ADVANTAGE KATHY SHAIDLE: The far left Nation magazine notes today that “much of what students are taught, and much of what most Americans think they know, about [Rosa] Parks’s activism is wrong. Here are corrections to ten commonly circulated myths about Rosa Parks:”
When the Montgomery bus boycott began, Rosa Parks was 42, a seasoned activist, while Martin Luther King was 26, a new minister pastoring his first church. Parks grew up in a family that supported Marcus Garvey, began her adult political life with the Scottsboro defense alongside her husband Raymond, and spent the next decade with E.D. Nixon pushing to turn the Montgomery NAACP into a more activist chapter. Mentored by legendary organizer Ella Baker, she was inspired by the political visions of Highlander Folk School leaders Septima Clark and Myles Horton, when she attended the adult-organizer-training school the summer before her arrest. Throughout her life, she believed in the power of organized nonviolence and the moral right of self-defense and described Malcolm X as her personal hero.
The Nation’s article is headlined “Rosa Parks Wasn’t Meek, Passive, or Naive—and 7 Other Things You Probably Didn’t Learn in School:”
No — I learned all that samizdat from Canadian Blogger Kathy Shaidle at her Five Feet of Fury Website — six years ago:
Parks was not a “humble seamstress” who spontaneously decided to defy the rules one day.
She was the Secretary of her local chapter of the NAACP and had been trained in civil disobedience.
(Of course, up until recently, only “obscure right wing” sites dared to point out these facts. Unable to deny them any longer, leftists like those at Common Dreams have recently been forced to accept them, and then try to twist them into yet another narrative.)
As Kathy writes today in response to the Nation’s big “revelation:”
I love how The Nation is now scolding people for believing the received wisdom about “poor, meek, untrained, ordinary church lady” Rose Parks that their fellow “progressives” have shoved down our throats for 60 years.
See also: the Left’s surprise (including the clueless denizens of the New York Times) that Woodrow Wilson was, like most original “Progressives” a straight up racist. When, in 2002, Reason’s Charles Paul Freund wrote a piece charting just a few of the lowlights of, as he described him, “The menacing Mr. Wilson,” I know I didn’t hear anything about those aspects of his presidency from my Wilson-adoring history professors at the College of New Jersey, just down the road from Princeton itself.