[GCFL-discuss] Jackson on Parks

[Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List]

There must be something interesting we can talk about. I doubt if Time
magazine is going to print this letter, so maybe I should toss it out
here for dissection. (It is a response to Jesse Jackson's shamelessly
opportunistic "Appreciation" of Rosa Parks, which Time for some
unfathomable reason asked him to write). I must admit, I cannot remember
a time I have ever had any respect for Jackson. 

Siarlys


It is unfortunate that you chose Jesse Jackson to write your Appreciation
of Rosa Parks. He has diluted, rather than extolled, her sterling
accomplishments, with irrelevant political rhetoric. Perhaps most glaring
is his use of the 21st century cliche "red states" to refer to the former
confederate states who had laws explicitly segregating public life by
race. At the time Mrs. Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus,
anyone who heard a state described as "red" would have understood that a
majority of the state's voters supported the Communist Party in the last
election.  No state from the short-lived Confederacy would have given a
majority of its votes to Republicans. Nor are states of the old South
uniformly "red" today, nor "red" states confined to those that once had
segregation laws. In states now stereotyped as "blue," there was no
shortage of restaurants and hotels where staff nervously said "We don't
serve Negroes here." (When I was a child, there was a joke about a man of
dark complexion who calmly replied "That's good, I don't want to eat one,
bring me some fried chicken.")

Mrs. Parks took her stand within a legacy that stretched back through
Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Dubois, not merely a spark out of nowhere that
ignited a mere nine years of progress. On the other hand, she was hardly
THE inspiration for the 100 year struggle of the African National
Congress, which began before she was born. There is a huge difference
between a native African majority fighting for freedom from an immigrant
"white" minority regime, and a stereotyped minority fighting for freedom
from laws favoring a "white" majority. Don't even try to compare
Tienanmen Square. While both Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 were important, the 1964 law had little to do with
enforcing school integration, and the Brown case had nothing to do with
jobs, housing, restaurants, trains, buses, or much of anything outside of
schools. Rosa Parks was never driven by any political agenda? Her whole
life was a political agenda, in the finest sense of the word.
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