Rosa Parks and the New York Times

By Nicholas Stix Two of the most celebrated photographs of the 20th century were staged. The first was the 1950 Robert Doisneau picture of a handsome young French couple "spontaneously” smooching, while the second was a 1956 photograph of Rosa Parks riding in a Montgomery, Alabama bus, a well-dressed, apparently 35-40-year-old white man (actually, he was only 28) sitting behind her. When it came out in 1992 that “The Kiss” (“Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville,” known as “Le Baiser” for short – “The Kiss”), which depicted acting students/lovers Françoise Bornet and Jacques Carteaud, was staged by Doisneau, many people were disappointed. People had always assumed the picture was a spontaneous bus that Doisneau had luckily caught for posterity, an assumption which led to people paying millions of dollars to purveyors of a poster of “The Kiss.” The knowledge that “The Kiss” was staged threw into question yet again the legitimacy of much “spontaneous,” naturalistic photography. The story about the staged Rosa Parks picture, “Photo captured an era, but not a moment,” was written by Peter Applebome, from of all places, the New York Times. “Everyone knows her. No one knows him. “Except for Catherine Chriss, his daughter. And, like his identity, hidden in plain sight, unknown even to the veterans of that era still living, what's most telling about the real story of the black woman and the white man is how much of what we think we know is what we read into the picture, not what's there. “The man on the bus, Nicholas C. Chriss, was not some irritated Alabama segregationist preserved for history, but a reporter working at the time for United Press International out of Atlanta. He died of an aneurysm at age 62 in 1990. Mrs. Parks died at age 92 on Oct. 24, a few weeks short of the 50th anniversary of her refusal to give up her seat on the bus to a white man.” According to Applebome, the Parks picture is plastered all over New York City buses, and according to Catherine Chriss, it is everywhere else, too. “Over the past few years, she's been amazed at how ubiquitous the picture has become. “‘It's everywhere,’ said Ms. Chriss, whose family moved to Ridgewood [NJ] from California in 2004.’ Apple used it in their campaign, “Think Different.” A friend called and said she saw the poster on the bus, the whole bus. It's on the bus my daughter Alison takes to school now. When Alison was in second grade, her classroom had that border with African-American heroes and leaders, and there's the picture. She told her teacher that was her granddad up there. She didn't believe her." What strikes me the most about this story, is that it is a story at all. It had always been clear to me that the picture was staged, for the simple reason that the bus appears to be empty, except for the black woman and the white man. Those Montgomery buses filled up in a hurry. And what would have been the likelihood of someone sitting down, in an otherwise empty bus, next to a member of the opposite race? I find it disturbing that people would fall for such an undisguised photo op. For many years, the mainstream media perpetuated the Rosa Parks Myth, according to which she was a simple, tired seamstress, spontaneously opposing tyranny. They avoided mentioning the reality, whereby she was the longtime secretary of the local NAACP, a civil rights activist who had been trained by the communists at the Highlander Folk School, she was not tired, and her act of defiance had been carefully planned. It took conservatives to tell the true story over the years. Applebome or one of his editors appears to have read at least one of those conservatives. “And rather than a simple seamstress who dared to ‘Think Different,’ Mrs. Parks was a longtime NAACP activist, who went to the famous Highlander Folk School to learn about social change and lunched regularly with Mr. Gray, the civil rights lawyer.” All he left out was the communist part; you can’t have everything. That is not to denigrate Rosa Parks. The fact that her December 1, 1955 sit-down had been carefully planned does not mean that she was not a heroine. But it is odd that civil rights leaders and their “journalist”-flacks felt that they could not tell the truth about the incident. (Previous incidents had occurred, one of which involved a teenager named Claudette Colvin. However, the NAACP expressly rejected Colvin as their poster girl for equal rights, since she was notorious for her gutter mouth, and also happened to be unmarried and pregnant. Those were the good, old days, when the organization actually fought horrible injustices rather than supporting them, and had some basic moral standards. Today, the NAACP routinely embraces violent, racist, criminals such as the convicted murderer of four people, Tookie Williams, who was executed on Tuesday morning.) It was nice to see Peter Applebome honestly report a story on race, for once. It is too soon to conclude from that, however, that he intends to become a full-time reporter. Applebome’s biggest race story was, to my knowledge, his December 20, 1996 article on the Oakland Unified School District’s decision to teach black children in “Ebonics” (black vernacular and street slang). As I wrote in “Ebonics: Bridge to Illiteracy,” in the July, 1997 issue of Liberty magazine,

As it turns out, however, mainstream media accounts had, if anything, gone out of their way to conceal the radical nature of the Oakland scheme. In the New York Times' first report on the Oakland resolution, for example, Peter Applebome reported that "[u]nlike standard bilingual programs, courses would not be taught in black English" -- and this erroneous assertion by our newspaper of record was, inevitably, to have a tremendous influence on the subsequent debate…. The first resolution clearly states that black American kids speak an "African language," rather than English, and that they should be taught in both. In the resolution, the board "officially recognizes the existence ... of West and Niger-Congo African Language Systems ... as the predominantly primary language of African-American students"; Oakland schools are to provide "instruction to African-American students in their primary language." And a spokeswoman for the board, Sherri Willis, recently confirmed to me that Oakland schools will be teaching in ebonics. Willis added that she has received calls from educators across the country, who are interested in developing programs similar to Oakland's.

Thus did Applebome provide cover to the black supremacists on the Oakland school board. Maybe in 2045, he’ll write the truth about the Oakland “Ebonics” resolution. In any event, this time, for once, the Times screwed up and got it right.