Carrol Cox wrote:
Leigh Meyers wrote:
Carrol Cox wrote:
> planned or unplanned (Rosa Parks was the latter),
.
> Mrs. Parks's husband felt differently.
It was a typo, later corrected. It was very definitely planned. In fact
planning stretched over several years.
Carrol
"The white folks will kill you,
> Rosa," he told her; others warned her as well. Parks agreed to go
> along with the plan, believing her appeal of the $13 fine might "mean
> something to Montgomery and do some good," And of course, it did.
.
http://www.wagingpeace.org/menu/issues/peace-&-war/start/peace-portraits/parks-rosa.htm
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The comments cited above make Rosa Parks and her husband, Raymond, sound
like political innocents. They weren't. Like many accounts, this one
underplays, probably inadvertendly, their developed political consciousness,
including their relationship to the CPUSA. They may or may not have belonged
to the CP - most likely not - but like most black men and women involved in
the struggle for civil rights during that period, they would have known,
worked with, and been influenced by a significant number of white and black
activists who were party members or sympathizers. Notably, when Rosa met
Raymond in the early 30's, he was active in the CP-led campaign to save the
"Scottsboro boys", nine young blacks threatened with legal lynching on
trumped up charges of rape.
The Highlander Folk School mentioned in the article which Rosa attended as
an NAACP organizer four months before her famous bus ride was was started in
the early 30's by Myles Horton and James Dombrowski who, if they weren't
formally party members, were part of its large periphery of active
supporters. The purpose of the school, in addition to promoting working
class culture, was to equip activists with the organizing skills to build
the emerging union and civil rights movements. Martin Luther King also later
attended the Highlander school, and was photographed in 1957 sitting next to
Abner Berry, who was covering the event for the Daily Worker. The photo was
widely circulated by white racists to red-bait the movement. CP'ers like
Hunter Pitts O'Dell and Stanley Levinson were reportedly part of King's
circle and helped draft his speeches.
As many on the list know, whatever its real and imagined shortcomings, the
CPUSA played an analogous role, though on a smaller scale, to the South
African CP in helping spark the US black freedom struggle. The resources the
party provided to the unions and civil rights organizations - especially its
cadre of dedicated young organizers - as well as the party's association
during the depression with the rapidly industrializing and antifascist USSR
earned it the respect of black activists like the Parks', Bayard Rustin, and
J. Phillips Randolph and of rising intellectuals like Ralph Ellison and
Richard Wright. They didn't have to belong to the party or even support its
"maximum program" to value its contributions and want to collaborate with
it.
These ties would also help explain the keen interest in King and the civil
rights movement displayed by Hoover and the FBI, which subsequently
scandalized the liberal public. In lionizing popular freedom fighters like
King, Rosa Parks, and Nelson Mandela, their liberal admirers have obscured
their associations - loose and not so loose -with the party. The almost
total absence of any reference to Rosa Parks as a developed political
activist and her widespread portrayal instead as a well-meaning black
housewife acting spontaneously from a sense of moral outrage - a fit role
model for Condoleeza Rice - is a measure of how much of her history and of
her times has been airbrushed, and lost to the current generation of
leftists.
