Almost muted between the American holiday of Thanksgiving and Christmas is a sacred civic moment hardly recognized despite its significance in birthing our nation’s modern manifestation of democracy.
Sixty two years ago this month on December 1, Rosa Parks refused to offer up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus, setting into motion the civil rights movement which would vastly expand our notions of freedom.
In our nation, the days that lead to Christmas are now unfortunately marred by excessive consumerism of the kind and quality that deadens our sensibilities around mutual engagement, cooperative struggle for social improvement and the ratification of the need for collective public courage.
Missed in the mayhem of our contemporary possessive materiality is the majestic heroism of Parks -- and people like her -- who understood clearly that there is a high price to pay for democracy and that the sacrifice for its purchase could be bloody, but necessary.
In 1955, Montgomery was throughly segregated. The unforgiving Jim Crow Laws imposed after Reconstruction were firmly in place. Public schools were divided by race with spending budgets that mocked “separate but equal” Constitutional claims. Housing patterns reflected a callous apartheid policy where blacks were relegated to the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Anti-public accommodation practices created separate public bathrooms, restaurants, and seating at the movies. Local racism in Montgemery also truncated the voting rights of thousands of the city’s qualified black voters
Even houses of worship in Montgomery suffered the sting of segregation, making Sunday morning sacred rituals in that city among the most racially and spiritually restricted hours of the week.
Contrary to the popular lore that now surrounds Rosa Parks’ undaunted civil disobedience, her action on that December evening rush hour were not spontaneous. Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on the bus was not entirely the result of righteous indignation summoned upon a momentary whim.
Parks — contrary to general knowledge about her life — was a longtime anti-racism activist of fierce, unyielding conviction. A member of the local NAACP branch, she understood the pernicious effects of prejudice, its impact on the civic dignity of Montgomery’s blacks, its crippling control of education policy, and the way in which racism relegated nearly half of the city’s residents to the shameful precincts of second class citizenship.
Parks and the incidents she ignited directly caused the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which extended nearly 400 days. That campaign is written about in majestic prose by Taylor Branch in his book Parting The Waters, the first of a three part epic depiction of how blacks radically changed democracy in America.
“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true," Parks explained to Branch. "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."
By the time of her arrest for refusing to give up her seat, Parks was fully prepared to engage a racist cultural establishment that had trapped blacks in Montgomery into a dark closet of existential confinement, a milieu of stupefying social and spiritual subjugation.
She had joined the NAACP in the early 1940s and worked her way into a leadership position. Parks trained at the famous Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, absorbing there the tactics of non-violent protest and civil disobedience. She had befriended and mentored civil rights lawyers like Fred Gray, and local civic stalwarts like E.D. Nixon.
As she was hauled to jail, surely Parks was mindful of Claudette Colvin, a black Montgomery teenager also arrested months before Parks for not giving her seat to a white bus passenger. Because Colvin, unmarried, became pregnant while the NAACP was preparing her case, her challenge was dropped by her civil rights attorneys on the grounds of her moral impropriety.
Parks’ unimpeachable civic contributions — their role in expanding our conceptions of democracy — can not be understated. Her actions birthed the Civil Rights Movement, which would be championed by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands who followed her lead.
As Americans inexorably pace themselves through yet another Christmas season replete with conspicuous consumption and avid purchasing grounded in greed, we should remember Parks for her generosity and the serious gifts she offered toward our grand and ever growing democratic sensibility.