Where did this idea come from?

This thought came to me last year in my social justice class when my teacher brought this thought process to my attention. She would spend class after class just having us talk about how loud our voices are and that if we use our voices, we could accomplish such amazing things. This is something that a lot of people don’t really think about, however. What we as a people are stuck in is the idea that we can’t do anything, or that it takes someone “special” or “born to be great”. We underestimate the power that we have within us, and we don’t know that our peers are our best allies. We think “oh, someone else can make a difference”, “someone else can take care of it”, “I’m not cut out for it”, “What difference would I make?” and the list goes on and on of all the excuses we have.

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This makes me think about the first chapter Soul Of a Citizen, more specifically, the very beginning. Loeb introduces us with the story of Rosa Parks, a social justice icon who refused to give up her seat for a white man and started the year-long bus boycott in Montgomery. However, before this, Loeb presents us with the sentence “We can learn a lot from the tales we tell about our heroes” (Leob 1) and then proceeds to talk about how this action “didn’t come out of nowhere. Nor did she single-handedly give birth to the civil rights movement” (Leob 2). Leob isn’t trying to say what Parks did wasn’t heroic in a sense, but that we shouldn’t make her the soul face of the civil rights movement. This is where I will now move to the story of MLK, who is also another soul face of the civil rights movement. In the film “Selma”, it shows more insight into what really happened during MLK’s peaceful protests. The film shows long, sleepless nights of pacing back and forth, arguments with friends, followers, and families, not to mention all of the police brutality. Men and women being beat with nightsticks, kicked down and then being stomped on, the sounds of shots being fired multiple times at one person even when they were down, it was horrifying to watch. It hit harder than I thought it would, and I was even angry at myself that it took me this long to realize what really happened to MLK and his followers. They just wanted equal rights and they did it with just the clothes on their back. They didn’t carry arms with them, they marched together peacefully, and this is what they had to face.

Going back to Loeb’s quote, you really do learn a lot from the tales we share. I personally learned that I was never given the full story. I was always told that Christopher Columbus was a hero because we wouldn’t be here without him. I was always told that Rosa Parks was a hero just because her feet hurt and she wouldn’t get up. I was always told that MLK was a powerful man in the Civil Rights movement because he marched and gave a speech from jail. I was always told that women being given the right to vote was pretty much the equivalent to giving women equal rights as men. None of this is true. None of this is the full story of anything that happened. Growing up, learning about our history, we were never given a full picture, the full story. Unfortunately, we never will learn what truly happened in our nation’s history. We can’t go back in time and see what has happened, unfortunately time travel is impossible. But, like the famous saying goes, we can only move forward.

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