What would Rosa Parks do?

Modern activists are defeated by their lack of restraint

As many people will know, Rosa Parks was purposefully selected to challenge segregation on buses, seen as the sort of black woman whom undecided and conservative whites would find sympathetic – respectable, churchgoing, serious. The real pioneer, Claudette Colvin, was a single mother, which is why it is Mrs Parks that my children all learn about at school.

Civil rights leaders understood that they had to win over public opinion and Martin Luther King, the leader and icon of the movement, appreciated the need to appeal to shared Christian values. He sold transformative change by packaging it as the fulfilment of America’s own ideals.

King also grasped the importance of the medium, in particular the power of television - the percentage of American households owning a television set had reached 90 per cent in 1960, a ten fold rise in a decade, and the transformation of media would make long-frustrated social change finally possible.

King understood that his daily statement for the cameras should be no more than 60 seconds, the perfect window by which every family in America would hear his message. Aware that activists faced the threat of violence, he also understood that this would only help them win over the reasonable public, telling photographers not to help protesters as they faced the hostility of white Southerners: ‘Your role is to photograph what is happening to us’, he declared.

He won the argument; indeed, such was King’s total moral victory, in part achieved by his own sacrifice, that American and even British conservatives now claim this man of God as one of their own, even though he clearly wasn’t.