This week, your reading assignment is from Danielle McGuire’s book, At the Dark End of the Street. Read through Page 134 of the book, and also read an article by Jeanne Theoharis about Parks in the Washington Post. (Optionally, you may also be interested in listening to this interview with Claudette Colvin in which she cites another of our “legendary Americans” as an inspiration for her decision not to give up her bus seat.)

Please be forewarned that this week’s readings contain often disturbing and graphic descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Because of the nature of history, studying the past often means confronting painful and distressing subjects and events. In this case, remembering incidents of rape and anti-rape activism in the American South, as well as talking about why those incidents have been forgotten, are crucial to the scholarly arguments that Danielle McGuire and Jeanne Theoharis are making.

After you’ve done the reading, choose one of the following prompts and respond to it in your Google Doc. Before writing, you may want to have a look at the Google Doc we created to help you focus on the rubric. Remember to use specific evidence to support your positions, and also to think broadly about which of our previous readings might also help you to make your case.

Scenario 1: Imagine that it is 2019, and you have been selected by Teach for America to teach social studies to eighth-graders in Mississippi. In your first year, the other eighth-grade social studies teachers are planning a unit on the Civil Rights Movement, focusing on the role of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. One veteran teacher who is familiar with Parks’s earlier activism has argued that students should be exposed to her anti-rape work on behalf of Recy Taylor, Gertrude Perkins and others. But another veteran colleague says the unit should stay focused on the 1955 bus boycott for which Rosa Parks as better known; she suggests that the classes should focus on the outlines of Parks’s story provided by the three pages about her on the America’s Story website and a National Archives Lesson Plan. As a newcomer to the school and the debate, your assignment is to draft an email to your fellow teachers outlining your position, which can either agree with one of your colleagues or advance a third possibility.

Scenario 2: Imagine that you have seen a close friend on Facebook commenting on a post about four protestors disrupting a presidential campaign rally. Imagine that the protestors, all women, took the microphone from the candidate and gave a profanity-laced speech about the Daniel Holtzclaw case. Your friend has commented, “The Black Lives Matter people would get a lot more respect if they took the quiet, humbler approach of Rosa Parks, IMHO. And also if they didn’t focus on rare bad apples like Holtzclaw.” This comment has elicited strong replies from other friends on Facebook. Some friends were outraged, but others agreed in principle with the comment, especially as a statement of political strategy. Having just read about Parks for your FWIS class, you decide to message your friend privately to share your own view on the comment, whether positive or negative or some combination of both. What would you say?

Scenario 3: In 2011, during legal proceedings over the disposition of Rosa Parks’s collection of personal papers and memorabilia, controversy erupted over the publication of a manuscript that appears to be an autobiographical account by Rosa Parks of an attempted rape. Some observers, including an attorney for the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, argued that this private document should not be publicly released or made available as part of an archive. Since then, the collection has been purchased and loaned for 10 years to the Library of Congress, which has made available the manuscript in question. As Jennifer Schuessler reported for the New York Times, the digital files from the collection will remain with the Library of Congress even after the physical objects return to the owner. Your assignment is to write an op-ed for submission to the Washington Post revisiting the question of whether this particular document should be archived and made public and defending your own position in the debate.

While working on this assignment and preparing for our discussion in class, there are a few other things I’d like you to think about.

• In his book on Davy Crockett, around p. 181, James Crisp talks about four moments or ways in which a historical voice can be silenced: at the creation of historical documents, at their assembly into an archive, at the moment of their retrieval by historians, and/or at the moment of delivery in a historical narrative. Which, if any, of these kinds of “silencing” have affected our ability to hear Rosa Parks?
• In our readings on Harriet Tubman, Sernett argued that the prevalence of the “Moses” image of Tubman, instead of the “General” image, reflects the preferences and values of the different groups that wrote about her. Why do you think most Americans have preferred or learned about the image of Rosa Parks as an unassuming lady who decided one day that she was too tired to stand up? Is it related to the same reasons why they have preferred “Moses” to the “General” Tubman?
• Indirectly, Danielle McGuire’s book is also a reevaluation of the place of Martin Luther King, Jr., arguably a “legendary American” in his own right, in history and memory. Did this book cause you to think differently about King? About the value of iconic, legendary figures in general?

Looking forward to seeing you in class! And remember, we will be letting out early at 4 p.m., leaving you some time to work on our class presentation.

Image Credit: “Montgomery, Alabama branch, NAACP meeting, about 1947,” Rosa Parks Papers, Library of Congress.