What Rosa Parks can teach us about resistance today | Jan-Werner Mueller

It was 70 years ago when four African Americans were sitting in the fifth row of a bus in Montgomery. As one white man had to stand towards the front, the driver asked the four to get up and move towards the back of the bus. Three did; one did not – the rest is history. Or so many American kids might think when they first read the story of Rosa Parks in school. It is a story of courage, but, lest one forget, it is also a story about breaking the law. And the question for us today is what civil disobedience means in an era when the federal government is signaling its readiness severely to punish even perfectly legal dissent. Before getting into any arguments about how disobedience can end up strengthening democracy, it is worth reminding ourselves that the textbook version of Parks is usually not the whole story. She was not just a fatigued seamstress who, after a long day, at work, spontaneously decided to protest against injustice. Rather, Parks had been a member of the NAACP in Montgomery since 1943; she had led the organization’s youth, and she had been investigating rapes of African American women in Alabama. Related: Brand-new activists are discovering political movements – and each other: ‘You feel the camaraderie’ What Obama once claimed – “that any of us ordinary people without rank or wealth or title or fame can somehow point out the imperfections of this nation, and come together, and challenge the status quo, and decide that it is in our power to remake this country that we love until it more closely aligns with our highest deals” – is true, but it is not the whole truth: Parks had no rank or wealth, but she had plenty of fellow activists and friends. Resistance is a matter of coordination, and coordination is helped by having an effective organization behind you. The bus boycott – which lasted a staggering 381 days – depended on organizers quickly distributing pamphlets in the Black community and on volunteers running “private taxis” (the US supreme court ruled segregation of buses unconstitutional in December 1956). Parks went on record saying: “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” Others were tired of it, too, but had the energy and courage to organize. What the political theorist Brandon Terry has called “our culture’s compulsive references to the civil rights movement” and, more particularly, “the apparent concord of civil rights celebration” overlook that nonviolent protest against injustice was hardly popular among whites across the country. It is something Trump’s court historians, starting with the ill-fated 1776 Commission, tend to leave out of their narratives; they make it seem like the entire nation loved coming together around the idea of “color-blindness” in the 1960s – and it was the only the crazy leftist proponents of identity politics who undermined that happy consensus. Civil disobedience is a “public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act,” according to what remains its most influential definition, put forward by the towering figure in political philosophy of the second half of the 20th century, John Rawls. There are reasons to think that Rawls’ approach has become objectively more difficult to implement today. Rawls had claimed that breaking the law to point to an injustice could convince majorities to bring about change. But he was relying on a media system which allowed majorities to see injustice – think of the vicious attacks by policemen (and their dogs) on civil rights protesters in Birmingham. While information is more accessibly today – and Black Lives Matter crucially depended on acts of police brutality going viral – our media landscape is also much more fragmented, with plenty of rightwingers making sure that events are reframed, which is a polite way of seeing: making sure their meaning is distorted. Rawls also relied on the notion that, in an “almost just” society, disobedience should involve being willing to accept punishment – as a demonstration of one’s overall “fidelity” to the law (which would also make it harder to have one’s conduct be portrayed as anarchism or worse). Of course, there is a general question as to whether one considers the US “nearly just”; but, more particularly, there is the evident tendency by the Trump administration to undermine the rule of law. The attorney general has seemingly given up on any independence from the executive, racing to follow Trump’s commands to exert retribution on his supposed enemies. As members of the Department of Justice have reported, the idea is no longer that cases are brought after fact-finding; rather, cases are constructed and then the race is on to find facts that might fit. There is valiant pushback by some judges; but the structural damage and corruption have been enormous already. Rawls thought of civil disobedience as a form of “public speech.” It is unclear whether that speech will be heard. Even if it is, one might doubt whether it will get a good-faith hearing by the authorities. The philosopher had assumed that “in a state of near justice, vindictive repression of legitimate dissent is unlikely”. Today, dissent both legitimate and legal is already being targeted by Trumpists and the president himself (threatening most recently to go after citizens who, to his mind, are disturbing “domestic tranquility”). Anyone contemplating civil disobedience must have answers to challenges which, for all the injustices of the south, “the mother of the civil rights movement” did not have to face in quite the same way.