>> > 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
^^^^^ CB; Yep, that's why I call her Red Rosa the Second. ^^^^^^^ > > "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/par ks-rosa.htm =============================================== 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. ^^^^^^^ CB: In this milieu arose the slogan "Scratch a redbaiter, find a racehater". White civil rights activists were redbaited by the racists because the Party was so unique in its support and activism in anti-racist struggles. ^^^^ 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. ^^^ CB: Very good points, Marvin
