We Can’t All Be Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks

America has largely forgotten Claudette Colvin. Nine months before Rosa Parks, Colvin, then fifteen years old, refused to relinquish her seat on a Birmingham, Alabama, municipal bus. Like Parks, Colvin was arrested; she apparently dropped her schoolbooks during the arrest. But Colvin’s arrest didn’t conjure a boycott, or international outrage. Why not?

Legal scholar Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow, suggests a simple reason: Colvin got pregnant out of wedlock. The local and national NAACP had a position of finding members with spotless personal histories, and using them to bait confrontations with unjust authority. Rosa Parks had nary a blot against her name before her 1955 arrest, and became a transnational martyr. Claudette Colvin got pregnant while awaiting trial, and got forgotten.

I remembered Colvin’s story this week (but, significantly, needed to Google her name) when news arose of a Florida police officer, caught on-camera, wrestling a shoplifting suspect to the ground and punching the suspect in the head at least eight times. The officer’s violent response is completely disproportionate to the nonviolent property crime. Yet I already anticipated the immediate response from police defenders: there’s little doubt the suspect did it.

According to reports, the accused shoplifter, a homeless man, simply nabbed a cooked chicken breast and ate it inside the grocery store. Challenged on the issue, he claimed his poverty meant he had no lawful obligation to pay. The store obviously disagreed, and called off-duty police officer Alexander Garcia-Contreras to stop the theft. Garcia-Contreras was filmed wrestling the suspect to the ground, punching him at least eight times, and handcuffing him.

Again, though the suspect’s charges were dismissed, there’s little doubt the suspect committed the crime. He did it with witnesses watching. He also argued with Garcia-Contreras and refused to go quietly. Therefore I anticipate my conservative-leaning friends whetting the arguments they deploy whenever stories like this percolate: why didn’t the accused just comply? Don’t police have authority to use force on resistant suspects? Isn’t the accused basically guilty?

These arguments recur whenever police do something awful on camera. Recently, I foolishly let a Twitter egg bait me into argument over whether Adam Toledo deserved to die. (Remember him?) In this troll’s estimation, Toledo’s shooting was justified because he almost certainly had a gun, was out in the small hours, and fled the police. It’s the teenager’s own fault, apparently, because he was guilty, and therefore deserved to die.

We could continue. There’s little doubt George Floyd passed some counterfeit money, and had methamphetamine in his system. Deserved to die. Daunte Wright had a warrant out for his arrest and fled the scene. Deserved to die. Because the people police interact with are almost never spotless, almost never Rosa Parks, some armchair pundits have a ready-made response whenever something awful happens. Bad people deserve rough, even deadly, treatment.

Nobody should have to say: it’s not the police’s responsibility to punish the guilty. Our entire legal system depends on the supposition that everyone’s innocent under the law, until the courts determine otherwise. But those who’d reform police, so officers like Garcia-Contreras don’t maul offenders who aren’t threatening anyone, don’t only want the legally innocent protected. Such violence shouldn’t even be an option for police to begin with.

Where I’m standing, Officer Garcia-Contreras had no authority to use violence. His suspect didn’t threaten anybody, didn’t have weapons, and was basically just an asshole. Yet we already know, in this era when Twitter trends get treated as news, that a sufficient number of people will cite the suspect’s behavior to justify why overwhelming violence was necessary. Because “bad people,” however we define that, deserve whatever they get.

Professor Alexander insists that civil rights organizations like the NAACP must abandon the quest for spotless icons like Rosa Parks. Because the greatest impediment to reform today is an overpowered and unaccountable criminal justice system, the people caught in the machine are often unsavory individuals with checkered pasts. But not just the reformers seek vainly for the untainted hero; the status quo similarly thinks the impure deserve what they get.

I’d like to believe Americans want to fix injustices where they exist. But the false desire for a spotless martyr to drive the narrative prevents us facing situations as they are. Claudette Colvin’s arrest was every bit as unjust as Rosa Parks’. The entire premise of our justice system is that the guilty deserve due process as much as the innocent. Mauling a homeless man when he’s down is the opposite of that.