Rosa Parks

Transportation is an important motif in “Rosa Parks,” which documents the ways trains and buses were loci of civil rights progress. Connecting disparate parts of the United States, these means of transportation were incredibly important for the civil rights movement, which had the goal of spreading the word and mobilizing activists. The poem opens with as Pullman porters using their position on trains to bring news of life in the North to Black people in the South:

. . . carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago

Defender to the Black Americans in the South so they would

know they were not alone (Lines 2-4).

Later, the poem documents the crucial bus boycott planned by the NAACP and initiated by Rosa Parks—again, positioning a mode of transportation as the setting for civil rights work. Finally, “Rosa Park” implicitly compares the civil rights movement itself to a train.

The words “this is for” are an important part of the poem’s refrain, repeated nine times in “Rosa Parks” (Lines 1, 4, 12, 16, 23, 26, 33, 37, and 37-38). These words emphasize the themes of political organizing and the necessity of