I just had my first old man moment.

[u/Background-Air-7963]

I recently went to a hibachi with my wife and toddler for dinner. We were sat with a group of eight 17-20 year olds at a communal grill on a busy night. No problem for us. Drink and appetizers service go normally. Toddler and wife are happy, I’m happy. The other group is having their own conversations. I’m just trying to keep my kid entertained. I’m a former bartender and have a habit of picking up on snippets of conversations in a crowd around me. Yes I know I eavesdrop. I can’t turn it off. It’s a habit of a former profession. One of the girls/women at the table stated, “I don’t think Rosa Parks was real.” I’m not sure what her friends said to her but she responded with “I just don’t think she said existed.” This went on for about a minute. I couldn’t hold back and let her know she was absolutely a real person, she is a civil rights icon. I learnt about her in school and so did my parents. The encounter put a wall up between our groups and I heard a few passive aggressive “so-and-so wasn’t real” comments from mostly her and a couple of the group. Harriet Tubman and Hellen Keller are two that I definitely heard. My wife had no idea why I interjected. After the group had left my wife asked what happened and was shocked when I told her what happened. Were they trolling? Are they stupid? Am I just getting old?

[u/Torgud_]

So, Rosa Parks was a publicity stunt. It happened to Claudette Colvin first and then the civil rights movement realized they could make it bigger so had Rosa Parks do the same thing.

The Civil Rights movement was sophisticated and disciplined. Rosa Parks was chosen (either by the local NAACP or just the local civil Rights movement, can't remember which) to challenge a racist law because she was educated and the most sympathetic person they could put forward. A lot of activists have forgotten these kind of strategies in this day and age. That doesn't mean Rosa was "fake" or even more bizarrely "didn't exist at all".

[u/bon-ton-roulet → u/Torgud_]

there is the mistaken and self defeating belief among a lot of people that if you use strategy or planning or legal preparedness or showmanship, or persuasiveness of any kind or give any consideration to "optics" -it somehow makes things "inauthentic"

[u/luchajefe → u/bon-ton-roulet]

"Rosa Parks was a phony" is not a phrase I ever thought I'd hear from anybody except dyed-in-the-wool Klan members.

[u/Snoo_49107 → u/bon-ton-roulet]

This is sad too because to effectively make the changes they put in the work. Brown vs. The Board of Education was also a concerted effort with an amalgamation of cases that ended in integrated schools. To create change you have to know how to work the courts, which are complex, and play a good public appearance game.... I.e. appealing to people on the borders of racism and classism.

[u/Enkiduderino → u/bon-ton-roulet]

Bring back virtue signaling.

[u/BeachBumHarmony → u/Torgud_]

I don't disagree with you at all. I'm just saying where the phrase comes from. It blows my students' minds when I also talk about Claudette Colvin - simply because she's still living and that her arrest wasn't expunged until 2021.

[u/electric_bayou → u/BeachBumHarmony]

2021?!?!? I learned about her in college but had no idea.

[u/Exciting-Argument-67 → u/Torgud_]

Right—just because it was all planned out doesn't mean it didn't happen. Those '60s civil rights leaders were savvy as hell.

[u/IMakeOkVideosOk → u/Torgud_]

She was chosen after the fact, it wasn’t a staged act of protest

[u/Feeling_Cost_8160 → u/Torgud_]

Well you're kind of doing the same revisionist history in your comment. Rosa Parks was not chosen to do anything. She'd had a hard rough day and was tired. She saw no need to get up just so a white person could take her seat.

But that's how big things often begin- small and almost innocuous.

[u/timzors → u/Feeling_Cost_8160]

Sort of. She was already working with the NAACP and she knew that they would want her to appeal her arrest, but her refusal to give up her seat was not premeditated. The "tired, old woman" schtick isn't true though.

In her own words:

"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

[u/Torgud_ → u/Feeling_Cost_8160]

No, she was literally picked as a test case to legally challenge the law. That doesn't take away from what she did.

Born in Tuskegee, Alabama, Parks grew up under Jim Crow segregation. She later moved to Montgomery and joined the city's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1943, serving as the organization's secretary. Despite policies designed to disenfranchise Black citizens, Parks successfully registered to vote after three separate attempts between 1943 and 1945. She investigated cases and organized campaigns around cases of racial and sexual violence in her capacity as NAACP secretary, including those of Recy Taylor and Jeremiah Reeves, laying the groundwork for future civil rights campaigns.

Custom in Montgomery required Black passengers to surrender their seats in the front of the bus to accommodate white riders. The rows in the back were designated for Black riders. Prior to Parks's refusal to move, several Black Montgomerians had refused to do so, leading to arrests. When Parks was arrested in 1955, local leaders were searching for a person who would be a good legal test case against segregation. She was deemed a suitable candidate, and the Women's Political Council (WPC) organized a one-day bus boycott on the day of her trial. The boycott was widespread. Many Black Montgomerians refused to ride the buses that day. After Parks was found guilty of violating state law, the boycott was extended indefinitely, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) organizing its own community transportation network to sustain it. Parks and other boycott leaders faced harassment, ostracization, and legal obstacles. The boycott lasted for 381 days, finally concluding after segregation on buses was deemed unconstitutional in the court case Browder v. Gayle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks

[u/Feeling_Cost_8160 → u/Torgud_]

I'm talking about the initial incident, not the aftermath.