With this week marking the 58th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, much has rightly been made of the Republican National Committee tweeting a picture of Rosa Parks this weekend, with a caption that said: “today we remember Rosa Parks’ bold stand and her role in ending racism.” (emphasis added) But while many have justifiably focused on the claim that racism has “ended” (which the RNC later “clarified“), another significant truth has gotten lost. If they really cared about Rosa Parks’ memory, Republicans would attempt to emulate her courage in challenging the White male entitlement that demanded she give up the seat that she paid for. That kind of White male entitlement still dominates both the GOP and the American political scene today.
For example, if the party really wanted to take lessons from Rosa Parks’ story, it would think about the 90 percent of African-Americans who stayed off those buses and walked or carpooled to work in order to demand equal treatment and recognition of their dignity. In contemporary elections, it is routine that more than 90 percent of Black America votes for anyone but the GOP.
GOP cronies and conservatives masquerading as moderates (Arne Duncan, here’s looking at you) would stop the kind of union busting in places like Chicago that continue to erode the school system and disadvantage the predominantly Black and brown students that attend Chicago public schools. Old school civil rights figures would decry the school reform movement and see clearly that it places Black children back in the very kinds of conditions that Brown v. Board of Education was meant to rectify. Companies like Wal-Mart would pay their workers a living wage and acknowledge that they could do so and still remain profitable each year to the tune of billions of dollars.
Moreover, Parks, who began attempting to register to vote and encouraged others to do so in Alabama in the 1940s, would balk at the brazen voter suppression efforts that the GOP continues to lead under the guise of implementing voter identification laws and gerrymandering voting districts to dilute the power of the Black and Democratic vote.
Most of all, if Republicans cared about Rosa Parks’ legacy, they would stop their war on women. In her wonderful book “At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance,” Danielle McGuire demonstrates that Parks had a long history of activism before she ever refused to give up her seat on that bus. In the 1940s, she worked as an anti-rape activist, perhaps because she was raped herself, as some of her archival papers seem to indicate.
