Put on your dunce cap Arne Duncan and go sit in the corner! And while you’re at it, read a history book or two.
Rosa Parks, a well-loved and respected activist who didn’t know that her actions would spark the beginning of a civil right’s movement, had a quiet dignity about her. She risked gong to jail as a black woman in the South, which is something that no one would want to endure in those days, to feel a sense of well-earned self-respect about who she was as a woman and an individual, no matter what the color was of her skin.
For Arne Duncan to even think that he could possibly consider himself on that level leads me to believe that he is either not in touch with this reality or his ego has been so overblown by the money and prestige afforded him by Broad and Gates that he truly has begun to believe that he is on the same level of a Rosa Parks or others equal to her stature.
Either way, I can’t imagine what President Obama must be thinking. If Obama has the historical understanding of Rosa Parks as I believe he does, he must be wondering how the heck does he get rid of this basketball thumping, no brain, albatross that he is feeling getting tighter and tighter, around his neck.
Please see Jim Horn’s post below on Schools Matter.
Dora
Arne Duncan’s “Rosa Parks Moment”
Having often declared segregated corporate school reform as the “civil rights issue of this generation,” Arne Duncan just placed himself on a whole new circle of Orwellian doublespeak hell by declaring last evening’s extended commercial for the corporate charter crusade as a “Rosa Parks moment.”
From the Hollywood Reporter:
Calling it a “Rosa Parks moment,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan put a momentous stamp on the upcoming release of Davis Guggenheim’s education-reform documentary “Waiting for Superman.”
The occasion was the film’s Wednesday night Washington premiere, organized by distributor Paramount Vantage, with a screening at the Newseum followed by a Q&A with notables involved in the film. That it will have the impact on public policy Parks’ actions ultimately had on the civil rights movement might be unlikely, but a good portion of Washington’s political class attended the event to further investigate the subject matter. . . .
I can think of a couple of ways that this feature-length marketing tool for Eli Broad is not a Rosa Parks moment. First, the person taking the big risk of defying the racist policy that would put black people at the back of the bus was a black person–Rosa Parks. Who is risking what in this present charade crusade? Well, some philanthro-capitalists are risking many millions of dollars, some would say, even though 33 cents on every dollar invested is given back in tax credits. The payoffs could be astronomical, too, if the charterites prevail and end up replacing public schools in urban areas. But Bill Gates or Eli Broad will never go to jail for their efforts or have their livelihoods or lives put in jeopardy.
Another difference between Rosa Parks and the Walton Foundation (it’s too absurd a juxtaposition to even be funny) is that Rosa Parks actually had the support of the civil rights community behind her. In the present instance that Arne thinks is a “Rosa Parks moment,” the following organizations have offered withering criticism of Arne’s Blueprint:
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
National Council for Educating Black Children
National Urban League
Rainbow PUSH Coalition
Schott Foundation for Public Education
In fact, they have offered their own plan for high quality, diverse, and equitable education for all children, a plan that does not involve CEOs, hedge funders, venture philanthropy, EMOs, CMOs, or the ZOO that the oligarchy has put schools in at this point in our history.
Rosa Parks also had the citizens behind her to demand that the laws be changed to make such an arrest impossible in the future. At this present historic tipping point, the citizens and the voters have made it clear in elections in New York and Washington, DC that that they are not on the side of change led by the banksters and casino capitalists who want to gamble the lives of school children on risky ventures that have little or no evidence and research to support them. A Rosa Parks moment? I think not. Rosa Parks, at present, does not need a ride that badly.
Real Facts,
I appreciate the information that you have provided. It sounds interesting and well worth delving into.
Rosa Parks, along with many other civil right’s activists and countless others who bravely marched the streets in the south for the most basic of human rights just to be hosed, beaten, jailed, hung, killed and thrown into rivers, watched their homes burn to the ground, seen their churches burned to the ground with their children inside, seen crosses burned in their yards, be terrorized by a hateful citizenry and watched their leaders be killed, cannot at all be compared to Arne Duncan or what he stands for which is the loss of a public trust through the privatization of what is to be a free and fair education for all of our children.
Dora
Check out Rosa Parks’ Other (Radical) Side
The myth that has grown up around Rosa Parks is of an exhausted Birmingham seamstress who, in 1955, was too tired to give up her seat and move to the colored section so a white man could sit down. According to the myth, this spontaneous act sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and launched the civil rights movement. In the miles of column inches that greeted the news of her death, there were only hints of what really happened.
In fact, Parks’s decision to keep her seat was carefully planned by the NAACP, for which she had worked for 10 years as a secretary. Her arrest did help start the bus boycott, but she played no role in organizing it. And though the boycott has gone down in folklore as a great blow for freedom, it did not even succeed; it was a court order that integrated Birmingham’s buses.
Several black women had already done exactly what Parks later did. They were arrested and charged with minor infractions. Parks’s best known predecessor was Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old high school student who refused to give up her seat on March 2, 1955. She was arrested and taken off the bus kicking and screaming. Police say she was screaming obscenities; she later claimed she was screaming that her constitutional rights were being violated. Not even Miss Colvin’s case was the spontaneous act for which Parks is now generally remembered. The girl had been active in the NAACP Youth Council, and had even discussed strategy with Rosa Parks herself.
The NAACP considered basing a desegregation case on the basis of Miss Colvin’s arrest but soon decided she was not an attractive plaintiff. She was dark, and many blacks wanted a lighter-skinned spokesman. The NAACP also learned she was several months pregnant by a married man, and discovered her habit of breaking out in volleys of curses. This was not a girl conservative black church-goers would support.
As E.D. Nixon, then a leader of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, explained years later, “I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with.” Rosa Parks was far more promising: “morally clean, reliable, nobody had nothing on her.”
The NAACP had been planning a bus boycott for years, and was waiting only for the right person to act as figurehead. Far from being an accidental hero, Parks was carefully groomed for her role. A white integrationist, Virginia Durr, had paid for Parks to attend civil rights strategy seminars at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. The school, known to be rife with Communist sympathizers, was under FBI surveillance.
Moreover, Parks’s role was strictly limited: keep her seat and hold her tongue. Others swung into action immediately to organize the boycott. The very day she was arrested—it was a Thursday—an English professor at all-black Alabama State College named Jo Ann Robinson stayed up all night mimeographing 35,000 leaflets calling for a one-day bus boycott the following Monday. On Friday, she and her students secretly leafleted elementary and high schools. As part of a coordinated effort, Montgomery’s black preachers met and agreed to endorse the Monday boycott from their pulpits, and to hold a mass meeting Monday night at Holt Street Baptist Church to assess the results. That evening, after a surprisingly successful boycott, thousands of blacks crowded into and around the church to hear 26-year-old Martin Luther King give his first public speech. The boycott lasted for more than a year, with both the blacks and the bus company more stubborn than anyone had expected. Blacks organized carpools that even the Citizens Council had to admit operated with “military precision.” Parks played no role in any of this.
You can add BAMN http://www.bamn.com/ to the list of civil rights groups opposing Race to the Top. Read “Save Dr. King’s Vision for America!
Defend the Right to Free Public Education!” on their website.