WSU community reflects on life of Rosa Parks

One person’s breathtaking courage on an ordinary day can inspire the world, but social movements are built on the backs of hundreds, if not thousands of unsung heroes who go about the daily, sometimes dangerous, work of laying the foundation for profound shifts in cultural acceptance and public policy.

Rosa Parks did both.

Several members of the WSU community took time last week to reflect on the legacy of Parks who died Oct. 24 at the age of 92. Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white man on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on Dec. 1, 1955, was the catalyst for a 380-day bus boycott that desegregated that city’s public transportation. However, the mass demonstrations and legal battles following Parks’ arrest went far beyond public transportation to eventually guarantee equal rights under the law to Americans of all races.

“She was one person who made a difference,” said Wilhelmina O. Sarai-Clark. Sarai-Clark was a young faculty member at Florida A&M when the Montgomery Boycott started, she said, and she met Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks when they went to Tallahassee to organize a bus boycott there. Despite warnings that any faculty members who participated in the boycott would be fired, Clark said she borrowed money from her parents so she could buy a car and help transport people around the city.

“I remember picking up people on the street corner and driving them where they needed to go,” she said. Eventually everyone—administration, faculty and students—took part in the boycott, she said, but no one lost his or her job.

“We went to jail like everyone else did,” she said, and laughed at the memory.

Sarai-Clark, who taught dance at WSU from 1965 to 1992, was named the 2004 Woman of the Year at WSU’s annual Women’s Recognition Luncheon.

Alice Coil, director of WSU’s Women’s Resource Center, said Parks’ death is a fitting time for self-reflection, for people of all ages and races to consider what they can do to further the cause of equality and justice for all.

On a bulletin board outside the Women’s Resource Center on the ground floor of Wilson Hall, Parks’ picture is posted beside these words: “She sat down, so we could stand up.”

Students chose that message and it is worth thinking about, Coil said. “What do we need to do to keep the legacy going?”

T.V. Reed, director of the American Studies program, agrees that Parks’ decision to be arrested rather than give up her seat was courageous and a defining moment in the struggle for civil rights. But, he said, it wasn’t a spontaneous or impulsive decision by a tired seamstress as it is sometimes portrayed.

“Yes, she was a seamstress,” Reed said. “Yes, she was tired that day. But she had been working for years in the civil rights movement.”

Reed, who is also a professor of English, said focusing on a single dramatic event obscures the hours and hours of work that preceded it.

Parks is important in her own right, he said, but also as a symbol of the hundreds and thousands of people, particularly black women, who were not only foot soldiers, but the intellectual leaders of the movement.

“Women like Septima Clark, Ella Baker and Jo Ann Robinson,:” Reed said. “People who actually did the thinking and groundwork in the movement but got very little attention compared to the male leaders who did all the speechifying.”

The deaths of Clark, Baker and Robinson garnered little attention in the mainstream press, even though among some historians they too are considered “mothers of the civil rights movement.”

Noel Sturgeon, chair of women’s studies, was heartened to see that Parks’ passing did not go unnoticed.

“I was very saddened by her death, but also happy to see so many people thinking about the importance of her actions,” she said.

Sturgeon also mentioned the mostly unheralded women leaders of the civil rights movement such as Clark, Baker and Robinson. “They had no degrees,” she said, “but they had a lot of bravery and a lot of smarts.”

There had been earlier, less successful bus boycotts, Sturgeon said, but when Parks took her stand the movement was ready. “They had a plan,” she said.

Felicia Gaskins, associate vice president in the Office of Equity and Diversity, said her sadness at the Parks’ passing was tempered with “a lot of joy at how she is being honored in her death.”

Parks, who was buried in Detroit on Nov. 2, laid in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Oct. 31. She is the first woman to ever be honored in that way.

“Having been a child living in southern part of the country during segregation, I have a somewhat of a sense of the courage it must have taken “to defy the law, Gaskins said. She said she remembers hearing her parents and grandparents discuss various protests and demonstrations and try to figure out which ones to participate in.

“It takes a great deal of courage and judgment to decide,” she said, “is this something that we are prepared to participate in?”

Gaskins said she sees Parks as part of a larger picture of the struggle for civil rights, but also as an individual who decided for herself that she was tired of acquiescing to an unjust and immoral legal system.

“It was more than physical tired,” she said. “She was tired of things not changing and she made a decision to try and change things.”

“It speaks to all of us about the kinds of decisions and choices that we make,” Gaskins said.