By Janelle Henderson
When I found out Rosa Parks died, I felt numb.
I wanted to feel something passionate like I had when actor/director/civil rights activist Ossie Davis died, or even when playwright Arthur Miller died, but I felt nothing. I felt as if the Civil Rights Movement was suddenly over.
This great woman I had heard about all my life was viewed as a heroic woman who one day got fed up with the ill treatment of blacks and single-handedly began the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In reality, she was a 42-year-old secretary of Montgomery’s chapter of the NAACP who was chosen to begin the boycott.
More recently, she was the woman who sued OutKast (and lost) for the use of her name in their song “Rosa Parks.”
With her death, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s appears to be over, but I am only left disgusted at the disintegration of the black political movement. There are no longer any major leaders urging blacks to continue battling discrimination and injustice toward minorities.
We have Rev. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, NAACP chairman Julian Bond and Louis Farrakhan, but in today’s movement there’s no one with the power to unite the black community like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X or Marcus Garvey had.
There’s also a deep division in the black community that makes it nearly impossible for us to go back to the organization of the 1960s. Debate over issues like classicism and affirmative action prevent an open dialogue within the community about the broader picture. It’s as if we’re too busy wondering what to fight for to move toward anything productive.
I was somewhat hopeful after 1995’s Million Man March, but although thousands of black men united that day, I saw no real action afterwards.
The march was a great opportunity for attendees to identify a single focus of black political activity but it failed miserably. In the end, the march was viewed by women as little more than a sexist meeting, and by the media as another failed attempt to redefine the black political movement.
In Rosa Parks’ eyes, I see the eyes of all the civil rights icons, and all I can think of is how disappointed they would be at how little progress we’ve made.
They fought for our suffrage and now most black people don’t vote. They fought for the integration of schools and this university has only an 18 percent retention rate for black students. Most importantly, they taught us how to use our knowledge as a weapon against injustice but we’ve chosen to forget.
College students were the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement, starting protests on campus and staging sit-ins at local diners. Now, it seems as though we’re more interested in pointing out injustices than working to change them.
We need to applaud Kanye West’s declaration that Bush doesn’t care about black people, but then we need to consider the meaning behind those words.
Neither our president nor any other political figure will care about our issues unless we make them known. We must do our part to make police brutality, education, welfare and all other issues affecting the black community important to our legislators.
Rosa Parks’ death made me realize how dissatisfied I am with what the black community has become. I hope some day we can live up to the legacy she and thousands of nameless, faceless people began for us.
