Re-reading Alice Walker`s Meridian Against the Backdrop of Rosa Parks

Abstract

It was Rosa Parks`s middle-class respectability and femininity that was emphasized in the construction of her public image as "perfect symbol" in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. What has been ignored in the use of Rosa Parks` public image is that her activist credentials were downplayed in favor of her middle-class respectability and femininity securely enclosed within the confines of domesticity. The fact that the protest symbol had to meet the standards of middle-class sensibility and behavioral qualifications demonstrates how the civil rights struggle was inextricably connected with the normalized black domestic and gender relationships in accordance with conventional middle-class patterns. At the center of this impetus for the normalized patterns is Black women`s ambivalent position between public and private space, which foreshadows fissures within the movement.

By re-reading Alice Walker`s Meridian (1963), the core narrative of which is about three civil right activists who worked for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the deep South in the mid-1960s, I explore the ways in which the divide of public and private spaces of Black women was deployed in the very moment the Civil Rights Movement began to try to find its momentum in the black Nationalist agenda against the backdrop of seamless solidarity for resistance-the ways in which Black women continue to serve as boundary markers of different ethnic collectivities and their emergence as full-fledged constituents continue to be jeopardized, sacrificing on the altar of race politics during one stage whatever rights they may have achieved during another stage.