pbs高端访谈:美国民权运动之母罗莎·帕克斯激进的人生

 　　JEFFREY BROWN: And finally tonight, what you might not know about the life and legacy¹ of a civil rights pioneer.

　　Gwen Ifill has our book conversation.

　　GWEN IFILL: By the time Rosa Parks died in Detroit in 2005, her place in the history books was assured. She was the first lady of civil rights, the mother of the freedom movement. Mourners lined up in three cities to pay their respects, in Montgomery, Ala., at the U.S. Capitol, where she was the first woman and only second African-American to lie in honor, and in her adopted hometown of Detroit, where her funeral ran for more than seven hours.

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　　Everyone agreed that the 92-year-old Parks had made history when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus in 1955. Her arrest sparked a 382-day bus boycott² that caught the attention of a movement and a nation.

　　But there was more to Rosa Parks' action that day, which was neither as random³ or as isolated⁴ as it has come to be seen. Now, on the 100th anniversary of her birth, a new biography explores "The Rebellious⁵ Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks."

　　The author is Jeanne Theoharis, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

　　The word rebellious doesn't usually appear in the same sentence as Rosa Parks. She is a different person than we thought.

　　JEANNE THEOHARIS, "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks": Right. And that's her word.

　　She talks about having a life history of being rebellious, which is where the title comes from. And I think it gets at sort of both the scope of her political life and then, right, the kind of character that we, I think, have come to sort of miss, right, when we see just Rosa Parks on that one day.

　　GWEN IFILL: Well, I know, in elementary school, I was taught that she was a tired seamstress. Her feet were tired. She sat down on the bus and didn't want to get up. And then, later on, the rumor⁶ was that she was an NAACP plant sent in to stir up trouble.

　　But she was neither of these.

　　JEANNE THEOHARIS: No, she was neither of these. And she would be the first to correct us, right, if we were saying she was tired, because in her autobiography⁷, she says, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

　　She wasn't tired. This comes out of a long history of activism. This is not her first act against segregation⁸. And she very much sees this in the context of this—she doesn't—she says she's not doing anything very different from what she'd been doing for years before—before she makes the stand on the bus.

　　GWEN IFILL: And in the end, she was far more radical⁹ than people think of her.

　　JEANNE THEOHARIS: Absolutely.

　　I mean, also, her activism doesn't end in Montgomery. She is—eight months after the boycott, and she is forced to leave Montgomery. She loses her job during the boycott. Her husband loses his job during the boycott. They're getting continuous death threats that continue even after the boycott ends.

　　And so, eight months later, after the boycott, they move to Detroit. And so she spends more than half of her political life in Detroit fighting the Jim Crow North, right, challenging Northern racism¹⁰.

　　GWEN IFILL: When we think about the civil rights movement, we often think of men, her collaborator¹¹ E.D. Nixon, or Martin Luther King, or even Malcolm X. But you seldom hear about the women.

　　And she wasn't just—she wasn't the only one.

　　JEANNE THEOHARIS: No.

　　I mean, so she has this longer history. She, in 1943, sees a picture of a friend in the paper and realizes that women can join the NAACP. So, she goes down. She's the only woman there that day. And she's made secretary. She's elected secretary, but she's going to spend 10 years before the—her bus arrest with E.D. Nixon transforming the Montgomery NAACP into a much more activist¹² branch.

　　Also, her act on the bus is not the first. She's not the first person. She's not the first woman. There are many women in that decade before she is arrested that makes these kinds of stands on the bus. That year in March, a young woman, a 15-year-old makes—is arrested for her stand on the bus. That's Claudette Colvin. That's very much where this begins.

　　GWEN IFILL: But Rosa Parks, with her straw hats and her church lady clothes and her demure¹³ attitude and her maternal¹⁴ aspect, was a far more preferable face to put on this, wasn't she?

　　JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yes, but I think part of why the community galvanizes behind her is also because they know her, they respect her, they see themselves in her, but they also trust, because she's been active for so many years, that he's not going to flinch¹⁵ under the pressure that's going to be brought to bear on anybody who becomes a kind of face of such a movement.

　　So, in many ways, part of why they galvanize behind her is she is a good face for the movement. But part of why they galvanize behind her is because of this longer history of kind of political work and activism.

　　GWEN IFILL: And part of the reason why she chose to be the face is because she went for training. She didn't just happen to be there that day. I mean, she happened to be there in that she was commuting¹⁶ home from work, but she was trained in how to behave in a situation like that.

　　JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right. Right.

　　So five months before she makes the stand on the bus, she goes to Highlander¹⁷ Folk School in Tennessee. And Highlander is an adult kind of organizer training school. It's trying to teach local people how to be leaders of their own movements. And she goes a two-week workshop. She takes off work to go to this workshop on school desegregation.

　　And it's very much about the kind of power of the individual to go back and lead their own communities. Now, interestingly, on the last day, they do this go-round, and they are asked, what are you going to do when you go back? And she says, well, resistance in Montgomery is too fierce. People are never going to be unified¹⁸, so there's no mass movement that is going to—mass movement that is going to emerge, but I'm going to keep working with the young people, because she's sort of formed a youth chapter of the Montgomery NAACP.

　　So she very much is not hopeful that in that moment that there is going to be this mass movement. And yet, five months later, right, on Dec. 1st, 1955, again, in her words, pushed as far as I could be pushed, sort of doing what I had asked of others. Right?

　　So she sees herself in this kind of community of activists¹⁹. She refuses to give up her seat.

　　GWEN IFILL: I have to ask you. In putting this book together, you found things we hadn't seen before, but there's a lot more out there, isn't there?

　　JEANNE THEOHARIS: Absolutely.

　　So part of her paper—she gives part of her papers in the late '70s to the Reuther Library at Wayne State. And she refers to this as sort of the first of her papers. But part of her personal papers are still here at an auction²⁰ house. The probate judge in Detroit gives it to an auction house here in New York to sell. And it's basically been sitting here for five years.

　　And so there's a lot more—no scholar has gotten to see those papers, which, again, I think, is very disturbing. I don't think you could sell papers of Martin Luther King, of FDR, of sort of other important 20th century political figures without a scholar assessing the papers. And yet no scholar has gotten to assess her papers.

　　And they are priced along with her effects very—$8 million to $10 million dollars. And so it puts a lot of institutions that she cared about sort of out of the running for those kind of papers.

　　GWEN IFILL: You say two things in the book which I think most people would have to stop and think about. One is that the retelling of her life was that it was a romantic fable²¹. And the other thing you talk about is her death and how it was a ritual of national redemption.

　　What did you mean by those two things?

　　JEANNE THEOHARIS: I mean, she's known for one act. She is celebrated²² for one act. And I think part of that celebration then puts it all in the past, right, when the actual Rosa Parks keeps working on racial and social justice issues all the way up to the end of her life.

　　Right? So she doesn't stop. She believes there's more change. And yet the way that she's memorialized sort of seeks to kind of end it, to say we are a post-racial society, when the actual Rosa Parks didn't think we were a post-racial society.

　　And so I use that sort of romantic fable, because I think part of how we have come to use her story is a way as a kind of nation to make ourselves feel so good about how far we have come, in many ways to ignore how far yet we have to go.

　　GWEN IFILL: Jeanne Theoharis, the author of "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks," thank you so much.

　　JEANNE THEOHARIS: Thank you.

　　JEFFREY BROWN: Gwen continued her conversation with biographer Theoharis. You will find that and more in Gwen's take on our home page.

1 legacy   

n.遗产，遗赠；先人(或过去)留下的东西

参考例句：

• They are the most precious cultural legacy our forefathers left.它们是我们祖先留下来的最宝贵的文化遗产。
• He thinks the legacy is a gift from the Gods.他认为这笔遗产是天赐之物。

2 boycott   

n./v.(联合)抵制，拒绝参与

参考例句：

• We put the production under a boycott.我们联合抵制该商品。
• The boycott lasts a year until the Victoria board permitsreturn.这个抗争持续了一年直到维多利亚教育局妥协为止。

3 random   

adj.随机的；任意的；n.偶然的(或随便的)行动

参考例句：

• The list is arranged in a random order.名单排列不分先后。
• On random inspection the meat was found to be bad.经抽查，发现肉变质了。

4 isolated   

adj.与世隔绝的

参考例句：

• His bad behaviour was just an isolated incident. 他的不良行为只是个别事件。
• Patients with the disease should be isolated. 这种病的患者应予以隔离。

5 rebellious   

adj.造反的，反抗的，难控制的

参考例句：

• They will be in danger if they are rebellious.如果他们造反，他们就要发生危险。
• Her reply was mild enough,but her thoughts were rebellious.她的回答虽然很温和，但她的心里十分反感。

6 rumor   

n.谣言，谣传，传说

参考例句：

• The rumor has been traced back to a bad man.那谣言经追查是个坏人造的。
• The rumor has taken air.谣言流传开了。

7 autobiography   

n.自传

参考例句：

• He published his autobiography last autumn.他去年秋天出版了自己的自传。
• His life story is recounted in two fascinating volumes of autobiography.这两卷引人入胜的自传小说详述了他的生平。

8 segregation   

n.隔离，种族隔离

参考例句：

• Many school boards found segregation a hot potato in the early 1960s.在60年代初，许多学校部门都觉得按水平分班是一个棘手的问题。
• They were tired to death of segregation and of being kicked around.他们十分厌恶种族隔离和总是被人踢来踢去。

9 radical   

n.激进份子，原子团，根号；adj.根本的，激进的，彻底的

参考例句：

• The patient got a radical cure in the hospital.病人在医院得到了根治。
• She is radical in her demands.她的要求十分偏激。

10 racism   

n.民族主义；种族歧视(意识)

参考例句：

• He said that racism is endemic in this country.他说种族主义在该国很普遍。
• Racism causes political instability and violence.种族主义道致政治动荡和暴力事件。

11 collaborator   

n.合作者，协作者

参考例句：

• I need a collaborator to help me. 我需要个人跟我合作，帮我的忙。
• His collaborator, Hooke, was of a different opinion. 他的合作者霍克持有不同的看法。

12 activist   

n.活动分子，积极分子

参考例句：

• He's been a trade union activist for many years.多年来他一直是工会的积极分子。
• He is a social activist in our factory.他是我厂的社会活动积极分子。

13 demure   

adj.严肃的；端庄的

参考例句：

• She's very demure and sweet.她非常娴静可爱。
• The luscious Miss Wharton gave me a demure but knowing smile.性感迷人的沃顿小姐对我羞涩地会心一笑。

14 maternal   

adj.母亲的，母亲般的，母系的，母方的

参考例句：

• He is my maternal uncle.他是我舅舅。
• The sight of the hopeless little boy aroused her maternal instincts.那个绝望的小男孩的模样唤起了她的母性。

15 flinch   

v.畏缩，退缩

参考例句：

• She won't flinch from speaking her mind.她不会讳言自己的想法。
• We will never flinch from difficulties.我们面对困难决不退缩。

16 commuting   

交换（的）

参考例句：

• I used the commuting time to read and answer my mail. 我利用上下班在汽车中的时间来阅读和答复给我的函电。
• Noncommuting objects are as real to the mathematicians as commuting objects. 对于数学家来说，不可交换的对象与可交换的对象是一样真实的。

17 highlander   

n.高地的人，苏格兰高地地区的人

参考例句：

• They call him the highlander, he is Rory McLeod! 他们叫他寻事者，他是罗瑞·麦克劳德！ 来自互联网

18 unified   

(unify 的过去式和过去分词)； 统一的； 统一标准的； 一元化的

参考例句：

• The teacher unified the answer of her pupil with hers. 老师核对了学生的答案。
• The First Emperor of Qin unified China in 221 B.C. 秦始皇于公元前221年统一中国。

19 activists   

n.（政治活动的）积极分子，活动家( activist的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• His research work was attacked by animal rights activists . 他的研究受到了动物权益维护者的抨击。
• Party activists with lower middle class pedigrees are numerous. 党的激进分子中有很多出身于中产阶级下层。 来自《简明英汉词典》

20 auction   

n.拍卖；拍卖会；vt.拍卖

参考例句：

• They've put the contents of their house up for auction.他们把房子里的东西全都拿去拍卖了。
• They bought a new minibus with the proceeds from the auction.他们用拍卖得来的钱买了一辆新面包车。

21 fable   

n.寓言；童话；神话

参考例句：

• The fable is given on the next page. 这篇寓言登在下一页上。
• He had some motive in telling this fable. 他讲这寓言故事是有用意的。

22 celebrated   

adj.有名的，声誉卓著的

参考例句：

• He was soon one of the most celebrated young painters in England.不久他就成了英格兰最负盛名的年轻画家之一。
• The celebrated violinist was mobbed by the audience.观众团团围住了这位著名的小提琴演奏家。