Rosa Parks: a case of mistaken identity. posted by Richard Seymour

The tendency is for the ruling ideology to slowly come to accomodate rebellion, to sanitise, defang and deodorize its primary practicioners. It's no fault of Marx's that this has happened to him to some extent: cuddly, rumbustious old Marx whom even Wall Street speculators can appreciate for his prophecies about globalisation, the tearing down of all walls (Chinese walls included), the profaning of all that is holy. This gesture cannot be so easily repeated with Lenin, and it isn't even that easy with Malcolm X, despite Spike Lee's best efforts. Gary Younge:

The myth of Rosa Parks is well known. The tired seamstress who boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955 and refused to give up her seat to a white man has become one of the most enduring legends of the civil rights era. Her subsequent arrest started the bus boycott that launched the civil rights movement. It transformed the apartheid of America's southern states from a local idiosyncrasy to an international scandal and turned a previously unknown 26-year-old preacher, Martin Luther King, into a household name.

"She was a victim of both the forces of history and the forces of destiny," said King. "She had been tracked down by the zeitgeist - the spirit of the times." The reality was somewhat different. Parks was no victim. The zeitgeist did not track her down; she embodied it. She had a long history of anti-racist activism and had often been thrown off buses for resisting segregation. Far from being a meek lady in need of a foot massage she was a keen supporter of Malcolm X, who never fully embraced King's strategy of non-violence.

"To call Rosa Parks a poor, tired seamstress and not talk about her role as a community leader and civil rights activist as well, is to turn an organised struggle for freedom into a personal act of frustration," writes Herbert Kohl in his book She Would Not Be Moved.