Summary

In the mainstream narrative, Rosa Parks is associated exclusively with her decision to not give up her bus seat. This narrows and dilutes her lifelong activism. Furthermore, focusing on seats on buses or at lunch counters shifts the focus away from the fact that activists like Parks were more concerned with dismantling systems of inequality than simply getting a seat next to a white person. This also makes the movement less relevant to contemporary circumstances.

Substantive desegregation sought to disrupt systems of material denial, resource hoarding, and degrees of citizenship and sought criminal justice reform, antipoverty programs, school equity, anticolonialism, union rights, and more. These broader visions of human rights and economic justice are often excluded from popular narratives of the civil rights movement which focus instead on the narrow concepts of personal freedom, color blindness, and seats next...