Rosa Parks vs. James Blake (Times Two!)

I'm in the middle of reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain. I've thought a lot about myself, J, Sam and my friends while reading this book. I score straight down the middle on the Myers-Briggs personality test (half-introvert and half-extrovert), but J is almost completely introverted.

The book is really interesting, and I'm especially intrigued about how the Culture of Personality developed in the 20th century (as opposed to the focus on inner virtue and character in the 19th century). It makes sense that our culture has idolized movie stars for almost a century; these film stars seem to embody the Culture of Personality that has been upheld for about that long. Oh, and I also think it's interesting how Cain suggests, "From an evolutionary perspective, introversion must have survived as a personality trait for a reason" (p. 15). I like thinking about introversion and natural selection!

While reading, it has been obvious to me that Susan Cain holds Rosa Parks in high regard. Rosa Parks, an introvert, is introduced in the first page of the book, and she has been mentioned a couple other times (and I've only read about sixty pages so far!). (The continual references remind me a little bit of how Joanna Brooks talks a lot about Marie Osmond in Book of Mormon Girl. Is it popular for recent nonfiction books to somehow "anchor" themselves around certain historical/cultural figures?) Anyhow, Cain wrote this story about Rosa Parks which I found especially interesting. Although this anecdote doesn't deal too much with introversion, I think it's interesting that Rosa Parks had two separate run-ins with the bus driver James Blake:

"Not many people know that twelve years before her showdown with the Montgomery bus driver, [Rosa Parks had] had another encounter with the same man, possibly on the very same bus. It was a November afternoon, in 1943, and Parks had entered through the front door of the bus because the back was too crowded. The driver, a well-known bigot named James Blake, told her to use the rear and started to push her off the bus. Parks asked him not to touch her. She would leave on her own, she said quietly. 'Get off my bus,' Blake sputtered in response.

Parks complied, but not before deliberately dropping her purse on her way out and sitting on a "white" seat as she picked it up. 'Intuitively, she had engaged in an act of passive resistance, a precept named by Leo Tolstoy and embraced by Mahatma Gandhi,' writes the historian Douglas Brinkley in a wonderful biography of Parks. It was more than a decade before King popularized the idea of nonviolence and long before Parks's own training in civil disobedience, but, Brinkley writes, 'such principles were a perfect match for her own personality.'

Parks was so disgusted by Blake that she refused to ride on his bus for the next twelve years. On the day she finally did, the day that turned her into the 'Mother of the Civil Rights Movement,' she got back on that bus, according to Brinkley, only out of sheer absentmindedness" (Cain, p. 58-59).