New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Where's today's Rosa?

New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Where's today's Rosa?Where's today's Rosa?

Civil rights movement started with Parks, but ended with King

There's a reason thousands of people turned out for Rosa Parks' funeral yesterday. On Dec. 1, 1955, when she refused to lift her bottom from a bus seat in Montgomery so that a white man could put his down, American history was cut into two parts - before the civil rights movement and after it.

Parks had no idea that her refusal would become a standard by which the nonviolent movement would judge itself as it grew to take on all of the grand dragons of Southern segregation. Yet it is important to understand that Rosa Parks, the young Martin Luther King Jr. and the many others whom we came to associate with the civil rights movement were not the petulant adolescents we saw take over most protest movements within 10 years.

The civil rights movement was a shooting star that brought much light, but it really only lasted until Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. By then, King was already losing ground to the separatist and "revolutionary" fantasies that misled younger black people into laughable obsessions with Africa. Ethnic identity became largely cosmetic. There was also the camouflage gear that has yet to leave us, and the addled admiration of mush-mouthed "leaders" like the Black Panthers.

It is almost 50 years since Rosa Parks took her position in the pantheon with Abigail Adams, Harriet Tubman and all of the rest of the remarkable American women who fought for women's rights, abolition, public education and the endlessly important aspects of the public good that could not come into existence unless people stood up to all that held them back. We have come a long way and are still behind the eight ball because the civil rights organizations are largely ineffectual, and the tribal impulses that had nothing to do with the civil rights movement have become, once again, a threat to the hard facts of what will get us out of this ongoing mess.

Affirmative action and the diversity hustle are now well established responses to bigotry. However important such policies might be for now, the irony is that they make it possible for our nation to continue to avoid the big, raggedy elephant in the room - inadequate public education. Hidden behind quotas and set-asides, the idea of providing high-quality education across the lines of color and class remains in the shadows.

We need a movement focused on this problem. Quality education is central to our getting as near as possible to equality, which actually means an equal chance to compete, not equal privilege.

Things are surely much better than they were when Rosa Parks declined to get up, but with a much clearer understanding of what we need in order to develop our population - which is always our greatest natural resource - we could do much, much better right now.

Originally published on November 3, 2005