Rosa Parks

Posted on March 8, 2006 in Anger Responsibility

Rosa Parks died several weeks ago. I did not write about her passing. Nor that of Coretta Scott King who I actually met once. Others did mark these deaths, some eloquently. I did not because I felt emotions which could not be registered in words. If I had tried, my article would have been insipid. There was no dirge in my heart that I could write lyrics for or set notes to. I accepted the passings as inevitable, nothing that shook me like the sudden deaths of Martin Luther King and the Kennedys.

Last night, as I fell asleep, Rosa Parks wandered into the twilight, sat next to my bed, and told me a thing or two about anger. Contrary to what mythology tells us, the civil rights movement was moved by anger. One day, Rosa Parks thought her feet were tired. She took a seat in the front of the bus, in the section reserved for white people. We know the story. Her feet were tired. That simple fact and the resistance of white authority to allowing her to take an empty seat, any empty seat, made her angry. They threatened and they inflicted an unreasonable consequence on her: they jailed her.

These days, many psych pundits and gurus hold that we should not allow ourselves to feel anger. I disagree. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk, holds that we should treat anger as our baby, give it loving attention. This is not the same as whipping ourselves into a fury. This is not rehearsal for violent imposition of our views. Rosa Parks simply sat where she wasn’t supposed to sit. No more would she let white men and white women force her to bow her head, defer to them by looking at the tips of her feet. She raised her eyes, she looked them in the eye. I am sitting down. These should not be words of rebellion.

The gurus and the pundits — false prophets of wellness — either reject Parks’s approach as confrontational or tell us that overwhelming love brimmed over in a cup once half full. I counter that Rosa Parks guided her anger and manifested it in a necessary act of boat rocking. She took the Montgomery bus segregation personally and, as a person, resisted it.

Through the years since the civil rights movement ended with the death of Martin Luther King, we have heard that we should not disrupt, we should ignore seething complacency. People fear the blood pumping in their temples, they fear heart attacks. Or so they say because many people die of heart attacks anyways. Anger plays a much smaller part than greasy food and lack of exercise. The pundits lie to us.

I seldom tell anyone not to be angry. My advice is to nurture your anger and see it through to positive ends. Anger signals change or the want of it. Perhaps you need to walk out. Perhaps you need to stay and resist. Rosa Parks did not fly to the North. Her home was the South, but things other than the beautiful red clay, the cotton fields, and the air heavy with evaporated rains made it hard for her to live there. She didn’t want to move. So she refused to go to the back of the bus. She had to do that if she wanted to be the master of her anger and her life.

Anger is what Rosa Parks was about in the 1950s. It was honest, righteous, and transforming.