I just finished reading The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theodoris, and I highly recommend it for those who like to read good history and especially for those who are concerned about how history is sometimes manipulated to make it fit into a nice narrative in which we can feel good about our society. Theodoris' thesis is that Rosa Parks was a life-long activist who did not simply feel "too tired" to get up from her seat. She was a strong civil right activist long before the Montgomery bus boycott and would be even more committed to the struggle for her people years after.
Most of this goes contrary to the story we have been told about Rosa Parks and provides a different perspective on our nation's slow-walk toward equality. It is also a myth perpetuated by scholars who find "comfortable history" more palatable than the story of a tough as steel woman who believed in self-defense, admired the young black power activists, who spent more time fighting discrimination in Detroit than Alabama, and whose hero was Malcom X. Too many Americans would find it difficult to accept this version because it points out the messiness of history, and reaffirms what most good historians know and that is that loose ends are not always neatly tied together in the end. More important, the story of Rosa Parks creates another strain within Ameican history that challenges the hegemonic narrative we push so hard in public schools and in many universities.
At the same time, we find that myth-making is not simply a task of American scholars and intellectuals. Currently, that is happening in Venezuela where El Comandante's followers are writing history for their next electoral campaign. In a few years all we will know about Hugo Chavez will be what will benefit the Chavistas in power--or if they lose the election, seeking power. Rosa Parks hated the fact that the story line was that she was tired from working hard when in reality she was tired of being discriminated against. For Chavez, embalming someone and putting them in display was one more symbol of capitalist debauchery. Now his enemies will have another example of El Comandante's "socialist contradictions" to point out.
Too often historical figures become footnotes in a history that we can manipulate for our own politics and our own causes. We create an overarching narrative or paradigm and find the people and events, fine tune them, or blatantly manipulate them, and proclaim it history. Most all of us are guilty of it in one form or another but some of us try to keep to the "truth" as closely as we can, while others simply rewrite it as most scholars have done with Rosa Parks and most Chavista historians will do with Hugo Chavez. And with today's post-modernist notion that there is no truth except interpretation it has become much easier to do so. Conservative and liberal historians use to simply leave out things, today's historians simply interpret them which ever way they want.
While no doubt that much truth is in the eyes of the beholder there are facts that cannot be ignored. We can interpret Rosa Park's actions which ever way we want, but we cannot ignore what she said about those actions over and over again. We can argue that black power advocates hated traditional civil rights advocates but we cannot argue that those traditional advocates and those black power activist met numerous times, held conferences together, or worked with each other in particular issues. We can say racism was a "southern thing" but we cannot deny the rampant discrimination, segregation and police brutality in the north. We can say that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a man of peace and nonviolence and that he loved this country, but we cannot erase his words to the effect that American was one of the worse killers of innocent people in history. We can now claim him as an American hero but we cannot forever hide the polls taken during his time which showed him to be one of the most hated men among Whites.
Yes, we can manipuate intepretations but we cannot erase facts, documents, speeches and personal words even if we do choose to hide them. In the end, history is not "comfortable" for the human species. And no good scholar or writer should ever be part of a historical and scholarly approach that tries to make it so. We might be strongly conservative, liberal, left or whatever ideology we believe in, but that does not give us the right to consciously lie, distort or misinterprest. If we really believe that what we write is the "truth" or the right solution, we ought to have the faith that it will make a difference. Or as the apostle John said, that it will make us free. To say we believe in something or someone and then manipulate the facts in order for that something or someone to prosper unfairly is an admission that we don't have faith in what we believe. Sure, truth does not always triumph but trying to tell the truth is liberating to us and to the causes we espouse.
I always remember an old Chicano activist who saw himself as the ultimate socialist. He preached the poor people's ability to see through the lies of the politicians. And he knew they would pick his candidate, but he helped the truth along by ripping down all the opposition's posters and did everything to prevent the other side from participating in the public debate. So much for the faith in his cause. Today, he is just another rich lawyer. If we don't believe in what we preach or write then we shouldn't write or preach it. And if we find ourselves writing a history that fits comfortably into a narrative we know not to be fully true, then we ought to take a hard look at what we are doing.
