Rosa Parks

Nikki Giovanni’s “Rosa Parks,” part of her 2002 collection Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, is an important poem written by one of the most accomplished, celebrated, and recognizable living poets in the United States.

“Rosa Parks,” named for famed the civil rights icon, takes readers through the creation of the first all-Black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), in 1925. The porters’ union was an important precursor to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s; its formation becomes a refrain that organizes and propels the verse. The poem is also inspired by progress and setbacks experienced during the civil rights movement, including Thurgood Marshall’s Supreme Court victory in Brown v. Board of Education, the vicious racially motivated murder of fourteen-year-old Emmet Till, and Parks’s brave decision to take a stand against segregation while riding a Montgomery city bus.

Giovanni’s poem is an extended metaphor that compares the civil rights movement to a train. Like a train, the movement has many interlocking and interdependent parts; requires many people to start, propel, and steer it; transports many people along with it; and has the ability to travel long distances.