Author gives textbooks a failing grade for their portrayal of Rosa Parks

November 20, 2005|By Eric Arnesen, professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is writing a biography of civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph.


By Herbert Kohl

New Press, 126 pages, $22.95

The death of Rosa Parks at 92 last month was an occasion for the nation to commemorate a woman long seen as an "American hero" and an "icon for equality, dignity, respect," as the news media reminded us. The story line is a simple one: Parks' refusal to give up her seat on a segregated bus in 1955 is widely remembered as the act that launched the modern civil rights movement that ultimately overturned Jim Crow, ended the disenfranchisement of blacks and ushered in a revolution in American race relations. In the recent words of the Senate's chaplain, retired Rear Adm. Barry Black, "She ignited a movement that aroused our national conscience." By sitting down, he said, Parks "enabled millions to stand up in a better world." Or, as Oprah Winfrey put it, "I would not be standing here today, nor standing where I stand every day, had she not chosen to sit down."

Even before she died, writer Herbert Kohl was troubled by what America--and its schoolchildren in particular--knew or learned about Parks. His focus in the brief and passionately argued "She Would Not Be Moved" is the inadequate way elementary-school teachers and textbooks portray her act and its implications. Visiting numerous schools and talking with countless teachers and students, he discovered mis-statements of fact, misrepresentations of history, an absence of context and, equally bad in his view, interpretations that evaded the larger questions of American racism and the character of social change. In this book--an extended essay, really, accompanied by a long appendix of excerpts from offending textbooks--Kohl deftly catalogs problems with prevailing presentations of Parks and offers his own, more historically accurate, politically pointed and age-appropriate alternative.

So just what is wrong with the dominant story line found in children's textbooks? Not quite everything, Kohl insists, but a lot. What students learn, he found from his examination of textbooks and curricula, can be summed up in a phrase: "Rosa Was Tired." But Parks, as the vast number of historical studies of the modern civil rights movement show, was no simple, weary seamstress; rather, she was an activist in the NAACP, an integral part of the black-activist networks in Montgomery, Ala., and a participant at the radical Highland Center's interracial training sessions in Tennessee. "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 organized struggle for freedom into a personal act of frustration," Kohl complains.

Unfortunately, in his reading, this is precisely what children's textbooks do. Not only do students rarely encounter the historical Rosa Parks, they also come away from their reading or other projects with little sense of the historical context necessary to understand what she did and why the movement ultimately prevailed. Activists in Montgomery had been laying the groundwork for a challenge to segregation for some time prior to Parks' arrest. In Kohl's view, the impressive "traditions of community solidarity, risk taking, and organizing in black communities are passed over in silence." Once the protests were under way, members of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the broad-based community organization that was formed to coordinate the 381-day boycott, were subject to physical violence, arrest and other forms of harassment. Black Mongtomery's protests were a "serious and dangerous matter," he argues, and the cost of victory was high. "Teaching the story of Rosa Parks should not have a happy face."

A further problem with the Parks-was-a-tired-but-courageous-woman-t aking-a-stand narrative involves what Kohl calls a "white-washed" version of segregation's history. The students he spoke with knew little or nothing about segregation or how it was maintained. They came away from their instruction with "no concept of the legalized, institutionalized racism, organized racist groups, and personal hatreds faced by African American people that created the need for a liberation movement." Their instructional materials manage to leave out accounts of "specific white individuals who are racist and do horrible things to black people," Kohl found. He disagrees with those teachers who, believing that young children cannot (or should not be asked to) understand such disturbing matters, are reluctant to expose their students to the "harsh and violent history of segregation." Instead, he favors those who believe that "avoiding the horrors of racism was just another way of perpetuating them."