Rosa Parks - the forgotten Afro American freedom fighter

Nelson Mandela has come and gone. So has Dr. Martin Luther King. Where they have gone remain still a mystery despite advanced scientific research. But they left amidst much celebration about their worthy lives. And even as they lived and worked for the cause of humanity, the ultimate publicity was given to their endeavours.

No grouse there. The grouse emerges in the case of female icons and the dimness accorded to their contributions. Why? Was there deliberate animosity against them? Just going through the life and times of Rosa Parks, the Afro American freedom fighter, reveals the fact that circumstances have much to do with it.

Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a White and she had to suffer. After coming out of prison the family advised her to go no further. She could get killed by the Ku Klux Movement. So despite some activities, she sat at home while Dr. King went ahead on the issue and if I remember correct went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Rosa's publicity was minimal in other countries and I myself came across her going through some Magazines. Born 1903. Dead at 92. I came upon her 100th Birth anniversary ceremony at which the American President was the chief guest. The ceremony was held in a photo gallery that depicted episodes from Rosa's life. The bus in which Rosa began her war against Black Segregation, almost unwittingly is one of the prize exhibits. In fact on this Commemoration Day, Barack Obama sat grinning in the particular seat that Rosa Parks had sat. 

Slave antecedents

Grin, he can, now in the comfort of the Presidential chair. But he himself, as he openly admits owning slave antecedents has certainly outlived one of the most cruel periods in human history (never engineered by Asians) when millions of humans were shipped from different states of Africa and were subject to what was known as the Trans Atlantic slave trade, perhaps even prefixed by the word Glorious.

For these poor men and women thus brought over supplemented European and American economy leading them to preponderance in the world. Now America keeps talking about human rights but it was as late as 1950, our own times, when the woman was asked to get up and give her seat to a White in a crowded bus. She was returning from work that evening carrying groceries for her family but her seat had to be sacrificed to pay homage to the grand species.

Rosa's reaction was natural. It all happened in Alabama, a US state that had a concentration of Blacks and was adjacent to Montgomery, populated more by Whites. Though other states were not that ruthless this city had a city code of its own that involved segregation for passengers. Coincidentally Alabama had been the last state to receive a a contingent of illegally shipped slaves from Africa (ship Clotilde) since slavery had been banned.

Slavery

Just for a brief historical sketch, ever since slavery was abolished in the USA, the lot of the Blacks had been improving, for as Dr. Martin Luther King frequently postulated in his famous speech "I have a dream" the now flourishing American economy was built on the sweat of the Blacks. Of course the part played by White Management cannot be undermined. Things began to improve gradually for the discriminated Afro American Citizens. Never opting to leave their homeland, once pooled together and weighed at coastal outposts, they were bundled into ships (especially designed as Slave outfits) and treated like the very cargo. A good number died on the way sickened by unnatural sea travel, the traumas involved in the transactions and grief at leaving their family and familiar pastures and the rigours of ocean transport.

Well. All that is past. Even the Civil war of the USA more or less fought on the Slaves issue is now pushed into the antiquity of the dim past. The Southern States that opted for the continuation of this degrading form of human labour where one human is bought by another, lost to the North in this war that nearly fractured America.

It stands testimony to the triumph of human values once submerged for the sake of filthy lucre. What had mattered was shipping enough labour for the sugar and cotton plantations plus a miscellany of other fields.

And now the slaves were liberated. Did things turn now rosy for the Blacks? Not as far as the life of Rosa Parks experienced. Not that other Black men and women escaped the traumas that she underwent but it was she who stood up or paradoxically refused to stand up, to give her seat to a White passenger.

Indignities

According to the Montgomery city code that engulfed Alabama, the buses were not only segregated but the Blacks had to undergo further indignities. They had to board the bus from the front, purchase the ticket and board again from behind. And worse still if any White was standing due to lack of seats, the Blacks had to offer theirs! Rosa Parks refused to offer her seat in a sudden mood of irritation.

Reading all this in the old mag I arbitrarily concluded that it was not Dr. Martin Luther King but the female, Rosa Parks who should have got the Nobel Peace Prize for she triggered the whole Movement. But there was no love lost between the two for Dr. King began to carry the torch lit by Rosa Parks.

Who was Rosa Parks initially? She was really a poor Negro girl who studied in a segregated and ill-equipped school in Alabama. Later she moved to an industrial school but had to cut short her education to tend to her sick grandparents. Her own family had been broken up. At 19 she got married to an activist who reinforced her ideas. Yet she continued with her seamstress job.

Participating in the ongoing Black-White feud was far from her mind at that time though Dr. King was making his fiery and emotional speeches in the neighbourhood.

Later she had articulated her thoughts somewhat along these lines, "At that time, I was asked to get up and give my seat to a White, I felt that I just had to act the way I did. Even then I never thought of leading a vast protest". Rosa Parks was arrested for violating the Montgomery city Bus Code. It set the whole region ablaze, provoking the wrath of the black population. She did get some awards but never the publicity and the recognition got by Dr. King or Nelson Mandela for after all, she was a female!