Everybody Move to the Back of the Bus

Hopefully, everyone in America has by now seen OutKast's video for the song "Rosa Parks"--it features an old, presumably southern, black man playing a blues harmonica, various black dancers doing shuck-n-jive moves, Andre 3000 and Big Boi dressed in ridiculous, "ghetto fabulous" outfits with ostrich feather boas, sheepskin chaps, cowboy hats, football shoulder pads, and on and on. The entire things is very, very slick and very, very uncomfortable for the viewer. Just what, exactly, are they trying to say, particularly with their chorus that includes the line "A-ha, hush that fuss; everybody move to the back of the bus"?

Personally, I thought, upon seeing it for the first time in about 2000 or so, that it was the most brilliant satire of black culture and the most vicious comment on the willful ignorance of blacks towards their political agency and manipulation of black political power by white culture. In other words, it perfectly captured the infuriating dilemma that was Rosa Parks.

To Ms. Parks' credit, and she apparently could really miss a point, the Civil Rights figurehead sued the living hell out of OutKast and won. What, exactly, she won, I have no idea.

I "met" Rosa Parks once, in 1996 or '97 at my high school, which was 75% nonwhite at that time (the number has since gone up) in an auditorium with 2000 of my closest, blackest friends. She was about 86 years old and not too friendly. In fact, I think I can honestly say she was a complete bitch: sharp tongue, short fuse, shoulder clearly displaying upon itself a large chip.

During the assembly proper, we were told, in exactly these words, to sit down and shut the fuck up. It was always thus at West Charlotte High (or, to the white trash in Mecklenburg County, "West Chocolate High"): we had a first-time principal who took it as his mission, as had a dozen overmatched honchos before him, to whip the "no respect" black kids into shape and in so doing achieve nothing less than a miracle. In so aspiring, however, "Dr." Simmons triggered a backlash from the white, liberal parents who voluntarily bused their kids across the city to honor their parents' commitment to integration. Racial equality be damned! Noblesse oblige, like slaveowning, cannot be legitimated from within; it requires validation from the black students, as with the slaves, in the form of expressions of gratitude and servility.

Simmons fucked that all up. An Afro-centric high school? Nigger, please.

Rosa Parks stepped into this maelstrom ready to inspire some young delinquents to rise above their very real circumstances. Judging by her speech, inspiration used to come with a quick backhand and lots of insults. She was, truly, a horrible woman on the dais. She railed on, shamed, and ridiculed all of us, but particularly the black students. I'm not certain she saw or cared that there were a few white kids in the room. When it came time to ask questions, only black students were chosen.

But I had a question. Poor historian that I then was, I had read my textbook in 11th grade American history very carefully and I knew that Rosa Parks was not the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat on the bus; she was merely the best-connected and least problematic of the potential standard-bearers of protest. An earlier case centering around Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old who also refused to move and was arrested, was dropped unceremoniously by the NAACP after she became pregnant out of wedlock (bringing a special note of irony to the words of the woman who coached her and helped her carry out the action: "Always do what's right." That person, by the way, was Rosa Parks.). My question for Ms. Parks was whether she thought that students ought to be learning a version of American history that was based on happy little fairytales about people who "just got the idea in their heads" to change the world, or whether some sense of political ability and intent was required. In short, wouldn't it be better if students learned that the world is not made of heroes and innocents but rather of politics?

I never got to ask my question. And, for good measure, most of us were dismissed from the assembly but a small group was selected to stay and catch, as it were, the poison pearls falling from the lips of the icon. There were no white students in the handpicked group.

The death of Rosa Parks has brought this episode back to the surface of my mind, as I continue to wonder about the histories of heroes and saints, virgin births and shibboleths. Is popular memory just history with the politics left out? Isn't the modern study of history just history with the politics left out?

The day after she spoke, our psychology class had a substitute teacher, an out-of-towner named Mr. Fischman. He drove to school on Beatties Ford Rd., which runs all the way from cracker town, Huntersville, into the ghetto of west Charlotte. On the way, as he drew near the school, he noticed streets named for famous African Americans (they mark a subdivision of tract homes, by the way. So, much as crappy white subdivisions have themed streets--oak, maple, elm, walnut, etc.--so too do black ones; theirs are just named after idealized people, sometimes.). He saw Rosa Parks St. and was curious, so his first question to us, an "advanced" class full, naturally, of gleaming white children representing a full 10% of the white enrollment in the school, was "who is Rosa Parks?"

We thought, of course, that he was joking. Or, perhaps, he was psyching us out--you know, because it was "psychology" class and all. But he was serious. And we had to explain it to him, along with the fact that she had just been to our school the day prior. He didn't believe us. Sometimes, I don't believe what I saw, either. And those times, I think I prefer to be lied to.