Rosa Parks: A Conscience of black America

Rosa Parks
1913 - 2005



The death of Rosa Parks reveals a couple of things (to me) about black America then and how it may apply to black America now.

THEN:

Rosa Parks wasn’t a civil rights leader or an agitator against the government demanding social change. She was an everyday working class woman who was tired of being treated like a second class citizen at the whims of any white person who saw fit to remind her of such. While we celebrate her courage to say “NO!” and remember the cause that was started by her actions, we should also take a look at how her actions sparked such a significant united response by the black community in the south. Rosa Parks represented the mental and emotional fatigue of all of Black America but, it appears, none were willing to speak to this fatigue. The black community, as a whole, continued to live under the ‘Jim Crow’ mentality that gave a reality of being worth less than whites. The outcry and response by the black community to take an ‘any means necessary’ approach to the Montgomery Boycott showed how long and how desperate the black community had become living under such conditions. This desperation did not spark violence but it did spark a ‘collective sacrifice’ where churches, communities, and private citizens carpooled in an act of defiance towards what was almost a century of discrimination that had followed centuries of slavery. Rosa Parks said what every black in the south wanted to say to an oppressive government….NO! Her ‘no’ was heard around the world. But her NO also sparked unity instead of violence, her ‘no’ sparked organized effort not individual protest. Rosa Parks spoke to a complacency that kept an entire class of people separated from the promise of America…the promise of freedom. In her passing, let us pay respect for her courage and in her memory let us address the complacency that has yoked the black community for decades if not centuries.

NOW:

The black community in America has benefited from the sacrifices that were made to advance civil rights in America. These sacrifices were being made as recently as the late 1960s. Today, 2005, black America continues to struggle for self reliance and the promise of the American Dream. We have allowed complacency to replace our outrage for better schools and safer communities. We have allowed complacency to turn a blind eye to the high rate of abortions and STDs that plague the black community. We have allowed complacency to allow an entertainment genre to rise and become the soul identifier of Black America. Our complacency has allowed the father figure in the black family to be replaced by a social welfare system. Our complacency allows for the excuses of poverty and education to justify crime and social cannibalism as we feed on each others grief and frustrations. Our complacency has allowed teens to become roll models and parents and parenting to become obsolete. Our complacency allows us to attack those would speak of our ills today instead of uniting to overcome them. Rosa Parks’ ‘NO’ spoke to the mental and emotional fatigue of Black America then but who will speak to our fatigue now? There’s no bus driver to point at to blame for this problem…only a mirror. There’s no bus system to boycott…only a mirror. Black America has to look at themselves to understand why we are still living in the ‘Post Civil Rights’ era and not in the ‘American Dream’ era. Just as we looked to one another to overcome the inequality taking place in Rosa Parks’ time, so too must we look to one another to overcome our complacency, our collective poverty, and our lack of social awareness today. While black America is free according to the constitution, we are still in bondage according to our own behavior and lack of social growth. We blame history for our condition, and fear a future of change. Like Rosa Parks from a generation before… I am here to say ‘NO!’ I’m tired of our disproportionate representation in the prison system. I’m tired of the public school system failing our children. (To fail our children is to fail our future)
I’m tired of the token accomplishments of a select few being aired in front of the population to suggest victory when in fact we are still in the struggle. I’m tired of looking to ‘the man’ for help when we don’t help each other. I’m tired of prehistoric civil rights leaders attempting to keep us in a ‘one size fits all’ political philosophy while our communities wither on the vine. So to the politicians of convenience; seeking our votes while dodging our circumstances, I say ‘NO!’ To the civil rights leaders and organizations of days gone by with no vision of the future, I say NO! To those who look elsewhere to fix the problems in their own communities, I say NO! To those who feed the hate but not our children, I say NO! To those who tear down the family unit but not the crack houses, I say NO! Are you as tired as I am? Are you as tired as Rosa Parks was and you’ve had enough? Then stand, organize, educate, and equip each other for the future that men like King, Shabazz, Du Boise, and Washington dreamed of. Let’s get off of this bus and work together to carpool into a future we can be proud to pass on to our children.


Thank you Rosa Parks. Thank you for the courage to stand for change. We will carry your torch into the next generation.

M. DiBartolo
American Zulu