Rosa Parks on Clarence Thomas: "His confirmation to the highest court in the land would not represent a step forward in the road to racial progress but a u-turn on that road. ...His statements on Brown v. Board of Education case..and even on the Roe v. Wade to me indicate
"that he wants to push the clock back. ...The Supreme Court now appears to be turning its back on the undeniable fact of discrimination and exclusion ...I believe that Judge Thomas will accelerate that trend and that will be destructive for our nation.”
Friends, please, please amplify. The NYPD are now raiding City College. Reports are hundreds of cops. Please, I know that what happened at Columbia tonight is sickening--but this is Part II. And our
@cuny
students are largely working class students of color.
To read Rosa Parks' full statement against the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court (issued before Anita Hill's experiences were made public), see here at the Library of Congress:
Re Rittenhouse, as many have noted, there is a long history of white people targeting those white people who side with Black activism & challenge white supremacy --and a lack of state intervention when they do. A short thread:
The best way to honor John Lewis & C.T. Vivian is not with statements or even renaming the Edmund Pettus Bridge. We must restore & expand the Voting Rights Act. We must insist members of Congress (including Mitch McConnell) actually get this done. Anything less is shameful.
On
#MalcolmX
's birthday, it's important to see the admiration Rosa Parks & Malcolm X had for each other. They met in Nov 1963 because Malcolm was deeply inspired & wanted to meet Parks. She later called him her personal hero. Activists need other activists. Courage needs courage.
.
@Mattel
, your blurb on how Rosa Parks "led an ordinary life as a seamstress until an extraordinary moment on Dec. 1" is just plain wrong. I wrote a book detailing her life of freedom fighting - 2 decades of activism before her arrest & 4 decades after. Can I help you do better?
#InstacartStrike
#AmazonStrike
Please respect the picket line today and don't order from Instacart and Amazon. These workers are doing essential work and deserve essential protective gear, added pay, full sick days, and deep cleaning.
"This could be devastating." A number of workers for two delivery service giants, Amazon and Instacart, are preparing to go on strike. They’re demanding added protections from the coronavirus and a boost in pay because of a massive increase in business,
@SamBrockNBC
reports.
On Malcolm X's birthday, I think about him & Rosa Parks.They meet for the first time in 1963 because he puts out the word he wants to meet her. Courage needs courage; activists need other activists. He talked about 2 civil rights activists with awe-Rosa Parks & Fannie Lou Hamer.
65 yrs ago, the Montgomery bus boycott began. Some key facts: the boycott succeeded because of a massively well-organized carpool system Black people created giving 15,00-20,000 rides a day. It was massively harassed by police.Rosa Parks lost her job five weeks into the boycott.
Lots of people constantly call on young activists, particularly BLM, to be like Martin Luther King. They have no idea what they're really calling for. Five ways to actually BE like Martin Luther King on what would have been his 94th birthday.
During the Montgomery bus boycott, Rev. Bob and Jean Graetz spoke out in favor of the boycott in church, worked on behalf of the boycott, sat in the "Black" section at the movie theater. Their house was bombed twice:
Fun fact: this is just not true. In 1964, Brooklyn CORE--who'd been challenging NY housing, school & job inequality with little change--called for a stall-in on highways to the World's Fair. White and Black moderates were horrified & wanted King to repudiate. King said no.
Fun fact: Martin Luther King Jr. opposed blocking roadways & transit paths indefinitely because he understood it was more likely to piss people off than convince them.
This is an exercise in vanity, not activism.
And the list could go on. Just as in Kenosha, there is a long history of the white people who dared step outside and challenge white supremacy becoming targets of violence & lack of state protection alongside the Black activists & community members they were organizing with.
Detroiter Viola Liuzzo was killed driving marchers home after the Selma-to Montgomery march. There was an FBI undercover in the car of whites who killed her. The FBI scuttled the trial and instead spread rumors about Liuzzo's personal life.
Year after year, I'm discouraged by the ways we continue to miss Rosa Parks' full life of activism-2 decades before her bus stand & 40 years in Detroit fighting Northern racism after. So I wrote this: The Real Rosa Parks Story Is Better Than the Fairy Tale
Rosa Parks would be 109 today. To her death in 2005, she insisted the movement wasn't over & there was much more work to be done. She sat on a People's Tribunal in 1967 to call attention to police brutality in Detroit & served on many political prisoner defense committees.
Also, in Montgomery, librarian Juliette Morgan wrote a letter to the newspaper in favor of the boycott, criticizing White Citizen's Councils as "cowardly Southern white men." She lost her job, was harassed incessantly (rocks thrown at her, prowlers, calls). She took her own life.
On this King holiday, one of the greatest distortions of Dr. King's legacy in recent years has been how people try to use King to chastise Black Lives Matter--erasing King's long history calling out police brutality North & South and his challenge Northern liberals. A thread:
If there is an FBI in the afterlife, beware. My father, Athan Theoharis, died yesterday.The son of a Greek immigrant who grew up poor in Milwaukee & scored a scholarship to the Univ. of Chicago at 16; a Marquette University historian who devoted his life to documenting FBI abuses
Episcopalian seminarian Jonathan Daniels joined SNCC's organizing in Lowndes County. When a local deputy drew his gun on Black teenager Ruby Sales, Daniels pushed her down, took the bullet and died. His death deeply impacted Stokely Carmichael, who told Daniels' family himself.
In the 1961 Freedom Rides, whites Jim Peck & Walter Bergman were mercilessly attacked --Peck needed 53 stitches. The FBI knew of the mob amassing in Birmingham against the Rides; their informant alerted the whites gathering where the first bus would arrive.
TDIH, on Feb.. 4, 1913, Rosa Parks was born. Her grandfather was a supporter of Marcus Garvey; when Klan violence escalated after WWI, he would sit out at night with his shotgun to protect their family home. As a 6 year old, she would sometimes sit vigil with him.
Please amplify: to accompany the new film The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, we created a suite of lessons for educators to teach her life, the boycott's organizing, Parks' challenge to Northern racism and critical thinking about master narratives:
Friends, please keep shining a light on Columbia & Yale and the criminalization of students there. But where is the outrage when this happens at
@cuny
& Brooklyn College-when working class students of color are criminalized instead of Ivy League students?
These photos of King in Chicago are powerful. They moved into a North Lawndale tenement in 1966 to bring home the realities of poverty, urban neglect & segregation. Coretta Scott King recalled, "They were so happy to have us there."
Just bought some more of these beautiful stamps of the amazing Gwen Ifill. The Post Office is essential to our democracy, which may be why Republicans want to abandon it. Trying to do my small part to
#SaveThePostOffice
Rosa Parks & Stokely Carmichael admired each other. In 1966, Parks went to Lowndes County to support the independent Black political party Carmichael & SNCC were building there for voting rights. That fall, Carmichael spoke in Detroit & called Parks (in the front row) his hero.
Can confirm from court support details. Columbia got charges lowered, released fairly quickly. CCNY arrestees were stuck in the backlog, charges not lowered, last releases weren’t until around 5pm today following legal threat.
As appalling & dishonest as comparisons being made to
#RosaParks
by conservatives this week, they couldn't get away with it as blithely if liberals didn't already misuse & mischaracterize lifelong freedom fighter Rosa Parks (without broad reproach). A short historical reminder:
64 yrs ago,"pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed," Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus.She was a longtime activist around criminal justice, voting rights, desegregation but her bus stand was not planned that day. 6 key points to get us beyond the myths:
2. Insist allies walk the walk. “We do not need allies who are more devoted to order than to justice" King made clear the need for disruptive protest. "If our direct action programs alienate so-called friends … they never were really our friends.”
1. Make clear that there "can be no compromise" around police brutality. King understood that the problem of policing in the US was not simply some bad apples. Rather the police and the courts act "as enforcers" in Northern ghettos in a system of "internal colonialism."
4. Be angry at injustice and not apologize for it: “It is purposeless to tell Negroes they should not be enraged" King stressed, "when they should be,”
It's important today to remember that Martin Luther King had personal experience with police abuse & a systematic critique of the role of the police in the North as well as the South. Yet he is often mis-used and falsely pitted against contemporary moments like BLM. A thread:
5. Make clear racism is not just a Southern sickness but a national cancer: “As the nation, Negro and white, trembled with outrage at police brutality in the South," King highlighted, "police misconduct in the North was rationalized, tolerated, and usually denied.”
3.Reframe the issue from Black behavior to white illegality: "When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out…he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law."
TDIH, Rosa Parks was born. While many know she wasn't a simple apolitical seamstress, her ideas about US racism & struggle are still largely unrecognized. So for today—at a time in this country when we need her ideas more than ever—a short thread highlighting Parks as a thinker:
65 yrs ago, longtime activist Rosa Parks made her stand on the bus. She wasn't meek or quiet or tired or old. For yrs, people asked me to do a YA version of my Parks bio to cut through the myths about her. Finally I could see it. The book comes out February 2 with
@brandycolbert
!
The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North is out today! The essays reject the idea of northern racism as episodic or transplanted rather than state-sponsored & indigenous.They argue it's impossible to avoid the Jim Crow North as a central concept for understanding the US today.
At the Lorraine Motel with the
#PoorPeoplesCampaign
. Rev. Barber reminds that we honor Dr King not by worshipping the tombs of the prophet but recommitting to the struggle against racism, poverty, and militarism. "Turn up now!"
#MLK50
There's been a lot of misuse & mischaracterization of Martin Luther King & Rosa Parks this week to decry the uprisings taking place from Minneapolis to Atlanta. In the interest of historical accuracy, a short thread & reminder of what King and Parks actually said and did:
Brooklyn College students called out the long history of Islamophobia from undercover cops embedded in Muslim student groups to the president demonizing peaceful, pro-Palestine demos as dangerous. “The vibrant diversity which makes our school beautiful is not safe in her hands.”
A broad, multiracial coalition of students who called for the resignation of the president of Columbia or Harvard would be big news. But because this story concerns a public college, little attention has been paid to it.
TDIH, Fannie Lou Hamer was born. One of the least known aspects of her work was the Freedom Farm Cooperative and pig bank. Fannie Lou Hamer's Pioneering Food Activism Is a Model for Today
"We do not need allies who are more devoted to order than to justice.” King explained. “….I hear a lot of talk these days about our direct action talk alienating former friends. If our direct action programs alienate so-called friends….they never were really our friends.”
It's disturbing how Dr. King has again been rolled out to chastise current protests.I've also been troubled by how King's long record calling out police brutality & the false discourses of 'crime' & 'culture' used to support it is erased. So I wrote this:
Please amplify: over 500
@cuny
faculty across 25 campuses signed an open letter criticizing
@ChancellorCUNY
's decision to call in the NYPD on the Gaza encampment, highlight the different charges CUNY students are facing from Columbia students, and call on him to drop the charges.
So excited to share the news that The Rebellious Life of Mrs Rosa Parks is being turned into a documentary by the great directors
@JHamilton71
&
@redrubes14
and executive produced by
@soledadobrien
for Peacock:
Today would have been Rosa Parks' 111th birthday. Of the many facets left out of the ways we understand her activism and honor her legacy is her deep understanding of global human rights, anti-colonialism and her persistent critique of US foreign policy. A short thread:
I had the great fortune of taking a class with Julian Bond in college & being his TA years later. Today we publish Julian Bond's Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. This is a master class in the civil rights movement, as Julian taught it for 2 decades.
Rosa Parks hated that 'tired feet' story: “I didn’t tell anyone my feet were hurting. It was just popular... because they wanted to give some excuse other than the fact that I didn’t want to be pushed around.” For more on her life of freedom fighting, see .
Ella Baker mentored Rosa Parks. She mentored many of the young people of SNCC. She opened space for Harlem parents to advocate for equal & excellent schools for their children. Her birthday today reminds us of the crucial organizing work of mentoring & holding space for others.
Over 150,000 people with the multiracial
#PoorPeoplesCampaign
descended on DC today to insist this country must do better than celebrate “essential workers” but treat their lives as expendable, value guns more than lives & war more than living wages. Fight poverty not the poor!
Friends, please amplify and pay attention to the police raid and violence happening right now at CCNY alongside Columbia. Shame on
@ChancellorCUNY
for sanctioning the NYPD to hurt our
@cuny
students.
Tomorrow will be Rosa Parks' 110th birthday. She was adamant to the end of her life in 2005 that "the struggle continues" & there was much more work to be done. But too often we trap her on the bus on a long ago Dec. evening, refusing what her legacy asks of us today. A thread:
"They said we couldn't bring together poor Black people, poor whites, poor Latinx, poor indigenous, veterans, the homeless, LGBTQ youth, Jews, Christians, Muslims, elders to millennialials from across the whole country. But we did."
#PoorPeoplesCampaign
The trailer for The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (adapted from my book) directed by
@JHamilton71
and
@redrubes14
and executive-produced by
@soledadobrien
has dropped! The film premieres
@Tribeca
on Thursday
In memorializing MLK, we need to actually see Coretta Scott King & her lifelong activism which begins before they marry, influences his and continues for decades after his death. 'I am not a symbol, I am an activist': the untold story of Coretta Scott King
We need to reckon with how much Dr. King called out his liberal Northern allies, for allowing segregation &inequality at home, favoring damaging cultural explanations for urban inequality, & decrying disruption, all of which continue today. So I wrote this:
We need to learn more abt FBI surveillance of Black women activists: the FBI surveilled Coretta Scott King for years after MLK's assassination fearing ways she was tying civil rights to antiwar movement and Mae Mallory & Harlem Nine 1958 protest of NYC schools and Ida B Wells...
Searching early FBI files at
@fold3
, I found a couple of reports about Ida B. Wells. From 1919: "she is considered by all of the Intelligence officers as one of the most dangerous negro agitators" …
King zeroed in on the differential outrage between police brutality in the South & North, despite Black protest: “As the nation, Negro & white, trembled with outrage at police brutality in the South, police misconduct in the North was rationalized, tolerated, & usually denied.”
Obama denigrates contemporary activists but celebrates earlier heroes like Rosa Parks & Fannie Lou Hamer, willfully ignoring how 'snappy' they were. Parks herself noted how "a militant Negro" was treated "almost a freak of nature..many times ridiculed by others of his own group.”
#TDIH
, 105 yrs ago,
#RosaParks
was born. When she was young, she got in trouble with her grandmother for defending herself against a white boy. Her response: “I would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated, than not be allowed to say ‘I don’t like it.’”
Pro tip: being against "forced busing" was the preferred northern way to oppose desegregation (while distinguishing themselves from the south). Most students were bused before "busing" without objection from white parents. As Julian Bond observed, "It's not the bus, it's us."
We have to stop calling it the Boston ‘busing crisis’. It was the Boston segregation crisis. Most Boston students were bused before ‘busing’ to maintain the city’s segregated schools. My piece on the 50th anniversary of decision ordering desegregation:
Shame on
@Mattel
for claiming to honor Rosa Parks with a new Barbie, while saying she "led an ordinary life as a seamstress until an extraordinary moment on Dec. 1." Parks had been an activist for 2 decades by then on criminal justice, voter registration.
Rosa Parks opposed the nomination of Clarence Thomas, saying his appointment "would not represent a step forward in the road to racial progress but a u-turn on that road" and thought the Court was "turning its back on the undeniable fact of discrimination and exclusion."
My father spent his life unearthing & exposing the FBI's abuses of power. After 9/11, he grew more despairing that the country was falling prey to the same fear-mongering & repeating past mistakes: Athan Theoharis, Chronicler of F.B.I. Abuses, Dies at 84
It's one of MLK's most misused quotes. King criticized the "myth of time" over and over: "Time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. ...I’m convinced that the forces of ill will have often used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill...
If we're serious about honoring
#RosaParks
, then being appalled by conservative comparisons is nowhere near enough. She spent her life taking action after action for justice--not because she knew what it would change but she didn't want it "taken for granted you were satisfied."
A whistleblower for democracy who devoted his career to exposing the FBI’s wrongdoings, defending voting rights, calling out the post-9/11 surveillance state, and warning the country was repeating past mistakes. May his memory be a lesson.
At the age of 19, she married a politically-active barber Raymond Parks-"the first real activist I ever met"-who was organizing to protect & defend the Scottsboro boys from execution. This was dangerous work--she recalled late night meetings with guns on the table for protection.
As she told her grandmother when she was young and got in trouble for standing up against a white bully, "I would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated, than not be allowed to say 'I don't like it.'"
"A first-class citizen does not beg for freedom. A first-class citizen does not plead to the white power-structure to give him something that the whites have no power to give or take away. Human rights are human rights, not white rights."--Gloria Richardson. Rest in Power.
This is an important synopsis of Louise Little’s life and her political influences that shaped her son Malcolm X’s life: Overlooked No More: Louise Little, Activist and Mother of Malcolm X
Despite calls from Black & white moderates, King refused to condemn plans to stall cars to the '64 World's Fair. “We do not need allies who are more devoted to order than to justice.….If our direct action programs alienate so-called friends….they never were really our friends.”
Today is Ella Baker's birthday. And guess what came in the mail this weekend? Our book Julian Bond's Time to Teach which comes out Jan 12th! It's a narrative history of the Southern civil rights movement drawn from his teaching lectures. Like many, Ella Baker was his mentor.
So much of the material on Rosa Parks on the web is wrong or incomplete. So we made this website to teach Rosa Parks's life of freedom fighting & the long Black freedom struggle, particularly around criminal justice, differently. Please take a look:
A bit of good news on the anniversary of Julian Bond's death.Pam Horowitz & I have compiled & edited Julian's teaching lectures into a narrative of the Southern civil rights movement. Out in January from
@BeaconPressBks
. Danny Lyon contributed photos; Vann Newkirk the afterword.
At the age of 30, she joined the local NAACP because she wanted to vote. This was WWII & she was galled that Black people including her brother Sylvester were serving in the military and yet most weren't allowed to vote at home. After 3 tries, she succeeded in registering.
President Obama praised her "singular act of courage". Yet, Parks herself was clear: “Over the years I have been rebelling against second class citizenship. It didn’t begin when I was arrested.” She described it as a "life history of being rebellious."
Today's the day that The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks adapted from my book, directed by
@JHamilton71
&
@redrubes14
and executive produced by
@soledadobrien
premieres
@Tribeca
! Here's the trailer. You can get tickets to watch it at home at:
What sustained a 382 day boycott was not walking but a massively well-organized carpool system with 40 pickup stations across town, giving 10,000-15,000 rides a day. The police ticketed the carpool mercilessly. In Feb., the city arrested 89 boycott leaders including Rosa Parks.
So excited to announce that on October 19th, the documentary adapted from my book and directed by
@JHamilton71
and
@redrubes14
will premiere nationally on
@peacock
!
To the end of her life at age 92, she believed that the struggle was not over and there was much more work to be done. She placed her greatest hope in the energy & spirit & militancy of young people. "Freedom fighters never retire," she once told an audience. She never did.
Rosa Parks & Malcolm X met for the last time a week before his assassination when he comes to speak in Detroit & she gets an award. He signs her program. She later described him as her personal hero. Both understood & drew strength from the courage of others--a lesson for today.
Today is the 54th anniversary of Dr. King's assassination. Too often we trap King in the South when throughout his adult life, he was clear segregation & inequality were a national cancer, not a Southern malady and he called out the limits of Northern liberalism at home.A thread:
Before Dec 1, Rosa Parks fought to prevent execution of Scottsboro boys & Jeremiah Reeves, pressed for justice for rape survivors, organized voter registration, attended Highlander, organized NAACP youth council, fundraised 4 Claudette Colvin's case-all amid dangers of this work.
At the age of 42,"pushed as far as she could be pushed" & angered by the acquittal of the 2 men who'd killed Emmett Till, she refused to give up her seat on the bus & was arrested. That night she decided to pursue a legal case. The Women's Political Council called a bus boycott.
An honest reckoning with King's legacy & what it asks of us today must begin with acknowledging King's long history highlighting police brutality outside of the South and his insistence that Northern liberals see their own racism & push for change at home not only the South.