22 pages • 44 minutes read
Nikki GiovanniRosa Parks
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Transportation
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.
“This is for”
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 repetition for any progressive movement. They also suggest the scope of the civil rights struggle: Though the poem is named for Rosa Parks, one courageous individual, it celebrates and describes many more people than Parks.
Rushing
“Rosa Parks” feels like it rushes from line to line, moving the reader at breakneck speed through the poem. This is achieved through Giovanni’s heavy use of enjambment (see “Enjambment” in the Literary Devices section). Enjambment accelerates reading: Getting to the next line becomes necessary for meaning. There are 45 enjambed lines in the poem, which builds an inexorable sense of haste, dramatizing how the Pullman porters felt as the trains they worked hurtled from stop to stop, and how organizers and activists must have felt in their desperation to overturn one unjust law after another.
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By Nikki Giovanni
