Yeah, the politics of respectability. It was why, although Claudette Colvin had had the same incident as Rosa Parks, a few months before, they went with Mrs. Parks, because Claudette was an 18 year old working class girl, who turned up pregnant long after… I think this has always been a point of contention within the movement, that they had to purge the movement of “underisable”, disruptive elements, especially given the cold war context, so lefitsts had to go and the face was seen as needing to be people like King - hence why people like Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker were relegated to less public roles in the movement, because they upset the notion of proper class and social roles (Rustin was gay and had a record, Baker was unapologetic in her connections to socialists and communists, and was deeply democratic in her approach).
But they got the major legislation pushed through, which of course now seems to be slowly being dismantled…
First, I’ll say that I am an omnivore of music such that who or what created it doesn’t matter as long as it sounds good to me. I’ve got rap, country, classical, pop, etc in my music catalog–I’m not locked into any particular format or style.
That said, I fucking hate that Greenwood song with a passion. I hated it before I spent a long time in the Middle East having to listen to it being piped in via AFRTS, and I’ll hate it for the rest of my days. That such vapid, insipid, pandering fecal matter ever made it into musical form still baffles me.
Edit: When I say “musical form” in relation to the piece of shit mentioned above, please consider that phrase in the loosest sense possible. As in, “not music in any way, shape, or form”.
Well said and I fully agree. I wonder–would you think the same logic would apply to the Occupy movement of late? Of course, as someone pointed out on this site in the past, social movements don’t succeed overnight, so it’s hard to see what gains came of Occupy (at least for me–I’m sure they’re out there, and maybe they haven’t manifested in any concrete way just yet).
I can see that “purity of message and motif” being absolutely applied, and rigidly, within the Republican party…but then, I would think that’s a basically conservative method in the first place.
Lastly, I think this sort of government targeting has manifested today as the NSL–the government doesn’t have to disinform and terrorize its citizens, it can just order them not to speak to anyone about any facet of their particular case. In any case, that’s some seriously creepy shit.
Back then, you got an invasive and threatening letter like this after challenging the power centre of a notoriously bigoted society. Nowadays you get this sort of thing multiple times a day if you comment on offensive elements of video games or if your ex thinks that you slept with a journalist. Just think how great it will be when you can view YouTube comments personified on Occulus Rift!
I think Rosa Parks’ respectable image wasn’t just for the mainstream white acceptance, but rallied many blacks who had worked so hard with such awful treatment. I think they wanted people to see their dignity and finally force deserved respect.
My mother grew up in Montgomery, AL, where they had the bus boycotts. Last year our family had a reunion there and visited the Rosa Parks museum (which is fantastic) and the Civil Rights Memorial (also fantastic).
They liked to portray Rosa Parks as this sweet lady who just got tired one day, but she was the secretary of the NAACP, a long time activist. There were laws about which seats a black person could sit on. The area where she sat, she legally was not required to move. She didn’t defy the law at all - she wanted it enforced.
They didn’t come right out and say it, but it was reasonable to infer from the long history the museum presents of previous legal challenges against segregated train and bus travel and of Rosa’s own involvement that she was aware of this zone on the bus and had a habit of sitting there in order to provoke an incident.
Seeing the reenactment of the night (told through shadow play, not an actual reenactment), her calm in the face of a mob was an act of deep courage that I had not fully appreciated before. Many black women had been beaten and raped by the malicious bus drivers. That night, the bus was overflowing when a large group of people got on the bus coming out of a theater, where they’d been drinking. It was an extremely dangerous situation for her. There was a large, crowded, drunk angry mob of white people on the bus.
After she was arrested, that she was willing to continue as a test case was taking on a enormous responsibility and danger based on treatment of other people in similar cases. She had the option to bow out, but agreed to be the public face of this issue. Within one day, using mimeographed leaflets that was distributed all throughout the black community, King’s organization rallied thousands of people and put together the bus boycott. The organization behind it was so, so impressive. I had never known just how quickly they put together an entire alternate system of transportation so everyone could get to work.
I totally agree with you - it wasn’t just about getting whites to notice oppression, but about rallying group action… And you’re right that lots of people don’t know about her long history of activism, especially in regards to sexual violence aimed at black women, who rarely got redress from the court systems. I think the ability to get something together so quickly rested on the years of activism that went before this…
Getting the system to work equally was the goal, and having a system of laws that white could continually violate with impunity was the core of white supremacy - whiteness made one immune in regards to the black community. Put in that terms, it should certainly make us think harder about how the system operates now and gets to violate the law with impunity and who has to serve time… unfortunately, it’s all still all often race and class based. It feels retrograde lately, in fact.
It’s stupefying that J Edgar Hoover continues to be revered today. He may have been a good guy in the early days of the FBI, but by the 50s and 60s he was in full fascist tyrant mode, only retaining power because he had the wiretapped/surveilled goods on every politician powerful enough to challenge him. (Additionally, in later years, he proved to be “strategically incompetent,” willfully ignoring the inroads made by organized crime because, hey, that would be difficult and he could not easily demonstrate progress. Much better to harass “communist” civil rights leaders.)
If they had to name a building after him, it should’ve been a sewage treatment plant, not the FBI headquarters.
I was catching up on the comic Subnormality, and I came across this great line…
“Well maybe it’s not going anywhere so we might as well act like it. And not be the kind of fucking assholes who think that because Martin Luther King Jr. slept around he was fucking somehow insincere. I had a dream and it was to find out that I’m not the only one who needs to rub one out to relieve anxiety… The more bananas you notice everyone is, the more comforting that is. The more understanding you TRY to be…”
I thought that this was relevant to the discussion…
