Bravery and conformity: tension between individual courage and social pressure

Bravery and Non-Conformity -- the Story of Rosa Parks

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius," writes Ralph Waldo Emerson at the beginning of his essay "Self-Reliance." (Emerson, 1841) And, one might add, for all women too! In his famous essay, Emerson writes that genius, and true self-reliance and bravery comes from resisting accepted norms, and refusing to follow the crowd, and the mass, popular opinion. Such was the case with Rosa Parks, who held fast to her sense of dignity and worth as a person, risked imprisonment and physical assault, so that she might hold true to her convictions.

Rosa Parks is one of the icons of the American Civil Rights movement, because she is both ordinary and extraordinary. On one hand, Parks was not a minister, nor a great orator. Parks was 'merely' a seamstress who refused to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. However, Parks' single act of defiance, not even performed in the comfort of a collective march or a movement, more than fifty years ago helped touch off the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's. (Shipp, 2005, p.1) True to Emerson's creed, Parks did not accept the current dictates of her society. White, Southern, Jim Crow society said to Parks that she should obey the laws of the land that told her that whites should sit at the front of the bus.

Parks did not wait for the law to tell her what she knew was right. She behaved as if her belief was true for all human beings. Through her inspiring example, African-Americans living in Montgomery boycotted the buses for nearly thirteen months. This came at tremendous personal sacrifice to African-Americans, who were often dependant upon buses to get to work and school, more so than whites. (Dove, 2003, p.1) However, Parks' willingness to put her life on the line, quite literally in a society where defying a white person could mean death, or at very least the loss of her livelihood, enabled other Black men and women to have courage. "Her act of civil disobedience, what seems a simple gesture of defiance so many years later, was in fact a dangerous, even reckless move in 1950's Alabama. In refusing to move, she risked legal sanction and perhaps even physical harm, but she also set into motion something far beyond the control of the city authorities. Mrs. Parks clarified for people far beyond Montgomery the cruelty and humiliation inherent in the laws and customs of segregation." (Shipp, 2005)

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards....Trust thyself." (Emerson, 1841) Parks' actions are the embodiment of this statement. The Montgomery bus boycott continued while formal civil rights organizations mounted a successful Supreme Court challenge to the Jim Crow law that enforced African-American second-class status on the public bus system. (Shipp, 2005, p.1) If it had not been for Parks' self-reliance and bravery, however, this legal victory would never have been fought, never have been won.

By holding true to her own values, Parks became an example to other African-Americans in Montgomery, who may have been frightened to act in such an openly defiant manner. Her example touched the lives of others, without even her explicit intention. It is easy to remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As an icon, as a man who was always great. But on 1955 King was only twenty-six years old, "the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery," and was then "drafted to head the Montgomery Improvement Association," the organization formed to direct the nascent civil rights struggle. As a result of his leadership during the boycott, he became a major civil rights leader. Parks actions touched King's life, Parks genius enabled King's emerging genius for leadership to be realized.

Parks did not seek the limelight. "I did not get on the bus to get arrested," she later said. "I got on the bus to go home." (Dove, 2003, p.1) She was a quiet, private woman. She did not desire, by nature, to stand as an iconoclast, the image of the typical Emersonian, defiant artist. Yet, she took the principle of Emerson to heart that "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide." (Emerson, 1841) Park's act of civil disobedience was as private and quiet as her nature. But it was the very ordinary, private nature of her act that was so seismic. It drew attention to the fact that America was still so racist a society that a seamstress going home after a hard day's work could not peacefully assume her seat without being assaulted. An America made such an act of privately quiet yet assertive dignity a crime had forgotten its values and its promise made to African-Americans after the Civil War.