Sept. 21, 2018 – The life of Rosa Parks (1913-2005) was one defined by grace and grit, a combination reified in her tireless work to peacefully fight for her civil rights and the civil rights of all Americans, especially African Americans who faced daily discrimination under Jim Crow laws. Douglas Brinkley, author of Rosa Parks: A Life, the definitive biography of her life, eloquently delivered the Keynote Address at last Friday’s Student News Net Symposium, held at the University of Iowa.

Student News Net attended the 2013 Day of Courage, held at The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Mich., to honor the centennial of Rosa’s birth. Speaker after speaker spoke about Rosa’s quiet demeanor and determination to make a difference as an activist in the struggle for equality as promised in the Declaration of Independence.

At the Day of Courage, Douglas Brinkley summarized key aspects of her life that he learned from his two years of research as he wrote her biography, published in 2000. His book was a gift for the new millennium in 2000 and remains a gift to history today.

Parts 2 and 3 of Douglas Brinkley’s address

Learning about Rosa Parks — Student News Net Symposium – Sept. 14, 2018
Trying to “walk in someone’s shoes” is always beneficial in order to understand a consequential point in time. It’s especially poignant when trying to walk in Rosa’s shoes. To even come close to understanding her action on Dec. 1, 1955 when she refused to give up her assigned seat on Montgomery City Bus #2857 to a white passenger, one needs to know that Rosa had been a civil rights activist her entire life. The notion that she was simply tired from her day of work as a seamstress is a myth.

The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation acquired the Rosa Parks bus in 2001 and restored it to its original look. Today, the bus anchors their “With Liberty and Justice for All” exhibit. Visitors are allowed to walk through the bus and sit in the seats. (Photo: Student News Net)

In the summer before Rosa took her courageous stand by sitting in her seat, Rosa attended a two-week training course on civil disobedience at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. A white couple paid her tuition. As Dr. Brinkley was researching her life for his book, mixed in with irrelevant newspaper clippings in a collection of her papers archived at Wayne State University in Detroit he found Rosa’s handwritten notes from her time at Highlander. Dr. Brinkley describes the notes as “an utterly invaluable trove.” (p. 235)

Therein lies the reason Dr. Brinkley’s book is a gift to history. History is discovery. Historians are information detectives who sift through volumes of material to add context to a person’s life and important events. Finding those notes from Rosa herself was another piece of evidence that her action on Dec. 1, 1955 was not because she was simply tired but a watershed moment when she decided the time had come to act. She did not wake up that day planning to act. Rather, she reacted to circumstances that she would no longer tolerate. Dr. Brinkley recounts the day in his book with Rosa’s words.

“Just having paid for a seat and riding for only a couple of blocks and then having to stand was too much” she told the Highlander Folk School’s executive committee at a meeting a few months later: “These other persons had got on the bus after I did. It meant that I didn’t have a right to do anything but get on the bus, give them my fare, and then be pushed wherever they wanted me….There had to be a stopping place, and this seemed to have been the place for me to stop being pushed around and to find out what human rights I had, if any.” (pp. 109-110)

When ordered to move, Rosa looked at the bus driver and said: “No.” The bus driver said he would call the police and have her arrested. Rosa replied, “You may do that.”

On page 107, Dr. Brinkley writes:
Her majestic use of “may” rather than “can” put Parks on the high ground, establishing her as a protestor, not a victim. “When I made that decision,” Rosa Parks stated later, ” I knew I had the strength of my ancestors with me,” and obviously their dignity as well. And her formal dignified “No,” uttered on a suppertime bus in the cradle of the Confederacy as darkness fell, ignited the collective “no” of black history in America, a defiance as liberating as John Brown’s on the gallows in Harpers Ferry.

Douglas Brinkley’s advice to students
At the conclusion of Dr. Brinkley’s Keynote Address at the Symposium, he was asked how Rosa’s inspiring life can be translated into action by students today.

He advised students to lead a dignified life as Rosa had.