Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Ah Ha, Hush That Fuss " When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up and I said, 'No, I'm not'. And he said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested.' I said, 'You may do that.' " Hundreds of radio stations yesterday paid tribute to Rosa Parks in the only way that seemed fitting:  by playing that Outkast song. It's interesting to me the role that Rosa Parks played in the civil rights movement.  As NPR put it yesterday, she was an icon.  She wasn't a "leader," in the way that Dr. King was:  she didn't lead marches or speak at rallies.  She wasn't an organizer, though she was active in the NAACP.  She wasn't even the first person to be arrested for sitting in the "white person's" section.  She was a symbol, a member trained to be a symbol, in the same way that I helped to train dozens of members when I was an organizer.  Members take the hardest jobs, and often the most frightening.  I trained members to speak at press conferences, to testify in front of legislative committees, to lead rallies and marches, and sometimes just to be the presenter of hundreds of signed petitions to the targeted official.  It's hard, on the organizer's end, to pick the right person:  you need a combination of ego (to be the center of attention) and humility, of eloquence and heartfelt honesty.  Members are often the most overlooked part of any nonprofit:  they're given the most lip service, but in point of fact, organizations get lost in their own machinations, their political stands, their connection to the powermakers, and they forget that they stand on the backs of their members. We used grassroots members as speakers for very simple reasons:  no one cared what I thought as an organizer.  I wasn't on Medicare, or Medicaid, or food stamps.  I wasn't on Section 8 housing.  I had no story to tell.  I could offer statistics to prove our political case, but nothing quite tells a story like an actual, living, human being.  Organizers and political leaders can only do so much:  to really have an impact, you need members.  So Rosa Parks was a grassroots success story.  She exemplified every black person who ever had to suffer with unjust laws that proscribed their humanity.  She was an ideal candidate - quiet, meek, yet possessed of an inner strength beyond all bounds.  Rosa Parks was a rock, and was exactly the right person to become exactly who she became.  Every day as an organizer, I was looking for someone to become the next visible member, the next embodiment of our latest political campaign.  People are powerful:  think about Rosa Parks, James Meredith, Jackie Robinson, Polly Klaas.  Think about Cindy Sheehan.   The individual story is always, and is justly, more powerful than any intellectual, statistical, or in some cases, rational, argument that can be made.  Rosa Parks became a symbol for the civil rights movement, and suffered for it.  She and her husband lost their jobs after her famous case.  She feared for her life, and fled for Detroit, where she lived until her passing.  We warned our members constantly that there were negative effects of going public with a personal story, and Mrs. Parks truly suffered for her single act of defiance.  But in the end, she was strong enough to handle it, just as Dr. King and her companions at the NAACP saw when they decided to use her court case to launch the boycott that became the first chapter of the modern civil righs movement.  Rosa Parks was a symbol, an icon, a living reminder of all that our country has gone through (and toward the end, a symbol of all we still have to overcome.)  People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in. 3:28:45 PM     Speak up!  []