Strike Three. Given three chances to nominate a Hispanic to the Supreme Court, George Bush struck out, leaving the Nation's largest minority unrepresented on the Nation's highest court.
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Instead, he chose a distinguished Italian New Jerseyan from my county, a judge who maintains his chambers in Downtown Newark (my city), despite the fact that the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, on which he sits, meets mostly in Philly and sits here only two weeks a year. Alito also judges moot court at Seton Hall Law School, in Downtown Newark; lives in West Caldwell, my county (Essex); was born in Trenton, New Jersey's state capital; went to college, undergrad, at Princeton; and was called 'very much a Jersey guy' by one reporter on cable news. (I will let pass, for the moment, the insult in dropping the "New" from "New Jersey". Would a reporter call New York "York", New Hampshire "Hampshire", or New Mexico "Mexico"? I don't think so.)
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This is all sort of happy news for me as a New Jerseyan and Newarker, especially inasmuch as the backdrop for the report from Newark was our very handsome Federal Courthouse, which should help dispel some of the ridiculously outdated negative perceptions of my splendid city. [Click here to see photos of other splendid Newark sights at my Newark website, www.resurgencecity.org.] Alas, it is also a blatant attempt to influence the New Jersey Governor's race, in which the Republican, multimillionaire Doug Forrester, is running an extremely ugly campaign, accusing the Democrat, megamillionaire Jon Corzine, not only of tolerating corruption but of actually being corrupt himself, and thus trying to portray himself as Mr. Clean. In this context , the nomination of Alito must be seen as an attempt to extend Alito's spotless reputation to the Republican Party in general and thus sway voters next week. We'll see if it works. I hope it does not.
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Hype Lying in State. Rosa Parks is being honored in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol Building, the first woman so honored and only the second black. (It is a tribute to the incompetence and stupidity of American media today that I still don't know who the first black was, since media didn't bother to add that relevant bit of information.)
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CNN's story today contains this preposterous quote:

"I rejoice that my country recognizes that this woman changed the course of American history, that this woman became a cure for the cancer of segregation," said the Rev. Vernon Shannon, 68, pastor of John Wesley African-Methodist-Episcopal Zion in Washington[.]

Last week, on the satiric cable show The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, Stephen Colbert used the word "overrated" in connection with Rosa Parks, to initial groans and hoots of disapproval from the audience until he went on comedically. I don't want to be comic about this. Rosa Parks truly is grossly overrated.
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I have tried to research exactly what it is that Rosa Parks did to warrant being called "The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement", and came up with exactly this: she refused to get up from a bus seat because she was tired. That's it.
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Oh, she had been a low-level member of the NAACP before that incident, so was militantly disinclined to yield her seat. And she had done some work in trying to register blacks to vote. But she was not a leader, just a worker, the kind of decent, hard-working volunteer whom every public-purpose organization relies on to do the grunt work. That would not have made her "The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement", any more than it made 20,000 other low-level volunteers major figures in the movement.
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Ms. Parks merely provided a rallying point for other people, real leaders, to blow things up into a major confrontation between the forces of segregation and regression on the one hand and the forces of integration and progress on the other. Prime but not alone among those real leaders was Martin Luther King, Jr. The entire extent of Rosa Parks's contribution to the early civil-rights movement was to refuse to get up from a bus seat and then to permit herself to be trotted out by the real leaders to take a bow or say a few words.
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The early civil-rights movement was actually completely dominated by men, in a subsociety that is all too largely matriarchal because of broken families. The men who controlled the movement wanted to put a female face to their movement, for internal political reasons and to blunt some of the hostility of the men who dominated the white, segregationist establishment, because chivalry toward women was part of the Southern tradition.
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It is actually rather insulting to fix on Rosa Parks, a nonleader, rather than a real female leader like Barbara Jordan or Shirley Chisholm, as "The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement".
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It is not Rosa Parks's rhetoric that resounds in the memory of the Nation. She didn't write the "I Have a Dream" speech, nor the anthem of the movement, "We Shall Overcome". It is not her strident, forceful leadership and organizing prowess that animated the masses. She didn't run for Congress or President. She just permitted herself to be trotted out again and again as a figurehead, and used to establish a minor charitable foundation late in life. The rest of the time she served as little more than a receptionist in a Congressman's office — except when he wanted to trot her out for some event.
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I searched the Internet for a list of her substantive accomplishments, a distinguished resume of decades of writings, speeches, confrontations at the doors of universities or in Congressional or state legislative hearings. There is no such long and impressive list. I watched an hour-long documentary about her life on the Biography channel. Very sketchy. It tried to magnify tiny accomplishments into a distinguished record of public leadership. She has no such record.
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Rosa Parks was a very nice lady who did very nice things but who would have accomplished nothing had her particular tiny act not been picked up and run with by real leaders who made it into a cause celebre. Had they settled instead on some woman who got arrested for trying to register to vote or sit at a segregated lunch counter, that other woman would have been plumped up as "The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement".
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While it is very nice to honor Ms. Parks (who, sadly, never had real children of her own) as a decent woman who contributed in her way to national progress, the rhetoric about her is way overblown. It is more than a little condescending to put her in place under the Capitol dome, a sop to blacks as a force in our culture and politics (now displaced by Hispanics as our largest minority), personalized around a modest woman of modest accomplishments who was little more than a front for ambitious others.
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Rosa Parks was a nice lady who wanted better things for herself and her people. That is enuf to say about her.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,026.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:12 PM