If you miss me at the back of the bus...
Oct. 27th, 2005 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustOddly enough, we were talking about Rosa Parks last week; we'd been to a LitFest event at which Sir Peter de la Billiere promoted his book about the Victoria Cross, and talked about the nature of courage (nothing particularly profound, but not as gung-ho as you might expect either). On the way home, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler said, more or less out of nowhere, "Rosa Parks is my idea of someone who showed courage".
In her Guardian obituary, Sheila Rowbotham comments on the legend of Rosa Parks, the tired seamstress who had finally had enough and said "No", whichwicked_wish expresses beautifully:
It's "a condescending misapprehension", she says. Rosa Parks was a seamstress, and she was no doubt tired at the end of her working day, but she was also a long-time civil rights activist, and she was deliberately making the first move towards a bus boycott.
Perhaps there's an element of condescension here, an assumtion that a woman, and a woman with a manual trade, may have innate dignity but is unlikely to have a political strategy. But I think it's more the other way round, there's a sense that political action is "not quite nice", only justified if you are pushed into it by outrageous demands, and without quite realising what you are doing. Defending your rights is one thing, demanding them is quite another.
Well, Rosa Parks demanded her rights, and while there's still a way to go, it's because of her, and political activists like her, that things have improved over the past fifty years.
durham_rambler said, more or less out of nowhere, "Rosa Parks is my idea of someone who showed courage". In her Guardian obituary, Sheila Rowbotham comments on the legend of Rosa Parks, the tired seamstress who had finally had enough and said "No", which
wicked_wish expresses beautifully:1 seamstress on a crowded bus
2 tired feet
3 seats surrendered
4 seats demanded
It's "a condescending misapprehension", she says. Rosa Parks was a seamstress, and she was no doubt tired at the end of her working day, but she was also a long-time civil rights activist, and she was deliberately making the first move towards a bus boycott.
Perhaps there's an element of condescension here, an assumtion that a woman, and a woman with a manual trade, may have innate dignity but is unlikely to have a political strategy. But I think it's more the other way round, there's a sense that political action is "not quite nice", only justified if you are pushed into it by outrageous demands, and without quite realising what you are doing. Defending your rights is one thing, demanding them is quite another.
Well, Rosa Parks demanded her rights, and while there's still a way to go, it's because of her, and political activists like her, that things have improved over the past fifty years.
