But, but, Rosa Parks isn't a radical left wing activist attention whore?
Funny how the same people that bash on Sheenan are showering love on a known activist practicing the same civil disobediance.
Please try to learn a bit of compassion for those fighting the good fight, time changes a lot and the total lack of consistancy on views here is pretty eye-opening.
In 1943 Rosa Parks became secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP. That year, she made her first attempt to register to vote, although she did not succeed until her third try, in 1945. She also had her first dispute with a local bus driver when she tried to defy a rule that required blacks to board buses from the back door.
NAACP commie radical leftist or American hero?
"The key issue to remember about Rosa Parks, in light of various tendencies to rewrite her heroic role in history and to subtly distort it, is that she was always an activist, part of a team, part of a movement and not just someone who spontaneously happened to be too tired to get up.
The spontaneity idea, found in folk songs and exaggerated to varying degrees in movies about her, belies a richer if less readily comfortable truth that she was long a leading activist for Civil Rights, being pictured in a famous foto of Civil Rights leaders in the 40s on the Lincoln Memorial, and having trained at the famous organizers' school in rural Tennessee where Dr King also trained.
There was a case, before Rosa Parks, of a younger person who had been arrested for a similar offense that she ultimately stepped up to the plate to do; but this case was marred by the potential whiff of (subjectively defined) scandal in a the crucially culturally conservative middle class leadership of black Montgomery. Rosa Parks was selected, hand picked by her colleagues, as the perfect test case. She was frail, not young, and had a squeaky clean record. There was nothing anyone could say about her that would disturb the most hidebound of conservative preachers. No beads or lesbian liberation or anything like that -- it was self-conscious respectability all the way. That's how the Civil Rights movement organized, it is how they thought, and it is how they won.
Her role as an organizer fulfilling a role may be less cinematic than some images, but it reminds us of the reality that only careful planning and strategic thinking ever got the greatest citizens' movement of the last half-century anywhere. Talk to any veteran of the Civil Rights movement -- I don't mean people like my parents who participated (as whites) at the fringe. I mean the day to day full time organizers and leaders. They don't reason from cachet; they don't get caught up in this weeks inside-the-beltway gossip. They don't nurture pie-in-the-sky notions that have no possible relevance or impact on ordinary people's lives. And they are not naive about the nature of power or organizing. I have my differences with that approach to politics (mine is a lot less orthodox), but theirs is a way that cannot but be respected, and brought to bear every time we see the wisdom that those organizers had as a matter of course lacking all around us.
Rosa Parks was an organizer whose actions were undertaken in the coldest and savvyest of pragmatic calculations, for the good of freedom on the part of people who were in the struggle for the long haul. To honor her, we must never forget or slight that truth. "
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