Remembering Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks died just a month or so shy of the 50th anniversary of her famous bus ride on Dec. 1, 1955, when she faced arrest rather than surrender her seat to a white rider.

We’re better people and a better nation because of Mrs. Parks, and I imagine that teachers and librarians throughout the country will be discussing her legacy tomorrow. At least, I remain optimistic the day will not go unmarked.

There are, however, wrong, bad, stupid and just plain irritating ways to go about commemorating the act that launched the Civil Rights Movement. One of them is to foist a vapid and poorly written book on kids and hope they’re gullible enough to swallow an obvious lecture.

The Bus Ride That Changed History strives too hard to sound important and get its point across. The segregation law was “overturned because one woman was brave.” We get that in boldface, by the way, on every frigging page. Each page adds a line that builds to a clumsy crescendo about the bus ride, the boycott, the court battle, etc. It’s left to cutesy (and I hate cutesy) drawings of kids and their quote bubbles to fill in the story’s details, though little is said of Mrs. Parks herself. She’s an icon, not a person, in a tome that delivers a heavy-handed message about standing up to The Man and his stinkin’ laws.

There’s a difference between pedagogy and storytelling, even stories with important lessons, and nothing illustrates this better than Nikki Giovanni’s treatment of the same subject in Rosa. The famous poet lends her musical sense of language to this biography, which gives us a single day in her life. Mrs. Park’s mother has a touch of the flu and her husband, a barber, is proud he’ll be cutting hair at the air force base. She works as a seamstress, but since the Christmas rush is only just beginning, her boss can spare her early to look in on her mother. She’s excited at the prospect of having some extra time to make her husband’s favorite dinner – meatloaf.

The rich trove of details makes the story sing, as well as fleshing out Mrs. Parks into a real person with hopes, daydreams and distractions. And when her day takes a disastrous turn, we’re ready for her to make her stand by sitting down. We learn much; how she was secretary of the local NAACP chapter, how her girlfriends quickly rallied to her cause, how what started as a one-day boycott snowballed into a national movement.

Sometimes the details seem shoved in, as when we meet the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or the rapid discussion of Emmett Till, a lynched black youth whose killers had recently been released -- the event was seminal in Parks' decision to resist. Collier’s watercolors similarly zoom in on the story being told, with Parks cast in a soft, yellow glow, which he used to suggest a halo, as he describes in an opening note.

Collier’s depiction of the fateful moment shows Parks seated to the reader's left, African Americans jammed in the aisles behind her, creating a visceral feeling of a swaying, jostling throng. The Edwards/Shanahan book, however, shows Rosa seated on the reader's right.

Giovanni's text seems to suggest that Collier's depiction is wrong, but I'm not sure. I'm still searching news accounts to settle the right vs. left seat debate. This is no small boo-boo. It’s rather like that famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware – headed the wrong way.

But it’s the agenda that bugs me about the first book. Transparency is great in government, bad in literature. We don’t want to be knocked over the head with An Important Message. We want kids to tease it out themselves, to think it over, to remember this quiet, determined woman. That’s not to say Giovanni is morally neutral or we should let kids judge for themselves or some other post-modern, deconstructionist hokey. Giovanni trusts us to know right from wrong and to discern heroes from villains.

Comments

[elswhere]

Thanks for these thoughtful reviews.

One thing that always bugs me in discussions of Rosa Parks, especially explanations aimed at children, is the "Rosa Parks was just an ordinary woman who was tired and everything changed just because of her" approach. It minimizes Parks's previous experience in civil rights work, her identity as a conscious activist and her awareness of her place in the movement, and the collective action of the civil rights community. It sounds like the first book you cite falls into that trap, and the second doesn't.

[Anne]

Exactly. Thanks for putting it so succinctly. "Rosa" not only delves into her NAACP involvement, but emphasizes that she wasn't "tired" in any physical sense. Her exact words to the arresting officer were: "Why do you pick on us so?"

[Soorya dev]

I loved to read these things and there is a chapter on Rosa Parks going on in my school.