Rosa Parks: Interpretations Interpretation 1: “The Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott”

by David J. Garrow

While many schoolchildren are familiar with the common account of Rosa Parks’s arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus, Garrow’s interpretation provides a more sophisticated look at those events. Garrow’s Rosa Parks was not merely a tired African-American woman who made a spontaneous decision to keep her seat. Rather, she was a knowing participant in an organized attempt to make social change in the segregated South. Two aspects of the protest are noteworthy. First is the organization behind the movement. Garrow points out that organized black activism existed in Montgomery for at least six years before Parks’s arrest. However, factionalism and disunity within the organization had hampered previous protests. Indeed, at least two other black women had previously been arrested for precisely the same offense, but their arrests had not prompted any significant organized response.

In addition, Parks’s arrest and the subsequent boycott were so well managed that their success is attributable to the planning of the events. The arrest and protest had been planned long before they happened, and Parks had been chosen precisely because her character and dignity made her a sympathetic character.

David J. Garrow, “The Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” Southern Changes (Vol. 7, No. 5, 1985) 21-27.

For Open Educational Use. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and the Stanford History Education Group, and Historical Thinking Matters (2007), historicalthinkingmatters.org. Interpretation 2: Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true,” Parks later explained. “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. . . . No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” (Rosa Parks)

Taylor Branch provides a sophisticated look at Rosa Parks. Although she is sometimes portrayed as a passive, meek woman who spontaneously reacted under the indignity of Montgomery’s segregated bus system, Branch shows a Parks who was already a rather seasoned activist by 1955. Parks characterized herself as having a life history of rebelliousness toward racial injustice, and she had been involved in a number of civil rights issues prior to her arrest.

She and her husband had raised money for the Scottsboro Boys’ legal defense fund, and parks had joined the NAACP in 1943, some 12 years before the Montgomery arrest.

Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).

by Robin Kelly

Robin Kelly rejoins a popular image of Rosa parks as a misfit, a rebel, or a troublemaker. Indeed, Parks, while perhaps one of the most well- known examples, was not the first African-American woman to defy segregation.

More importantly, while Parks’s arrest is often credited with sparking the civil rights movement, Kelly shows that the Birmingham, Alabama’s bus system was the battleground for a civil rights struggle over segregation in public space 10 years before Parks was arrested. The Birmingham events were neither as publicized nor as successful as in Birmingham—at least in terms of affecting wholesale change—but they demonstrate an African-American working class that attempted to grasp agency and local power in a segregated South.

Robin Kelly, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996).

For Open Educational Use. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and the Stanford History Education Group, and Historical Thinking Matters (2007), historicalthinkingmatters.org.