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Rosa Parks
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Background
The Civil Rights Movement
“Rosa Parks” is inspired by the progress and setbacks experienced during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This movement fought for equality, freedom, and justice for Black Americans. An important goal of civil rights activists like Rosa Parks was to end legalized segregation in the United States by abolishing “Jim Crow” laws that prohibited Black people from entering white-only establishments. Civil rights activists also advocated for voting rights and protested state-sanctioned violence committed against Black Americans.
“Rosa Parks” the poem begins with a precursor to the civil rights movement—the creation of the first all-Black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), in 1925 (Lines 1-2). From there, the poem progresses to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed school segregation in the United States. Brown v. Board of Education was a crucial victory, but its implementation met with delays and resistance from school districts. In 1957, for example, President Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed the National Guard to integrate a high school in Little Rock, after the Governor of Arkansas refused.
On top of institutional resistance, racial progress was also met with violence from racist white Americans. “Rosa Parks” references a Gwendolyn Brooks poem about a lynching in Little Rock, Arkansas, that took place shortly after the decision in Brown v. Board of Education (Lines 8-9) and addresses the torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till (Lines 16-37). Till’s killers were acquitted by an all-white jury, but Till’s open-casket funeral and images of his horribly mutilate face sparked grief, shock, and outrage; Till’s murder prompted further civil rights protests.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks kicked off a NAACP-planned boycott of buses in Montgomery, Alabama, by refusing to give her seat on a bus to a white man. This brave act is, of course, integral to the poem. Led by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the Montgomery Bus Boycott spurred many other similar boycotts and sit-ins, including one at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, alluded to in Lines 51-53 of the poem.
The Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts Movement began after the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, when, in response, the poet Amiri Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem. Developed with ideas from the Black Power movement, the Black Arts Movement sought to create separate cultural spaces for Black people and expressed the need for self-determination for Black people and the beauty and strength of being Black.
Along with Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jay Wright, Maya Angelou, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, James Baldwin, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni were important members of the Black Arts Movement.
Giovanni organized the first Black Arts Festival in her hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, and she edited a Cincinnati-based Black art journal titled Conversation. Giovanni first two books of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgement, both published in 1968, marked her as a poet associated with the Black Arts Movement.
While Giovanni’s poetic career and fame have endured well beyond the end of the Black Arts Movement, her work continues to engage themes important to it, including the beauty and strength of being Black and the right of Black people to determine their own destiny. “Rosa Parks,” for example, celebrates Parks’s incredible strength and courage and emphasizes how her actions changed laws and minds.
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