"Frequently Underestimated Breadth, Complexity, and Variety of Beliefs and Perspectives"

"But that does not mean that the experience of a particular African American will necessarily determine that person's preferences. Experience affects thinking in all sorts of subtle, complex, mysterious, and surprising ways. But it does not determine thought. Hence, we ought to be skeptical about claims regarding 'the authority of experience' and efforts to make a credential of experience. That a person has suffered impoverishment and marginalization is, alas, no guarantee at all that that person will be attuned to those social vices or immune to them."

Randall Kennedy at Heterodox Academy emphasizes diversity of thought throughout African-American history.

Hush that Fuss

"She spent nearly two decades before the bus incident struggling, organizing and agitating for civil rights, mostly as the secretary of the Montgomery, Ala., branch of the N.A.A.C.P. But it wasn’t until Parks was in her 40s and attended an integrated workshop that she found 'for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society.' This didn’t mean that she was eager for integration, though. She was later quoted as saying that what people sought 'was not a matter of close physical contact with whites, but equal opportunity.'"

Charles M. Blow in The New York Times discusses a new biography of Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis.