And… Part 3! Please keep in mind though that this in no way covers all the important women of the 20th century. There are tons and these are just a few of them, but there are a lot of influential women who don’t get enough recognition if you want to check them out.
Anyway, since the last three were white women I thought I should probably include an influential woman of color to finish this up. And since Rosa Parks is pretty awesome she gets her own blog post.
Rosa Parks
Most descriptions of Rosa Parks say that her greatest contribution to the Civil Rights movement was refusing to leave her seat so that a white man could sit down. Generally afterwards they say that Martin Luther King organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott afterwards. It’s true that he did, but everyone forgets to mention that he did it with her help, and that she was already considering the possibility of making her action a protest before she’d even been bailed out of jail. They also omit the fact that Parks was involved in the Civil Rights Movement long before the bus incident.
She’d been an active member of the NAACP for years and at the time she was the secretary of her local chapter. She had already started working with King on peaceful protests before the boycott occurred, though her involvement in his movement largely grew after the boycott.
Her commitment to the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement was extensive. She was behind-the-scenes of many of the major events of the movement, printing pamphlets, doing secretarial work, helping other NAACP members organize protests, and founding and working with NAACP youth groups. She worked closely with many famous Civil Rights activists, most notably King.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott is significant, even though it wasn’t Parks’s only contribution to the movement as many textbooks claim it was. Parks refused to give her seat up on a Montgomery bus for a white man considerably younger than her and much more capable of standing in the aisle. This was against the rules of the bus system, which stated that she had to give up her seat. Parks refused, and calmly allowed herself to be arrested and taken to jail. NAACP members bailed her out, and she started working with activists, including King, to turn the event into a boycott.
Through the churches they organized a system of station wagon taxis which they could take to work instead of the buses. Police started cracking down on the station wagon taxis, saying public transportation not controlled by the government was illegal, but the protesters still refused to ride the buses, and a huge number of Montgomery African Americans were involved. The city eventually repealed segregation of buses, because they needed the bus fares of African American commuters, who formed a majority of those who had used to commute by bus. It was a huge triumph for the Civil Rights Movement which would not have been possible without Parks’s involvement in the boycott.
I think the reason that Rosa Parks is only famous for the bus incident is because it’s the only moment that’s memorable. Most of her work could only be appreciated by the people involved in the protests she she helped to organize and publicize. Unfortunately she lived in a time where a black man had little respect and a black woman close to no respect, so she couldn’t take control of movements on her own. However, her contributions to the Civil Rights movement nevertheless have made an impact.
For more information you can check out these websites:
This one says “Rosa Parks was a devout Christian” in the corner which is a bit weird, but from what I can tell the information is pretty accurate and there is a lot of it: http://www.rosaparksfacts.com/
Anything I said that isn’t in the links is from what I remember from her autobiography My Story which is a pretty interesting book if you want to know more.
As I said, there are a ton of influential women I didn’t get to, especially a bunch who worked in literature and music and art, so if you’re interested in the topic you can check those out. Hope you enjoyed these posts!
Loved this series of posts so much! This one in particular is really cool because it fits into the discussion about women as well as the ongoing discussion we have in our classes about the civil rights movement. You mentioned how Rosa Parks is known for that one moment when she refused to get up on the bus, and that made me think of how media and press played such a large role in the civil rights movements of the '50s and '60s. The media plays an equally large, if not larger, role in movements today, as evidenced by the media's response to things such as the Matthew Shepard tragedy.
ReplyDeleteI agree, Maya. As we discussed in class the media played an essential role in Civil Rights movement, and no more than ever, social networking sites like twitter and facebook are share the same type of information as they did in the mid 20th century. For instance the twitter campaign for the kidnapped Nigeria girls has helped publicize the current situation in the country as well as call for increased rights for women.
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