Rosa Parks: a legacy for HR

Rosa Parks: a legacy

On this day in 1955, African-American civil rights activist Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and refused to obey orders that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. Though her action was not the first of its kind, Parks' act of defiance became so famous that, in time, it gained her the nickname "Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement."

To commemorate this defining moment in history, HRM decided to look at how Parks' actions help redefined how we view racism both in and out of the workplace - and, more importantly, what the state of workplace racism is today.

NAACP

After the incident on the Montgomery bus and her subsequent arrest, Parks decided to approach the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and volunteer to become a test case. It was a brave move for Parks, as she knew it would result in persecution by the white authorities. She was, for instance, sacked from her job at the local department store.

With the help of other activists, including Martin Luther King, the Montgomery Bus Boycott followed. For 13 months the 17,000 black people in Montgomery either walked to work or took lifts from the small car-owning black population in the city. Eventually, the loss of revenue and a decision by the Supreme Court forced the Montgomery Bus Company to accept integration of black passengers, and the boycott ended.

Over the intervening years, Rosa remained active with the NAACP, before founding the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development with her husband in 1987. The institute was designed to help the young and educate them about civil rights.

Though Parks died in 2005, her legacy lives in on.

Take for granted

We already reported at the end of October about a recent study in the Journal of Labor Statistics, which claimed the race or ethnicity of HR managers can often have a strong impact on the racial makeup of a company's workforce.

And last month, a former New York Post editor made moves to sue the paper, complaining that "female employees and employees of color had been subject to pervasive and systemic discrimination and/or unlawful harassment."

Meanwhile, in the UK, in a bid to further reduce racism in the UK, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) yesterday launched new guidelines entitled Tackling Racism in the Workplace, with the resource been launched to coincide with a conference staged by the TUC.

According to reports in the UK, TUC deputy-general secretary Frances O'Grady has reported that black workers - potentially including those with jobs in London - are among the worst affected by the economic crisis. This, O'Grady argues, underlines the need to stamp out discriminatory practices around recruitment and redundancy.

Meanwhile, back in July, a group of black Philadelphia police officers filed a federal lawsuit against their department, alleging an online forum geared toward city police is "infested with racist, white supremacist and anti-African-American content."

The Obama effect

Of course, while such  evidence suggests that workplace racism is still a problem that needs to be dealt with, there is hope. For one thing, America now has an African-American president, something that significantly highlights how attitudes to race have changed in the last 54 years.

Yes, so HR certainly still has a long way to go before it is completely rid of workplace racism - and Mr. Obama's election, for instance, certainly can't singularly signify the immediate riddance of racist attitudes or the poor education in black communities - but hope is there. In fact, reports suggest that the Obama presidency has led to subtle changes in African-American's business ambitions - and how they're perceived.

Ben Counts, Creative Director at Coil Counts Ford & Cheney Inc., a Chicago-based advertising firm, told Chicago Business, "Obama's election helps people understand that there's no reason why it shouldn't be perfectly reasonable to have the thought-leader in the room be a person of color - and that's certainly a shift."

Rosa Parks' memory stands for one thing: ultimately, we are all human and deserve the same rights as everyone else. In the workplace, HR managers have to face up to their responsibility to protect all workers, regardless of age, sex, sexual identity, race or ethnicity. It is human resources, after all.

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