Picture Paragraphs

There is a trap that many of us fall into when imagining struggles against power. We imagine that we must be the lone hero, standing up against the indomitable might of our oppressors. We imagine ourselves taking heroic stands – like David against goliath, like Rosa Parks against racism. Or we imagine ourselves becoming powerful, inspirational singular leaders – like Martin Luther King Jr., like Malcolm X.

But what these imagined images fail to make note of is the power around those people. Google recently did an icon image for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and it directly expresses what I’m talking about.

I particularly like this image because it emphasizes one often overlooked aspect of the Civil Rights movement – that it involved a whole lot of people!

Let’s look at the Montgomery bus boycotts, a story which most people are familiar with. Most people will tell you something like this: Rosa Parks was on the bus one day when she all of a sudden decided that she wasn’t going to move to the back of the bus, sparking the community of Montgomery to come to her aid. Thus began the boycott that would eventually lead to the desegregation of the bus system.

Few people are able to go into deeper detail. But we don’t need much to realize that the boycott was actually an incredibly complex undertaking. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted over a year – 381 days, to be exact. In 1950, over 900,000 Black people lived in Montgomery. But these 900,000 Black people were not boycotting their jobs. They were not boycotting their grocery stores, and they were not boycotting their lives. This means that, for over a year, 900,000 Blacks in Montgomery had to find alternate ways to get to work, to get home, to get to the grocery store, and to generally get around the city.

Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1st; by December 3rd, the vast majority of Montgomery’s Black population was boycotting. It is absurd to imagine that this occurred in a vacuum. It is ludicrous to imagine that after Rosa Park’s arrest, a previously disparate community suddenly came together out of nowhere in order to support her. No. Based on the speed with which the community reacted and the clarity of the community’s action, we can be fairly sure of several things. The first is that there was already a network throughout Montgomery, through which information and discussion could travel quickly and efficiently. Second, is that the members of these networks were of generally the same mindset; there were little to no people saying, “Well, I don’t know, I don’t think our segregated bus system is all that bad.” Finally, we know that this network was able to spring into action. There was no hemming and hawing about what kind of action would be best, which would be the most efficient.

So much of the time, discussions criticizing society end in the lament, “But what can I do?” We see only Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King as the movers in the civil rights movement; we think that we must make ourselves like them before we can even start to make a difference. And, because we can never make ourselves into a hero of such mythic proportions, we think that, until someone that powerful does show up, we can only wait around, doing nothing, being
ineffectual.

We as activists must realize that change was never brought about by a single person. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has become lionized, certainly. Yet, when we recognize that the Civil Rights movement was won not by a single person, but by a whole network of people, a whole movement of people, working towards a common goal, we can begin to imagine the next steps of our own movements.