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Rosa Parks and the lessons of the civil rights movement
Nearly 50 years ago, Rosa Parks became a symbol of the mass movement against racism that eventually forced the dismantling of the system of official segregation in the American South. Her arrest on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, triggered a year-long bus boycott, an event that is generally seen as the beginning of a decade-long battle against segregation that mobilized millions and won the support of workers all over the world.
After her death two weeks ago, however, Mrs. Parks was eulogized hypocritically by the very forces that opposed the struggle for civil rights and today remain the bitterest enemies of every struggle for equality and social progress.
George W. Bush issued a statement from the White House. His Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke at services for Mrs. Parks in Alabama. The Republican-led Congress voted to allow her body to lie under the Capitol Rotunda, the first time this honor has ever been bestowed upon a woman.
Who are they to mourn Rosa Parks? They are, after all, the political heirs of everything she fought against. The modern Republican Party is the product of 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights and 1968 and 1972 election victor Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” winning a solid base of support among right-wing and racist forces in the formerly solid Democratic South. The elder President Bush, father of the present occupant of the White House, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in Texas in 1964 on a platform of opposition to the civil rights legislation that was then before Congress.
Moreover, this party today holds office largely through the disenfranchisement of black voters. It presides over the most wretched social conditions—in many respects worse than those of a half century ago—with the misery concentrated especially among blacks and other minorities, as exposed before the entire world only two months ago in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The fact that Bush and the entire political establishment are allowed to “celebrate” the life of Rosa Parks under these conditions highlights the vast degeneration that has taken place in the official civil rights movement, and the need for a sober examination of the history of this movement and its decay.
Read More
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/nov2005/park-n08.shtml
George W. Bush issued a statement from the White House. His Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke at services for Mrs. Parks in Alabama. The Republican-led Congress voted to allow her body to lie under the Capitol Rotunda, the first time this honor has ever been bestowed upon a woman.
Who are they to mourn Rosa Parks? They are, after all, the political heirs of everything she fought against. The modern Republican Party is the product of 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights and 1968 and 1972 election victor Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” winning a solid base of support among right-wing and racist forces in the formerly solid Democratic South. The elder President Bush, father of the present occupant of the White House, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in Texas in 1964 on a platform of opposition to the civil rights legislation that was then before Congress.
Moreover, this party today holds office largely through the disenfranchisement of black voters. It presides over the most wretched social conditions—in many respects worse than those of a half century ago—with the misery concentrated especially among blacks and other minorities, as exposed before the entire world only two months ago in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The fact that Bush and the entire political establishment are allowed to “celebrate” the life of Rosa Parks under these conditions highlights the vast degeneration that has taken place in the official civil rights movement, and the need for a sober examination of the history of this movement and its decay.
Read More
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/nov2005/park-n08.shtml
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