by a white court and its judges. Indeed, the of ordinary ones” (Durkheim [1915] narrative presumes that federal courts would 1965:245). Sacred things cannot be adored, however, 9 A schema is a cognitive framework that simplifies if their aura is blurred by competitors. The complex events or people and links them to prior experi- greater the number of beaux ideals within any ence. Those who lack a schema for football, for example, realm of activity, the more ambiguous their will understand and remember less about a game than those able to locate each action within the game’s frame- referent becomes. The natural limits of cogni- work of rules and traditions (see, for example, DiMaggio tion, therefore, reinforce the ideals which 1997). THE SYMBOLIC POWER OF ONENESS 137 have ruled against integration if not pressured boycott and the Court result would have been by black resistance. “So when you ask why the identical” (93). Put differently, Montgomery’s courts had to come in,” JoAnn Robinson, buses would have been integrated whether or President of the Women’s Political Council, not Rosa Parks had given up her seat. explains, “they had to come in. You get 52,000 On the other hand, court decisions alone people in the streets and nobody’s showing could not end public hostility or segregation. any fear, something had to give. So the During and immediately after the boycott, the Supreme Court had to rule that segregation homes of Martin Luther King, Jr. Ralph was not the way of life” (Williams 1987:71, Abernathy, and Robert Graetz were bombed 89). Robinson’s statement has two implica- or damaged. Shots were fired at the King tions: (1) the boycott broke the back of the home. Four churches were bombed, and many segregationists by putting unbearable pressure other acts of violence were committed against on the bus company and downtown mer- boycott leaders and followers (Robinson chants, and (2) the boycott forced the courts to 1987). After Montgomery’s buses were inte- rule against the city. Both implications under- grated, ten years passed before Montgomery estimate the autonomy of the courts and over- desegregated its schools and other public estimate the power of public demonstrations. facilities. In many other cities, buses remained Long before Montgomery’s boycott segregated. Local stalling tactics and violence began, the Supreme Court had handed down a delayed the progress of integration every- series of liberal decisions on jury selection, where. housing, public education, voting rights, pro- The memory of the Gray/Browder litiga- fessional school integration, and equal access tion has been, in any case, replaced by the to publicly funded resources, including golf more resonant story of Rosa Parks’s defiance courses, swimming pools, beach houses, and and an oppressed black community arising on public parks. By the time of the Brown deci- its own to overcome white oppression. But if sion in 1954, which was not made under the the Rosa Parks story distorts history, its appeal pressure of public protest, little was left of the does not reside in its distortion. Rosa Parks’s Plessy-Ferguson principle. Furthermore, the occupying the fateful bus seat, her arrest, and Fifth Circuit Court’s unpressured integration subsequent apotheosis are real episodes in a of Columbia, South Carolina’s bus system in historic movement. Her renown, whatever the January 1956 makes implausible the claim NAACP’s role in creating it, keeps alive the that a boycott forced the Fifth Circuit Court to memory of 381 days of authentic courage, integrate Montgomery’s bus system in perseverance, and sacrifice. November 1956. But to affirm the reality of what Rosa Martin Luther King believed the Browder Parks symbolized does not mean she con- decision was significant because it broke the tributed to it as much as is commonly deadlock between resisters and the city believed. Any federal suit against (Williams 1987:89). In fact, there was no Montgomery bus segregation by a noncontro- deadlock. After eleven months, the black com- versial plaintiff would have probably succeed- munity was far worse off than the white, and ed. On the other hand, Rosa Parks’s personali- the city had no incentive to give in. When an ty was unique; if she had somehow disap- Alabama circuit court was about to prohibit peared from Montgomery after her arrest, no the use of car pools, the boycott was, in fact, one can say for certain whether any of the on the verge of collapse (Glennon 1991), and plaintiffs—Browder, Colvin, Franklin, or it would have collapsed had not the federal McDonald—could have assumed her symbol- district court issued its Browder ruling. There ic role. There was nothing inevitable about a was no direct cause and effect relationship, single resister symbolizing the boycott, but observes legal scholar Robert J. Glennon, once a representative symbol was chosen, it “between the boycott and the end of segregat- had to stand alone. ed buses in Montgomery.” The Browder case Was Rosa Parks chosen as the boycott’s “could have proceeded without the attendant symbol because she was somehow better qual- 138 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY QUARTERLY ified than other women or because she better Rosa Parks symbolizes a revolution of such met MIA’s strategic needs? The question is significance as to make her selection over oth- difficult. She was certainly not the first or ers a trivial matter. Her aura resides in the most courageous in the matter of active resis- social realities she marks. tance or first to be considered a lead plaintiff. Rosa Parks was selected because of a combi- Resentment nation of traits: she was not only an NAACP Rosa Parks’s case is important because insider but also a quiet, churchgoing woman her renown is sustained by forgotten heroes with no hidden vices. Rosa Parks could be and heroines—people who deserve to be what Colvin or Franklin could not be, and that remembered and resent not getting their due. is a pure celebrity, not in the sense of a person The numerous writers who have interviewed known for being known, but for being the the boycott’s participants know intuitively that most persuasive representative of her peers. the “shadow effect” of resentment That she could have done so better than (McLaughlin and Miller 2004) is a common Auriela Browder, or for that matter, the less entailment of oneness.11 “She made some- obscure and more active Jo Ann Robinson, is thing out of what I started,” declared Claudette debatable. But the main point is that once she Colvin of Rosa Parks (Kitchen 2005). was chosen, her renown would have been Attorney Fred Gray echoed Colvin’s words diminished if someone else were placed when he explained that it was she, Claudette, beside her. who inspired Montgomery’s black leadership The boycott’s consequence, then, was to take action against the city. If a 15-year old real, but not in the way we usually think about child can stand up to segregation, Gray it. As a cause of bus segregation’s demise its declared, then adults must do the same. effect was questionable; its true function was Without her example, Montgomery’s black (1) to enhance the dignity and solidarity of the citizens would not have defied segregation black community by demonstrating its mem- (McGrew 2005a). bers’ willingness to go to jail for their beliefs Likewise, Aurelia Browder’s son Butler (Valien 1989), which whites were unprepared observed that monuments had been built to to do when the courts ruled against them; (2) honor Rosa Parks, but “my mother has been to impress the legitimacy of black grievances all but forgotten.” (Even Martin Luther King on fair-minded whites; (3) to draw national Jr. failed to mention her in his [1958] recount- attention to the cause of racial justice; and (4) ing of the decisive action of the federal district to inspire boycotts in other places. court.) Many still believe, in fact, that Rosa To represent every protester as dramati- Parks was the lead plaintiff in the case against cally as Rosa Parks and every leader as clear- the city of Montgomery, and Butler Browder ly as Martin Luther King—and this point can- despairs at his constant need of having to cor- not be overemphasized—would confound, not rect them. “It was Aurelia Browder who clarify, the meaning and consequence of their “changed the laws that applied to segregation” struggle. In 1955, it would have made no dif- (McGrew 2005b). Boycott leaders were equal- ference if one of Mrs. Parks’s peers had been ly resentful. E.D. Nixon was pained to know chosen to be mother of the Civil Rights that his decades of achievements, culminating Movement, but once a unique presence is established it becomes indispensable. “The bus driver could have been any other driver,” declared that if she had recognized Blake to be the man observed Washington Times commentator who ejected her from his bus in 1943, she would have Suzanne Fields (2005:A21), “but only Rosa waited for the next bus (and probably not have been arrested). 10 Parks could have been Rosa Parks.” In fact, 11 See Douglas Brinkley’s (2000) discussion of Montgomery leaders’ envy of Rosa Parks. Bernice Barnett, who interviewed Claudette Colvin and other boycott workers, was struck by the intensity of their feelings 10 The discourtesy of driver James F. Blake was more of being unfairly deprived of recognition. Personal com- important than Ms. Field believes. Rosa Parks herself munication, February 15, 2007. THE SYMBOLIC POWER OF ONENESS 139 in the boycott, are ignored. [H] istory,” he said, respond. Yet, selective attention would be “ought to be written true. Give him [Martin unnecessary if individuals could attend to Luther King] all he earned, but don’t rob me” everything. They select deliberately because (cited in Baldwin and Woodson 1992: 65; see their cognitive limitations allow them no alter- also Garrow 1989). The Matthew Effect, native. whereby rewards build on themselves, oper- Man’s limited memory is understood bet- ates transparently in this case. E. D. Nixon was ter now than ever before, but the question one of the bus boycott’s key directors, but remains as to why a humanly instituted deficit when NAACP officials decided to inform should be added to a natural one. Put differ- their membership about the boycott’s details, ently, if working memory’s capacity were they called in Rosa Parks. That Nixon took out independent of culture, then this essay would his resentment on Rosa Parks is therefore no be about the symbolic power of fourness, not surprise. Once a warm friend, he denounced oneness, for human working memory readily her as a “lovely, stupid woman” (Brinkley manages several chunks of information. The 2000:175 ). most natural path, then, would be to recognize Like E.D. Nixon, Ralph Abernathy the several best home-run hitters, strikeout believed his own role to be indispensable. leaders, and golden glove champions. But Ambitious men like Jesse Jackson and social conventions are limited by, not hostage Andrew Young “didn’t realize.|.|.the degree to to, nature. The limits of nature, on the other which Martin depended on me for counsel hand, depending on their qualities, are more when we were alone and how many of his likely to reinforce, if not directly contribute to, ideas originated with me” (1989: 479). the formation of some social conventions than Abernathy never openly resented King for others. overshadowing him, but his biography, pub- Condensation (a cognitive heuristic) and lished after King’s death, exposes King’s habit the Matthew Effect (a social process) work of plagiarizing passages for sermons and together, transforming fourness into oneness speeches and describes his extramarital affairs (nature into culture) by deliberately simplify- while on Southern Christian Leadership ing complexity, distinguishing one contributor Conference business.12 Earlier, Abernathy dis- to a project and forgetting others, thus sym- placed his resentment from King to Rosa bolizing the ideals these contributors and this Parks, belittling her as a mere functionary and project pursue. The power of oneness is in this mocking her husband as a “frightened lush” sense overdetermined: however weak the (Brinkley 2000:175–6). Matthew Effect in promoting any one reputa- Resentment is a reaction against unfair- tion, human memory limits recognition— ness, and many of Rosa Parks’s contempo- sometimes to one person or event, always raries believed she had received more than she toward one. Even if man’s working and long- deserved. What, then, can be said, in a gener- term memory capacities were greater, the al way, about those whose accomplishments her commemoration obscures? Matthew Effect’s positive feedback process would limit recognition— sometimes to one CONCLUSION person or event, always toward one. Cognitive deficit, thus, reinforces rather than creates Attention, as noted in this essay’s opening society’s need to represent its ideals with pages, refers to the way men and women unique symbols. select the stimuli to which they wish to Oneness exaggerates the qualities of persons above the boundary of recognition and 12 Leaders were not King’s only critics. In the Browder diminishes the qualities of those below, but vs. Gayle hearing, Auriela Browder reiterated the often- how does oneness affect our understanding? stated claim that “Montgomery made King.” She testified We need to know how condensation and the that the people, not Martin Luther King, conducted the boycott: “We employed him to be our mouthpiece” (Burns Matthew Effect, acting together, induce and 1997:34). sustain this result. What does this interaction 140 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY QUARTERLY tell us about the fundamental nature of one- Anon. 2001. “The Uncelebrated Grandmother of the ness itself? Modern Civil Rights Movement.” Journal of Psychologist Edwin Boring (1963:5) Blacks in Higher Education 31:50. Anuzis, Saul. 2005. “Reaction Tuesday to the Death of claims in his essay, “Eponym as Placebo,” that Rosa Parks.” Associated Press, October 25. there are too many facts for any one mind to Retrieved October 2007 (http://web.lexis-nexis. have more than a few in stock,” and that com). eponyms reduce information to manageable Bagehot, Walter. [1872] 1978. The English proportions. An eponym refers to the person Constitution. New York: Garland. after whom some event or achievement is Baldwin, Lewis V. and Aprille V. Woodson. 1992. named, while placebo is an inactive agent used Freedom is Never Free: A Biographical Portrait of Edgar Daniel Nixon. Atlanta, GA: Office of to distinguish the objective effect of an active Minority Affairs. agent, like an experimental treatment of some Barnett, Bernice McNair. 1993. “Invisible Southern kind, from the subjective effect it produces. To Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights say that eponym is a placebo is to say that Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, individual names associated with great Race, and Class.” Gender and Society 7:162–82. achievements produce a sense of understand- ———. 1995. “Black Women’s Collectivist Movement Organizations: Their Struggles during, just as a placebo produces a sense of well ing the ‘Doldrums.’” Pp.199–219 in Feminist being. However, a sense of understanding is Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s not necessarily real understanding. History Movement, edited by Myra Marx Ferree and would be more complex, and certainly more Patricia Yancy Martin. Philadelphia, PA: Temple valid, if written without eponyms. Non- University Press. eponymic history, Boring claims, would reveal ———. 2007. Personal Communication. Department the impersonal, collective currents culminat- of Sociology, University of Illinois-Champaign- Urbana. February 15. ing in great events. Bartlett, F. C. 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Barry Schwartz is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Georgia. Since 1982, Schwartz has studied the cognitive, emotional, and moral lineaments of collective memory. His two most recent books, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (2000) and Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era (2008) trace and explain beliefs, feelings, and judgments of Lincoln from his assas- sination to present. He is now working on a series of projects that include Lincoln’s changing place in the African-American community.