How Rosa Parks’ Legacy Lives On In The Black Lives Matter Movement

Sixty-one years ago, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus and settled into American history. We’ve seen the iconic pictures of Parks getting booked at the police station, or later staged seated on a bus looking pensively out the window. Parks has become one of the great, mythic figures of the Civil Rights era ― a kind of sanctified figure who feels worlds away from the current, volatile era of social justice. But she isn’t. 

Today’s fight for civil rights and social justice may, on the surface, seem like the very antithesis of the movement in which Parks played an integral part. In many ways, this is true. The intersection of technology, social media, and grassroots activism has produced a very different kind of struggle. The #BlackLivesMatter movement, created by Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza, has been criticized for being divisive (”All lives matter!”), disruptive, aimless, and even violent, in the wake of heated protests in Ferguson and, more recently, Chicago.

#BlackLivesMatter protestors are considered a stark contrast to the apparent respectability of the civil rights activists of the 1960s. When we think of those protesters, we think of peaceful black people marching quietly in church clothes, turning the other cheek and nobly rising above the abuse of water-hose wielding police officers and tear gas.

Rosa Park's justifiable anger and defiance is what links today’s civil rights activist to Parks and her contemporaries. In that sense, the #BlackLivesMatter movement is not a disruption but a continuation of the work that Parks and others began.

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