Rosa Parks Was Badass and the Ultimate Connector

Rosa Parks wasn’t a physically tired, old Black seamstress who wouldn’t give up her bus seat to a white man. Rosa Parks was 42 years old and a pillar of Montgomery, Alabama society at the time of her arrest in 1955. When she broke the bus segregation laws, her contacts and networks spanned the city’s economic and social hierarchies. A well-known white lawyer, Clifford Durr, knew Parks because she’d hemmed his daughters’ dresses. Durr accompanied the former head of the Montgomery National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), E.D. Nixon, to bail Parks out of jail that night. Durr became one of Parks’ lawyers in her fight against segregation.

Parks was a courageous, practiced activist decades before her resistance to bus segregation laws. In 1931, she fell in love with her husband, Raymond Parks, who was a barber by day and activist by night — or whichever hours he could go undetected. Civil rights activism during that time was dangerous. Two of Raymond’s associates were killed while they were trying to free the Scottsboro Boys — the nine Black youths who were wrongly accused of raping two white women. In The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, Jeanne Theoharis writes that “Rosa and Raymond married in December 1932 ‘right in the middle of the campaign to save the Scottsboro Boys.’”

In the decades to follow, still well before her Montgomery bus action, Parks continued to deepen her activism. She became one of the first women to join the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943. Then, after multiple attempts to register to vote, she was finally allowed in 1945 after passing a literacy test — a Jim Crow era barrier to prevent Black people from voting. That’s why, when she didn’t give up her seat, it wasn’t because her feet were tired. Theoharis quotes Parks:

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. . . . No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

While her resistance to bus segregation laws lives on in popular memory as an individual act, the truth is that Parks was part of a rich tapestry of community. She was dedicated to her church, the Civic League and voting rights efforts. While multiple Black bus riders before Parks had also refused to give up their seats to white passengers, they were not embedded in activist networks like Parks and therefore did not galvanize the movement. Parks’ networks leveraged her sound reputation and alchemized her refusal into a 382-day bus boycott. This complex coordinated effort amongst a wide range of community groups resulted in a Supreme Court ruling that the bus segregation laws were unconstitutional.

If you removed Rosa Parks from her local Montgomery networks and placed her on a different segregated bus, in a different segregated town, her action and arrest would likely not have caused more than a stir. As much as United States popular culture champions the individual, it takes a village to achieve greatness. In a village, or community, the relationships of various strengths between people give that group its power. To move mountains or challenge unjust laws. A team is a small version of a community and so too rises or falls based on the amount of social capital amongst the group members.

Ron Burt, a network scientist, wrote about people who had very diverse networks like Rosa. He called those types of networks Open Networks. These open networks from Burt’s research explained a full 50 percent of career success for individuals. In other words, half of your career success can be predicted by the diversity of your network. The chart below illustrates this point:

It clearly shows that having a large open network predicts individual performance while having a small, closed network is problematic. Rosa’s network as I stated before was wide, open, and diverse. Therefore, all of us have heard of Rosa Parks and not Claudette Colvin. Claudette refused to give up her seat on the bus 9 months before Rosa, but Claudette was only 15 years old and pregnant, embedded within a closed, small, and narrow network.

There are many reasons why Rosa was a connector. One was she did not give in on forming ties or connections with people who looked like her. She intentionally overcame the generally unconscious desire for all of us to engage in homophily. Ronald Burt also illustrated this natural tendency to engage with similar others. As Michael Simmons states in his article:

Most people spend their careers in closed networks; networks of people who already know each other. People often stay in the same industry, the same religion, and the same political party. In a closed network, it’s easier to get things done because you’ve built up trust, and you know all the shorthand terms and unspoken rules. It’s comfortable because the group converges on the same ways of seeing the world that confirm your own. To understand why people, spend most of their time in closed networks, consider what happens when a group of random strangers is thrown together:

Simmons continues…

By understanding this process, we can begin to understand why the world is the way it is. We understand why Democrats and Republicans can’t pass bills with obvious benefits to society. We understand why religions have gone to war over history. It helps us understand why we have bubbles, panics, and fads.

But not only does it help us understand fads, panics, and bubbles it also helps us understand why Rosa Parks is a charismatic connector and such a value to others. Through her intentional effort, stubbornness, and courage she refused to be put in a box as a meek Black woman or just the wife of an organizer. Rosa knew that her greatest contribution in the service of equality, justice, and freedom was her relentless pursuit of not “giving in”.

Rosa Parks was Badass