Was Rosa Parks' Resistance Faked?

AKA how not to flirt with a black woman

Recently, I flew to Florida, and when it came time to get on the plane, I got in line behind a really pretty Black woman who was wearing a Rosa Parks T-shirt.

I figured, hey, I might as well strike up a conversation, and I complimented her shirt. I said, “I like your shirt.”

She’s like, “Oh, thank you. Rosa Parks, right?”

And then I figured I’d flex my Black history knowledge a little bit and be like, “But nobody ever has a Claudette Colvin T-shirt now, do they?”

And she gave me the ick face like, “No, not really.”

And it didn’t really work.

So avoid that tactic if you have an opportunity, fellas.

But the reason I bring this up is because recently there’s this Black influencer named Officer Brandon Tatum, and he has been making his fame and fortune off of following in Charlie Kirk’s footsteps and misrepresenting facts about the struggle for civil rights and the legacy and impact of the civil rights movement.

So let’s unpack this.

What he had said is that Rosa Parks staged her arrest, and therefore it was not a valid example of resistance or rebellion.

And there’s some truth to that, okay?

Claudette Colvin, on March 2nd of 1955, was the first woman in Montgomery, Alabama, to be arrested for not giving up her seat.

She was a 15-year-old girl. She wore glasses, and she was dark-skinned.

When she was sitting on the bus with some of her friends from school, a white woman came up and demanded her seat, and she refused.

The police came and arrested her and dragged her, kicking and screaming, off of the bus.

So, in addition to the charge for not giving up her seat, she was also charged with resisting arrest and assault on a police officer.

So she was not a very sympathetic symbol for the movement.

Now, she wrote a letter to the NAACP telling them about this situation, and the secretary of the NAACP at the time was one Rosa Parks.

She was a mature, grown woman, attractive, well-composed, light-skinned, which is important when it comes to PR, sadly, thanks to the racist nature of our society.

Colorism is baked right into it, where lighter-skinned people are perceived more favorably than darker-skinned people.

So she knew all this, and she owned a car.

Her husband could have driven her home from work, but she chose on this day, after work, to ride the bus.

She sat in the very front row of the Blacks-only section.

Now, as the whites section filled up, the bus driver came back and moved the little divider to behind Rosa Parks and said, “You need to get up and go.”

And she said, of course, we all know, “I’m not moving.”

When she was arrested, she submitted peacefully and gracefully, and she said as she was leaving that she was just tired and didn’t want to get up.

It made for a very sympathetic image.

Now, what happened after that was that the Women’s Council organized the Montgomery bus boycott to start on the day of her trial, December 5th, 1955, and it became very successful.

It brought a lot of attention to the injustices and the movement, and Martin Luther King Jr. was promoted to a visible position within this, and that’s where he became as famous as he did.

So, was it staged?

It was provoked, definitely.

She knew what would happen, but she didn’t make them arrest her.

She didn’t make them make an unjust law.

She just allowed herself to be caught up in it in a way that presented a sympathetic image for white America.

Does that mean it wasn’t valid resistance?

I don’t know.

You tell me.