Doctor Who, Rosa Parks, and the erasure of radical activism
Like many others, I absolutely loved the most recent Doctor Who episode. I thought its portrayal of Rosa Parks was phenomenally moving, its use of music was fantastic, and in general it was really well done.
It was also incomplete. That’s not necessarily a criticism; as this article (conveniently about Rosa Parks!) from the Social Psychology Quarterly points out, there is a “symbolic power of oneness” that leads us to pinpoint specific leaders and create narratives about them that are powerful in and of themselves, but that necessarily includes the elision of lots of other facts, circumstances, and leaders. Because many, many people don’t know the true history of Rosa Parks - I certainly didn’t until I took a sociology class on social movements in college - I figured I’d give interested folks an opportunity to learn more.
The episode had a lot of small shoutouts to the true, complete history for people who knew what they were listening for, but I know a lot of people didn’t! Some cool things the episode did so you can scan for them in this information dump:
- Jeanne Theoharis’s book, linked below, was one of the first (if not the first) to connect Parks’s decision on that particular night to the news that Emmett Till’s murders would walk free. In our first encounter with Parks in the episode, she warns Ryan that Emmett Till was from out of town, too.
- When Ryan joins Parks and her husband and MLK Jr. and Fred Gray, Parks says to the men that he might be a candidate for the Youth Council. That Council was connected to the lawsuit that ended segregation in Montgomery through at least two young plaintiffs!
- Also, Fred Gray is a name most folks probably didn’t recognize, which is a bummer because he was a BADASS - a black civil rights attorney and the one who contacted the group of African American woman who had been calling for a boycott and let them know that Parks’s arrest could be the spark they were waiting for.
Rosa Parks was not a random seamstress sitting on a bus who, out of the blue, decided to take a stand against blatant and egregious racism. Rosa Parks was a seasoned, life-long activist by the time she was on the bus driven by James Blake. She had been the secretary of the NAACP chapter in Montgomery for years. She and her husband met when he was fundraising for the Scottsboro Boys. Her personal hero wasn’t Martin Luther King, Jr. (although they were close friends!), it was Malcolm X. She was a black radical who described her experiences as a “life history of being rebellious” (cited at least in Jeanne Theoharis’s The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, if not other places as well).
She also wasn’t the first, or last, black woman to refuse to stand up to make room for a white passenger on a Montgomery bus. In fact, the lawsuit that Rosa Parks was involved in (Browder v Gayle) had five key plaintiffs, of which Parks was only one (and not even the lead plaintiff!). In March 1955 - nine months before Rosa Parks’s protest in December of that year - a young, fifteen-year-old woman named Claudette Colvin, who was a member of the NAACP’s Youth Council that Parks suggested Ryan join, refused to give up her seat.
Claudette’s case was folded into the broader litigation that was started by Fred Gray, but like Parks, Claudette wasn’t the lead plaintiff. Why? Because she was fifteen and pregnant and it would’ve led to bad press. Another young woman, Mary Louise Smith, was also arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus. She also became a plaintiff, and was also not the lead plaintiff - this time because the lawyers were concerned she was too poor to be sympathetic to a jury.
I also just want to mention the role of allies for a minute. Clifford “Cliff” Durr and his wife, Virginia Foster Durr, were two white activists in the Civil Rights movement. Cliff was a lawyer who was looking for an ideal case to challenge the Montgomery bus segregation laws as unconstitutional. He advised Fred Gray on the litigation, as Gray was relatively inexperienced at the time (he was only 25). The Durrs are super cool people and I highly recommend reading more about them; they’re great role models for allies like myself. Some cool facts about them:
- Virginia was close personal friends with Rosa Parks and with Eleanor Roosevelt
- Virginia was Hugo Black’s sister-in-law (Black was a Supreme Court Justice who was a critical vote in tons of civil rights cases)
- Virginia explicitly credited her time at Wellesley College as the reason she went from being a racist to being a civil rights activist (she was forced to eat with black students and protested it and was threatened with expulsion, and she went from that to being an influential civil rights activist. people can and do change!)
- Virginia was instrumental in helping pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (and lobbied to end the poll tax with Eleanor Roosevelt).
- Cliff refused to sign a loyalty oath as ordered by the Truman administration based on the House Un-American Activities Committee (aka McCarthyism) and ultimately left his government job for that reason. BUT, he was already on the FBI lists because of his wife’s activism around voting rights and racial equality and their mutual friendship with a member of the Communist Party, Jessica Mitford
- Cliff also joined, and was later President of, the National Lawyers Guild, an extremely progressive legal organization that still exists today (I’m a member!).
- While Gray handled Parks’s federal claims as part of the Browder case, Cliff was her attorney in state court (which were two separate lawsuits)
- And, in a great example of true activism: Cliff lost almost all of his white clients because of the work he did in Montgomery, and his response was to double down on that work and devote the rest of his life to representing Civil Rights Movement activists, surviving based on primarily philanthropic financial support and his friends’ help.
Some cool books you might want to check out if you liked this:
[horrifyingly, all of those books are, afaik, by white authors, so if anyone has any ideally academic books they want to link me by black authors please message me or just reblog this with the titles/names/authors/whatever!]
In summary: Rosa Parks was not one individual acting entirely alone. She was a seasoned, radical activist whose personal hero was Malcolm X and who had been the secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter for years. The portrayal of her in the (white) American consciousness, and in this episode, erases how radical she was, just like we continuously erase how radical MLK Jr was and erase everything about Helen Keller’s politics (fun fact: she was a suffragette, a radical socialist, hated Woodrow Wilson, and helped fucking found the ACLU!). That’s not to say there isn’t value in telling her story the way it was told in this episode, but it is an example of an erasure that points to our discomfort with radical activism, then or now.
