Somehow no one combined the personal with the political more than the figure of Rosa Parks. The sheer importance of her courage and forthrightness in igniting the Civil Rights Movement and in fostering a new pride and consciousness of black America in the postwar years has been the talk of many tributes of the last week. I don’t have too much to add to those tributes, other than to note that it no way diminishes her personal legacy — or the legacy of hundreds, thousands, other personal acts of determination and courage that comprised the Civil Rights movement — to point out that the political transformation of the Second Reconstruction, both in black and white consciousness, had major structural bases, from the transformation of Southern agriculture to the consolidation of liberal consensus among political elites after World War II. Furthermore, the solitary act of civil disobedience had such reverberations because it wasn’t a solitary act; local activists were waiting for an act of civil disobedience to champion (though I suspect were unprepared for the scope and nature of the mass movement they would launch) and Rosa Parks was not the first person to refuse to give up her seat, simply the one most suited to championing. Jack Bloom captures the paradox in his Race Class and the Civil Rights Movement: “Though unplanned, Rosa Parks’ arrest was no accident.” Rosa Parks may have been an ordinary woman, but she was among the least ordinary ordinary people of History.
But there’s another, parallel legacy Rosa Parks left behind. It might not be accurate to say that Parks invented postmodern politics, but as if half by accident she stumbled into its discovery. I don’t mean to discount the importance of mass media in politics before 1955, but after Parks, it has become a commonplace that the media, particularly the iconic media of photojournalism and television, are the proper terrain of mass movement politics. The initial act of Park’s civil disobedience is striking because it alone leaves no indexical trace of newsfilm footage or Time photograph, and we have only eyewitness testimony and official police record of what happened. With the possible exception of the first student sit-in in Greensboro, on the other hand, the rest of the Second Reconstruction played out merely as a series of media moments: the later sit ins, the bombing of the Freedom Rides, Bull Connor using canine dogs and hosing down children, the police charge at Selma, Martin Luther King at the march on Washington, Fannie Lou Hamer at the Democratic National Convention. That’s not to say that both the political machinations of legislators or the lived reality of Southern blacks (and whites) not in these hotspots weren’t important, just that even they played out with an eye to a national media scape that was new, powerful and ultimately defining. This (perhaps inevitable) discovery of the mediatized political landscape hasn’t always had a positive effect (it enables, at one extreme, the rise of modern terrorism as we know it), but it continues to set the terms for the new social movements (feminism, environmentalism, gay rights, new Right religiosity) central to our time and even infects the old social movement politics of interest politics and economic activism, left and right. I know that civil rights veterans sometimes get angry at the appropriations of the techniques and rhetoric they pioneered by groups that would come after them. Imitation is flattery, I say.
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