www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, November-December 2005Black/Red ViewLegacy of Rosa Parksby John Alan There is a need to rescue Rosa Parks from the political attempt of President Bush and other leaders to separate her greatness from the dialectics of the ongoing struggles of African Americans for freedom in this nation. Rosa Parks died as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the historic Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott against segregation in public transportation, which was sparked by her act of defiance of refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. Such is the power of what Rosa Parks represented that Bush sent an army officer to bring her body from Detroit to the Rotunda in the National Capitol. This is also the 50th anniversary of NEWS & LETTERS. The Montgomery Bus Boycott is so fundamental to the beginnings of News and Letters Committees that it has been named from the start in our "Who We Are and What We Stand For" statement, alongside the Detroit wildcat strikes against automation, as signaling a new movement from practice that is itself a form of theory (see http://newsandletters.org/commitees.htm). In February 1956, we ran a front-page story "Montgomery Negroes Show the Way," before news of the event was widely known. The original editor of NEWS & LETTERS, Charles Denby, was a Black worker born in Alabama who throughout his life kept a close relationship with the movement in his home state. I met Rosa Parks at one of our early meetings in Detroit where Denby worked with her along with other African Americans from Alabama. The very first chapter of Part Two of Denby's remarkable life story, INDIGNANT HEART: A BLACK WORKER'S JOURNAL, is titled "Visiting Montgomery" and contains a unique account of events in Montgomery from his discussions with Rosa Parks and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT What comes across in Denby's account is that the greatness of those two participants was their ability to relate to the unfolding drive for freedom among the Black masses reaching for self-determination. Denby describes how Reverend King and Rosa Parks both were surprised by the initiative of the masses at each stage. The daily paper, the MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER, made a racist editorial comment along with reprinting a leaflet which students put out calling for a one-day boycott to protest the arrest of Rosa Parks. It was meant to expose the alarming activity of the students, but when word got out that way, 80% of the people joined the boycott. Most established Black and labor leaders at first opposed it, but it continued to grow. This signaled the beginning of the whole Civil Rights revolution and the many-faceted revolts of the 1960s. Many have tried to confine the meaning of the Civil Right Movement to politics or getting a few high placed African Americans in government and industry. That's where today's iconography wants to freeze the legacy of Rosa Parks. Some of those who found a place in U.S. capitalism are complicit in helping Bush in that effort. RACISM STILL PERVASIVE In spite of the African-American spokesmen who were brought into capitalism as a way to blunt the movement, racism continues to pervade U.S. capitalism. See, for example, the way the poor and African Americans in New Orleans were abandoned in the wake of Katrina to fend for themselves. Raya Dunayevskaya, in her first major theoretical work, MARXISM AND FREEDOM (1958), brought out the reason of the boycott as its unfolding 13-month-long spontaneous mass self-organization. She wrote: "The spontaneity of the walkout AND the organization of their forces to keep up the boycott...is truly historic and contains our future." She said the greatest thing about the boycott was "its own working existence" (p. 281), using the same phrase that Marx used to describe the Paris Commune. NEED FOR PHILOSOPHY As we said in the Preface to THE DIALECTICS OF BLACK FREEDOM STRUGGLES: RACE, PHILOSOPHY AND THE NEEDED AMERICAN REVOLUTION, "Needed more than ever is what Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S., called in THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, giving 'a philosophic structure to concrete events.' The challenge is to understand ongoing history not merely as a sequence of events, nor even to uncover the root cause of ever-resurgent racism and classism, but to grasp the self-movement of the freedom idea within the revolts in civil society. That is the only way to discern the elements of the new society which are present in today's spontaneous revolts. Without a philosophic structure the revolts invariably get pulled back into the framework of bourgeois politics." (p. 2) |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
