A Black child sits quietly at a desk. Eyes steady. Breath slow. The room treats that calm as danger. A teacher marks it as “defiance.” A dean calls it “disrespect.” National data shows Black students are suspended at 3.5 times the rate of white students for subjective categories such as “defiance” or “insubordination,” even when behaviors match (Civil Rights Data Collection 2018). The misreading carries a cost. It teaches young people to shrink themselves. It teaches them to distrust their own steadiness. This shapes a wound that follows them into adulthood.
Rosa Parks lived inside a similar system. Born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, she grew up in a world where quiet composure was demanded yet feared. Her mother, Leona, a teacher, instilled in her dignity, study, and self-respect. Chronic illness kept her home often, where reading became discipline rather than escape. Caring for her grandmother and mother after leaving school at sixteen demanded responsibility that forged character rather than crushing it. Returning to finish her diploma in 1934 confirmed that education was part of her purpose (Parks and Reed 42). Her NAACP work in the 1940s deepened that purpose. Investigating racial and sexual violence, documenting testimonies, and attempting to register to vote three times before succeeding in 1945 taught her that persistence was not a slogan. It was practice.
By 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, she carried decades of trained composure. Jeanne Theoharis shows that Parks was chosen precisely because of her reputation for steadiness, clarity, and moral weight (Theoharis 51). She said she was tired, but not tired of giving in. Her stillness on the bus was not absence. It was presence.
That misreading of quiet continues, now with technological reach. In 2018, Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru found that commercial facial recognition systems misclassified darker-skinned women at error rates up to 34 percent, compared to less than 1 percent for lighter-skinned men (Buolamwini and Gebru 17). These systems already shape school security tools, hiring software, and public surveillance. The pattern repeats: calm Black faces treated as suspect or unreadable. The code carries the old fear.
Parks’ life offers a different reading. Stillness becomes authority when it is anchored in purpose. For educators, this means rewriting discipline codes to remove subjective categories, auditing school data monthly for racial disparities, and adopting restorative practices that rely on dialogue instead of removal. For cultural workers, this means creating spaces where children practice composure without penalty: drumming circles, reading rooms, or oral history workshops. For parents, it means teaching children to trust their internal quiet, naming it as grounding rather than submission. For community members, it means demanding transparent reviews of digital tools that interpret student behavior or identity.
Parks leaves us with a question. If we learned to read the quiet of our children the way she learned to read her own, what new possibilities would we begin to see?
Works Cited
Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, vol. 81, 2018, pp. 1–15.
Civil Rights Data Collection. “2015 to 2016 National Estimates of Discipline.” US Department of Education, 2018.
Parks, Rosa, and Jim Haskins. Rosa Parks: My Story. Puffin Books, 1992.
Theoharis, Jeanne. The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Beacon Press, 2013.
